Does Deutschland do digital?

SINCE it was founded in 1923 Trumpf, a family-owned company based near Stuttgart, has had one main mission: making things that make things. It started out with motorised hand shears and other tools to work sheet metal. It then invented fabrication machines with a numerical-control system and later was among the first to use lasers to cut metal. A prime example of a firm from Germany’s industrial Mittelstand that has outgrown the label (which literally means “mid-sized trades”), the firm today has annual sales of €2.7 billion ($3.2 billion) and more than 10,000 employees worldwide.

Trumpf’s roots in metalworking and other hardware stand in stark contrast to what it is trying to achieve next: building a new business purely based on software and data. Unveiled last month, its online offering, called Axoom, connects machines built by Trumpf and others, and uses the data it collects from them to help customers organise their production—for instance, to warn them when they are running out of material or to order it directly from the supplier. Much like smartphones, Axoom will be able to run “apps” from other providers, such as software to schedule workloads, or to predict when machines will need a spare part.