Materna Group to double turnover and workforce by 2025

EBIT increase of more than 30 per cent underpins growth plans

The company intends to achieve its planned growth both organically and through acquisitions. The long-established company will focus its acquisitions on the nine strategic focus areas. To this end, the in-house Mergers & Acquisitions team is actively seeking suitable candidates. As has been the case for the past 40 years, the foundation will be profitable growth with a stable operating profit (EBIT). The starting point is excellent: in the 2020 financial year, the Materna Group – which remains family-owned – achieved its best-ever results in terms of turnover and EBIT in the company’s 40-year history. In 2020, turnover rose by 9.6 per cent compared with the previous year (€323.8 million in 2019) to €355.1 million, whilst EBIT increased by more than 30 per cent.

The Materna Group currently employs more than 2,500 staff, 90 per cent of whom work in Germany across 18 sites. “We aim to double our workforce by 2025,” says CEO Martin Wibbe, setting out the ambitious target. Of these, 400 new jobs are planned for 2021 alone. A quarter of this target has already been achieved in the first three months.

With its ‘Mission 2025’, Materna is aiming to catapult itself to the top of the rankings for medium-sized IT service providers in Germany. According to the Lünendonk list, the company currently ranks fourth in this category.

Accelerating modernisation with Journey2Cloud™

Journey2Cloud™ is aimed at customers across all sectors and is suitable for SMEs as well as globally operating corporations and the public sector. “One of the biggest challenges currently facing our clients is how to quickly and securely transform their existing, legacy application landscapes – which often consist of hundreds or even thousands of applications – using cloud technologies,” explains Marcus Neumann, who has taken on responsibility for the Cloud Innovation & Operation growth area at Materna. Materna focuses precisely on this area, addressing migration and modernisation based on mainstream cloud technologies. According to a recent IDC study, 46 per cent of the companies surveyed in Germany are already at an advanced stage of their cloud implementation.

The modular approach of Journey2Cloud™ enables customers to modernise their application landscape step by step and migrate it to the cloud. In doing so, Materna takes into account that each application generally has its own life cycle. “We work with each customer on an individual basis and take their level of maturity into account. Within a few weeks, we jointly develop a bespoke roadmap for the transformation, including a reference architecture. This is based on the cloud technologies already preferred by the customer,” Marcus Neumann continues. Depending on the client’s situation, the services begin with an initial consultation and the development of a bespoke strategy. However, clients can also opt to receive targeted support solely for the onboarding and migration of existing applications, or for operations only.

With Journey2Cloud™, the focus is on the applications and their interdependencies with one another and with the infrastructure. Only then are the associated workloads considered. Marcus Neumann gives an example: “For a major logistics client, we migrated the business customer portal from a monolithic on-premises solution to a scalable solution, which we now operate for the client in the Microsoft Azure Cloud.” To meet these and similar client requirements, Materna will expand its team of cloud and application development experts from the current 700 to over 1,500 as part of its Mission 2025. A sourcing mix of onshore, nearshore and offshore staff is planned to support this growth.

Strong partnerships

The Materna Group is intensifying its close collaboration with its high-performing partner ecosystem. This includes, amongst others, Amazon Web Services, BMC, Google Cloud, Micro Focus, Microsoft, Red Hat, SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow and VMware. Clients benefit from the implementation of industry-specific and technologically innovative solutions. Sebastian Austen recently took up the position of Vice President of Strategic Alliances with the clear aim of expanding the partner ecosystem.

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About Materna

The Materna Group currently employs more than 2,500 staff worldwide and generated a turnover of 355.1 million euros in 2020. Materna covers the entire range of services offered by a full-service provider in the premium segment: from consultancy and implementation to operations. Materna advises and supports companies and public authorities on all aspects of digitalisation and delivers bespoke technologies for agile, flexible and secure IT. Its clients include IT organisations as well as specialist departments within companies and the public sector. The Group also comprises various subsidiaries.