Dortmund-based Dr Materna GmbH claims to be the largest independent software house in Germany. The company is 12 years old and has 150 staff, with subsidiaries in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Gera. Dr Materna has a 50% stake in Comstar GmbH and owns 100% of Team GmbH in Paderborn. It started life as a consultancy, offering training and software development for mid-range and mainframe computers, but now focuses on software development for commercial data processing applications. The company prides itself on the products it has brought to market, such as its HyperDoc document archiving system, which is used for the press archives of the Dusseldorf state chancery, and by the Deutsche Bundespost. Other home-grown products include DX-Union, an office software package that integrates MS-DOS and Unix under Windows 3.0 by combining parts of each operating system under a uniform interface.The software enables the personal computer user to sit in a mixed network and seamlessly access either MS-DOS or Unix applications, the good Doktor says.
