The safety of the fishermen of India and the tourists of Indonesia has improved in the past two years thanks in part to 40 German-made cubes that line the rim of the Indian Ocean: weather-resistant computers that collect information as part of the United Nation’s tsunami warning system, installed after the tragedy of 2004.
Nearly 10,000km away, in Leipzig, eastern Germany, Dietmar Schulz is not shy to talk about his company’s invention – sold as the Seiscomp or the Priocomp – as a classic example of German ingenuity creating a niche in a global market dominated by high-volume manufacturers from countries where labour is cheap.
Mr Schulz has been able to bloom as a highly specialised maker of computer equipment even as the industry has moved to Asia or eastern Europe. Standard computers and servers are no longer made in Germany, neither are mobile phones, and it is an open question how long chip-production will survive.
“We’ve maybe got two or three rivals who make computers as robust as ours,” says the joint head and co-owner of computer-systems house Alpha 2000. “They’re mostly American and mostly have a military background. But maybe because of that, what they have on offer is more expensive than anything we sell.”
For about €1,800 ($2,607), Mr Schulz and his business partner Matthias Brühl will sell you a finely machined splash and dust-proof box, 15cm high and a little less in length, housing a low-energy computer processor, as much as 1,000 megabytes of memory, as well as a hard disk that holds up to 100 gigabytes of information.
“The components are small and use very little energy – 10 watts, less than a light bulb,” says Mr Schulz. Using so little energy means the computer produces little heat, and can thus do without the usual fan. Also, it can easily feed its energy needs from solar cells, a wind turbine, or a normal car battery.
Combine this with a transmitter that communicates with headquarters and custom-made software that will re-set the computer if this link should be severed, and you have a device that can do its collation and computation autonomously – in a jungle or on a beach, or in a mine or the grimiest of factories.
On average, Alpha 2000 has sold one of these bespoke machines every week for the past nine years, some 500 in total. And Mr Schulz has his eyes on a whole raft of untested industrial applications.
The German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), based in Potsdam on the fringes of Berlin, started the ball rolling in 1998 when it approached Alpha 2000’s Potsdam office to sound out the possibility of building weatherproof computers for a global earthquake monitoring-system that it was building.
Alpha 2000, which today employs 45 people, jumped at the chance. “If you ask tech-geeks whether they can do that type of thing for you, their fingers start itching,” Mr Schulz says. “We finished that job in 1999 and sold a whole lot more to other research institutes. Our computers operate in 17 countries now.”
The company is currently working on an order for 15 devices for a public institution – “based in Austria” is all Mr Schulz is prepared to give away. But unsolicited demand from industrial companies has also led him to believe that the market for the Seiscomp /Priocomp can still grow substantially.
“We sold a computer to a company that cuts holes in metal,” he recalls. It had a fairly standard PC controlling some machines in a factory whose air was heavy with oil particles. “The vents on the PC drew in the oil,” Mr Schulz says. “Every quarter of a year one of these machines died.”
Now the factory has an Alpha 2000 computer that should run five or six years before needing anything like a significant overhaul, he says. “Of all the machines we’ve sold since 1999, I’d say only three or four stopped working altogether.”
Mr Schulz says Alpha 2000 could imagine supplying machine-tool makers with its rugged computer. “There are also obvious applications in the area of outdoor security systems and in renewable energy. An Alpha 2000 machine would be perfect to monitor a solar-power station,” he says.
