Indi.An: Our Story in a Nutshell

When Christoph Linder, Christian Guse-Mann and Jörg Vermehren founded the company on February 1, 2006, the focus was on software development for industrial automation.
The core business centered on programming tailor-made solutions for industry, manufacturing, and logistics.
We started under the name "Büro für individuelle Anwendungsentwicklung" (Office for Individual Application Development). Since this name proved to be too long for everyday business, it evolved into the pragmatic abbreviation: Indi.An.

The spark for our own product development was a large-scale project in the solar industry in 2007. The requirement was a plant-wide web HMI system for hundreds of machines, each with over 1,000 data points.
At that time, web technologies (such as AJAX) and the available S7 drivers from manufacturers were either not technically designed for this volume of data or were not approved. To achieve the necessary performance for direct controller communication, we developed our own driver.
This resulted in the first version of the PLCcom library for S7. Over the years, the library has been continuously modernized—now supporting features like symbolic access—and is used today in industrial applications worldwide across all sectors.

In the following years, we developed software solutions for various industrial companies on behalf of automation integrators. Building on this practical experience, we began developing our own vendor-neutral web HMI system, QuickHMI, in 2012.
Since the versatile use of this system required additional communication paths, we simultaneously developed robust protocol implementations.
This led to the release of the PLCcom libraries for Modbus and the PLCcom OPC UA SDK, which are now in stable use globally.

QuickHMI has been continuously developed since the release of its first version in 2014. With the third version, we introduced a small tradition: each release is given the English name of an animal alongside its version number.
Starting with V3 (Antelope), these names document the technical progress of the system up to the current V14 (Lynx)—though we skipped version 13 just to be safe.

In practice, QuickHMI enables the creation of web HMI and SCADA applications. Thanks to natively integrated protocols, integrators and OEM machine builders can connect a wide variety of controllers directly. Today, the system is used to visualize and control plant processes in a manufacturer-independent and platform-agnostic way via browser or app, without the need for complex programming of the hardware communication path.

What began in 2006 with the programming of individual plant software now forms the foundation of our software products.
With our protocol libraries and the QuickHMI system, we provide automation engineers and machine builders with established tools to reliably implement cross-manufacturer data communication and visualization on their systems.

Today, more than 20 years later, the Bremen-based software company is still led by its three founders.

Our core competency – specializing in industrial protocol implementation and web visualization – has developed not only from our project business, but above all through years of dialogue with our customers.
We are a small, focused team of code specialists by choice. Our PLCcom libraries and QuickHMI system provide the tools to see PLC data from any manufacturer directly in your browser. We handle the complex interface programming for you. This focus means we will keep maintaining and developing our software ourselves for years to come.

We will continue to develop our software products based on a clear roadmap and adapt them to new technical standards.
This way, we ensure that our software remains a reliable building block for your future automation projects.

If you have any questions, just write to us: [email protected]