About us
Software from Karlsruhe for production, laboratories and data centres.
ICT Baden GmbH builds software for environments where computers run for a long time and rarely have someone sitting next to them: plants, laboratories, warehouses, server rooms. We are a small team with short paths – whoever writes to us gets an answer from the people who build the software.
The team
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Founder, managing director and owner
Frank Pfattheicher
Frank Pfattheicher founded ICT Baden and runs the company. For more than 20 years he has been building software for industry, energy and telecommunications – from the PLC (Siemens S7, Beckhoff TwinCAT) and protocols such as OPC UA, Modbus and IEC 60870 to the application. Alerting and telephony for plants (Informant, CallCenter) and the ModbusExplorer tool are his work.
In 2004 he co-founded the .NET User Group Karlsruhe and led it for many years; he contributes to the .NET Open Space Süd and is a member of the association of Karlsruhe software engineers (VKSI). His conviction: only software built with current technologies is an investment in the future.
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Software development, products and AI
Jo Pfattheicher
Jo Pfattheicher builds the products, takes care of releases and testing – and of making sure the software can be put to use without detours. Before that he worked as head of IT and security officer in IT companies; he knows how software is rolled out, secured and operated in large environments.
Jo is our AI expert. He has been working with AI every day since the first publicly available language models – not as a toy, but as a tool. This website and the new products, including documentation, tests and translations into five languages, were built in a few weeks with AI agents that he directs and checks. He also runs language models locally without the cloud, trains his own models and builds agents that take over workflows in operation. We pass this knowledge on: if you want to introduce AI in your own company, you can book that with us as a service.
Why we do it this way
We want good software to simply be available. Plants, laboratories and warehouses often run software that is old, expensive or awkward – not because there is nothing better, but because switching is hard: licences per device, servers that must not be switched off, tools nobody maintains any more.
That is why we publish our new products as open source, do without licence servers and mandatory cloud, and earn our money with support and custom development. The software stays usable even if you decide against us one day. That is our benchmark.
How we work
- Open source under MIT
The source code of our new products is published on github.com/ict-baden. Every release can be reviewed, built and reused.
- Support contracts instead of licences
The software is free of charge. We earn our money with response times, updates and help in operation. Support and pricing
- No dependency, no telemetry
No licence server, no mandatory cloud, no data sent home. How we handle security reports is on the security page. Security
- Karlsruhe, on site or remote
We are based in Karlsruhe-Durlach, Germany. We work with large corporations and mid-sized companies on site or remotely – whatever the plant allows.
Contact
Let’s talk about your project.
Tell us what you have in mind – a product, custom development or introducing AI. We will get back to you personally.