Company
Klaus Landsdorf
Co-founder, managing director and sole owner of Iniationware GmbH since 2024. M.Sc. in Media Informatics. On plant floors since 2004, and since 2013 in the bodies where the standards for them are written.
Why this career is on the record
Anyone who tells you whether an automation project pays off should have built and commissioned one. This page sets out where that judgement comes from — with dates, so it stays verifiable.
The short version: trained on commercial software, moved onto the plant floor, learned there that a plant does not stop at handover. Then the data side, the standards work in industry bodies, and finally a company to bring both together.
The thread running through it is durability. Software in a factory runs for ten years and longer, often untouched. Once you have carried that responsibility, you build differently: less code, clearer data structures, and no dependency on a vendor who changes the interface in five years.
The route here
Eight stations, each of which added something that is still in the work today.
Apprenticeship: ERP software
Trained as a software developer, C++ and C# in an ERP environment. The basis for reading business processes, not only technical ones.
Onto the plant floor
From commercial software to industrial programming: PC software for process control systems, at the plant rather than at a desk.
First plant of his own
At animal feed producer Una-Hakra in Hamburg, the first large plant developed and commissioned independently. Responsibility from the first line of code to running production.
Automation and MES
Plants and MES modules for food, soils, animal feed and truck scales, in national and international projects. Industries where batches, recipes and records count.
Data instead of code
Five years in private health insurance working on IoT, databases and data structures. The lesson: a good data structure replaces a great deal of programming — and outlasts it.
Into the standards bodies
Work in the OPC Foundation working groups, later with the VDMA on Industry 4.0. OPC UA, MQTT and IIoT where the decisions are made.
His own company
Iniationware GmbH founded in Lohne: to offer process knowledge the way it makes sense, and to pass it on to the next generation through vocational training.
M.Sc. in Media Informatics
Studied part-time alongside full-time work from 2011, specialising in software engineering and future computing. Master's thesis on the networked asset administration shell in Industry 4.0, ISA-95 and OPC UA.
Software you can sleep through the night on
From 2007 the work shifted from programming to the question of how to build programs that run safely and stably for ten years and more. Not as a quality promise, but out of self-interest: whoever commissioned a plant gets the call at every fault.
The degree from 2011 answered a gap that grew more visible with each project. Software architecture and UX decide whether a system is still changeable after five years, and whether the people on the line will use it at all. Neither can be picked up on the side.
What follows shows up in every project: few, clearly cut data structures, open standards instead of proprietary interfaces, and a willingness to say that a step does not pay off.
2025: iniationOS
Digital tools have grown enormously over the past twenty years. Efficiency and effectiveness in manufacturing have grown by a fraction of that. This gap is what the company works on.
iniationOS brings together what came out of the stations before it: operations management for production, quality, maintenance and inventory, industrial digital twins and 3D simulation — the lifecycle as described in the master's thesis, now as a product you can actually use.
The core is unspectacular and effective for exactly that reason: one data foundation instead of data silos, and one query language that is the same for systems, people and AI.
At a glance
- Degree
- M.Sc. Media Informatics
Software engineering and future computing - On plant floors
- since 2004
- OPC Foundation
- working groups since 2013
- Open source
- OPC UA for Node-RED
author and initiator since 2017
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