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Unbelievable... 25 years ago we started out as a couple, today we are an established consulting and software company.
Once upon a time ...
The AIC Group was founded 25 years ago as Active Information Concept in Lüneburg – at a time when the term business intelligence was still unknown and the business area was called data warehousing. Dialog marketing was carried out manually by experts in database marketing, and marketing automation was considered an unattainable vision. Today, all these things are taken for granted, as if they had always existed.
However, this development has taken place over many years – a development that we as the AIC Group have actively accompanied and enriched with our ideas. Today, we operate our software products in the cloud, BI and data science have been supplemented by generative AI, and topics such as hyper-intelligence and big data have long since become reality. These and many other topics will continue to determine the direction and mission of the AIC Group in the coming years. The future remains exciting and continues to promise innovation and diversity.
We started out together at MicroStrategy in the USA. The topic of data warehousing was still in its infancy and there were only a few evaluation platforms that enabled complex analyses. MicroStrategy is still one of the market leaders today, went public shortly after we started and is now a permanent fixture in the BI market.
Active Information Concept (AIC) is founded in Lüneburg in August 1999. The first projects are launched with a focus on consulting for data management and data analysis. The partnership with MicroStrategy is established and remains an integral part of our range of services. The customer base grows steadily and AIC develops into a renowned partner for BI and marketing automation.
AIC grows, and the premises in Zeppelinstrasse become too small. A move to Johannes-Gutenberg-Straße offers more development potential, so that we still feel at home there today. Our software development in the field of marketing automation is born. Our cloud-based offering for email marketing, push notifications and real-time workflow control is developed with a great deal of pioneering spirit.
The marketing of our Marketing Automation aisuite is launched and presented to the public at CeBIT in Hanover. As an integration partner of MicroStrategy, we present our solutions and hold talks with potential customers. On the fourth day, we spoke to our first customer, which of course we didn’t know at the time. Not only is the number of employees increasing, but AIC is also developing due to the new areas of responsibility, resulting in new organizational units.
Our BI consulting was awarded the 5-year contract for the design and implementation of MicroStrategy in-house training for 20 locations of a leading retail group, from Portugal to Tokyo. Our BI expertise for the MicroStrategy platform and our competence in the retail environment were decisive for the contract.
We are celebrating our 10th anniversary as a training company. We started successfully back in 2001 with the training of our first employee in the field of application development. Since then, we have regularly trained young people in this field. Some of them found working at the AIC Group so exciting that they are still a permanent part of the AIC team.
The time was right and we were named Partner of the Year 2010 by our BI partner MicroStrategy. We were delighted when we were presented with the award at the MicroStrategy Symposium in Düsseldorf. Unfortunately, the trophy has not been awarded again since then, so it has remained with this one award for AIC.
Cooperation is an important success factor for the AIC Group. We have been cultivating this with the local business development agency since 2012 in order to be able to implement innovative ideas with the support of the state of Lower Saxony and Europe in addition to our operational business. Time and again, there are major projects where advice and financial support have produced great solutions. This joint approach pays off for us and helps us to repeatedly bring new solutions to market maturity.
We have our software certified. As a German software provider, we receive a new award from BiTMi every year.
brandeins and Statista select the best consultants in Germany, and the AIC Group is there for the first time. We receive the BEST CONSULTANT award for our work in the BI and marketing retail sector. Since then, we have been able to repeat this award 8 times.
We decide to operate our software in the cloud in future. The first module we are developing is the email marketing component, which will form the basis of our Marketing Automation Studio (MAS). Even though we didn’t know what challenges awaited us, we overcame them thanks to our development team and brought an excellent product to market.
We look for the right partner for CSA-certified e-mail dispatch and find one in Inxmail. We have been working very successfully with Inxmail since the beginning and are pleased to have a very reliable partner at our side to this day. In 2024, we will have achieved gold partnership with Inxmail and look forward to many more years of partnership together.
We have already written 20 years of company history, which we celebrated in style with a company outing to Sankt Peter-Ording. As northern lights, sailing is part of our DNA. That’s why the mottos of the event were beach sailing and buggy surfing. That was really something different, as you only really know sailing with water under your keel. Great fun for everyone and a fantastic shared experience.
Every year we have a summer and a Christmas event. This year’s summer event focused on physical coordination. The entire team took part in a small golf tournament at Escheburg Golf Club. After an extensive breakfast, the three best AIC golfers were determined in pitching, driving and putting and the trophies were awarded at the barbecue.
Our software development continues to move towards the cloud and uses the new Customer Data Platform for our customers. The new workflow component is presented to the first customers as a new editor – a great further development of the previous solution.
In August we celebrate 25 years of AIC in the Kunstsaal Lüneburg. Instead of the summer event, there was Lüneburg catering and live music. Our guests enjoyed a great evening, perfectly prepared by our event team. We are proud of the last 25 years and grateful for the support of our team, our partners and our customers – only together could we achieve this success.
