Robert Bosch GmbH, or Bosch, is a German multinational engineering and electronics company headquartered in Gerlingen, near Stuttgart, Germany. It is the world's largest supplier of automotive components measured by 2011 revenues. Bosch's core products are automotive components, industrial products and building products. Bosch has more than 350 subsidiaries across over 60 countries and its products are sold in around 150 countries. In 2009 Bosch was the leader in terms of numbers of patents at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office with 3,213 patents.
Founded in 1969, Software AG is an enterprise software company with over 10,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries. The company is the second largest software vendor in Germany, the seventh largest in Europe. Software AG is traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol SOW and part of the technology index TecDAX. The company was founded in 1969 by a group of six young employees at the consulting firm AIV. ADABAS was launched in 1971 as a high performance transactional database management system. In 1979 Natural, a 4GL application development language, was launched. The company continued to open offices and subsidiaries in North America, Japan, UK, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Saudi Arabia. By 1987 Software AG had around 500 employees, 12 subsidiaries in Europe and offices in more than 50 countries. In 1999 Software AG was listed on Frankfurt Stock Exchange and soon after the company released Tamino Information Server and Tamino XML Server.
