((otrs)) to be Listed on the Open Market with 1,85 Mil. Shares.
December 22, 2009 — OTRS AG, the largest service provider and developer for the world’s leading open source service-desk system, OTRS, will be listed on December 23, 2009. The ((otrs)) group – made up of OTRS AG and its 100% subsidiary company OTRS Inc. in Silicon Valley, USA – will be listed on the open market of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange with 1.85 mil. bearer shares of common stock (no-par shares). Scheich & Partner GmbH from Frankfurt is acting as lead broker. The first trading day for the ((otrs)) common stock is December 23, 2009.
Andre Mindermann, the chair of the ((otrs)) group, explains the reason for the listing: “The most important aim of our listing is to transfer OTRS AG to the free float market. In doing so, we believe we will be consistently transferring the philosophy of the open source software movement into the world of business. Not least, we want to give the OTRS community the opportunity to share in the success of the ((otrs)) group. We owe the extremely positive corporate development of OTRS AG this year to the fact that we are committed to the open source concept. In these times of the financial crisis, we are experiencing a boom with our open source business model. We waive all forms of licensing cost and therefore create genuine and measurable added value for the user companies.”
As the world’s leading service management solution, the open source software, “OTRS Service Desk” (Open Ticket Request System), available in 27 languages, is used by over 70,000 corporate groups, small and medium-sized companies and public-sector institutions all over the world. 60 per cent of DAX 30 companies use the OTRS Service Desk software. The community project, OTRS.org (www.otrs.org) was launched by Martin Edenhofer in the year 2001. In 2003, he founded OTRS GmbH together with Andre Mindermann and Burchard Steinbild, which changed its name to AG in 2007. OTRS AG is the world’s largest developed and service provider for the licensing-cost free OTRS Service Desk software. OTRS AG’s range of services includes enterprise support + maintenance, implementation advice, integration, customizing of the application, training, and hosted OTRS services. The web application, OTRS Service Desk, can be upgraded to the comprehensive IT service management solution, “OTRS::ITSM”. OTRS::ITSM is the only open source software that is compliant with the industrial sector standard ITIL(c), i.e. with the best practice recommendations of the IT infrastructure library. Particularly for large companies, this consistent orientation towards ITIL is an important reason to choose the licensing-cost free OTRS::ITSM software.
“OTRS::ITSM already supports the incident management, problem management, configuration management, and service level management ITIL processes,” explained Andre Mindermann, the chair of OTRS AG. “The highlight of the new version 2.0, which we will be introducing at CeBIT in March 2010, will be a completely newly developed change management module, which is also based on the ITIL best practice recommendations.”