Mark Kobbert

Since 2014 I have been building the technical foundation of the SYMESTIC Cloud MES platform.
From the microservice architecture on Microsoft Azure through the IoT gateway connectivity to the real-time data processing of more than 15,000 machines in around 20 countries. My job is to make sure that machine data from any machine park – regardless of age, regardless of manufacturer – arrives in the cloud reliably, securely and in real time.

I joined SYMESTIC as a software developer straight out of university.
Business Informatics at SRH Hochschule Heidelberg. The interface between business logic and software architecture drew me in back then and still shapes my work today. I don’t think in features, but in problems that need to be solved: How do you connect a press from 1995 without touching the PLC? How do you process 50,000 data points per second without latency? How do you keep a system running reliably across many countries with different network conditions?

The decision that shaped my work the most was rebuilding the platform in the mid-2010s.
Instead of lifting the existing on-premise software into the cloud, we started over. Cloud-native, microservices, API-first, on Microsoft Azure. This was not an incremental update but a redesign from the ground up. Every decision – from the database architecture to the gateway protocol – was designed for scalability, real-time capability and maintainability.

I see the result every day in the monitoring dashboards.
A platform with 99.9 % availability that scales automatically when a customer connects 200 machines at once. IoT gateways that can be installed in two to four hours per machine – OPC UA for modern controllers, digital I/O gateways for legacy equipment without any digital interface. No PLC intervention, no production interruption, no months-long integration project.

What drives me:
Most MES projects fail not because of the software, but because of the implementation. Too long, too complex, too expensive. My goal is to dissolve that hurdle through architecture: a platform that rolls out as fast as a SaaS tool and integrates as deeply as an enterprise MES. That is not a contradiction – it is an architectural decision.