2020: Trust as a recipe for success

Accelerated digitalisation, exciting new customers and organic agility brought success in an extraordinary year. Thanks to the impressive engagement of everyone involved, Swiss IT service provider Ergon Informatik can report positive annual results, closing the year with sales up 13% and 5.8% growth in its staff.

Full of challenges, 2020 required flexibility, adaptability and staying power. The concerted engagement and outstanding personal agility of 326 employees resulted in a successful year reflected in 39 new clients and turnover of CHF 59.8 million. “The basis of Ergon’s culture is trust, which is a key success factor in the company’s strategy,” says Gabriela Keller, CEO of Ergon Informatik AG.

Accelerated innovation

The shift to digital has accelerated innovation both within the company and with our customers, resulting in record-breaking go-lives. A security project for a leading Swiss financial-services provider, for example, took a mere seven days from request to go-live. LiPay, the digital payment solution from Liechtensteinische Landesbank (LLB), also went live four months earlier than planned to counter the pandemic with powerful innovation. “We were also able to earn the trust of our customers, giving them reliable support as a technology partner in challenging times. Together we were able to adapt rapidly to change and assure business continuity,” enthuses Ergon CEO Gabriela Keller.

A diverse portfolio

The year 2020 brought a gratifying number of new customers and projects in a variety of areas, including an SMI-listed Swiss industrial group, a Swiss insurance group specialising in health and accident cover, and a leading German retailer. In addition, Ergon saw powerful growth in telecommunications, e-health and legal. Ergon is also supporting SIX Digital Exchange, a major Swiss player in the financial industry. Ergon is working with the start-up Fieldwalk to revolutionise the construction industry, enabling connected planning by means of augmented reality and building information modelling (BIM).

Airlock: secure expansion

With Airlock two-factor authentication (2FA) we created a new, user-friendly solution providing comprehensive protection from password theft, phishing and social engineering attacks. The Airlock secure access hub is thus even more closely focused on intelligent access management. In the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), the clientele for Airlock grew by a total of 20 customers. With customers in Serbia, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the Philippines, there is also solid progress in terms of international expansion.

Investments for the future

Ergon is positioning itself in the open banking community as a driver and source of know-how, for example through active involvement as a founding member of the OpenBankingProject.ch initiative and development of the Ergon Swiss open banking solution. The offering of products and services in artificial intelligence developed in different thematic areas, with innovation projects relating to voice control, automatic image recognition and conversational agents.

All good sites come in threes

The new site in the heart of Zurich augments the two existing office buildings and boasts its own co-working space. Ergon continues to endeavour to provide its people with an attractive place to work, both on site and at home, to encourage and facilitate collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

There were also various measures and digital campaigns to encourage and facilitate cross-team knowledge transfer and enable people to make new contacts even while working from home. As Keller explains, “Whether we’re working digitally, from home or at the office itself, we’re there for one another. Mutual appreciation, respect and open communication are essential. That’s how we make successful projects happen together.”