Bitkom e.V. — full name Bundesverband Informationswirtschaft, Telekommunikation und neue Medien — is the federal association of the German digital economy. Founded in October 1999, headquartered in Berlin-Mitte (Albrechtstr. 10), it represents over 2,300 companies, including more than 1,000 SMEs, around 700 tech startups, and roughly half of the DAX-40. It markets itself as "Germany's most important digital association and Europe's largest think tank for digital topics."
ThreeB IT joined via Bitkom's Get-Started programme for startups, the entry-level tier aimed at companies in our size class.
What Bitkom actually does
Beyond hosting glossy conferences, Bitkom does the unglamorous work of being in the room when German and EU digital regulation gets drafted. Their current advocacy load is heavy:
- EU AI Act implementation. Bitkom has consistently pushed for legally certain, innovation-friendly application of the AI Act, and published an "AI Act Simplification" position paper in 2025
- Sovereign cloud. A 2025 position paper on the proposed EU Cloud & AI Development Act, and a 2026 paper on Cloud Sovereignty Criteria in Europe
- Digital sovereignty of Germany and Europe broadly, including the "Digitalstandort Deutschland" agenda
- Digitalisation of public administration — the long, painful work of getting German agencies onto digital workflows
- Recurring annual events: Smart Country Convention, AI Infrastructure Day, Safer Internet Day
The 2025 Articles of Association (amended 24 June 2025) and the published fee schedule define exact membership tiers and dues.
What membership gets a Mittelstand vendor
Concretely:
- Access to working groups (Fachausschüsse, Arbeitskreise) where members shape position papers and meet customers, competitors, and regulators in the same room. For us, the AI, Cloud, Software, and Healthcare-IT groups are the relevant ones.
- Lobbying weight in Berlin and Brussels that no single SME could mount alone. When the German PDF/UA accessibility mandate moves to the next stage, or when the AI Act's enforcement guidance is being drafted, Bitkom is in the room. We are not — but the association we pay dues to is.
- PR distribution, training, and corporate-benefits programmes that punch above their weight at the SME budget level.
- A credibility signal to enterprise procurement that the supplier is plugged into the federal digital association — the kind of thing that gets noticed on tender shortlists.
Why we joined when we did
ThreeB IT was founded 1 March 2019 in Ibbenbüren — geographically far from Berlin, technically very close to it. As soon as we started taking on customers whose work touched regulated areas (healthcare during the COVID platform years; logistics with Kühne+Nagel; Microsoft 365 tenants for tax advisories and Mittelstand operators), we needed to be in the room when the rules around those areas were drafted.
Get-Started was the right tier at the right time. The full member list lives behind a lazy-loaded index on bitkom.org and is alphabetised — find us under T.
Where this fits
Bitkom is one of four community presences ThreeB IT maintains deliberately:
- .NET Foundation — the open-source backbone of the platform we build on
- .NET Conf sponsorships — recurring investment in Microsoft's annual community conference
- Ibbenbüren .NET Meetup — the local, everyday version
- Bitkom — the federal regulatory voice
Each does a different job. Bitkom is the one whose value most often goes unmeasured until you need it.