In the strange spring of 2020, while half of Germany was still figuring out the difference between Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Test Center, two software engineers in Ibbenbüren were finishing the paperwork on a company that didn't quite exist yet.
We are Thimo Buchheister and Thorsten Brügge, and on 15 June 2020 we registered ThreeB IT GmbH at Bergstrang 105. The plan was deliberately unfashionable for the time: instead of pitching another mobile-first start-up, we built a software house that was honest about doing two things in parallel — building software and running IT.
Why two disciplines under one roof
Most German Mittelstand customers we'd met in our previous roles had the same problem. A great consultant would design a beautiful .NET architecture, hand it over, and disappear. Six months later the operations team would be running it on a Domain Controller from 2014, with a backup script no one had tested since the day after they wrote it.
We wanted a model where the people who wrote the code also owned the lights-on responsibility for the customer's IT — Microsoft 365 tenants, endpoints, Azure subscriptions, and all. The shared muscle memory between "build" and "run" is what eventually became our four service pillars: IT Services, Software Development, Web Services, and Cloud Management.
The stack we picked
The bet was simple: stay close to Microsoft. .NET, Azure, and Microsoft 365. Not because anything else was bad, but because depth in one stack beats shallow knowledge of five.
That stack choice has aged well — and it set up everything that followed, including the SaaS products (Xircuit, Outastory, Postnomic) and the customer projects we ended up running for Kühne+Nagel, Steuerberater Keller, HP Elektrotechnik, and others.
More on those in the posts to come.