ORISA — A Suc­cess Sto­ry

ORISA has its roots in focal Infor­ma­tik GmbH, foun­ded in 1991. The foun­ders came from the Zeiss Cor­po­ra­ti­on and wan­ted to auto­no­mously use their expe­ri­ence in deve­lo­ping and pro­du­cing opti­cal com­pon­ents. One of their first lar­ge bulk orders was for a know­ledge-based solu­ti­on for the Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH which is the heart of opti­cal pro­duc­tion to the pre­sent day.

Fur­ther pro­jects focu­sing on know­ledge pro­ces­sing and con­fi­gu­ra­ti­on resul­ted in the for­ma­ti­on of ORISA GmbH tog­e­ther with for­mer IBM employees in Sep­tem­ber 1994. Based on the expe­ri­en­ces with know­ledge-based sys­tems and buil­ding on IBM’s preli­mi­na­ry work on a pro­log pro­gramming envi­ron­ment, the own pro­duct orisa­ba­se was deve­lo­ped; the future foun­da­ti­on for know­ledge-based solu­ti­ons. Fur­ther pro­jects in con­fi­gu­ra­ti­on, know­ledge manage­ment and data­ba­se appli­ca­ti­ons fur­ther expan­ded the wealth of expe­ri­ence in this area.

The result of the col­la­bo­ra­ti­on with Munich’s Con­sul­tancy Rade­ma­cher & Part­ner was the deve­lo­p­ment of the pro­duct con­fi­gu­ra­tor CREALIS® which sup­ports the descrip­ti­on, main­ten­an­ce and com­pi­la­ti­on of ver­sa­ti­le pro­ducts in the manu­fac­tu­ring indus­try. In April 1998 the share­hol­ders of focal and ORISA deci­ded to mer­ge both com­pa­nies.