EMBIQ GmbH settles in Graz: Silicon Alps in Austria, SoDA in Poland

When we opened our office in Graz in the summer of 2021, it was a small bet: a local company, a desk in Liebenau and the hope that Austrian clients would appreciate having a partner nearby. EMBIQ GmbH was entered in the Austrian commercial register at the end of August 2021 as a subsidiary wholly owned by EMBIQ sp. z o.o. in Lublin. Two years later it is a normal part of how we work, and this autumn it became more firmly rooted in the Austrian technology community.

Here is a short update on both sides of the company: why we set up in Graz, what joining the Silicon Alps Cluster means for us, and what our membership in SoDA gives us in Poland.

Why Graz, and why a GmbH

Austria was not a leap into the unknown. We had already worked with several Austrian clients, most of them based in Graz, and Styria is one of Europe's strongest regions for electronics, semiconductors and automotive engineering. For a company that builds software for connected devices, that is a natural neighbourhood.

A local legal entity changes more than the letterhead. Clients can sign contracts under familiar law, receive invoices from a local company and meet us in person without planning a trip abroad. It also helped that the Austrian Business Agency took the time to meet us in July 2021 and introduce us to companies and organisations in the region, including the Silicon Alps Cluster.

The first contract of EMBIQ GmbH followed in September 2021: electronics, firmware and software for a start-up building connected devices for road infrastructure (case study). More Austrian clients followed, and today we work with companies in Graz, Vienna and beyond.

Behind the Graz office stand our engineering teams in Lublin. In practice, projects run with one team across both locations: conversations, workshops and on-site testing close to the client, development and QA wherever the right people are. This autumn we also moved our Graz desk from Liebenau to a coworking space in the city centre.

Silicon Alps: the electronics cluster of southern Austria

The Silicon Alps Cluster is the Austrian technology cluster for electronic based systems, with offices in Villach and Graz. It connects industrial companies, research institutions and service providers around areas such as RFID and wireless IoT, smart sensor systems, power electronics and cyber security.

Our path to the cluster took a while. The first contact came in late 2022, and in March 2023 we visited the cluster's office in Villach, in the same week in which we also visited embedded world in Nuremberg. The decisive step was EBSCON 2023, the cluster's Electronic Based Systems Conference, held on 11 October at Messe Congress Graz under the motto “boosting transformation”. Besides keynotes, panels and an exhibition, EBSCON runs B2B matchmaking, organised by the Enterprise Europe Network team at the Styrian Business Promotion Agency together with Silicon Alps. We took part in the matchmaking, and a conversation with the cluster team during the conference turned into a concrete next step.

A week after the conference we received the cluster's cooperation agreement, and in October EMBIQ GmbH signed it and became a Silicon Alps partner. Within the cluster we belong to the RFID and wireless IoT area, which is very close to what we do every day with Bluetooth, other radio technologies and sensors. At EBSCON we also learned about SURE5.0, a Horizon Europe project on Industry 5.0 in which the cluster takes part, and we applied to its catalogue of technology service providers.

On 8 November we joined our first event as partners, “RFID & Wireless IoT: What's next?” in Voitsberg, west of Graz. The programme combined short company presentations, a regional update on the digital product passport the EU is preparing, an introduction to the cluster's trend-scouting platform and a tour of the hosts' facilities. For a company that builds the software side of connected products, it was a useful look at where identification and tracking technology is heading.

SoDA: our network in Poland

In Poland, EMBIQ has been a member of SoDA, the Polish organisation of IT services employers, since October 2019. SoDA gives software houses a shared voice towards public institutions, promotes Polish technology companies abroad and helps members compare notes on things that are hard to benchmark alone.

Two examples from this year. We contributed our data to the 2023 edition of SoDA's salary report and received a benchmark of our pay structures against the market, which matters for a company competing for engineers from a regional city like Lublin. And we follow the members' channel where software houses exchange information about available specialists and open requests, a very practical form of cooperation between companies that are otherwise competitors. It is the same problem we explored this year in our first prototype built on large language models.

Two networks, one team

Being active in both countries reflects how our projects actually run. A typical engagement might start with a workshop in Graz with a hardware manufacturer, continue with firmware, mobile and cloud development in Lublin, and end with field tests wherever the devices are installed. Silicon Alps connects us to the industrial side of that chain in Austria; SoDA connects us to the Polish software industry we are part of.

For clients this means a choice. They can work with the Austrian GmbH or with the Polish company, depending on what is simpler for their procurement, and still get the same people. You can read more about this kind of work on our IoT services page.

What comes next

Over the coming months we want to take a more active role in the cluster's RFID and wireless IoT community and to find partners for projects we could not deliver alone. If you are an Austrian or German company looking for a software partner for connected products, or a cluster member who wants to compare notes, get in touch. We are happy to meet in Graz, in Lublin or online.