About us

Where we are coming from and where it's going

From a professional point of view, we have been involved in software architecture and engineering, infrastructure automation and project management for more than twenty years.
Although we come from Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony in Germany - and thus a region with a strong connection to the automotive sector - a large number of our projects can be found in other industries.

Our vision

dreitier is the company that others (IT-interested, IT-affine, people) can trust blindly and unconditionally with questions in the field of software engineering and operations.

Our mission

We want to pass on our knowledge in the field of software engineering and the operation of software products. dreitier supports other people from the IT sector in taking a look behind the scenes, dealing with underlying technologies and solving errors independently.

WTFAQ

How we would characterise ourselves

Of course, this is a very subjective picture - but we are what our values are: Honest, uncomplicated, approachable, professional, asynchronous, appointment-avoiding, tech-driven, realistic, no-bullshitters.

What drives us

Having a vision and mission is good. However, it must also be realistic. We can't help everyone, and we've been in business long enough to know that we really don't know much. But we are excellent at recognising problems and solving them.

As part of our advisory and consulting services, as well as our software products, we gather the experience and pass it on.

Why we founded dreitier

We could have spent the rest of our professional lives with any employer or worked as freelancers. So why setting up a company and taking the risk? Thomas and Christopher always had the following points in mind:

  1. We were driven by the question of whether we, as nerds/techies, could run a company and use our IT background as an advantage. The economic interests were secondary for the time being.
  2. There was always a quiet voice in our heads saying: "You're not right here with your attitude and your priorities at this stage of your life.". We could have continued working with nice colleagues and superiors, but it would have felt wrong. We are not the classic consultants, but techies, and we stand by that to the outside world. We didn't find the employer we were looking for with our attitude and interests.
  3. Our helper syndrome on the one hand and our enthusiasm for realising software products on the other made it difficult to find a suitable company. Continuous Architecture was ultimately our answer to this balancing act.
  4. We are not the lone wolves who are travelling as freelancers. We realised that we complement each other quite well as a team. True to the motto "Never change a running system", we wanted to continue working together.

Why dreitier

In our mission, we support our customers on three levels: strategy, architecture and automation. In software engineering, the three-tier architecture is a well-known concept. Although it is intended for architectural implementation, it can also be applied to our work areas: The three tiers of strategy, architecture and automation. Since we do not only consult on pure software engineering, but also on operations and infrastructure, the term IT is obvious. In the end this results in an amalgamation of the words drei (German word for three), IT and tier: dreITier.

The fact that we are 3 founders and in German tier can be translated to animal is actually just a nice side effect. Also in the choice of the company name applies: Naming things is hard.

How we are feeling aligned with

You can put dreitier in a box with the CCC, Bonjwa, Uberspace, Atlassian, Spatie, NETWAYS

What milestones we have achieved

  • July 2023: Patrik joined as a Senior DevOps Engineer
  • March 2023: We got an official tax number. Seriously, this drove as crazy
  • April 2023: Steven joined as 2nd CEO
  • January 2023: Christopher took over CEO position
  • September 2021: Official founding date
  • End of 2020: First talks between Andreas, Thomas and Christopher to rename Andreas' company to dreitier
  • 2019: First serious talks between Thomas and Christopher about funding our own company