My name is Markus Schumacher, born in 1973, and I live in the Bergstrasse district of Hesse. In this blog, I discuss topics that have literally "occupied" me for many years: Technology, entrepreneurship and "toys". This article outlines how I came to do this.
Computers have fascinated me since I was a child. The conscious starting shot of my nerd career was in 1985, when my parents gave me a Commodore C64. Besides playing games, I quickly became fascinated with designing with a computer and still do today. By the way, I still have the C64 (see picture).
This hobby led me to study electrical engineering at the TU Darmstadt. When I couldn't find a reasonable job during the semester break in 1996, I decided to participate in a programming internship to learn the then new language Java . After Assembler and C in my studies, this was a completely new experience and set the course for the future. Equipped with this knowledge, I quickly got a job at an advertising agency in Frankfurt to design the first applets for websites of financial companies.
Thus infected, I decided to stay at the university and do my doctorate. I started this in 1998 at the IT Transfer Office (ITO) , an organization of the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt that kept itself alive exclusively through externally funded projects, initially sponsored by the Digital Equipment Corporation. This awakened the entrepreneurial streak in me. The creative freedom, but also the entrepreneurial risk (no project, no job, no PhD) of this time had a great impact on me. It also made me aware early on that technology alone is not enough to sell products or services on the market.
Without teaching duties, however, I lacked contact with the students. Therefore, building on my childhood experiences with computers, I created the Hacker Contest . The goal was to investigate current technologies (new at the time: WLAN, Bluetooth, etc.). In teams the participants took the role of attacker and defender. This initiative was continued for many years, even after I left the university.
In May 2003, I successfully completed my doctorate "with distinction". The subject was security patterns, a topic I had been working on for many years. Patterns originally come from architecture. The idea is that no architect can learn how to build beautiful houses. This requires experience - and that is exactly what is captured in a pattern. The idea was transferred to software (sgt. Design Patterns) and I then adapted and described it for security.
Equipped with this know-how, I decided to "get out" after my doctorate. I had an offer of a junior professorship, but that was still quite new at the time and not very attractive to me. I therefore used my ITO contacts and quickly found a job at SAP as Product Manager for Security. At the time, SAP was another project partner of the ITO and had taken over the lab in Karlsruhe with which we had been cooperating. During this time, the "old" SAP basis was converted to NetWeaver (Release 640+) and I was able to learn a lot about the different SAP technologies during this time, most recently during the conversion from an idea to the generally available product SAP Business ByDesign.
The topic of security has been close to my heart for many years. However, I didn't understand it in the sense of a protection function, such as logging in with a name and password. Instead, it was always more exciting for me to understand what gaps a system has, how these can be exploited and what you have to do to be "bulletproof". As I also realized that SAP customers develop a lot themselves, the next step was inevitable. When programming is involved and systems are complex, gaps are almost inevitable. So it was clear that I would leave SAP in 2006 and, together with a business partner I met at SAP, set up the Virtual Forge GmbH together with a business partner I met at SAP. Incidentally, I recruited many of the first employees who then carried out SAP-focused penetration tests from the age groups of the participants in the Hacker Contest.
I had a few ideas in my luggage about what can be done in the SAP environment that is not offered by the SAP standard. This resulted in another pioneering topic: scanning SAP ABAP code for security vulnerabilities. The resulting solution CodeProfiler for ABAP (version 1.0 presented at SAP TechEd in Berlin in 2009) is still a market-leading solution today. Our book "Secure ABAP Programming" was also published during this time. It has not lost much of its topicality, because although there are some new programming constructs in the SAP environment, "old-school" ABAP is far from over.
Virtual Forge was the practical introduction to business management for me. Exclusively self-financed, we have managed to reinvent the company over the years to stay ahead in the market and survive. As CEO and Managing Director, I spent many years looking after sales (how do I sell the value of technology), marketing (which customers do I target and how do they find me) and administration. All the while, tough decisions had to be made and my own compass readjusted: this included the company strategy and its implementation. With about 120 employees, we decided in 2018 to go in search of growth capital so we could be strategic (vs. reactive). This eventually ended with the sale of the company(mid-2019) to market competitor Onapsis, where I was an employee for the first time in many years as General Manager Europe.
Since the beginning of 2021, I have been self-employed again with the idea of sharing the experience I have gained on the path to becoming an entrepreneur described here. As I wrote at the beginning, it covers all facets of entrepreneurship and technical topics. I will also describe "toys" alongside my job from time to time. By that I mean things that you can afford as an adult and that are fun above all else.