Vendor visit
28
Turning
up the
funk
Critical Communications Today pays
a visit to Hytera Mobilfunk’s HQ
to see its facilities and get a feel for
the work that is required to keep its
clients’ systems in full working order
It is a crisp and clear winter’s day in Bad Münder,
Germany when we visit Hytera Mobilfunk’s
headquarters. Markus Oltmanns, its VP of product
marketing and communications, is there to greet us and
give us a guided tour of its facilities.
We walk past a wall with a colour-coded timeline of the
company’s history and then into a meeting room. Oltmanns
explains that our visit takes place at a busy time for the
company, as it is just before PMRExpo and they are gearing
up for the show. Speaking of which, Oltmanns remarks that
at his rst PMRExpo after the company had been acquired
by Hytera, a lot of his old colleagues and partners said the
new owners would ‘take every asset out of the company and
close down everything’.
Time has of course made a lie of such dire predictions and
Oltmanns notes that Hytera Mobilfunk subsequently nearly
doubled in headcount and invested €6m in a new building,
which accommodates the bulk of its R&D activities. Part of
the reason for the increase in headcount is that the company
quickly became (as an addition to its other activities) the
sales oce for Hytera’s activities in German-speaking
countries, the Benelux countries, Italy, Eastern Europe and,
from there, all the way through to Greece. is change
necessitated a considerable expansion of its service, pre-sales
and after-salesdepartments.
We move to the service department for TETRA systems,
where we see a number of work stations, showing live
remote views of some of the systems that clients are using
in the eld. ose operating these stations work in tandem
with their on-site partners, alerting them to any issues
that require them to drive out to a base station and make
repairs. Oltmanns explains that this is all part and parcel of
providing “radio systems as a service”.
We move past an old showroom that is to be taken down
and renewed and enter the training areas, which together
comprise Hytera Academy Europe. ere are two large
rooms, each with a series of desks where visitors can “get
used to the conguration of a TETRA system”. Oltmanns
adds that “we teach everything here: radio and system
programming, system programming, and eet mapping”.
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