Marondo Capital is pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Markus Schwarz and Dr. Ralf Brunner have joined the Marondo Expert Group. With the two new additions, the Marondo Expert Circle now consists of nine members.
The experts advise Marondo on transactions with regard to due diligence and support the investment & portfolio team in the implementation of value enhancement measures. Marondo has made nine investments in the software & IT sector since it was founded.
Prof. Dr. Markus Schwarz has been appointed to the “Corporate Foreign Trade” department at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences – Business and Technology for the 2020 summer semester.
Prior to this, he worked at SAP SE for twenty-six years and held sales management positions in Germany and internationally. He was then responsible for several global business units with a management span of up to 2,500 employees. Among other things, he was responsible for global product launches and the global business units SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business byDesign and SAP Learning Hub. Most recently, as Chief Customer Officer, he was responsible for existing customers worldwide and was a member of the Senior Executive Team at SAP SE with a direct reporting line to the Group Executive Board.
Dr. Markus Schwarz studied business administration (Diplom-Kaufmann) with a focus on marketing and industrial management at the University of Mannheim and the University of Alabama. He then completed an MBA in International Business and Marketing at Western Illinois University. He received his doctorate from the University of Mannheim with an interdisciplinary thesis on the management of organizational change during the introduction of standard ERP software.
His main areas of interest are globalization strategies, sustainable management of global customer relationships, international product launches and the digital transformation of business models. He is also involved in these areas as a senior advisor for several large and medium-sized companies in the software industry. In July 2020, Prof. Dr. Schwarz was appointed to the Supervisory Board of DATAVARD AG, a Marondo portfolio company, in Heidelberg.
Dr. Ralf Brunner has more than 35 years of professional experience in the IT industry and is an expert on the German IT market and current IT trends, developments and innovations. In his professional career, he has assumed responsibility in numerous executive management positions in large, international IT groups.
Dr. Brunner studied business informatics at the University of Applied Sciences Karlsruhe. He obtained his doctorate at the University of Sunderland/UK in Applied Computing at the Department of Computer Science with an interdisciplinary thesis on the design of IT interfaces for system integration in the environment of generic warehouse systems.
In his many years in management positions, he was responsible for up to 30,000 employees and a turnover of more than EUR 2 billion. This included the development, provision and operation of IT services (IT operations, consulting and service delivery organization) as well as P&L and sales responsibilities in general management and business unit management positions.
In his operational functions, Dr. Ralf Brunner has gained extensive experience in IT managed services, outsourcing, application management, software development, project management and consulting services, service desk, digital workplace solutions, data center operations, near/offshoring strategies, cloud solutions, cybersecurity and digital transformation.
Dr. Ralf Brunner also has extensive experience in the successful management of critical business and customer situations, reorganizations and realignments of business units, personnel restructurings and §613a spin-offs, as well as in M&A and corporate carve-out transactions.
Prof. Dr. Schwarz said: “I am very happy to be able to continue my previous collaboration with Marondo Capital in this select group of experts and look forward to the ongoing exchange in an exciting economic and technological environment.”
Dr. Brunner said: “I am delighted to have been appointed to the Marondo Expert Advisory Board and to be able to contribute my experience here. Marondo is an established and renowned investment company with a sustainable investment strategy and a management concept that accompanies growth companies with experienced experts and which has been implemented very successfully since the company was founded.”
Marko Maschek, Partner & Co-Founder of Marondo Capital, comments: “We are very proud that with Prof. Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Brunner we have succeeded in gaining two top-class software and IT experts with strong management experience for Marondo. We are delighted that they have joined us and look forward to working with them. Our circle of experts is a unique selling point for us, especially because Marondo invests in growth companies in Germany where market and technology expertise are key. In addition to Rolf Heiler, who has been on board since Marondo Capital was founded, the partnership now has three experts in the software and IT segment.”
About Marondo
Marondo, with offices in Munich and Stuttgart, is an investment company for fast-growing, technology-oriented companies of the next generation of SMEs in Germany and DACH. The fund invests in majority and minority transactions in companies from the German technology sector. These include software & IT, Industry 4.0, environmental technologies, new materials and health & medical technologies. In addition to extensive expansion capital, Marondo also offers liquidity solutions for existing shareholders. The partnership is led by four partners with over 80 years of industry experience, 90 financed companies and several hundred transactions over the last two decades. www.marondo.com.