Overview

As Founder and CTO of M2MGO, I led the conception, architecture and long-term development of our core product: PST – People · Systems · Things.

PST was a full M2M / IoT SaaS platform designed to connect machines with people – and to give companies the tools to build their own digital workflows on top of real-time machine data.

We founded the company together with the telecommunications incubator hubraum, and secured €500,000 in Microsoft funding to build and scale the platform on Microsoft Azure. From day one, PST was architected as a cloud-native, multi-tenant system with enterprise integration capabilities.

Over 10 years, we built, operated and continuously evolved the platform – serving both SaaS customers and on-premise installations.

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The Business Value

The core idea behind PST was simple:

Machines produce data.
People need applications.
Companies need digital processes.

With PST, our clients could create digital workflows using a drag-and-drop editor – without writing code. These workflows collected, processed and visualized machine data and combined it with manual inputs and enterprise systems.

Typical use cases included:

• Fleet tracking & tracing

• Shopfloor digitization (PDA applications)

• Production Data Acquisition (PDA / MDE / BDE)

• Custom IoT applications

• Machine integration scenarios

• Digital process orchestration in manufacturing environments

Instead of isolated dashboards, PST enabled real business applications that connected operational technology (OT) with IT and users.

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The Architecture – Four Core Building Blocks

1. Machines – The IoT Stack (MQTT & Data Ingestion)

At the time we founded the company, MQTT implementations were still rare and immature. We implemented the protocol stack ourselves and built a complete ingestion pipeline from scratch.

Key aspects:

• Custom MQTT-based communication layer

• Secure device authentication

• High-throughput data ingestion

• Real-time processing pipelines

• Scalable Azure-based infrastructure

This allowed us to reliably connect machines, sensors and embedded systems and stream their data into the platform.

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2. Apps – A Custom WYSIWYG Business App Editor

One of the most innovative parts of PST was our custom-built “What You See Is What You Get” editor.

Clients could:

• Design business applications visually

• Define workflows

• Combine machine data with manual inputs

• Build not only dashboards, but full operational apps

• Deploy web-based applications instantly

This was not just reporting – it was digital process creation.

Applications were web-based, responsive and ready to use on shopfloor devices, tablets and desktops.

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3. People – Multi-Tenant User & Role Management

PST was built as a multi-tenant SaaS platform.

We implemented:

• Role-based access control (RBAC)

• Fine-grained permissions

• Enterprise integration (e.g. Active Directory)

• Tenant separation and data isolation

Users could perform actions based on their privileges – from shopfloor operators to supervisors and management.

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4. Systems – Manual Entities & Visual Data Modeling

Not all company data comes from machines.

To address this, we built a visual database management layer that allowed clients to:

• Define manual entities

• Model their own structured data

• Connect to enterprise data silos

• Combine business data with IoT data

All defined entities became immediately available in the app editor, enabling true cross-system process modeling.

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Technology Stack

PST was developed and maintained over a decade with continuous evolution:

Backend

• ASP.NET (initially .NET Framework)

• Migration to .NET Core

• C#

• SQL Server

• Azure infrastructure

Frontend

• AngularJS (initial phase)

• Migration to React

• Custom UI framework for the editor

Architecture & Quality

• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture

• On-premise deployment variants

• CI/CD pipelines

• Unit tests and integration tests

• Long-term maintainability focus

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My Role as Founder & CTO

In m2mgo, I acted as:

• Founder

• CTO

• Lead Developer

• Team Leader

• Architecture Specialist

My responsibilities included:

• Defining the overall system architecture

• Leading and mentoring the development team

• Ensuring code quality and long-term maintainability

• Designing and supervising the IoT communication layer

• Managing SaaS operations and cloud infrastructure

• Overseeing migrations (Angular → React, .NET Framework → .NET Core)

• Ensuring stable operations for both SaaS and on-premise customers

Over 10 years, I was responsible not only for building the platform, but for keeping it operational, scalable and evolving alongside customer requirements.

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What This Means Today

Building PST from scratch gave me deep expertise in:

• IoT & M2M architectures

• MQTT-based machine communication

• SaaS platform design

• Multi-tenant enterprise systems

• MES / MOM integration scenarios

• Shopfloor digitization

• Enterprise user and role models

• Long-term software lifecycle management

It also shaped my mindset:
Systems must be scalable.
Architecture must be clean.
Software must survive years – not months.

If you are looking for someone who has built and operated complex industrial SaaS platforms end-to-end, PST is the proof.