Jan Hichert
CEO of Astaro

Our company provides integrated security services, such as firewalls, monitoring services and security planning. Even at the lowest level, there are hundreds of patents for firewalls that have been granted. Most of these are currently not enforced, but as a business opportunity for patent trolls or monopolists and reciprocally a risk in the balance sheet of our company we do not welcome any broadening of patentability of software in any part of the world.

Our strength always has been in time-to-market and excellent quality, in the security sector one has to react to any challenge very quickly and patents for software are not in sync with our cycle of operation.