It is not a stretch to describe Kleinschmidt as a company that has innovation wired into
its DNA. After all, founder Edward Kleinschmidt, pioneered in his lifetime an automatic
fishing reel, a macaroni twisting machine and the company’s longtime breadwinner—
the teletypewriter. That machine helped the Deerfield, IL, company usher in a new era
of telecommunications, enabling industries to shift from Morse code telegraphs to tele-
typewriter terminals. Today, Kleinschmidt’s electronic data interchange (EDI) integra-
tion and B2B messaging solutions connect thousands of customers to their vast global
trading partner communities.
Kleinschmidt built its current business on a robust data processing infrastructure devel-
oped with the same fierce dedication to innovation established by its founder. As the
company transitioned away from the teletype’s impending obsolescence in the 1970s,
Kleinschmidt began transacting point-to-point electronic business data between rail-
roads and other parties. As large-scale data processing was still in its infancy, the com-
pany engineered proprietary software to build services around the Tandem NonStop
fault-tolerant transactional computing platform. They constructed an in-house data
center to accommodate servers, modems and related systems. Over 30 years of growth,
Kleinschmidt continued to expand both its data center footprint and private cloud oper-
ations, as it built cutting edge transactional processing solutions upon the latest itera-
tions of the HPE NonStop platform.
Now Kleinschmidt is embarking on a new round of innovation – this time using the pub-
lic cloud. As a leader and pioneer in EDI and data integration across all industries, the
company determined that its product development efforts were being hamstrung by its
reliance on a traditional, on-premises data center model. Scalability and speed of deploy-
ment were not the only limitations. Clients were demanding modern data exchange ser-
vices based on web services and APIs. However, the day-to-day operations of managing
infrastructure, maintaining facilities and continually deploying new hardware were limit-
ing the company’s growth in this area, as well as reducing their options for expanding
into new lines of business.
“Kleinschmidt is not seeking to replace our core platform; we are looking to extend it to
make it even more capable,” said CEO Dan Heinen. “As a company on the forefront of
EDI integration and B2B messaging, the robust transactional processing solutions that
we have built upon the underlying NonStop platform continue to drive business with a
wide variety of customers, brands and firms. It is a unique approach, and it is why HPE’s
foundational NonStop architecture will remain core to this line of business as we move
forward toward our hybridized vision.”
In order to build a sustainable hybrid solution, Kleinschmidt needed a long-term plan to
integrate public cloud into its mix. It also needed to tap some industry expertise to help
with the integration of its existing HPE NonStop platform, to ensure that long-term ini-
tiatives were maintained and immediate day-to-day services for its global customer
base were not affected. The company partnered with the HPE Pointnext services team
to jumpstart the project.
FALL 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 71