Take responsibility – shape the future
Corporate social responsibility is part of our identity and thus firmly anchored in our value system. We are convinced that economic success and social responsibility towards employees, the environment and society must go hand in hand. We want to be a strong and healthy employer for our employees, one that acts in an economically responsible manner and thus secures and expands jobs in the long term.
We therefore specifically promote projects that foster a responsible and strong community. msg's CSR activities are largely decentralized and self-sufficient in order to respond flexibly and unbureaucratically to regional or local conditions. We want to ensure that social responsibility is understood as an integral part of our corporate mission by all msg group locations and companies.
“msg's decentralized corporate structure enables msg locations to independently initiate and support aid projects – making it easy to provide direct, on-site assistance quickly.”
– Dr. Jürgen Zehetmaier, CEO of the msg Group
We take our social responsibility seriously on many levels
msg supports various initiatives and social projects with monetary donations, donations in kind and donations of time. We are also especially proud of all of our colleagues who dedicate themselves to a good cause with a lot of creativity and passion.
As an organization with extensive IT skills, we not only make numerous contributions to existing open-source projects, but also provide our own software as open source.
In the following, we will discuss some past and ongoing projects in more detail.
Commitment to environment
The nationwide “City Cycling for Climate Protection” competition invites cities and communities to participate and inspire people in the region to switch to bicycles in their daily lives. The goal is for teams to cycle every day for 21 days, accumulate kilometers and avoid a lot of CO2 in the process. In 2020, many colleagues from various msg locations participated again, including 40 msg employees from our company headquarters in Ismaning.
The msg group company msg for banking made a valuable contribution to environmental sustainability with its #100years100trees anniversary campaign. The initiative called on employees to present their own environmental projects, large and small. msg for banking ag then had a tree planted by the Bergwaldprojekt e.V. for each project launched. In this way, great ideas were put into practice, such as building an insect hotel or processing packaging waste into pots for a herb and vegetable garden.
At msg's Passau location, all waste bins were removed from the offices and so-called waste centers were set up at various points in the building instead. This not only saves around 18,000 plastic garbage bags a year, but also adds more movement to the daily work routine. The Passau colleagues can dispose of their garbage, for example, near the kitchenette and even separate it into paper, residual waste, recyclables and organic waste right there.
Sport for a good cause
For many years now, msg employees at the Chemnitz location have been taking part in the annual hospice charity run organized by the Chemnitz Hospice and Palliative Care Service. The aim is to cover as many kilometers as possible in a maximum of 90 minutes. msg donates a sum of money to the hospice and palliative care service in Chemnitz for every kilometer run by its motivated colleagues.
600 kilometers by bike in five days – that was the challenge that msg colleagues in Braunschweig took on. Their destination: the msg company headquarters in Ismaning/Munich. The cyclists sought sponsors for each of the five stages of the tour. msg supported the committed employees with equipment, accommodation and special leave days. The collected donations went to Lebenshilfe Braunschweig.
The year 2020 was marked by the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, all city- or region-wide company runs were canceled throughout Germany. However, we did not let this get us down and instead virtually started our own run. Using the hashtag #runforIT, 160 colleagues regularly ran, jogged or walked – outdoors or on a treadmill – over a period of four weeks. The kilometers run were collected and submitted centrally. The sporty msg employees managed to run 1,836 kilometers together. msg donated a sum of money for each kilometer run to the non-profit organization “Viva con Agua”, which works to provide clean drinking water around the world.
Donations
Because equal access to education that is sustainable and fit for the future is important to us, we support the non-profit organization Zukunft Digitale Bildung (Future of Digital Education). The goal of Zukunft Digitale Bildung is to support teachers in actively shaping the digital transformation in education in order to ensure the basis for a future-oriented and sustainable change in education.
For 15 years now, msg has sponsored the St. Klara children's home in Freising. The sponsorship started in 2005 as part of our 25th anniversary. Over the years, this has developed into an intensive relationship with the home, characterized primarily by donations in kind and money. But here, too, our employees are not neglected: whether it's creatively painting children's faces, showing off their barbecue skills or entertaining, our colleagues are regularly involved in the annual summer festival, where they put a smile on the faces of young and old alike.
For Christmas 2019, the colleagues at msg company m3 management consulting GmbH came up with something special and donated gifts to children of a refugee family shelter near Munich out of their own pockets. On top of that, m3 presented a check that doubled the value of the gifts. The children were very excited and looked forward to the ceremonial handover of the gifts under the Christmas tree in the foyer of the msg company headquarters in Ismaning/Munich. Almost 1,100 km further east, colleagues from msg systems Romania in Cluj were active as Christmas elves at a primary school and in a kindergarten, and also made many children's eyes light up with more than 100 gifts.
Charitable work by employees
Viva Con Agua is a Hamburg-based aid organization that fights for clean drinking water around the world. msg implemented a web shop for the initiative, which sells artwork from various artists. The proceeds go to projects promoting clean drinking water around the world.
At the German government's “WeVsVirus” hackathon in March 2020, a large number of msg employees got involved in various project teams. In line with the motto “With IT against Corona”, more than 1,500 solutions were worked on, with 130 projects subsequently entering the concrete implementation phase. msg employees were involved in many different sub-projects.
msg is an official sponsor of the knowledge workshop educational institution in Passau. The aim of the institution is to get young people interested in technology and science at an early age in order to improve their professional and personal prospects. msg trainees regularly hold free courses for school students, giving them a fun introduction to IT-related topics.
Social aspects of msg culture
We want our employees to stay healthy. That is why we provide a comprehensive range of services as part of our company health management program “YOUR HEALTH”. From eye examinations and open office hours with the company doctor to advice on ergonomics.
In training courses on all aspects of health, employees learn how to stay fit and productive. Campaigns such as the msg Health Day at various msg locations (blog post about the 2023 Health Day) complement the range of services.
YOUR HEALTH focuses on a different topic each year and plans various activities. In 2024, the focus was on the socially important topic of mental health. In 2025, the topic is sleep.
We want our employees to feel comfortable at msg. After all, they are our most important factor for success. As part of our “Focus on People” cultural development program, we promote a culture of appreciation that creates freedom, enables participation and sets impulses for positive working relationships.
You can find out more about msg culture and our values here..
At msg, we see diversity as an opportunity and potential for our company, but also as a social responsibility. That is why we are committed to promoting diversity at msg, preventing discrimination, respecting the individuality of each of our employees and ensuring their development with us.
Contribution to the open-source community
msg operates Holmes, a Python-based open-source library for extracting information from English- and German-language texts. Holmes uses predicate logic to grasp the meaning of the sentences it analyzes. The library supports a number of use cases, including chatbots, document classification and intelligent search queries. That's because Holmes is much more than a traditional keyword search.
A team of msg employees has jointly developed an open-source software called GraphQL IO Java. The goal of the project was to achieve advantages over the reference implementation from Facebook – as well as to make the software more appealing and attractive for developers. In short: msg and the project are the right choice for anyone looking to implement modern GraphQL web APIs with subscriptions in Java.
Remote training has increased significantly since the coronavirus pandemic. It is important that both the content and the coach can be displayed in high resolution and smoothly. The otherwise popular online conferencing solutions MS Teams and Zoom are only partially suitable for this.
That is why Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall, head of the msg Research cross-department, founding member of the Apache Software Foundation and winner of the 2018 Software Engineering Award, developed an alternative video streaming solution: Live Video Experience (LiVE ), a highly optimized video setup that enables smooth, real-time, full HD transmission and professional audio quality, so that participants can be kept on task even during an 8-hour training session.
The solution, which is inspired by video game live streaming and is based on the same type of technologies, including OBS Studio, uses a unique, sophisticated and customized head-up display (HUD) to display and control the training information and is placed directly in the video stream. The LiVE setup has since been used extensively at Omsg.
The software components required for this were primarily implemented in JavaScript and published as open-source software. Find out more about LiVE at https://video-experience.live/
