The 47 old professor for applied Informatics/Business Informatics, Dr. Claus Rautenstrauch died on 26.11.2008 unexpectedly. The Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg has lost with his death one of its professors with high profiles. In the year 1997, Claus Rautenstrauch had been appointed as the first Business Informatics scientist at the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg. He established the study course Business Informatics and had developed it to get a high national as well as international reputation. Since 2001, he established the world wide biggest SAP University Competence Center, which provides meanwhile more than 160 universities in Europe, Middle East as well as Africa with SAP-Software in fields of research and traineeship.
He has arranged the postdoctoral program ''Very Large Business Applications-Lab'' with means of funds from secondary sources. His outstanding activities were those international ones. Together with Prof. Dr. Jorge Marx Gómez (formerly Magdeburg, now Oldenburg), he has established a master study course ''Business Informatics'' at two Cuban universities, which is supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). In the years between 2005-2007, he had an authoritative role in planing and constructing the Wadi German Syrian University (WGSU) in Syria. Prof. Rautenstrauch was much more than a company's founder. He worked till short before his death on a concept of an advanced training master study course.
Many of the students of Prof. Claus Rautenstrauch are meanwhile appointed to professorships. He was a very engaged and successful teacher, who could gather a big circle of students around him.
The Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg is devastated by this early sudden death. It will try its best to successfully carry his works on, which he has left behind him.
Prof. Dr. Klaus Erich Pollmann
Rector of the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg
Translated by: Hanna Astafan
