Piller Brand Guidelines: The Osterode Maker of Rotary UPS Systems, Founded in 1909

From fans in Hamburg to a works in the Harz.

Piller dates itself to 1909, when the engineer Anton Piller, who was born in Vienna, set up his own factory in Hamburg. The company says he started from a patent for the construction of a fan; German Wikipedia says his first products were blowers for organs and for forges. On 1 August 1919 the business moved to Osterode am Harz, in Lower Saxony, near Hanover, where, the company says, it began with 18 employees on a site of almost ten hectares.

Electrically driven fans became the core of the business. German Wikipedia lists fans, electric motors and generators among its products, sold abroad as well as in Germany, and says a second works opened at Moringen, south of Osterode, in 1939. The company’s own history says the firm became Anton Piller AG in 1940, still wholly owned by the Piller family, and that both factories expanded their production up to 1945.

That expansion was war production, and the record is plain about who did much of the work. German Wikipedia says the Osterode works was an armaments plant making electric motors and ventilation equipment for submarines and tanks, and, citing the historian Claus Heinrich Gattermann’s 2003 study of foreign labour in the Osterode district, that from 1942 several hundred forced labourers, mainly from the Soviet Union, France, the Netherlands and Poland, were held in the firm’s own camp. Erinnern in Südniedersachsen, a regional remembrance project, puts the number of foreign workers employed at the Osterode plant during the war at 905, among them young people; it says Piller and the town jointly ran a further camp for up to 223 “Ostarbeiter” and Poles from 1941, that prisoners of war were also put to work, and that severe mistreatment of forced labourers at the factory is documented. By September 1944, German Wikipedia says, about 1,900 people worked for the firm, most of them foreign workers.

Ground power, submarines and the rotary UPS.

The family stayed in charge after the war. In 1954 Hans Piller, the founder’s son, took over the management, the company says, and by 1962 Anton Piller KG employed about 1,000 people, according to German Wikipedia. His son Hans-Anton Piller joined the management in 1983, the third generation of the family in the business.

The products moved from air to electricity. Piller says it developed aircraft ground power supplies and frequency converters in the decades after the war, and its first rotary uninterruptible power supply, or UPS; it names its rotary hybrid UPS of the late 1970s or early 1980s UNIBLOCK, a name it still uses. Naval work runs through the same history: German Wikipedia records converters and drives for submarines from 1972, three-phase synchronous machines from 1975 and, from 2003, generators for the Type 212A submarine class, and says Piller supplies ground power systems for the AWACS aircraft fleet.

The business also spread abroad. Piller UK opened in 1976 at Cirencester, in England, where the company says it still operates; subsidiaries followed in France in 1986, in Australia in the late 1980s and in the United States in the early 1990s, and later in Italy, Spain, Singapore, China and India, according to the company’s history.

In the 1990s Piller narrowed its focus to power. It gave up industrial fans in 1996, German Wikipedia says, and the Moringen works became a separate company, now Piller Blowers & Compressors, which keeps the name but is not part of the group. The company says it launched its APOTRANS static transfer switch in 1997 and developed POWERBRIDGE, a kinetic energy store built around a flywheel, as an alternative to batteries in large UPS installations. In 2001 it opened an assembly and test site at Bilshausen, near Osterode, for its diesel UNIBLOCK systems, which it expanded in 2009.

Design and documentation.

The makers of uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution and precision cooling sell equipment that most people never see. It stands in plant rooms and data halls behind locked doors, so the companies tend to show it in place: long rows of grey cabinets under white light, battery strings racked floor to ceiling, switchgear with its doors open, and chillers and heat-rejection units lined up on rooftops and in yards outside.

The data hall itself has become the stock image of the trade. Photographs and renderings return again and again to cold-aisle containment, with server racks closed in behind glass doors and ceiling panels, to cooling units set between the racks, and to engineers with laptops checking a cabinet’s display. As computing loads have grown, liquid-cooling pipework, coolant units and prefabricated modules built off site have joined the cabinets in the pictures.

Factories, test laboratories and trade fairs supply the rest. These companies often show their own production lines and test bays, where equipment is run before it ships, and the industry gathers at events such as Data Centre World and the DCD conference series, where makers fill stands with UPS cabinets, cooling units and power distribution gear and present new ranges to data-centre operators and engineers. Corporate language leans on continuity: Vertiv, for example, presented itself as “Architects of Continuity” when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.

The companies in this guide range from listed groups to family firms, and several carry long histories under changing owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Piller family to RWE and Langley.

The family era ended in the 1990s. In 1993 the firm was renamed Piller GmbH and joined the energy group Lahmeyer AG; when Lahmeyer combined with RWE’s Rheinelektra in 1997, the utility RWE took the majority of Piller, according to German Wikipedia. In February 2005 NS Energy reported that Claudius Peters Technologies, a subsidiary of the British group Langley Holdings, had signed an agreement with RWE Solutions to buy the RWE Piller Group, as part of RWE’s plan to concentrate on energy-related services. German Wikipedia says Langley has owned all of Piller since 2005; the company’s own pages date the purchase to 2004 on one page and to the 2005–2008 period on another. Piller describes Langley as a privately owned British engineering group.

Under Langley, Piller grew through one large purchase. In November 2016 it acquired the business and assets of Active Power, the flywheel UPS maker of Austin, Texas, which English Wikipedia says was founded in 1992 as Magnetic Bearing Technologies; Piller says it merged the business into its own division. Its American headquarters moved in 2015 to a new building in Middletown, New York, and its Austin site makes Active Power’s CleanSource UPS, the company says.

Today Piller is headquartered in Osterode, where it says it has about 1,000 employees worldwide, manufacturing and research on the main site and assembly and testing at Bilshausen. Its current range, as listed on its website, includes UNIBLOCK rotary UPS systems, M-Series modular static UPS, Critical Power Modules with flywheels and POWERBRIDGE energy storage, along with static transfer switches and frequency converters, for data centres, airports, banks and naval vessels. In 2019 it marked a century in Osterode with a celebration for its staff and the town, the company says.

For a design guide, Piller shows a German engineering name whose history runs from fans to flywheels and includes a wartime record that its own published timeline does not mention. Compare Socomec, another long-established European power-protection maker, and Centiel, a newer UPS maker in Switzerland. For this guide we use a slate blue, a steel grey and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Piller’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.