A Journey of Analytical Innovation: Sievers Instruments Turns 40
Recently, our Sievers Instruments products marked a milestone by celebrating its 40th anniversary, culminating in a special event on May 30th at its Boulder, Colorado office. For the past four decades, Sievers has built a steadfast reputation for its efficient analytical testing solutions used for quality control, compliance, and process monitoring. Along the way, it has acquired more than 30 patents for water analyzing technical innovations, including the Sievers Membrane Conductometric Method and the Integrated On-Line Sampling (iOS) System. The company’s core mantra is to simplify complex measurements while offering superior technology, design, quality, and service.
Today, the Sievers product line is recognized as a global leader in total organic carbon (TOC) analyzers and analytical instruments, serving diverse industries and applications including pharmaceutical and semiconductor production, industrial processes, environmental and wastewater monitoring, and more. Manufacturers rely on Sievers to make smarter decisions through superior analytical testing—helping them meet regulations, optimize processes, and adhere to best practices.
Sievers has grown over the years from a startup with fewer than 20 employees to a company with global sales and field service teams, developing instruments that are used by some of the biggest companies in the world. In recognition of this achievement, let’s look back at how the company’s journey began.
Seeds of Analytical Excellence
In 1975, the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) recruited Dr. Bob Sievers to lead the rebuilding of the Analytical Chemistry Division within the Department of Chemistry. The university was particularly interested in his expertise in environmental trace analysis and his analytical work on moon rocks and dust brought back to Earth from the early Apollo missions. Dr. Sievers arrived in Boulder with the goal of developing new analytical instruments with unprecedented sensitivity and selectivity, potentially pioneering a new industry in analytical measurements.
Nine years later, in 1984, he founded Sievers Instruments with Dr. Misha Plam (CU), Dr. Ric Hutte (CU), Nancy Sievers, and Olga Plam supported by early funding from the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research program. According to recollections from long-term colleagues, the original workspace had only a single 10-foot by 10-foot manufacturing table, and in the early days, employees would ring a bell to celebrate every time they received a purchase order. Dr. Plam was adamant that every employee, regardless of their role or department, had to understand how the instruments worked. As a result, all new hires spent their first few weeks in the manufacturing department, building an instrument.
But the formula worked. Some of the initial instruments that Sievers commercialized include chemiluminescence detectors for nitric oxide, sulfur, fluorine sulfur, and redox. The early commercial success of those instruments helped fund the development of the first Sievers TOC instrument, the Model 800. Sievers produced another early TOC analyzer as part of a NASA contract to develop an instrument to monitor drinking water quality in space. The Sievers TOC A provided process control for recycling drinking water through TOC, conductivity, and pH measurements, and was used by astronauts and cosmonauts at the International Space Station.
After 12 years of building the company, Sievers was acquired by Ionics in 1996. This marked the first of a series of acquisitions, ultimately culminating with Sievers products becoming a part of in 2022.
Expanding Capabilities
Forty years on, the Sievers product line continues to evolve, adapt, and innovate. 91大神actively serves the expanding needs of industries with a comprehensive portfolio of analyzers and process analytical technology (PAT) instruments for water quality monitoring, real-time testing, and process monitoring. In markets where water purity drives product quality—including pharmaceutical, semiconductor, and personal care product manufacturing—Sievers TOC analyzers and instruments ensure that water sources meet stringent purity standards essential for final product integrity and performance.
While water quality monitoring built the foundation of the Sievers portfolio, evolving industry standards, tighter process controls, and the need for greater production agility have broadened the scope of applications for customers. These include cleaning validation, contamination control, rapid microbiological methods, final drug product testing, raw material and intermediate testing, and real-time release testing..
More recently, the Sievers product line expanded with the introduction of the new Sievers Soleil Rapid Bioburden Analyzer to offer more capabilities for the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, including near real-time data for microbial detection within ultrapure water and manufacturing processes.
With the addition of the Sievers Soleil, 91大神Water Technologies & Solutions became the industry’s first company to provide all four critical analytical testing parameters for pharmaceutical processes—bioburden, bacterial endotoxins, total organic carbon, and conductivity. This consolidated offering makes 91大神a unique single-source supplier of water testing solutions and process analytical technologies.
Product innovation has clearly played a big role in Sievers’ long track record of achievements. But equally, if not more relevant, is the passion, commitment, and expertise of its people. In a world of rapid change, the core values that have come to define Sievers’ culture and success have remained remarkably consistent. As a long-term colleague said, “Although the business has grown exponentially, the environment is similar in that everyone feels as important and valued as everyone else, and team members are always willing to help one another out.”
Happy Birthday Sievers!
