The interview
Q: What is your name?
My name is Peter Ganten and I'm the CEO of Univention, a company founded in 2002 in Germany for the management of digital identities and the integration of IT applications.
Q: What is your product?
Univention Corporate Server (UCS) is our main product and it aims to manage and administrate server applications and IT infrastructures in the most efficient and simplest way possible. UCS is entirely open source and designed to be easily integrated to already existing systems providing users identity management. It is a scalabe and accessible application with control over data and processes and digital sovereignty.
Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider the leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?
Our ID and Access Management layer is unmatched by competitors. GAFAMs who have a vendor lock-in approach, use entirely proprietary solutions and make any transition or integration of other applications difficult, which raises a lot of questions regarding data protection and sovereignty for European companies and Governments
Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?
One of our greatest strengths is our 20-year maturity and experience and more importantly our openness, which facilitates partnerships and increases customer confidence in growing market. Our open source approach allows users to look and modify the code to better suit their needs goes hand in hand with our subscription offer aimed at companies with additional customer support and service.
Q: Which free and open source software solutions do you use?
We have integrated a lot of open source applications in our app store, for example Jitsi, Nextcloud or XWiki.
Q: What are the strong points of your technology?
One of the key sectors using Univention solutions is the German public sector with many large municipalities (Köln, Bremen, Hanover, etc.), districts, federal states and school authorities using UCS and more precisely USC@School, optimized for the education sector. Using UCS to centrally manage user identities and authentication to services while maintaining exemplary and sovereign data protection is fundamental in administrations, but also cannot be neglected in private companies. For example, the French telecommunication corporation, used Univention's ID management solution on a very large scale, as they are in charge of over 31 million users accounts and data.
Q: Can you name user or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?
Thanks to our extensive App Center, our platform can be adjusted and optimised to meet the needs of each client as closely as possible. Working with over 700 companies and organizations worldwide in very diverse areas, it is essential to provide applications and solutions that fit each sector and can be integrated in existing environments or replace them.
Q: What European policies do you suggest to ensure sustainable development of your technology and its adoption?
There is a necessity of enforcing the use of open source technologies in Europe, which would also strengthen the whole European industry as the long-term benefits and development of functionalities would far outweigh the initial investments costs, which are typically 10-15% higher than GAFAMs offers.
Q: Tell us about a successful implementation. How did you implement it, why was it a success, where is this implementation today? Plans for the future? How is the relation with the client? Did the client help you get other clients?
One of our biggest success stories is our partnership with the Federal Government to develop a sovereign and efficient alternative to Microsoft 365 for state owned companies and administrations. Increased cost of proprietary solutions, the lack of interoperability, the non conformity to European legislation as well as the wish of German administrations to move to open source and cloud based solutions all played a role in Univention being asked to provide a solution. The workplace we created allows users to log onto many different applications and services only through Univention. The implementation required an overhaul of the complete IT system because of non-interoperability of the previously used Microsoft solution. Some Länder were ideal starting points for implementation as they were already relying on open source software in schools (e.g. Jitsi or Nextcloud). As of today, all of Schleswig-Holstein is running on Univention and accounts for more than 10.000 active users. We are working to implement the same solution across all the Länder in the near future while also working with other open source solution providers from Europe such as XWiki to include their products in our workplace environment.