Bremen, January 5, 2021 – With its solutions for the secure, independent and efficient operation of IT infrastructures, the Bremen-based open source vendor Univention achieved an increase in sales of more than 35% in 2020 compared to the previous year. The company was able to triple the number of users of its solution UCS@school in the education sector in the past months, now recording around 1.5 million users. 16,000 active instances of the core product Univention Corporate Server (UCS) are used in organizations with an enterprise subscription or as a free core edition.
“We have been working continuously for almost 20 years on our core product Univention Corporate Server (UCS). It enables our customers to not only manage their IT infrastructures securely but also to guarantee control and innovation as to self-generated data and IT processes. To this end, we consistently rely on open source and digital sovereignty as guiding principles. With the Univention App Center, we simplified the use of highly requested open source software significantly. For 2021, we are expecting this growth path to continue”, says Peter Ganten, CEO and founder of Univention, and he lists further progresses: “We have entered important new partnerships, including with Bechtle and Dataport, contributed intensively to debate the modernization of the German and European IT infrastructures and actively promoted the topics of digitization and digital sovereignty. Here, we were able to make important contributions to projects such as Phoenix and Sovereign Cloud Stack which strengthen Germany and Europe and reduce the dependence on HyperScale technology.”
Highlights of the past year include the winning of the tender for the “Phoenix” project (development of an Open Source web workstation as an alternative to Microsoft 365 for public administration) together with Bechtle as the general contractor and the co-founding of Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS). This is an open and federatable cloud infrastructure that is part of Gaia X. In addition, the federal states of Schleswig-Holstein, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Bremen are now using Univention’s solutions for their schools country-wide.

Univention Summit highlights projects for digital sovereignty

On January 28, the annual Univention Summit will take place. For the first time, it will be digital only. Univention CEO Peter Ganten will open the event with his keynote on “Digital sovereignty: spread possibilities, not dependencies”. Further renowned keynote speakers will give practical tips for the secure and sovereign design of IT infrastructures and the achievement of digital sovereignty in companies and administration. Another focus will be the digitization of education, which gained enormous momentum in the first year of the pandemic. In addition, IT managers from companies, administration and education will speak about the modernization of their organizations through Open Source software.

The highlights of the Univention Summit 2021 at a glance

  • Speech “Europe’s future is open” by Rafael Laguna (SPRIND)
  • Speech “Safe and efficient digital collaboration in 2021” by Frank Karlitschek (Nextcloud)
  • Workshop report on the technical infrastructure of Gaia-X (presented by Kurt Garloff, SCS)
  • Panel on digital sovereignty with Peter Ganten, Sven Thomsen (Ministry of Digitization of Schleswig-Holstein) and Johann Bizer (CEO of Dataport)
  • Roadmap of UCS and UCS@school
  • Practice-oriented presentations: integration of Apple devices in the IT infrastructure, digital offers in education with UCS@school, Nextcloud, itslearning and much more.

25 IT vendors as exhibitors

In the accompanying online exhibition, participants will meet 25 well-known IT vendors. These include the software manufacturer Nextcloud as diamond sponsor, the system house and education expert Bechtle, the Apple solution expert Bechtle as well as the vendors agorum and ONLYOFFICE as platinum sponsors.

Find the complete agenda for the Univention Summit 2021 at: www.univention-summit.com/#agenda

Venue

The Univention Summit 2021 will take place virtually only on January 28, 2021. Registration costs are 30.00 € per participant. The technology bar camp will take place on January 29, 2021. Participation is free, however, a registration is required. Please find further information at: www.univention-summit.com/registration

Pictures and impressions of the Univention Summit 2020: www.univention-summit.com/#impressions

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Alice Horstmann

Head of Communications