By Peter H. Ganten, CEO Univention GmbH
For more than a decade, Univention has been the leading supplier of an open source enterprise IT platform to manage IT infrastructures, identities and applications. Univention’s core product Univention Corporate Server is now trusted and used by more than 2,500 organizations worldwide.
The fast growing Univention App Center is built on this successful foundation and is an “App Store” for enterprise applications. Open-Xchange is one of the most successful apps amongst the more than 70 enterprise applications currently available in it. Leveraging the App Center and the Univention App Platform allows to make installations of these apps into existing environments extremely easy and results in perfect integration with existing user and rights management solutions.
Apps in the Univention App Center, or “Univention Apps” like Open-Xchange, may not only be installed with just a few clicks into existing Univention environments. They are also available as virtual appliances for all major hypervisors, as docker images and as ready-to-use solutions in many cloud environments. Thus, they can instantly be used in virtually any environment. And due to the industry proven Univention management system, they can always be managed centrally via a single identity management system. In addition, they come with a reliable update and life-cycle management and can easily be connected to other Univention Apps and to existing environments like Microsoft Active Directory, independently of where they run.
Univention Apps can be deployed fully automated using cloud management systems like OpenStack or VMware. They contain facilities for metering app usage in order to be integrated with the billing mechanisms of cloud service providers. Hence, Univention Apps and Univention App Center are the ideal solutions for cloud service providers to instantly deliver a large, comprehensive stack of integrated SaaS applications to customers. For software vendors the platform offers an easy-to-access channel to multiple cloud service providers, value-added resellers and end customers. And as the Univention App platform gives customers the choice of where to run which App, it gives them back control and makes cloud computing more trustworthy and flexible.
We joined forces with Open-Xchange and a number of other key partners to create the Open Cloud Alliance. An industry network to support our joint goal: An open cloud where customers have choice and control, where even smaller cloud service providers can make comprehensive offerings and where software providers can easily bring their solutions to many clouds.
Univention is based in Bremen, Germany and has subsidiaries in Berlin and Boston (USA). We have a worldwide partner network in Europe and North America for the distribution of our products and a constantly growing number of software and hardware vendors certificating their products for Univention Corporate Server.