Q and A: Univention CEO Peter Ganten to speak at Nextcloud Conference

Univention, makers of the Univention Corporate Server, partnered with Nextcloud earlier this year to bring Nextcloud to their users through the Univention App Center. We spoke with Peter Ganten, founder and CEO of Univention, who will be giving a talk at the Nextcloud Conference this Friday.

Hello Mr Ganten, we look forward to hear you at the Nextcloud Conference! Can you introduce yourself a bit and tell us about Univention?

Of course! At Univention we build software organizations use to make access to the applications their members need to use as easy as possible. This obviously involves identity management and in fact Univention Corporate Server, our core product, is used by organizations with between just 3 and 30 million users exactly for this. But it also involves our App Center which makes deployment and integration of on-premises and cloud based enterprise software quick and easy. Take Nextcloud for example: with just a few clicks in the App Center Nextcloud is readily deployed and integrated into the organizations’ identity management system in a supported and maintained version.

And about myself: Well I founded Univention a long time ago and still am proud to be its CEO.

What were your motivations for starting Univention, to built an open source company?

When we started back in 2001 we were mostly thrilled by the technical possibilities open source software started to offer to professional organizations. Our aim was to make these opportunities usable especially to smaller and medium sized organizations which typically need more ease of use, « productized » offers and responsibility taken up by a partner they can trust. Over the years open source became more central to our offerings and our thinking, because we realized the great advantages open source software has in regards to security, trustworthiness, digital sovereignty and the ability to innovate. However open source by itself is never enough. We always have to deliver great products with high value for our users.

What is behind the collaboration between Univention and Nextcloud and how do you see both move forward?

We have been working with the ownCloud community since its inception. When Nextcloud was created as a fork it was clear to us that this project had a lot of potential and we soon started discussing to cooperate with them, too. We share the same goals: digital sovereignty, choice, open source principals and many more. We are very impressed by the agility and speed of the Nextcloud project and are excited about the features Nextcloud will come up with next.

The collaboration and the many good discussions with the Nextcloud team gave inspired us to think about further possibilities for our App Center like for example In-App Payments.

And we see a close collaboration in the education market. So at the moment a serious number of our school customers are testing Nextcloud for their organizations. We will also discuss with Nextcloud the integration of their new app store concept and develop a direction and strategic apps together.

Thank you for the interview and see you at the Nextcloud Conference!

Peter will speak on Friday morning about the collaboration between Nextcloud and Univention