20 years of Sivis: It all began with role construction for SAP authorization concepts

Gerhard Schröder is still Chancellor and governs together with the Greens. ThyssenKrupp AG is established as Germany's largest steel and armaments company. A malware program called "Melissa" spread via e-mail traffic blocks companies' computers and causes around $80 million in damage worldwide.

The year is 1999 - and in Karlsruhe, Kai Bounin founds the software company Sivis in a living room. His vision: to offer software development and consulting from a single source.

"Through my consulting work, I have experienced that the differences in roles are mainly due to organizational structures. An asset accountant does the same thing in company A as in company B."

This knowledge was the cornerstone for the Sivis suite. After just six months, Kai Bounin had to hire the first employees - he could no longer handle the workload.

Authorization and compliance

"With new employees come new ideas. Our initial product quickly evolved into a complete suite of solutions around SAP authorizations, users and compliance."

Bounin reports.

And success is not long in coming: T-Systems becomes the first major customer in 2001; 3,000 SAP users in 26 countries can be rolled out in 80 days, a fraction of the time it would have taken with the SAP standard. In 2007, 750 SAP users can be rolled out at Bayer in Brazil in 40 days, and a major project at T-Systems in South Africa also starts in 2007.

Later, tasks such as license optimization and license management are added. Both fields are becoming increasingly linked to the topic of SAP authorizations. Over the past 20 years, role building has increasingly evolved into enterprise risk management.

Today, therefore, both a risk management and a compliance system are designed in parallel: on the one hand, to meet legal requirements and, on the other, to counter company-specific risks.

"We have been constantly developing our products as well as creating completely new modules to serve the current challenges of the market"

says the company founder. Where is the journey heading in the next two decades in terms of data protection and compliance? Kai Bounin:

"I can only look into a crystal ball. But I'm sure that artificial intelligence and machine learning will gain enormously in importance. This will have a lasting impact on compliance in particular.