Bitsea celebrates its 10th anniversary

A decade of progress and success

On December 21st, 2013, we proudly held the “birth certificate”, the business registration, of Bitsea in our hands. Ten successful years are now behind us. Now Bitsea GmbH, a pioneer in the world of software visualization and open source security and compliance management, is proudly celebrating its 10th anniversary. Since its foundation in December 2013, the company has become a leading player in the industry, creating innovative solutions for its customers.

The founding idea was to find a simple solution to a frequently recurring and eminent problem in software development: It is very difficult to understand how a system was built. But this has a major impact on long-term costs, security, development time and quality. What was needed was a kind of “X-ray machine” to examine and understand the inside of software. Bitsea developed this and is thus one of the pioneers in software visualization.

A brief look back at our history:

The beginnings

The journey began a decade ago when the founder of Bitsea GmbH, Dr. Andreas Kotulla, had the vision of quickly identifying problematic software structures automatically in order to avoid operational risks such as high follow-up costs. In the early years, the company concentrated on software visualization and the automation of tests.

Soon after, comprehensive consulting on the management of open source was added as a service: open source risks such as security gaps or copyright infringements were to be identified in order to avoid legal disputes or vulnerability.

Growth: customers and partnerships

Over the years, Bitsea GmbH has acquired major global companies in the automotive, aerospace, telecommunications, logistics, finance and investor sectors that have laid the foundation for its success.

The partnership with the Software Alliance enabled the company to expand its expertise together with the Alliance to cover a wider range of services.
Together with our partner Revenera (formerly Palamida), we offer a comprehensive solution for the management of open source software licenses. The Revenera system enables software artifacts and libraries as well as “build” processes to be managed and checked in relation to open source usage requirements.

More and more customers are now using open source tools such as ORT, Fossology or SW360, for which we also offer support.

Certification

Bitsea was awarded the TISAX certificate in 2019. TISAX (Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange) is an important certification for information security based on ISO 27001 and is widely used in the automotive industry. This is a testimony for our customers that information security is guaranteed at Bitsea.

Services set standards

Bitsea has established itself as a provider of software auditing services. Bitsea advises customers comprehensively on the management of open source: open source strategy, open source governance, open source processes, compliance tool chains and offers an open source program office (OSPO) and scanning as a “managed service”. Bitsea builds and operates vendor-independent tool chains and the associated infrastructure. Bitsea identifies and monitors operational OSS risks and helps customers to ensure legal compliance of the source code. We have set up a comprehensive training program for project teams in this regard. The wide range of services enables Bitsea to react flexibly to the changing requirements of the industry and always offer its customers the best possible individual solutions.

Innovation

A key to Bitsea GmbH’s success has been our ability to continuously develop and drive innovation. Bitsea’s research projects AlarmRedux and Auto-VisRev deserve special mention. With Alarm Redux, a BMBF-funded project to improve medical care through innovation, Bitsea has developed a solution to the problem of nursing staff in intensive care units being overloaded by multiple alarms. After two years of research, a system for alarm reduction through intelligent aggregation, predictive alerting and optimized visualization was developed.

In the Auto-VisRev research project, Bitsea worked together with Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences on a project funded by the BMWI’s Central Innovation Program for SMEs (ZIM) to improve software quality and compliance.

Sustainable business practices play an important role for Bitsea: we attach great importance to keeping the ecological footprint of our business activities as small as possible and minimizing the release of climate-damaging CO2 emissions. We have implemented many measures to achieve our climate neutrality. We have also supported the work of local associations such as clinics, hospices and carol singers with donations for many years.

Associations and cooperatoions

Bitsea is a member of various IT associations and regularly exchanges information on current trends and innovations in the industry. Bitsea is a member of Bitkom and active in the Open Source working group. The working group focuses on “Open Source as a strategic instrument” in order to demonstrate on a broad basis how effective the use of open source is. As a sponsor of the #bfoss congress series and the Bitkom Open Source Monitor, which is published every two years, Bitsea supports companies in the legally compliant and secure use of open source.

Bitsea actively participates in the Linux Foundation’s OpenChain project and supports the standardization of open source compliance programs, resulting in the ISO standards ISO/IEC 5230 for compliance and ISO/IEC 18974 for security assurance. We are also actively involved in the “Export Control Group” and shape drafts for future standards.

Dr. Andreas Kotulla regularly speaks at Bitkom and OpenChain events on current topics in the IT industry.

Bitsea maintains close cooperation with research centers and universities and supports bachelor and master theses, internships and offers job opportunities for working students.

Outlook for the future

We now employ more than 25 people on 4 continents and serve many international corporations, medium-sized companies and investors as well as law firms. As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of Bitsea GmbH, we are optimistic about the future:

The company remains committed to consolidating its position as a market and innovation leader, acquiring new customer segments and industries and forging new partnerships.

New directives such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), DORA or NIS2 require a growing number of manufacturers in all industries to carry out intensive testing of open source components and software architectures. This is Bitsea’s area of expertise.

More and more software is being generated by artificial intelligence. This software is also subject to copyright and compliance requirements. As a result, the number of systems to be examined continues to grow.

With a dedicated team of experts focused on excellence and customer satisfaction, Bitsea will continue to shape the technology landscape and provide its clients with world-class solutions in open source management, compliance and software maintainability.

We look forward to working with our clients to continue to shape open source compliance and software architecture review for the next decade.