Cendio was founded in 1992 by students from Linköping University, and is one of the oldest open-source companies in the world. During the first year of business the legal name of the company was Signum Support AB and the business was mainly focused on services and support against the local market. In early 2000 the company changed name to Cendio Systems, and the product Fuego Firewall was transferred to a new company called Ingate Systems, joint owned by Cendio and Intertex.
Since 2003 the name of the company has been Cendio AB, and the main focus has been the self-developed open-source-based software ThinLinc. ThinLinc helps organizations worldwide to publish Linux desktops and applications. Today more than 500 organizations worldwide are using ThinLinc in their daily operations, and more than 120 000 end users every day are accessing their Linux desktop with ThinLinc. Our customers run from 5 to 5 000 concurrent users and are mainly in the Industrial, Educational and Healthcare sectors.
Cendio actively develops and maintains the open-source projects TigerVNC and noVNC. Additionally, the company contributes to other ones such as Pulse Audio and VirtualGL. We are currently a team of 15 people, and the turnover in 2020 was ~US$ 1,8 million. The goal is to double the turnover in 2023.
Cendio is still located in Mjärdevi Science Park in Linköping – the seventh biggest town in Sweden and the center of the aerosystems industry.
For more information on the city of Linköping and Mjärdevi Science Park please click on the links below.
Why do we invest in open source?
We are Cendio, proud to be one of the oldest Linux-centric companies in the world. Our team accumulated a lot of knowledge as a result of engaging for such a long time with Linux software development and open source projects. All of this experience resulted in ThinLinc, a multiuser Linux Remote Desktop Server totally free for up to 5 users. We are happy to see that ThinLinc helps thousands of users and system administrators to get easy remote access to their Linux Desktops.
Open source projects are an essential part of our DNA, and we invest in helping them progress. We proudly develop and maintain the TigerVNC and the noVNC projects. Both are central components of ThinLinc and make its graphical performance incredibly fast. We also support other projects through indirect engagement, such as VirtualGL and Pulse Audio.
Developing open-source and proprietary software allows us to deliver the best of the two worlds. On the one hand, we offer a fully supported and enterprise-level Linux Remote Desktop Server – ThinLinc. ThinLinc fulfills the needs of several system administrators that need to handle complex multiuser and multi-device environments. On the other hand, we can make TigerVNC, noVNC, and others available for a greater community. Cendio’s business model helps people by making Linux technology accessible and affordable.
When a customer decides to buy the ThinLinc subscriptions, this customer supports the development of open source software, as a great amount of our revenue is invested in those projects. We also make ThinLinc totally free for small installations, up to 5 users.