Codific is fortunate enough to have success stories to share, and we thank everyone of our clients and individuals who have helped us along this journey. Therefore, we would like to share how Codific came to be, and some of our very proud moments.
After graduating from high school in Bulgaria, Aram moved to Belgium in 2001 to study Computer Science at KULeuven which is amongst the best universities worldwide. As a student looking for a job he met Dag – the current CGO and co-founder of Codific.
Aram and Dag became good friends and started working together. They ran an IT support service with other fellow students. The venture helped students, teachers and people within the area with any IT issues they faced.
Aram then went on to get a Masters degree in Informatics and later on a PhD in Computer Sciences. His research focused on predicting vulnerable components using Machine Learning and privacy threat modeling. At the IMEC- distrinet research group, he was involved in streamlining LINDDUN, the most systematic privacy threat modeling methodology (now part of the NIST and ISO standards). Together, with his team, they were considered the intellectual parents of this world’s gold standard framework. In his 12 years with DistriNet, he became one of the top experts in privacy and security threat modeling. Since 2021 Aram has joined the OWASP SAMM project, which is a security maturity AppSec programme helping organizations improve their security posture.
The start of Videolab
Meanwhile, in the General Practitioner (GPs) programme ICHO, they were trying very hard to improve the training of their GPs in doctor-patient communication. Many years ago, the majority of universities found teaching communication skills, empathy, patient centered care and soft skills training to be challenging. They then started looking for solutions to this through reflective feedback mechanisms. Thus, the movement began and universities turned to recording interactions. Specifically, in KU Leuven they were sharing patient recordings with encrypted USB sticks, which were sent back and forth between hospitals, clinical and university campuses by certified currier.
They decided it was time for change and wanted to move these interactions onto the cloud, however this implied very serious legal and ethical concerns around privacy and security of the data, GDPR and patient protection legislation. Any such solution needed to be at the world gold standard of privacy by design architecture.
On the search for this, they approached Aram with their problem and ideas for solutions, at the time Aram had built Codific, a business for secure software development and cybersecurity SaaS solutions. This is where Codific’s flagship product, Videolab was made. Videolab is what helped shape Codific into the leading Ed-Tech provider it is today. Videolab was created specifically with this in mind, as a privacy-complaint video sharing platform where patient interactions can be recorded and shared in a GDPR- safe environment.
This allowed students, trainees or assessors to upload simulated consultations, peer consultations or real patient consultations which are always encrypted. Students are able to go back, self reflect, make time fragmented comments or ask questions. Secure collaboration allows students to securely share the recording with peers and receive feedback from multiple different sources.
Through the Flemish General Practitioner organization, ICHO, who had originally requested this platform, all big Flemish universities such as KU Leuven, University of Gent, VUB and University of Antwerpen started using Videolab. From this stem, word of mouth quickly spread and others saw the huge potential and value in Videolab and adopted the platform. The first in the Netherlands being the University of Rotterdam, today there is at least one deployment of Videolab in every medical university in the Netherlands.
Jump to the different success stories:
The inspiration behind the Codific Academy
In Bulgaria in 2018, where Aram went to high school before his scholarship in Leuven, the software engineering community was booming and Codific made the tactical choice to buy a small SME and to build the Codific Academy. The mission of the Codific Academy is to develop local ecosystems for software engineering startups in Burgas city, Bulgaria. By partnering with local companies and both local and foreign universities to improve education and industry alignment through fast track specific training programs for exceptional young talented professionals.
Codific believes in a long term transformational relationship with its team members where both professional growth and learning is the top priority.
How Codific got into HR-Tech
Later on, a startup called Adforum, a Belgium based Human Resources startup providing HR services to large corporations hired Codific to build a secure backbone platform to which they could develop their psychometric methodologies. These were the seeds that later grew into SARA, our second flagship product. SARA stands for Survey, Analysis and Reporting Automation.
SARA is now used by front row HR experts and professionals who build their psychometric methodologies on top of the secure architecture to provide integrated HR tech solutions to their customers.
Very proudly, SARA now services leading experts such as Unicorn and Mapwave.
Our Codific Academy links strongly with SARA through developmental HR strategies. We want to be the go to place where ambitious young talents have room to grow and we provide all the resources possible for them to learn on the job.
Our SAMMY journey begins
As we always say, security is a journey not a destination, in 2020, Codific implements what we believe to be the best overall security posture model, OWASP SAMM. At the same time, we internally develop a tool to manage this, SAMMY. SAMMY created interest worldwide amongst the leaders of security and is then productised as a SaaS solution in 2022.
There is a free version available here where we offer corporate licenses for organizations who want a defined SLA (Service level agreement) and full data ownership.
Finding software solutions for all
Throughout all this, we also built an attendance app for ICHO years prior. This year, we decided to invest in this further as we sense a lot of demand and value in this sort of application. Therefore, we launched our latest version of Attendance Radar, which is now also a productised in a free version. Many of our team members are teachers in different higher education institutions, such as Geneva Business School, KU Leuven, Erasmus Rotterdam and the top Bulgarian universities. We saw an inconvenience in the way attendance is being taken and thought we could provide a practical solution with Attendance Radar.
Finally, on the SARA front, we noticed our customers provide highly valuable methodologies through their psychometric methodologies. Therefore, we started working on a SARA marketplace as we believe more people should have access to these brilliant methodologies.
Conclusion
All of what we do at Codific is made with privacy and security in mind. Our final aim is to contribute to a safe and secure digital future and help organizations reach this as easily and effortlessly as possible. In order to do this, an organization’s behaviour must change over time, and this must be consistent. We understand that for long term goals to be held up, small changes must be made.
Every little step helps.