Camunda Review 2015

For anyone interested in Camunda, here is my 2015 review.

Revenue

Our total company revenue grew by 79%.

We have grown our subscription volume (the amount of money we can expect as a recurring revenue) by 87%.

The renewal rate of our existing customers is 100%. Since 2012, when we started our offering, we have not lost a single customer. I cannot believe it will stay like this forever, but right now this means:

• They keep using our product and therefore still want the support.
• Our customer service is pretty good.

We’re still profitable.

Customers

We have almost doubled our customer base and signed up pretty impressive names such as AT&T, the German National Rail and T-Mobile.

Most of our customers (more than 85%) introduced Camunda BPM for executing their core business processes. Not the absence request or similar simple things.

Most of our customers have around 40 (technical) process definitions in production, with around 30 to 50 steps each, and they run about 10,000 process instances per month. Most of those who do human workflow management (not just Straight Through Processing) serve around 1,000 users with Camunda BPM, some more than 10,000. Some of our customers (those doing more STP) have a significantly higher traffic, some of them execute even up to a 100 million process instances per month.

Product Innovation

We had two releases of Camunda BPM this year, and both have been exactly on time. Among the many improvements we have made, I would say that the new support for DMN (Decision Model and Notation), and the new Camunda Modeler (based on bpmn.io) are probably most noteworthy.

Traction

By “traction” I mean the awareness for Camunda in the BPM market. It’s most difficult to measure, but most important to predict our future. I will narrow down my excitement to three anecdotes:

1. In November, Clay Richardson from Forrester published a new BPM vendors report. He included Camunda, together with three other (well known) open source BPM vendors. Camunda has been a big BPM brand in Germany for years, but we had a hard time getting awareness in other regions. My feeling is that we’ve made a huge progress here, especially in the United States.
2. In January, we will go on a roadshow and present Camunda BPM 7.4 in 7 cities in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. So far, almost 500 people have registered to attend it.
3. The number of inbound leads that we are receiving per month climbed to more than 500 over the year. In December, we have actually received more than 1,000 leads.

Honestly, this is thrilling.

Team

We have grown our team as well and now have a staff of around 40 employees.

Our team has also grown in many other ways. For example, in spring we hired people who don’t speak German, so we made English our company language. I am very happy that we managed to do that without friction, because I know from my own experience that this means leaving your comfort zone.

Obviously, I am very proud of this team and everything we have achieved this year. Of course I am proud of our growth, but at the end of the day, this is not what counts. Some companies grow by 80%, some by 800% or not at all. I believe it’s way more important that we feel good about what we’re doing, and that we’re having a great time. I think we do, and that makes me proud.

Thank you for reading, and thank you to our customers, our partners and the best possible team to build this company.

Have a great new year!

Jakob