Camunda in 2016 and 2017

Camunda has had an outstanding 2016:

Tremendous Growth

More than 120 customers are now using Camunda BPM Enterprise which allowed us to grow our annual revenue by an incredible 82%.

Our revenue stream is subscription based, and more than 98% of our customers decided to renew their subscription (some of them entering their fourth year of subscription). Since we are not talking about SaaS here, but rather the enterprise subscription for an open source software product, this number speaks to the actual value of our enterprise services such as support and maintenance.

Spreading world-wide

Our customers as well as our 50 system integration partners are present in more than 20 countries.

In the US especially we are currently witnessing the breath-taking development of our traction. We have therefore hired a BPM industry veteran, Ryan Johnston who has teamed up with Frederic A. Meier. Together they are now building our North American presence with offices in San Francisco and Denver.

2017: New Products

Our existing product Camunda BPM is extremely successful and the focus of further expansion. At the same time, we are working on exciting new software products that will become available in 2017:

The Camunda Web Modeler is the definitive SaaS tool for letting anyone map, design and discuss their business processes in BPMN, CMMN and DMN. It provides unprecedented usability and witty new features for collaboration. I’ve been in this industry for more than 10 years now and ever since we wrote the first edition of our BPMN handbook, I have dreamt of such a tool, and now it’s becoming real! Just check out the landing page, you can start modeling right away – what does this tell you about the underlying technology? It’s just awesome!

Camunda Optimize will be a new tool that allows business users to inspect and improve processes that are running on Camunda BPM. It leverages one of our most popular reporting features, the BPMN heatmap, in order to point out process behavior, bottlenecks and missed KPI thresholds. It also provides predictive analytics based recommendations for improvement and it does not stop there: It allows you to actually do the improvement and change the process models that are in production! There’s the popular saying “You can’t improve what you can’t measure” which I’d counter: “Measuring is futile, if you cannot improve”. This is the difference between things like process mining and Camunda Optimize, and it makes a world of difference.

Under the codename TNGP (a tribute to Star Trek) we have several years ago started an R&D project for a completely new BPMN workflow execution technology. In 2016 we began to actually implement this technology, and in 2017 we will make it available to some organizations with specific requirements. These requirements are about massive throughput, infinite horizontal scalability, complete resilience and NoSQL persistence, and also about new software paradigms such as microservices. This is all I can say for now, but if you recognize yourself in these keywords, you might want to contact us.

Thank you

In our yearly all-hands meeting, we reflected on the past 8 years since the inception of Camunda. We’ve come a long way, it has been exciting and sometimes nerve-racking, but I do not regret a single day. The reason for this is the people I am working with.

In my mother tongue German, the word “Mensch” simply means “human”. In Yiddish however, a “Mensch” is “a person of integrity and honor” (see Wikipedia).

To me, this simple matter of fact causes many different strong emotions. One of them is a deep gratitude for the people working at Camunda. They are very diverse in many ways, let it be their origin, their habits (my co-founder is vegetarian, true story!), their religion and last but not least their political ideology. They differ, but I can vow that everyone of them is a true Mensch, and because of that we are able to build a company that I expect to become a category leader, while having an amazing time together.

This is what I will always find the most valuable memory from my time with Camunda. Thank you for that, and thank you for being a Mensch.

Happy New Year!