WSO2 passed many key milestones in 2021: by year-end, we had over 700 customers in nearly 90 countries, our annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew 31% to reach $63.3 million, and we achieved a net dollar retention (NDR) of 109%. We also expanded the team from 550 to over 900 employees in less than two years and hired several key senior leaders.

2021 was another great year for WSO2. Although it was business as usual in the new norm, the results were exceptional. The company acquired 145 new customers and achieved revenue growth of 31% YoY. We started our journey towards radically simplifying the creation of digital experiences for our customers by introducing new cloud platforms.

Today’s consumers demand digital customer experiences that are responsive, secure, scalable, and “always-on”. The pivot to digital means that activities like ordering food, booking a taxi, or even retail purchases now revolve around quickly meeting the expectations of digital audiences.

Transforming customer experience is at the heart of digital transformation. Digital technologies are changing the game when it comes to customer interactions, with new rules and possibilities that were unimaginable only a few years ago. Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is a new field of identity and access management (IAM) that is fundamentally a component of digital customer experience.

The main objective of Customer IAM (CIAM) is to drive revenue growth by leveraging identity data to acquire and retain customers. It will build an identity-centric ecosystem to nurture an anonymous website visitor into a well-known loyal customer. We have come across multiple phases in the past, and today at the age of the customer, identity has become the glue for all contextual marketing. In doing that, in our journey towards CIAM, we face multiple challenges.