While the year 2021 was a huge success, we've re-energized ourselves for 2022. By launching new cloud platforms, we began our path to radically simplify the production of digital experiences for our clients. This allows us to offer products and solutions as software as a service (SaaS), private cloud, or on-premises, with the ability to seamlessly move between the three alternatives in the future.
Customer identity and access management (CIAM) has become indispensable for organizations. According to an article by the Business Research Company, the CIAM market is expected to reach $45.56 billion in 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 18.6%. The research firm adds that the increasing use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices — such as smartphones, smartwatches, smart homes and medical sensors — will be the primary driving factor for this growth.
WSO2 Identity Server is the most popular open-source CIAM system on the market, and it is widely used by educational institutions and government agencies as an on-premise CIAM solution. Single sign-on/sign-out (SSO), identity federation, strong authentication, identity administration, account management, identity provisioning, fine-grained access control, API security, monitoring, reporting, and auditing are all possible with WSO2 Identity Server's seamless integration capabilities.
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.
Startups can be somewhat small to large scale businesses and they can vary between different fields of interest. With entrepreneurship becoming one of the hot trends of the decade, a lot of startups have shown up on the records. Many innovative ideas are converted into businesses. Some of these startups excel in large businesses whereas many meet the end of their line in a very short span of time. But this doesn’t keep entrepreneurs from capturing business opportunities.
