In January, we promised you that we would carry on our mission in 2016: building the best-in-class, open source software and services for email, collaboration and productivity applications that you have come to expect from Open-Xchange. Now, in December, looking back on 2016, we’re confident that we’ve made good on our promises.
We finished 2015 with 165 million users of OX App Suite. This year we’re expecting to see in the New Year with over 200 million App Suite users. This has resulted in a revenue increase for this year of over 40 percent. What’s more, Dovecot’s market share has jumped 11% to over two thirds of all reachable IMAP servers world-wide.
When we look at our growing family, we see a wealth of customers to be proud of. Proximus in Belgium, Elisa: Finland’s largest telecoms ICT and online service company as well as Rackspace to name a few. We’ve also successfully deployed our product with a large telecommunication company in France and Vodafone in Germany and are deploying with a few more large providers world-wide that we can’t name, yet.
Our product range continues to widen and deepen to meet the needs of our customers. For App Suite we added a fully featured and easy to use Windows Client to support offline usage. With OX Documents, we augmented our browser-based productivity suite by adding OX Presentation to OX Text and OX Spreadsheet, thus completing the suite.
With the increasing use of mobile devices by both consumers and businesses, providing a great user experience on these devices has become a key factor to our long-term success. As such, we hired a complete team of over 20 mobile app developers, UX designers and project managers by bring on-board employees from Enough Software from Bremen, Germany. Their skills broaden our capacity and talent for mobile app development and allow us to offer the best possible user experience on these platforms. Their addition alongside the other great hires we made this year takes our team from 160 in 2015 to 230 today.
But our expansion doesn’t stop there. Our growing presence in the APAC region is being led by David Poole. His 20 years’ experience of scaling large-scale messaging services for Telcos and ISPs is a great asset for delivering trusted Internet services across the diverse markets in this region.
The announcement of the new features of PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.0 and PowerDNS Recursor 4.0 towards the end of July has caused quite a stir in the market, particularly the launch of our parental controls and security filtering. Telcos and ISPs looking to add value know they need to meet increasing demand to protect subscribers and their families from unwanted, malicious and inappropriate content on the web. PowerDNS can now filter this by category and endpoint device without creating latency. This puts us a long way ahead of the competition.
Speaking of competition we’re exceptionally proud that, for the second year in a row, the specialist research and analysis firm Radicati Group awarded us ‘Top Player’ status in its Radicati Market Quadrant. We’re head to head with software giant Oracle, and highly positioned with strong marks for strategic vision and platform functionality.
Accelerated growth has delivered the second fully profitable year in a row for OX giving us the perfect foundation for continued growth in coming years. Our “OX as a Service offering” is gaining heightened traction, especially among telco and cable companies, who appreciate the value of outsourcing their email platform to a trustworthy vendor.
In 2017 we plan to continue our elevation from software vendor to comprehensive software and solution provider for ISPs and telcos. As such our Management and Supervisory Board have finalized an internal financing round which has given OX the financial means to cover the operational cost of sustainable growth, long-term growth.
While 2016 had many surprises, not all of them pleasant, we want to renew our promise to you: we won’t stop in our efforts to champion and develop the open-source software and services that keep the Internet open, and will keep our customers, shareholders, employees and really, everyone in the world safe and happy.
Thank you sincerely for a successful year of partnership and progess!
Rafael Laguna
