A Year of Releases
At Camunda, we’re all about continuous improvement. We love talking to our customers and user community to understand how our products can even better solve their process automation problems. In that spirit, we released two new versions of our Camunda BPM platform that included a lot of community driven enhancements. The most recent release, 7.12, made its debut right on schedule at the end of November. And just this week, we released our fourth Optimize update of 2019, with 2.7 now ready and available to deliver deep process insights.
Alongside, we’ve released some very special products this year.
Camunda Cloud
At September’s CamundaCon CTO Daniel Meyer officially launched Camunda Cloud – the first ever BPMN-based workflow technology engineered specifically for the cloud as an on-demand cloud service. It signals a new era of workflow-as-a-service in the cloud and we’re looking forward to introducing you to a truly cloud-scale workflow, as we work towards releasing the GA version in 2020.
Zeebe
We can’t mention Camunda Cloud without Zeebe, which provides the industry’s first horizontally scalable, BPMN-based workflow engine for Microservices and is at the heart of our on-demand cloud strategy.
In July we initially launched Zeebe as GA, after an extensive beta period, and shortly afterwards also welcomed our first Zeebe enterprise edition customer.
You can download the distribution and inspect the source code on GitHub, plus our Co-Founder Bernd Rücker wrote an in-depth post explaining Zeebe’s value and how it can impact your projects: Bernd’s blog post.
Integrating Cawemo into the Product Stack
Cawemo, the “Google Docs for BPMN,” became a first-class citizen of the Camunda product stack this year, available both as a service and on-premise.
This tool began as a small side-project, simply to see if people responded to a real-time collaborative modeling platform. It turns out that you did – our experiment blossomed to rapidly growing base of tens of thousands of users.
Our CEO Jakob Freund wrote a blog on Cawemo, marking its inclusion in the product stack.
Great Community Contributions
Check out this detailed summary of community activities by our Developer Advocate Niall Deehan. Particularly noteworthy is the integration of the open source extension BPM Assert into the Camunda stack. This was a special moment for us because not only is BPM Assert one of the most highly utilized extensions available, up until 2019 it was developed and maintained by one of our wonderful contributors — Martin Schimak. Niall spoke with Martin at the time – you can read their interview for all the details.
Many New Enterprise Customers
We welcomed a host of new Enterprise Edition customers last year, which grew to more than 300 enterprise customers in 2019, including Viacom, the City of Montreal, Wipro, Santander, the European Commission and BNP Paribas.
It’s fantastic to see just how many industries are embracing Camunda BPM to automate their workflow and decision automation, and the benefits they are reaping as these projects come to fruition — like Citta Di Lugano, T-Mobile , LinkedIn and Roche Pharmaceutical.
Fast 50
For the third year running, we were delighted to be named in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, placing us among the fast-growing tech companies in Germany. We were also included in Zalando’s TechRadar, which supports engineering teams at Zalando to pick the best technologies for new projects.
Not your Grandfather’s BPM anymore
We often get asked why Camunda wasn’t represented in Gartner’s iBPMS Magic Quadrant this year. Even though companies automate some of the most challenging business processes with Camunda, and inclusion in the report would have garnered significant coverage for us, we felt Gartner’s category definition did not fit with the developer-friendly, open source approach we have chosen.
Gartner defines an iBPMS as a type of high-productivity (low-code/no-code) application development platform. And this is exactly what Camunda BPM is not and was never meant to be. Our CEO Jakob summarized in this blog post, why Camunda provides a more modern workflow and decision automation solution that is more flexible, easier to integrate and better supports the needs of developers and the business, than the legacy iBPMS that are typically covered in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Real-Life BPMN
This year was a busy one for our chief technologist, Bernd – not only did he speak at more than 40 conferences on a mission to help developers tackle microservices orchestration, he updated the popular handbook: Real-Life BPMN.
We’ve been pleasantly surprised by just how fast the fourth English edition has flown off the shelves and more than 900 of you joined Bernd and Jakob in an October webinar to learn more about the growing trend of microservice architectures and how we’re covering these in our handbook.
Camunda on the Road
In 2019 we were on the road more than ever before, bringing workflow and process automation to your doorsteps. You joined us at 13 Camunda Days across the globe, from New York and Amsterdam to Toronto and Munich. Plus we’ve supported 46 user-organized Meetups all over the world from Brazil to Russia with speakers, beer and snacks, and hosted our first community hackday.
And to top it off, we completely sold out CamundaCon. It went off with such a bang that we’re now moving our Berlin event into a much bigger venue, so we can welcome even more of you in 2020. And we’re bringing CamundaCon to New York on April, 23-24 – the first time this event will be held in the US.
Fun Stuff
What is life at Camunda if not fun? We’ve had an absolute blast this year.
We grew by over 70% and welcomed countless new Camundi across a variety of roles. We now hail from 31 different nationalities, working distributed across the entire world, from Australia and the US, to Singapore, the UK and Germany.
Our annual hackdays saw some of the greatest Camunda hacks yet, from the Jenkins Traffic Light to the Camunda Playground. You can read Niall’s musing on our hackdays in these two blogs:
https://blog.camunda.com/post/2019/08/camunda-hackdays-2019-partone/
https://blog.camunda.com/post/2019/08/camunda-hackdays-2019-parttwo/
And, of course, we couldn’t sign off without mentioning Camunda’s first ever company trip, which brought us to Sweden: Camundi from all around the world had the chance to hang out together, debate business ethics, attend personal development workshops, or simply recharge going kayaking or hiking, dance at a Wild West party or join an impromptu karaoke contest.
Can we top 2019 next year? You bet! Come January we’re starting a new decade and a new, exciting year for Camunda. So if you’re up for a challenging experience that will never be boring — come join us: https://camunda.com/career/
