Never far from the front-pages of every newspaper, magazine, broadcast, Tweet or social media post globally, 2015 has been the defining year in propelling privacy and data issues into the public consciousness. Fierce debate is waking the masses up and empowering people everywhere to finally start questioning the trust we’ve placed in the faceless corps and governments demanding to trade on our personal data for their own gains and profit. The kindling has been lit and global organizations, bent on manipulating the blurred lines governing policy, terms, conditions and access, are now only serving to only fan the flames into an inferno.
In Europe, the ruling on Safe Harbor has enshrined into law that mass surveillance is a violation of fundamental human rights. Governments and businesses cannot simply ignore our fundamental right to privacy, but must abide by the ruling and enforce it.
For now, Obama’s administration has admitted defeat in forcing legislation allowing the US government to build backdoors into technology to legally spy on its citizens, although it almost seems it is coming back, if we read between the lines of his “Oval Office” speech on Dec 6. In the UK however, Cameron’s rhetoric on banning strong encryption in the form of the Snooper’s Charter looks to be a leading issue for hotly-contested debate into the next year. Compounded by the daily continual onslaught of high-profile cyber attacks laying bare the ugly facts that our data isn’t remotely safe in the hands of big business it’s little wonder Internet users globally are finally saying – enough is enough.
Championing this revolution, 2015 has also proved to be similarly momentous for our growth here at OX. Our experienced and ever-expanding team now totals 160 privacy and data geniuses catering for 165 million customers globally, a growth of 45 million new pioneers putting control of their own data first. This is also reflected in our revenue growth that accelerated to a whopping 70% y/y!
As we continue to anticipate the direction of the market to serve our growing customer base, the last year has also seen us strategically broaden our own scope and portfolio of services. Not only has “OX-as-a-Service” really taken off to great applaud, providing consumers with a fully hosted, fully managed OX App Suite, securely operated by OX, but 2015 has also seen the welcoming of IMAP server software giant Dovecot and the incumbent Secure DNS software provider PowerDNS into the OX family. Expanding our value-proposition to include service provider partner infrastructure services and support allows us to work with customers and partners globally to deliver the business-critical elements of their infrastructure.
Moreover, the OX team also expanded into becoming a hosted service provider. This experience and know-how is crucial for the coming years as we evolve from a pure software vendor to a trusted solution provider for the Internet industry.
So what’s next for the year-ahead? No doubt the political debate surrounding the ‘hot potato’ of encryption will feature heavily in the US Presidential elections, further fueling public querying over just how much more broken trust we’re willing to take.
For us at OX, as everyone continues to start seeing the facts for what they really are and realizing they do have a choice over just how their data is used, we’ll be there supporting them. It looks to be another milestone year. In addition to our headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany, and offices in Cologne, Hamburg, Olpe, Dortmund, Turin, Paris and Madrid, we’ll continue to expand and serve customers across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia too.
Undoubtedly the past year has been a great ride but let’s also propose a toast to the year ahead.
2016: OX is ready for you.
