Global technology company IAS, which exports its integrated software solutions to the whole world, continues to work with the vision of Industry 4.0 without slowing down. We interviewed with Yaşar Hakan Karabiber, Chairman of the Board of IAS, about the company's activities and its goals for 2021. Karabiber talked about many technologies such as caniasERP, IoT, big data, cloud, iasDB, caniasIQ and their global market potential. Stating that they have successfully completed the year 2020, Karabiber says that they are also assertive in 2021: “In 2020, we increased the turnover of our company by 35 percent and our teams increased by 50 percent. We know that 2021 will be a busy, challenging but successful year as well. We will continue our progress in the new year and expand the volume of our operations. This year, we aim to grow at least 100 percent in all countries where we operate, and this goal is not far off for us! ”
IAS Holding was founded in 1989 as a software company producing enterprise resource planning solutions. In 1994, we started to produce our own technology at the R&D center in Istanbul. In 1997, we served Turkey's first TUBITAK supported, development platform TROIA the market. We developed our corporate resource planning product caniasERP on the TROIA platform and put it into service. Our company has always adopted the vision of producing its own technology and leading the digital transformation process. Since the day it was founded, we have always carried out our work by planning the future. In order to create the infrastructure of our future work, we also offered our own database, IAS Database (iasDB), to our customers at the beginning of 2019. At the point we have reached today, we are no longer just an ERP producer! We have turned into a global technology company that offers all the technologies our customers need in their Industry 4.0 journey with a single software. Under the framework of canias4.0, besides our enterprise resource planning solution caniasERP, we offer many innovative products such as IoT, big data, AI (artificial intelligence), cloud solutions, our own database iasDB, our business intelligence solution caniasIQ and e-Government integrations. We respond to all the needs of our customers with the consultancy and training services we offer along with our technological solutions. We deliver all over the world.
We provide services in 16 languages in 31 countries with more than 1000 customers, more than 30 thousand users and more than 50 business partners worldwide. Germany, Turkey, India, United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Switzerland and in the United States a total of 12 offices, we are continuing our success with our partners around the world with the operation. In order to provide better quality service to our users, we continue our efforts all over the world without slowing down, and we are increasing our partner network and the number of our offices and employees in the global day by day.
We cannot talk about a single sector. We have customers from almost every sector in both the production industry and the service area. IAS is a company that offers technological solutions regardless of the sector. We always develop our products as flexible, customizable, developable, easy to integrate and user-friendly. Our biggest advantage in this regard is that we have our own software development platform TROIA and our own database iasDB. When we set out on this path, this was our main goal: we analyze the needs of our customers in the finest detail, and quickly adapt the necessary developments to their business processes. Thanks to the TROIA Platform, it is very easy to customize the standard modules of our ERP solution caniasERP, which are fully integrated with each other. Moreover, we free our customers during the development process. Privatization requests can be carried out by experts in the field of IAS, as well as companies can create their own IT teams and make the improvements they want proactively, thanks to TROIA, which is offered to customers with open source code. We continue to renew and improve our products and services every day in line with our experience of more than 30 years and the feedback and demands from our customers. I can say that we have always signed forward-looking projects to "prepare our customers for the future". On this road we set off with the vision of Industry 4.0, many of our products such as caniasERP, IoT, big data, cloud, AI, iasDB, canias IQ, web client, e-Government application integrations as well as consultancy and training services respond to all the needs of our customers, we guide them in their digital transformation journey.
As I mentioned before, IAS is a multinational, global company. Our products are developed by engineers in our R&D center and exported all over the world. However, we employ employees of almost all nationalities in our offices in Germany, Switzerland, India, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. Our global employees make up 40 percent of our total employment. Our global offices are mostly focused on sales and consulting services. Thanks to these offices and our business partners located all over the world, we successfully export our products and continue our projects successfully.
For years, IAS has been asking companies, business partners and even competitors operating in their own sector, "Are you ready for the future?" The pandemic that unexpectedly appeared in 2020 proved how important this problem is. Because the companies that have turned to the future, understood the technology well and made the necessary investments gained a great advantage in this process. Today, it is obvious that technologies that come to the fore with digitalization and Industry 4.0 gain more importance. Many companies have experienced this personally and have prioritized concentrating their investments in this direction with the pandemic process. As IAS, we did not slow down in our work despite the pandemic in 2020. We quickly adapted to new conditions and ways of doing business, and we successfully passed this challenging process thanks to correct planning, rapid adaptation and advanced technology products we have developed. In 2020, we increased the turnover of our company by 35 percent and our teams grew by 50 percent. We know that 2021 will be a busy, challenging but successful year as well. We will continue our progress in the new year and expand the volume of our operations. This year, we aim to grow at least 100 percent in all countries where we operate, and this goal is not far off for us!
With Industry 4.0, we have focused on issues such as IoT, machine learning and big data, which are frequently brought to the agenda. Actually, these are the issues we have been working on for years. We believe that we will start to reap the results of our work in 2021. In 2020, despite the pandemic, we carried out very successful projects, especially in IoT. We will increase the scope and number of these projects significantly in 2021. On the other hand, one of our main goals while developing iasDB was to have the freedom of movement in our works in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data. We have already started to take advantage of this. Many will hear about our projects in these areas in the future.
R&D studies have always been one of the focal points for IAS. We are constantly growing our workforce and investments in this field. As a technology company, we continue our R&D studies in line with our goal of being a pioneer in Industry 4.0. As a company that produces its own technologies, we carry out conceptual studies. As I summarized before, one of the most important goals of 2021 is to experience what we have done in the fields of IoT, big data, artificial intelligence, business intelligence that we have been working on throughout 2020. We always promise our customers freedom of movement and flexibility. We took this one step further with our new licensing model that we developed in 2020. We reconstructed the modules of caniasERP, our corporate resource planning solution, in a more flexible structure by focusing on the needs and processes of our customers. With this setup, we aimed that our customers can directly access the modules they need with more affordable costs. In 2021, we will work on the spread of new modules and their more use. In addition to our new licensing model, important work has been carried out on our new user-friendly interface. This year, our focus is on promoting this, collecting its outputs and feedback, and conducting the necessary training and documentation. In addition, we have works that will enable our customers who are just starting to use our system to quickly adapt online with our fast transition mechanisms. We have also made important improvements in terms of security. We are currently at an important point regarding data security, and we plan to expand our work on this subject in 2021. In addition to all these, we will experience our IoT-related projects, new developments and new IoT devices in the field in 2021. We will take our work on business intelligence one step further. We will also have projects regarding its integration with e-Signature procedures. Finally, the issue of archive mechanism is one of the 2021 agendas.
Our products are always ready for the future! We always have the freedom to develop and improve on our software development platform and our open source code, TROIA, our own database iasDB, our user-friendly interface and our new licensing model. We offer flexible, fully integrated holistic software solutions to our customers. Thanks to the technologies we offer under canias4.0, our customers can find solutions to all their needs in all business processes with a single software. Thanks to canias4.0, the need for third party software is eliminated. This provides a great advantage to our customers in terms of investment. In addition, our new licensing model has been designed so that our customers can get the highest efficiency with lower budgets. To summarize, canias4.0 technologies offer customers freedom of movement, speed, flexibility, customization, easy development and low cost advantages. Our full range of software solutions are our most important feature that sets us apart from our customers.
We aim to increase our area of activity both in our own offices and in the projects we have started with our business partners. This year, we focused on our operations especially in the South Korean market. Here, we have an important project that we work with our business partner. We think that the scope of these projects will grow in 2021. Along with a large, global automobile manufacturer, the overseas production centers of many automobile sub-industry companies will be on our target in 2021. One of our other focus countries is Germany. We are operating there with three offices and our work will continue rapidly. On the other hand, as I mentioned before, England is one of the important countries for us this year. At the end of 2020, we got a new business partner here. We see that there is a great potential in terms of ERP especially in the production sector and we will increase our work. In addition to these, Lithuania, Pakistan, Spain and France are among the countries in our focus.