The Doppler Quarterly Winter 2016 | Page 55

the data center business, but at the same time they may want to put certain mission critical applications or datasets on-premises or managed in a private cloud. Up until now, hybrid clouds looked real nice on Power Point decks but implementing them has been as challenging as getting a budget passed in Con- gress. It is incredibly hard to do, way too expensive, and takes too long to implement. Docker and its budding ecosystem promises to make hybrid cloud a reality in the near future. 5) Robust Ecosystem Speaking of budding ecosystems, maybe the biggest reason why Docker has joined the billion dollar club is its robust ecosystem. In a discussion I had with Adrian Cockcroft from Battery Ventures (formerly from Netflix), Adrian said this about the importance of ecosystems: “If you want to raise a lot of money, it is really good if you can be the center of an ecosystem and have lots of companies orbiting around you…that’s the real value Docker has…they have built and are maintain- ing an extremely vigorous ecosystem.” A few months back some colleagues and I were discussing whether Docker was overhyped. In some ways we could say that they are, since some people think Docker can solve world hunger. But when a cloud giant like Amazon integrates with a small company like Docker when the product is in Beta, I have to believe that it’s the real deal. In fact Google, IBM, Red Hat, and many others bet on Docker a year ago when Docker was reminding us daily that it was not GA. Since going GA, Microsoft has joined the ecosystem. In fact, in the last 6 months, Microsoft, yes that’s right, Microsoft is the number one open source contributor to Docker. A flurry of startups have emerged to fill in certain gaps in areas like manage- ment, orchestration, and security. These companies are also raising money with ease as VCs are all betting big on containers. Here are some recent examples: • ClusterHQ – $12M Series A in February 2015 • Sysdig – $10.7M Series A in July 2015 • Twistlock – $2.5M seed finding in May 2015 • Rancher Labs – $10M series A in June 2015 • SocketPlan - Purchased by Docker in March 2015 What we may be witnessing here is a robust new ecosystem similar to what VMware created several years ago. The VCs that bet on VMware years ago made out well and I am sure many VCs see a similar opportunity forming with Docker. WINTER 2016 | THE DOPPLER | 53