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Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO
- goseeastarwar 10y agoSurprised there wasn't also the typical "want to spend time with family" part to cover the fact that the CEO was fired and a board seat was his consolation prize. If you want to raise $180M without a business model to become a fabled unicorn, you had better know what you're doing. Docker just got a lot less interesting with an ex-Concur exec in charge, but it'll probably exit within 2-3 years and make the investors happy.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoGuesses to who would acquire it? My money is on HP or Oracle.
- bpicolo 10y agoor IBM
- bigtones 10y agoVMWare
- zemo 10y agogo a few corps up the chain: VMWare was acquired by EMC, which was merged with Dell. Dell EMC is probably a safe horse in this race.
- johnbellone 10y agoRedHat
- krallistic 10y agoI highly doubt that given the history between both companies... But would be funny to force a docker dev to merge systemd pr's...
- jaboutboul 10y agoDefinitely Red Hat. The relationships run deep and Golub already has a great relationship with Jim Whitehurst. That maybe be the only reason to keep him on the board there.
- Jdam 10y agoConsidering the great ties that Concur had with MS - Microsoft!
- mseri 10y agoThis statement seems reasonable after the amount of noise around cooperation and support with Microsoft at the latest conference
- geertj 10y agoI don't think HP, but Oracle is definitely plausible in my view.
- jensvdh 10y agoIntel
- user5994461 10y agoThe best for the customers would be to be acquired by Google, AWS or RedHat. Then they can "replace" the docker name with something that works, earn revenues out of it and benefit from the synergy with their other products. The issue is, Docker is not worth billions of dollars and these buyers are already en route to kill it with their own replacement.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoExactly.
- human_error 10y agoWould Google or Amazon be actually interested in buying Docker? Like you said, they'd rather make their own product which would happen to support docker features.
- felipelemos 10y agoNothing resound 'new' or 'modern' better than the word 'Docker'. Get a look at https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/ https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/ and count how many times the word 'Docker' appears. If someone buy them will be mostly for the name.
- amirmc 10y agoYou think that a board seat (the group that the CEO reports to) is a consolation prize? That makes no sense at all.
- goseeastarwar 10y agoIt makes all the sense in the world when you realize how board's actually work.
- AlexB138 10y agoCan you expand on that? I'm not familiar enough with how boards operate to understand what you mean.
- goseeastarwar 10y agoFounders agree to all sorts of nefarious stuff they think will never be triggered to get to a signed term sheet. Investors will exercise this power when the incentives are misaligned with the founders (aka the company isn't doing well).
- amirmc 10y agoYou've still not said anything about 'how boards work'.
- goseeastarwar 10y agoThe kinds of things I'm referring to is almost always around relinquishing power to the investors on the board. Founders end up with very little control even if they have board seats.
- jacquesm 10y agoMy money would be on SAP. Similar pattern to Nokia.
- tyingq 10y agoMy kneejerk reaction is that a senior leader from Concur, then SAP, is going to buzzword bingo and "enterprisify" docker into something very different. That's probably not fair though. Concur is a pretty big success story, sold for $8B, and it appears some good decisions drove that.
- bdcravens 10y agoWalking around the exhibit hall at DockerCon, and then trying to pick sessions, I couldn't help but feel that heading a small engineering team I was at the wrong conference.
- majewsky 10y agoSame at CloudNativeCon by the way. I went to the technical-sounding talks (as opposed to "success stories"), but most of them were just "observe as I upload a YAML file into Kubernetes and stuff happens". Meanwhile, the booths were 50% "we can install Kubernetes for you" and 50% "we can do monitoring/logshipping for your Kubernetes", which is interesting given that the Kubernetes guys are working on solving the first issue and Prometheus/Grafana/Fluentd solve the second issue already.
- opsunit 10y ago2c from my experience. Fluentd is a terrible log shipper: sub-second timestamping is not yet supported in the stable build, support is patchy in the plugin ecosystem in 0.14. There's also some humdingers buried in the source (Rational numbers for time arithmetic?) Abstractions leak all over the place. The plugin ecosystem is weak and the API shims in the minor version API break are poor and in my experience break semver. Prometheus has the right idea, but I wouldn't want to be running and scaling my telemetry system if I'd also taken on the burden of running my own container scheduler. Whilst I've no doubt Prometheus can be made to scale, I'd rather somebody else made the federation decisions for me.
- meddlepal 10y agoAgreed. There was a remarkable difference between 2017 DockerCon and 2016. I felt right at place in 2016 but 2017... just missed the mark. Felt very much like all the session were geared toward "Introducing Docker" or "How to convince your manager about Docker". Oh well :\
- megadethz 10y agoNow we finally know the real reason for the rebrand.
- skeptic2718 10y agoDocker is being used to cure diseases, keep planes in the air, to keep soldiers safe from landmines, to power the world’s largest financial networks and institutions Why do this?
- jjtheblunt 10y agocure diseases : Nobel prize for Hyperbole right there.
- ythn 10y agoMarketing. The same could be said of almost anything though: "[Linux|Raspberry Pi|Angular|Python] is being used to cure diseases, keep planes in the air, to keep soldiers safe from landmines, to power the world’s largest financial networks and institutions
- jacquesm 10y agoFor Linux, the Raspberry Pi and Python it is probably actually true about the first two, not sure about the landmines, Raspberry Pi in finance I doubt but Linux and Python for sure.
- vowelless 10y agoWow. But I want to give them a fair opportunity to justify this statement. Can someone give me examples of diseases being cured via docker, or planes being kept in the air (etc)
- aub3bhat 10y agoDocker was probably a victim of its own success, with so many containers & orchestration systems popping up (CoreOS, Kubernetes, etc.), it became harder for them to capture enterprise market that they had taken for granted. Worse the impression that I got was somehow Docker with its great usability was for amateurs and not for enterprise users (where most of the revenue is expected to come from). Anyway I think Docker is a great revolutionary product living up to the vision that was initially presented. However it badly needs enterprise adoption to remain viable, all other container systems suck in usability aspects. Hopefully this drives more revenue while keeping the core product still easy to use.
- monkey2005 10y agoDocker just needed to license and support the engine rather than trying to build a crappy enterprise platform a'la Cloud Foundry. The Docker engine is the one thing which nobody else can easily replicate. They would have smashed it in the mass market at something like $100/yr/node.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 10y agoThe Docker engine is the one thing which nobody else can easily replicate. They can, and have: https://coreos.com/rkt https://coreos.com/rkt That's why Docker had to keep expanding.
- holydude 10y ago+ the docker engine is just a polished version of what we had for ages
- user5994461 10y agoNot totally accurate. BSD and solaris have had good containerisation engines for a while. Linux, not so much.
- onwardly 10y agoMy company has been a partner of Concur for several years, starting back in 2012 when the original founders (Steve, Raj and Mike) were all still there. Steve was easily the most-respected leader in the travel industry- even people that disliked Concur admired Steve. He was articulate, created a clear vision for Concur that they maintained even as they grew like wildfire, and he inspired trust and goodwill with Concur partners. I get the "oh no, SAP executive" instinctual reaction, but Steve is clearly an entrepreneur at heart and considers himself an entrepreneur (it took them 20 years of grinding and ups and downs to build Concur what it is today). There was also a comment about him leading the company to exit in 2-3 years. I seriously doubt it. Concur's stock symbol is CNQR which isn't a coincidence. They didn't build Concur to sell it, they built it to conquer, which they had basically done when SAP bought them. Plus after 20 years I imagine $8B sounded pretty good, but I don't think their approach was ever to try to "flip" the company and I doubt he would join Docker if that was the intention in any way.
- nullnilvoid 10y agoThis is standard PR stuff. Docker's PR machine has been working hard and churning out stuff like this. > Steve was easily the most-respected leader in the travel industry... When you read "easily the most-respected", it triggers some doubt. > They didn't build Concur to sell it, they built it to conquer, which they had basically done when SAP bought them. You meant they were conquered when they were bought by SAP, right?
- shykes 10y agoThey were conquered in the same way that Pixar was conquered by Disney.
- onwardly 10y agoI'm not affiliated with Docker in any way and I'm just speaking from my experience. My only connection to Steve Singh is just that my company still partners with Concur. Concur became a behemoth in corporate travel, and companies that competed against them or didn't want to work with them eventually had to.[1] It sounds like you don't know a lot about the corporate travel industry which is fine. I'm sure a lot of people would love to get "conquered" for $8B some day. [1] http://www.businesstravelnews.com/Business-Travel-Agencies/IBM-will-cease-operating-Global-Expense-Reporting-Solutions-as-a-standalone-product-effective-March-31-2016 http://www.businesstravelnews.com/Business-Travel-Agencies/I...
- bmelton 10y agoNot that I'm anybody to say so, but I think it's worth posting a friendly reminder that Solomon is a beneficial HN contributor here in good standing (shykes), and will likely read the remarks we post here at some point. I see some of the posts trending towards vitriolic here, but it's worth remembering that CEO or not, he's one of us, and deserves to be treated as well as any other member of the community. Personally, I would like to extend my thanks to him for creating dotCloud (which I still miss, and preferred to Heroku for a variety of reasons), extending that into Docker, and for having been a hell of a nice guy all along the way.
- shykes 10y agoThank you Barry, I appreciate this message more than you know. Steve is an incredible human being, and a founder who took his company from zero to market dominance - Billion+ revenue and still growing fast. He persisted through 20 years of ups and downs to get there, and created a culture where people look out for each other and stay for the long run (average tenure is almost 15 years). For a founder like me he's the ultimate role model, it's a privilege to be able to work with him and scale Docker together.
- kordless 10y agoThis is a company we're talking about here, not an individual. That is true even if an individual of our group envisioned an important technology. Pulling punches, as it appears that you are asking us to do, is irrational, especially given this latest move is likely to take the company public. I think it's important to note that maybe investments like this in infrastructure are not so great for users or the Internet as a whole, given company's objectives (especially public ones) has always been to dictate how technology makes revenue and how people must conduct themselves when using that technology. I think it's important we see all sides of it and if Docker happens to be controversial, well, that's their problem to solve, not ours. That's why they get the big bucks and we get to sit here and say what we want about it, at least for the present moment. I would note that you have just as much right to say what you think here as anyone else, and saying otherwise is "speaking" for us as a group. I appreciate your comment and your presence here in this group.
- sytse 10y agoI'm sorry to see Solomon go. I think Docker has a challenge on their hands with Kubernetes and that a founder would be the one with the authority to make a drastic change. It is inspirational to see that nowadays you can build a huge company when you make a product developers want.
- monkey2005 10y agoSolomon isn't going anywhere :-)
- sytse 10y agoI mean seeing him go as the CEO.
- d3ad1ysp0rk 10y agoHe wasn't the CEO - Ben Golub was (since 2013).
- sytse 10y agoOops, my bad.
- throw9966 10y agoWonder why there isn't any article about Sudhir Steven Singh in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Singh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Singh
- holydude 10y agoI think Docker cannot make money on its own. It's already too late for them to build on the hype as other companies captured the most critical customers / audience.
- odonnellryan 10y agoHow can't they? Doesn't Red Hat make a ton of money, despite plenty of other distros capturing market share? :)
- user5994461 10y ago1) Red Hat has orchestration, that Docker doesn't have. 2) RedHat is well positioned in the big enterprise market with support/vendor contracts, containerization is just one more lateral offering in the portfolio. 3) RedHat is a well known and trusted brand, Docker is not.
- kristianc 10y agoIt's a shame when software companies follow the path of handing over the CEO role to ever less technical people until the CEO barely knows what the company does. I always admire the companies that can avoid that path.
- trjordan 10y agoThe alternative is to stubbornly hang on to a technical CEO until the CEO barely knows what the company does. I have a hard time admiring CEOs who carry contempt for most of their employees.
- opportune 10y agoThe thing about Docker is that the target audience has a technical background. Bob and Joe Accounting has no need for Docker, but Google does, HPC users do, Amazon does, etc. If the CEO doesn't even know how the product works or what it does, that's fine if you're selling iPads to school superintendents, but not so fine if even your customers are likely to know more than you. Not to insinuate that Singh doesn't understand the product. I'm sure he does, to an appreciable extent. But this isn't just a technical product, it's a technical product that pretty much only other technical people are going to be interested in. You say that holding on to a technical CEO will lead to contempt for the nontechnical employees of the company, I say that even the nontechnical employees of the company (project managers, account execs, salespeople) will need to have technical backgrounds anyway
- MentallyRetired 10y agoNice. Maybe now they won't copy Apcera so closely.