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Red Hat worked because it was a time (the height of the dot-com bubble) when open source operating systems were something of a Wild West - rapidly becoming an i
by btown 4y ago
Red Hat worked because it was a time (the height of the dot-com bubble) when open source operating systems were something of a Wild West - rapidly becoming an industry standard, but not well understood by existing businesses. Red Hat provided guidance for that transition.
Confluent was arguably also able to do this for a similar reason - at the time they launched, the Kafka model was becoming vital, but was also novel and difficult to manage in production, and its enterprise services and support were critical for adoption. (They do have a managed cloud now, but their enterprise services were 73% of their revenue in 2021 and 61% in 2022: https://investors.confluent.io/node/8466/html https://investors.confluent.io/node/8466/html ).
But it's hard to run what is essentially a professional services firm and popularize an open-source product at the same time... unless your open source product is already rapidly becoming paradigm-defining, and you're the people with the unique know-how to position yourself as the saviors for that space.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoConfluent also moved early on the Confluent Community Licence for Kafka Connect connectors they developed to prevent other service providers being able to provide the service that Confluent did.
- andrewem 4y agoSide note on Confluent’s products. Thanks for that link - the “Disaggregation of Revenue” table where the 73% and 61% numbers came from shows that Confluent Cloud revenue increased from $94M in 2021 to $211M in 2022, which was more than Confluent Platform’s revenue growth. If those growth rates continue then Confluent Cloud will very soon be the majority of their revenue.
- toyg 4y agoI always take those numbers with a big pinch of salt. There is a wave, in the management world, that wants every business to be "Cloud” (i.e. SaaS), because of the (largely correct) assumption that it enables better rent-seeking and long-term lock-in. So every vendor is officially busy "pivoting to a subscription model" and wants to show growth in that area to investors, so they file everything they can under "cloud" divisions.
- op00to 4y agoPeople want cloud services because they can show value back to the business faster than traditional enterprise solutions. That gets you more money.
- midasuni 4y agoIf those growth rates continue in 1 years time they’ll be a trillion dollar company