Docker Inc.’s ongoing evolution took a significant step today as the container pioneer announced a corporate restructuring plan and that it will sell off its Docker Enterprise business to Mirantis.
The corporate restructuring will be fueled by a $35 million “recapitalization” investment from previous investors Benchmark Capital and Insight Partners. That funding is about one-third of what it raised in its most recent funding round in late 2017. Reports recently surfaced that Docker Inc. was attempting to secure funding in order to steer a corporate turnaround.
More importantly, Docker Inc. is selling its halo Docker Enterprise Technology Platform and associated intellectual property to Mirantis for an undisclosed amount. Docker Inc. CEO Rob Bearden explained that the moves are part of the company’s “next phase of its growth” targeted at the developer community. This will include the company maintaining a focus in the Docker Desktop and Docker Hub assets.
“After conducting thorough analysis with the management team and the board of directors, we determined that Docker had two very distinct and different businesses: one an active developer business, and the other a growing enterprise business,” Bearden explained in a statement. “We also found that the product and the financial models were vastly different. This led to the decision to restructure the company and separate the two businesses, which is the best thing for customers and to enable Docker’s industry-leading technology to thrive.”
Docker Inc. also announced that current Chief Product Officer Scott Johnston would be taking over as CEO of the company. He will replace Bearden, who was named to that role in May. Johnston will become Docker Inc.’s fifth leader since 2017.
Mirantis to Accelerate KaaS
Mirantis co-founder and CEO Adrian Ionel explained that Mirantis had been talking with Docker Inc. for “a long time,” adding that he knew Docker Inc.’s CEOs “and had a good relationship and good understanding as to what the company is trying to do.”
The company is acquiring the Docker Enterprise Engine, Docker Trusted Registry, the Docker Unified Control Plane (UCP), and the Docker Command Line Interface (CLI). The Docker UCP is where customers can manage container clusters orchestrated by either Kubernetes or Docker Inc.’s internally developed Swarm platform. Mirantis noted that Kubernetes would be its main area of focus moving forward and that it expects to support Swarm for at least two years, “depending on customer input into the roadmap.”
Mirantis will also be getting all Docker Enterprise customers and contracts, and all strategic technology alliances and partner programs.
Docker Inc.’s Enterprise platform has been viewed as a leading product in the space. A Forrester “New Wave” report from late last year had the platform in the “leader” category alongside Red Hat and Rancher Labs.
Ionel noted that the deal will also include around 300 Docker Inc. employees. “They are hugely talented people and some of the best cloud native people in the world,” Ionel said of the employees to be transferred. “They really match with the Mirantis theme and technical culture.”
Ionel said the move will accelerate his company’s push into the managed Kubernetes space. “We are moving toward a Kubernetes-as-a-service (KaaS) vision and [Docker Inc.] matches that,” he said. “We can use this as an accelerator to get us to that market quicker.”
Mirantis will be adding a turnkey service experience to the Docker Enterprise product that allows the platform to be fully managed by Mirantis. “This is an as-a-service experience that does not require customers to have a Kubernetes expert on staff,” he said, adding that Mirantis is working toward fully automating that software management over time. Ionel also said he expects current Docker Enterprise customers to continue that usage through the transition.
Mirantis is also bolstering its open source commitment by working on core upstream technology and contributing to open source development. Ionel said that Mirantis remains committed to a seamless integration and support for Docker Desktop and Docker Hub.
Mirantis Sees Docker Potential
Ionel also expects Mirantis will be able to make a better business case from the Docker Enterprise platform than its former owner. He explained that Mirantis will position it as a “pure play that is infrastructure agnostic” against other platforms that are tied to a specific vendor. Ionel specifically cited platforms from VMware and IBM/Red Hat.
“They are sort of locked in with their legacy offerings,” Ionel said of those competitors. “We are the only one that is truly infrastructure independent and cloud native.”
As for recent moves by the market’s large cloud providers to provide hybrid- and multi-cloud support like Google’s Anthos, Ionel said Mirantis has a leg up because it will be available immediately. “Anthos does have mindshare but is not there in the market yet,” he said. “We are there.”
Google did unveil its Anthos platform into general availability earlier this year, and followed that up with service mesh and serverless enhancements in September.
Mirantis also has a strong history in using Kubernetes. The company earlier this year announced it had signed an eight-figure, multi-year deal to provide AT&T with core infrastructure software to run the carrier’s 5G services. The central component of that core infrastructure is Kubernetes and is part of AT&T’s Airship work.
Docker Inc. Saga
The restructuring move continues what has been a tumultuous few months for Docker Inc.
Analysts noted that Docker Inc.’s push to make container adoption easier was also part of its downfall. “In a sense, Docker is almost a victim of its own success,” Jay Lyman, research analyst at 451 Research, recently told SDxCentral. “It democratized containers and made them easier to use.”
Docker Inc. was indeed foundational in the development of the current container ecosystem. The firm’s container platform, which is known as simply Docker, remains the basis for many container deployments today.
However, the company has struggled to make a business model out of that foundation.
“The challenge is really to make containers easy enough for enterprises to use and want to use, but it also has to require some level of support for enterprise users in order to support a business,” Lyman explained.
Docker Inc. did appear to have an edge in that support angle with its homegrown Swarm container orchestration platform that at one point dominated the space. And that early success nearly paid off as Microsoft was reportedly looking to buy Docker Inc. for a substantial $4 billion. Others were also reportedly interested in a purchase, including Red Hat and VMware.
Docker Inc.’s latest move is similar to other recent operational changes announced by players in the space.
Mesosphere, for instance, recently changed its name to D2IQ. That move came under the auspice of changing its focus from helping companies set up their cloud-native infrastructure to “day two” (D2) challenges of running that infrastructure in a production environment (IQ).
Mesosphere was one of the first vendors to release a container orchestration platform with its Marathon product that ran inside of DC/OS. The Marathon orchestrator witnessed early adoption and continues to be used by a number of larger organizations in dealing with large container deployments. D2iQ CTO Tobi Knaup previously told SDxCentral that some of the company’s customers were running several clusters with up to 30,000 nodes in each cluster.
UPDATE: Story updated to note that Google did launch its Anthos platform into general availability earlier this year.