Docker, Inc. Raises $105M for Product Development
Docker, Inc. today revealed it picked up an additional $105 million in financing that, among other things, will be applied to extending the reach of the Docker container application development tools that developers use into the realm of serverless computing frameworks and emerging WebAssembly (Wasm) and Web3 platforms.
Overall, this latest round of investment brings Docker, Inc.’s valuation to $2.1 billion.
Docker, Inc. CEO Scott Johnston says this latest round of funding should increase developers’ confidence that the skills they are acquiring today will be applicable to multiple types of IT platforms in the future.
The company currently claims that application development teams that make use of Docker containers release code 13 times more frequently, are able to ramp productivity with new technologies in 65% less time and compress the mean-time-to-remediation (MTTR) of security vulnerabilities by 62% when compared to legacy approaches to building applications.
Docker, Inc. also says there are now more than 10 million registered developers and development teams. The company also now has more than 56,000 commercial customers, including over 70% of the Fortune 100, nine of the 10 top technology companies, eight of the top 10 banks, eight of the top 10 retailers, eight of the top 10 media companies and seven of the top 10 health care companies. In fact, Docker, Inc. is reports that year-over-year annual recurring revenue increased by a factor of four over the previous year.
As the number of developers that employ containers to build applications steadily grows, there are myriad new technology platforms emerging. Docker, Inc. is committed to not only growing its existing ecosystem but also ensuring whatever investment developers make today to acquire skills will be extensible as the IT landscape continues to shift.
Wasm, for example, is a portable binary code format and a corresponding text format for building applications in a sandboxed execution environment that runs in memory. It replaces the current method for building software that relies on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct security boundaries between them. It’s still early days, but Wasm promises to make it simpler to run any application on any platform.
Web3, meanwhile, refers to an effort to employ blockchain platforms to decentralize the web. The term Web3 was coined by Polkadot founder and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014. At its core, Web3 encompasses any exchange of a digital asset without central authority, such as a bank or a government, involved. The entity that manages the exchange of digital assets is instead referred to as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). A DAO is defined as an organization that records its membership, rules and responsibilities on an immutable ledger, enabled by blockchain technology, that employs some form of a token to represent an asset. The overarching goal is to reduce the dominance and control over centralized services held by a handful of large providers.
Regardless of how IT evolves in the years ahead, it seems the IT landscape will continue to be more varied than it is today.
