Docker acquires Orchard to extend platform leadership
Experienced team brings talent and technology to strategic developer initiatives
San Francisco, CA – July 23, 2014 – Docker, Inc., the commercial sponsor of the Docker open source project, today announced that it has acquired Orchard Laboratories, Ltd., for an undisclosed amount. Orchard is an early Docker community member and creator of solutions on the Docker platform, including a hosted Docker service and Fig, an application composition and orchestration tool. With the Orchard team and technologies extending Docker’s capabilities for developers, this acquisition accelerates Docker’s mission of delivering an open platform to build, ship, and run distributed applications.
“Our goal is to provide the best tools and experiences for developers creating web-scale applications that move frictionlessly between bare metal, virtualized, and cloud environments,” said Ben Golub, CEO, Docker. “Orchard really stood out to us with their vision of what developers need and their delivery of well-designed services and products.”
Fig, Orchard’s orchestration tool, is noteworthy in the ease with which a developer can compose and manage a multi-container Docker application. After defining the application’s containers and their dependencies in a simple configuration file, the developer can – with a single command – automatically start all the components of the application, including containers, network connections, and storage dependencies. This eliminates the overhead and inevitable mistakes inherent in re-typing multiple complex terminal commands or creating rigid, unmaintainable custom scripts.
“Docker and the potential of its community and platform interested us from the start,” said Ben Firshman, CEO and co-founder, Orchard. “We’re excited to bring our products and experiences from Orchard, and join with the Docker team to build great tools that developers love to use.”
Firshman and co-founder Aanand Prasad will lead developer environment initiatives at Docker while continuing to maintain Fig. Orchard, the hosted Docker service, will not be a focus, and Orchard customers have already been informed and will be provided with a smooth transition program. Firshman and Prasad will continue to reside in London where, in addition to their product leadership work, they will help expand Docker’s European footprint.
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About Docker, Inc.
Docker, Inc. is the commercial entity behind the open source Docker project, and is the chief sponsor of the Docker ecosystem. Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. With Docker, IT organizations shrink application delivery from months to minutes, frictionlessly move workloads between data centers and the cloud, and slash infrastructure costs by 50 percent or more. Inspired by an active community and by transparent, open source innovation, Docker has been downloaded 4+ million times and is used by thousands of the world’s most innovative organizations, including eBay, Baidu, Yelp, Spotify, Yandex, and Cambridge HealthCare. Docker’s rapid adoption has catalyzed an active ecosystem, resulting in more than 20,000 “Dockerized” applications and integration partnerships with AWS, Red Hat, Google, Canonical, IBM, OpenStack, Rackspace, and Cloud Foundry.
Docker, Inc. is venture backed by Greylock Partners (Jerry Chen), Benchmark (Peter Fenton), Trinity Ventures (Dan Scholnick), AME Cloud Ventures (Yahoo! Founder Jerry Yang), Insight Venture Partners, Y Combinator, and SV Angel (Ron Conway).
