Docker Sets Sights on Enterprises with $40M Investment from Sequoia Capital
With $40 million in new funding, Docker hopes to further develop initiatives to meet the needs of enterprise customers. David Messina, vice president of enterprise marketing at Docker, said that the fact that so many enterprises are interested in Docker shows how important apps are becoming to a wide variety of businesses.
The company announced the new investment, led by Sequoia Capital, today and said it will use the money to fund international expansion as well as to better serve enterprise users.
“Many of the world’s largest financial institutions and governments are already using Docker,” Messina said. “One thing they’re keenly interested in is having a formal support relationship with Docker.”
In addition, he said many organizations are looking for training support as the use of Docker grows across their businesses.
Docker also plans to continue to build a platform that will allow developers within an organization to share Dockerized apps behind the firewall, only with co-workers. The company already supports the Docker Hub Registry, where people have shared 35,000 Dockerized apps. But the private offering would let businesses set up an internal “catalog” for Dockerized apps, similar to the private app stores that many companies set up to share phone or cloud apps with employees.
Offering more support for enterprises has already proved to pay off. When Docker 1.0, the first supported version of the technology, was released in June, there were three million downloads of Docker. Now, just three months later, there are 21 million downloads, Messina said. While some enterprises use experimental technologies, many prefer to wait for supported versions so that increase in downloads could at least partly be attributed to enterprises jumping in.
Messina said businesses are learning that Docker can help them develop new iterations of their offerings much quicker and that can help drive their businesses. For instance, Gilt, a designer shopping site, has 300 Dockerized components, he said. He said that allows developers to bring scores of changes to the site every day. “This next generation of distributed apps powered by Dockerized apps is allowing the company to innovate in real time,” he said. “As we talk to more and more enterprises, that’s what they’re getting excited about. They see apps as the fastest way to innovate the business and Docker is becoming the standard for them to do these innovations in real time.”