Rancher Labs is the creator of the most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform and it more than doubled its commercial revenue and enterprise customer base in 2019. This significant growth demonstrates an accelerating demand for containers within the enterprise and, specifically, containerized workloads running on Kubernetes.

The rapid adoption of Kubernetes has been widely predicted. According to 451 Research, 76% of enterprises worldwide will standardize on Kubernetes by 2022. Additionally, Rancher Labs' own industry survey indicates multi-cluster environments are the norm, hybrid cloud deployments are prevalent, and edge is emerging as an important use-case.

"The Kubernetes marketplace saw significant consolidation in 2019 with the acquisitions of Heptio and Pivotal by VMware, and Red Hat by IBM," said Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs. "Understandably, many organizations are concerned by the possible consequences of this consolidation and are turning to Rancher as the only vendor-neutral, multi-cluster, multi-cloud Kubernetes management platform."

Unique Approach to Managing Kubernetes

Rancher's unique Run Kubernetes Everywhere strategy is built son three simple tenets:

●      Certified Kubernetes Distributions - organizations need to deploy certified Kubernetes distributions everywhere they need to compute - in the datacenter, on multiple clouds, and across desktop, branch, and edge locations.  With the Q4'19 GA of K3s, a lightweight and certified Kubernetes distribution purpose-designed for small footprint workloads, Rancher supports the industry's broadest range of Kubernetes distributions including RKE, EKS, AKS, and GKE.

●       Central Control & Visibility - IT operations teams need simple, consistent cluster operations for all clusters running anywhere, as well as centralized security and policy management across multi-cluster and multi-cloud environments.  In Q4'19, Rancher Labs launched v2.3 of their flagship product, Rancher, which is already the industry's most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform.

●      Streamlined DevOps - any Kubernetes strategy must make it easy for developers and DevOps teams to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications at scale.  With the Q4'19 beta release of Rio, a new application deployment engine for Kubernetes that delivers fully integrated deployment experiences from operations to pipeline, DevOps teams can leverage an opinionated application deployment engine that accelerates workload delivery to any Kubernetes cluster.

Commitment to Open-Source Innovation

Illustrating Rancher Labs commitment to open-source innovation, in 2019 the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) accepted Rancher's vendor-neutral container storage solution - Longhorn - as its latest Sandbox project. Longhorn joined 20 other current projects and was accepted in recognition of the unique value it brings to the cloud-native ecosystem.

Additionally, Rancher Labs received a Firestarter Award by 451 Research, awarded to the company for innovation, enterprise leadership, and its ‘trailblazing work that made it possible to handle a range of Kubernetes implementations from a common management platform.'

Gartner Research also recognized Rancher Labs in 2019, citing the company in two of its Container Industry reports and five different Gartner Hype Cycle reports.

World-Class Customer Experience

Rancher's customers include many of the world's largest enterprises. As such, another key factor in Rancher's continued growth is their commitment to a world-class customer experience which includes onboarding services, certification programs, professional and consulting services, and 24/7 support. Rancher's commitment to their customers is reflected in the company's industry-leading net-promoter-score of 70. 

What Rancher's Customers Are Saying

One of the largest commercial banks in the Netherlands is standardizing on Kubernetes and Rancher. Erik van der Meijde, Platform Delivery Manager at de Volksbank comments: "Containers are now at the heart of our growth and innovation strategy. In order to be competitive, we need to increase the velocity of development through automation, while maintaining reliability and security. Rancher represents ‘next level' containerization that allows us to become more agile and innovative."

Netic is one of a group of companies creating the first truly national and entirely digital health service in Denmark; making Rancher an intrinsic part of its deployment plans. Kasper Kay Petersen, Sales and Marketing Director at Netic comments: "For a hybrid environment, Rancher is ideal for managing components across on-premise and the cloud. The ongoing health of the Danish population relies on a healthcare infrastructure that is ‘always on' and completely reliable. As new applications are added to FUT the volume of patients connecting to the service will quickly expand. Rancher allows us to scale rapidly, develop and test new services concurrently securely and in a stable way."