Rancher Labs,
creators of the most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform,
more than doubled its commercial revenue and enterprise customer base in
2019. This significant year-on-year 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 on 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.