This CEO sold his last company for $8.3 billion — now he has a master plan to lead $1.2 billion Docker to victory

docker ceo steve singh

Docker CEO Steve Singh took over the $1.2 billion company about a year ago — and says that the company has is close to "triple digits of millions" in bookings this year.
Docker essentially invented the market for software containers, a red-hot developer technology. But some of the hype has come off, as competitors have swooped in.
Singh says that the company is in a good position to help companies modernize their existing software, using Docker to make it easy to meet the needs of 21st century applications.
He says that despite the gossip, he wants Docker to be an independent company with $1 billion in revenue. But "if someone buys us, they buy us."

Back in 2014, Steve Singh had to explain to a Wall Street analyst — on a public conference call for investors, no less — why Concur, the company he had cofounded two decades earlier and where he was serving as CEO, had put itself up for sale to SAP for $8.3 billion.

Singh tells Business Insider that he took immediate exception to the question.

"[I] think what you’re going to find [...] is the company was not up for sale. Great companies are acquired, they’re not sold," Singh told the analyst.

Now, Singh is the CEO of $1.2 billion software startup Docker, after taking over for Ben Golub just over a year ago. And while the details are different, Singh told Business Insider at the Dockercon event this week that his philosophy hasn't changed: Even as some observers openly speculate about the performance and future of the startup, he insists he's in it for the long haul.

While Docker is credited with igniting the massive trend towards software containers (more on that later), Silicon Valley gossip has long held that the company moved too slowly and made too many missteps to capitalize on its early momentum. At one point in 2016, Docker reportedly turned down a $4 billion acquisition offer from Microsoft.

Singh says that he's ignoring the buzz, and working towards a day when Docker is a publicly traded company with a bulletproof business model and $1 billion in annual revenue.

"Yes, one day we'll be public," says Singh. "If someone buys us, they buy us."

While Docker is a private company and doesn't have to share its financials, Singh gives some hints as to the success of the strategy, so far: Over the last year, Docker has doubled its enterprise customers, he says. And bookings have gone from "single digits" of millions in 2016, to "double digits" in 2017, and on track to do "almost triple digits" in 2018.

He's confident enough that he says that the company has no immediate plans to go after more investment capital.

"We don't need to at this point," says Singh.

So what is Docker, anyway?

Docker, the software, makes it easy for developers to take advantage of software containers — a technology for packaging an application up in a neat, tidy metaphorical box, such that it runs exactly the same on your laptop as it does in a massive data center or cloud computing platform. The tech existed before, but it was never as easy or convenient.

The success of Docker led to the massive adoption of containers, by companies of all shapes and sizes. At first, it looked like Docker was well-positioned to capitalize on this wave, and it raised $95 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation in 2015.

As the competition heated up, though, things changed. While the Docker open source project remained a popular way to create containers, it struggled to find a consistent strategy for selling to businesses. Meanwhile, big vendors swooped in, as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Red Hat, Pivotal, VMware, and others all made huge bets on containers. Google, in particular, has had massive success with Kubernetes, free software for managing containers.

docker solomon hykes

And so, some of the hype around Docker, the company, started to fade, as concerns about the health of the business mounted. When word got out last year that Docker was raising money, there was some skepticism: "If only it could raise similar amounts from paying customers," joked Adobe executive Matt Asay in a column for TechRepublic.

Ultimately, Docker would raise $61.8 million at a pre-money valuation of $1.2 billion in October, according to Crunchbase — an extremely modest uptick in valuation from 2015, comparatively. And in March of this year, Solomon Hykes, the original developer of the Docker software, left his operational role at the company, though he remains on the board.

The future is containers

Singh says that containers are still the future, and Docker is still in a good position to capitalize on that, despite pressure from Red Hat and Pivotal, which he describes as the biggest competition.

At Dockercon itself, the company unveiled a new part of the master plan: A feature called federation for Docker EE, which lets you manage all of your applications no matter where they're hosted. Singh says that customers are doing piecemeal software deployments between their own servers and Amazon's, Microsoft's, and Google's clouds, and he wants Docker to be the way that they manage that complexity.

"Microsoft has no interest in a multi-cloud container platform," Singh says, highlighting the fact that Docker has no horse in the cloud wars and can support everybody all at once. "Each of these cloud has their own area where they're exceptional."

Jim Whitehurst Red Hat CEO

In a more general sense, Singh says that the opportunity for Docker is in helping companies modernize their older, legacy applications. Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), the company's flagship product, takes an application and simplifies the process of breaking it down into containers.

Once an application is thusly "containerized," Singh says it becomes easy to break it down into components, in an approach known as microservices — basically, metaphorical Lego bricks that make it simple to add new features to software, or assemble what you already have in new ways.

In so doing, Singh says that Docker can save a company lots of money: First, in infrastructure, as Docker can squeeze more efficiency out of existing hardware. Second, on developer productivity, as the container approach helps standardize the way software is built, letting programmers move faster and worry less about breaking things. For big customers, like Docker flagship customer Liberty Mutual, that can add up fast.

"You're talking about tens of millions of dollars of savings," says Singh.

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