
Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO - alexellisuk
https://blog.docker.com/2017/05/introducing-docker-new-ceo/
======
onwardly
My company has been a partner of Concur for several years, starting back in
2012 when the original founders (Steve, Raj and Mike) were all still there.

Steve was easily the most-respected leader in the travel industry- even people
that disliked Concur admired Steve. He was articulate, created a clear vision
for Concur that they maintained even as they grew like wildfire, and he
inspired trust and goodwill with Concur partners.

I get the "oh no, SAP executive" instinctual reaction, but Steve is clearly an
entrepreneur at heart and considers himself an entrepreneur (it took them 20
years of grinding and ups and downs to build Concur what it is today).

There was also a comment about him leading the company to exit in 2-3 years. I
seriously doubt it. Concur's stock symbol is CNQR which isn't a coincidence.
They didn't build Concur to sell it, they built it to conquer, which they had
basically done when SAP bought them. Plus after 20 years I imagine $8B sounded
pretty good, but I don't think their approach was ever to try to "flip" the
company and I doubt he would join Docker if that was the intention in any way.

------
tyingq
My kneejerk reaction is that a senior leader from Concur, then SAP, is going
to buzzword bingo and "enterprisify" docker into something very different.
That's probably not fair though. Concur is a pretty big success story, sold
for $8B, and it appears some good decisions drove that.

~~~
ralfn
>"enterprisify" docker into something very different. That's probably not fair
though.

But that's actually the industry containers are good for. Enterprise.
Predictability trumps costs. The flaws of docker may over time get fixed. It's
the small companies and startups that are making a fool of themselves by
pretending they extract any kind of value out of docker.

Imagine a large 100+ man software project that spans two years and involves
four different organisations collaborating. There are at least 100+ non-
technical 'knowledge workers' interacting with this process. The people have
the intent of 'not being responsible for anything', but establishing their
position/role so their cost/budget is validated. You know, the typical large-
scale Oracle/Cap-Gemini/IBM clusterfuck of incompetence.

But that's the secret! They aren't incompetent at all (as organisations). They
sell something no-one else sells. They sell predictability.

Because for all what it's worth: they don't make huge architectural fuck ups.
They make their deadline. And they are able to deliver something, even with
this many stakeholders pissing all over the project from any direction.

For them, docker is brilliant. It standardizes something. It doesn't do it
very well, but that doesn't matter. They aren't in a low-margin world. "Docker
isn't really secure, you really should run every docker image in a separate
VM". Sure. These sort of people are paying 500-1000 per instance anyway. No
one cares. Coordinating devops with this many stakeholders, now _thats_
expensive.

The quality of the actual technology (much like on the web itself) is
initially irrelevant. The value is in the fact there's a contract. A standard.
Docker is a bad implementation of reasonable idea. The question isn't if it's
a good technical choice. No, it's not. But it's organisational and
economically more compatible with the rest of world.

And you know what? At least those enterprise idiots will run JVM instances on
their docker images, so if they need more than three servers it's not because
they are incompetent (like every startup wasting their time on cloud
orchestration stuff). At least when they pay the price in complexity for
building something scalable it's because they actually need something
scalable.

~~~
tyingq
I meant something different by "enterprisify". Ever dealt with SAP?

~~~
spIrr
What did you mean?

~~~
tyingq
Complicated licensing, unbundling of every little feature, aggressive
salespeople, hyperbolic marketing, etc.

------
goseeastarwar
Surprised there wasn't also the typical "want to spend time with family" part
to cover the fact that the CEO was fired and a board seat was his consolation
prize.

If you want to raise $180M without a business model to become a fabled
unicorn, you had better know what you're doing.

Docker just got a lot less interesting with an ex-Concur exec in charge, but
it'll probably exit within 2-3 years and make the investors happy.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Guesses to who would acquire it? My money is on HP or Oracle.

~~~
user5994461
The best for the customers would be to be acquired by Google, AWS or RedHat.

Then they can "replace" the docker name with something that works, earn
revenues out of it and benefit from the synergy with their other products.

The issue is, Docker is not worth billions of dollars and these buyers are
already en route to kill it with their own replacement.

~~~
felipelemos
Nothing resound 'new' or 'modern' better than the word 'Docker'. Get a look at
[https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/](https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/) and count how many
times the word 'Docker' appears.

If someone buy them will be mostly for the name.

------
kristianc
It's a shame when software companies follow the path of handing over the CEO
role to ever less technical people until the CEO barely knows what the company
does. I always admire the companies that can avoid that path.

~~~
trjordan
The alternative is to stubbornly hang on to a technical CEO until the CEO
barely knows what the company does. I have a hard time admiring CEOs who carry
contempt for most of their employees.

~~~
opportune
The thing about Docker is that the target audience has a technical background.
Bob and Joe Accounting has no need for Docker, but Google does, HPC users do,
Amazon does, etc. If the CEO doesn't even know how the product works or what
it does, that's fine if you're selling iPads to school superintendents, but
not so fine if even your customers are likely to know more than you.

Not to insinuate that Singh doesn't understand the product. I'm sure he does,
to an appreciable extent. But this isn't just a technical product, it's a
technical product that pretty much only other technical people are going to be
interested in. You say that holding on to a technical CEO will lead to
contempt for the nontechnical employees of the company, I say that even the
nontechnical employees of the company (project managers, account execs,
salespeople) will need to have technical backgrounds anyway

------
bmelton
Not that I'm anybody to say so, but I think it's worth posting a friendly
reminder that Solomon is a beneficial HN contributor here in good standing
(shykes), and will likely read the remarks we post here at some point.

I see some of the posts trending towards vitriolic here, but it's worth
remembering that CEO or not, he's one of us, and deserves to be treated as
well as any other member of the community.

Personally, I would like to extend my thanks to him for creating dotCloud
(which I still miss, and preferred to Heroku for a variety of reasons),
extending that into Docker, and for having been a hell of a nice guy all along
the way.

~~~
apetresc
I'm legitimately confused - has Solomon ever been CEO of Docker? I don't
believe he is now. Why would extra sensitivity around Solomon be needed right
now?

~~~
kristianc
He was CEO of dotCloud, as far as I know, I don't think he was ever CEO of
Docker, Inc.

------
megadethz
Now we finally know the real reason for the rebrand.

------
aub3bhat
Docker was probably a victim of its own success, with so many containers &
orchestration systems popping up (CoreOS, Kubernetes, etc.), it became harder
for them to capture enterprise market that they had taken for granted. Worse
the impression that I got was somehow Docker with its great usability was for
amateurs and not for enterprise users (where most of the revenue is expected
to come from).

Anyway I think Docker is a great revolutionary product living up to the vision
that was initially presented. However it badly needs enterprise adoption to
remain viable, all other container systems suck in usability aspects.
Hopefully this drives more revenue while keeping the core product still easy
to use.

~~~
monkey2005
Docker just needed to license and support the engine rather than trying to
build a crappy enterprise platform a'la Cloud Foundry.

The Docker engine is the one thing which nobody else can easily replicate.

They would have smashed it in the mass market at something like $100/yr/node.

~~~
icebraining
_The Docker engine is the one thing which nobody else can easily replicate._

They can, and have: [https://coreos.com/rkt](https://coreos.com/rkt)

That's why Docker had to keep expanding.

~~~
holydude
\+ the docker engine is just a polished version of what we had for ages

~~~
user5994461
Not totally accurate.

BSD and solaris have had good containerisation engines for a while.

Linux, not so much.

~~~
vertex-four
Ehh... the actual "make a container out of this chunk of the filesystem" bit
can be done in a couple hundred lines of Ruby/Python/Perl - Docker is, of
course, just telling the kernel to create new uid/filesystem/network/etc
namespaces and what to put in them. Most of Docker is the image management
system and build tool.

~~~
icebraining
I think the point is that those namespaces are rather recent themselves,
whereas e.g. FreeBSD has had jails since 2000.

------
skeptic2718
_Docker is being used to cure diseases, keep planes in the air, to keep
soldiers safe from landmines, to power the world’s largest financial networks
and institutions_

Why do this?

~~~
vowelless
Wow.

But I want to give them a fair opportunity to justify this statement. Can
someone give me examples of diseases being cured via docker, or planes being
kept in the air (etc)

~~~
monatron
Reproducibility is a big problem in analytic pipelines, specifically genomics.
Researchers tend tweak their tools here and there and it has always been quite
difficult to "package" a pipeline. Docker makes that much easier. We've seen a
huge movement in the containerization of genomics pipelines, the results of
which (we hope) help cure serious disease. In my world, we're using Docker
every day to try and find cures for pediatric brain cancer. It's obviously not
our only tool, but it helps.

~~~
ilovecaching
Neural networks that construct ontologies from gene similarity matrices for
discovering cancer pathways are tools that help cure cancer. There are a
myriad of technologies supporting these type of applications; Torch, Python,
Tensorflow... Docker is a minor detail that has as much to do with curing
cancer as JSON or HTTP. When you make a claim like the one Docker is making,
you should be a critical piece of the pipeline that actively contributes
towards the end goal, not a piece of infrastructure. As a scientist, I find it
disgusting that they're using cancer research as their buzz word for stability
and importance.

~~~
tonyhb
> Reproducibility is a big problem in analytic pipelines, specifically
> genomics... [Docker solves this problem].

There is a legitimate fundamental issue with reproducing people's setups and
Docker solves this. Ergo docker is valuable technology for data science.

Literally typing `docker run...` to reproduce results (vs. VM setup,
installation etc.) seems important enough to justify their phrasing.

Fact: there are handfuls of data science startups that essentially rebrand
docker and have been funded in the hundreds of millions of dollars
specifically to solve this problem.

------
throw9966
Wonder why there isn't any article about Sudhir Steven Singh in Wikipedia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Singh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Singh)

------
holydude
I think Docker cannot make money on its own. It's already too late for them to
build on the hype as other companies captured the most critical customers /
audience.

~~~
odonnellryan
How can't they? Doesn't Red Hat make a ton of money, despite plenty of other
distros capturing market share? :)

~~~
user5994461
1) Red Hat has orchestration, that Docker doesn't have.

2) RedHat is well positioned in the big enterprise market with support/vendor
contracts, containerization is just one more lateral offering in the
portfolio.

3) RedHat is a well known and trusted brand, Docker is not.

------
MentallyRetired
Nice. Maybe now they won't copy Apcera so closely.

------
sytse
I'm sorry to see Solomon go. I think Docker has a challenge on their hands
with Kubernetes and that a founder would be the one with the authority to make
a drastic change.

It is inspirational to see that nowadays you can build a huge company when you
make a product developers want.

~~~
monkey2005
Solomon isn't going anywhere :-)

~~~
sytse
I mean seeing him go as the CEO.

~~~
d3ad1ysp0rk
He wasn't the CEO - Ben Golub was (since 2013).

~~~
sytse
Oops, my bad.

