Heptio will be joining forces with VMware on a shared cloud native mission
Today we are incredibly excited to announce that Heptio will be acquired by VMware. It is a watershed day for our company, and we hope for the industry as a whole. The inevitable question is … why have we decided to join forces (now)?
Life at Heptio has been pretty exceptional since we founded the company two years ago. In a short period, we have made strong contributions in the Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem, assembled a remarkable team and onboarded some of the most prestigious enterprises as customers. We were incredibly well capitalized and supported by our investors. So what gives?
Shared vision.
Heptio’s mission is to build a platform that accelerates IT in a multi-cloud world. We are on the precipice of a major transformation—the de-coupling of applications from the environments where they are run. And we feel a responsibility to help organizations navigate this transformation to true cloud native architecture. To realize the greatest possible impact, Heptio would need access to an entirely different level of resources and execution capabilities than we have today.
Who is best positioned to lead this transformation? The company that led a parallel transformation—the software defined data center. VMware. They have experience, execution muscle, customer trust and full leadership commitment.
When we first started conversations with VMware, the alignment of our respective visions was uncanny. With virtualization, VMware helped enterprises change the way their infrastructure operates. VMware values our products and services—together we can apply these technologies to change the way business operates, and where they run their applications.
Customer Value.
We live in a really interesting time. Enterprise companies are dealing with waves of disruption in the software space, and increasingly fragmented and complicated hosting environments. Kubernetes has an important role to play as a ubiquitous, uniform framework—to be as available and invisible as a utility, like electricity. We believe that an enterprise should pick their infrastructure hosting environment based solely on pragmatic attributes: cost economics, data locality and sovereignty, and connectivity to the consumers and workloads they support.
The value for enterprises is not the electricity, nor the vehicle through which it is delivered; value is created when applications are plugged in. The missing piece is a control plane that shapes the experience in deploying and accessing cloud native technologies. It must address day 2 challenges, integrating technologies into a practical enterprise environment, and instituting policies and management capabilities. It is going to take a hard push from an engaged, enterprise-friendly company to make it real. We are convinced that VMware possesses the ability and commitment to create a platform that works everywhere and meets the unique needs of enterprises. Together we can change the game.
Community Connection.
From the start, Heptio has maintained a healthy relationship with the open source community. We’re tied into the Kubernetes steering committee and a number of SIGs, plus our team has shepherded five open source projects (Sonobuoy, Contour, Gimbal, Ark and ksonnet). We feel like the community trusts us. That trust continues to be well placed. The team at VMware have a parallel appreciation for the community; they fully understand the importance of being closely connected to foster more innovation. They have so much energy and resources already focused on this area; the time is right to join forces and accelerate the value delivered to the open source community.
Culture First.
I’ve left culture to the final topic for this post, but the fact that VMware puts its culture first is central to our decision to join their fold. We think a lot about the culture of a company not only as an expression of its values, but as a blueprint for how it creates value in the world. Even before we started conversations with VMware, we were aware of similarities in our culture and core values. We have some great people working at Heptio that ‘grew up’ at VMware—they enjoyed their work and had tremendous respect for their colleagues. This made us feel good about joining them, and instilled confidence that our teams would gel and we could focus our energy on our shared mission.
In Closing.
At Heptio, we’ve often (internally) lamented that we’re not great at celebrating our achievements. But today, we can’t avoid a proper celebration. I’m so proud of our team and what they’ve built in such a compressed time frame, and so grateful to our community for their incredible support. I’m immensely excited to join forces with an organization that shares our mission and that has proved they know how to deliver transformative technology. We’re fired up to have an even bigger impact.
