I’m extremely happy, actually overjoyed, to announce that HP has acquired the Stackato product from ActiveState! Stackato is our platform (or PaaS) for enterprise IT departments and developers, based on various open source projects, including Cloud Foundry and Docker. Members of the team will be joining HP to help continue to grow Stackato as part of HP’s Cloud business. ActiveState will continue as a company and will retain all of our other products including ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl, and Komodo IDE.
HP has a leading hybrid cloud portfolio, HP Helion, and has committed to investing more than $1 billion on cloud-related product and engineering initiatives and professional services. As a founding Platinum member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, HP’s focus on developing open, hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise aligns with Stackato’s strengths. HP has a breadth of understanding of open source, and uses it to maximize customers’ benefit across products, solutions, and services. Stackato will enhance HP’s open source cloud solutions, helping to further strengthen HP’s leadership in the cloud space and in the Cloud Foundry community.
Since we shipped version 1.0 of Stackato in February 2012, we have been growing our team, expertise, and customer base. In just over three years, we have had over a dozen new feature releases based on our vision of what a platform should be, combined with feedback from our enterprise customers and prospects. We’ve been very successful with Stackato and I couldn’t be more proud of the team we’ve built. We have done this without a single dollar of venture money but rather by growing our business organically and using the profits to reinvest into Stackato.
While we have successfully out-innovated much larger competitors in the enterprise platform space, including being first with buildpacks, Linux containers (LXC, then Docker), redundant routers, Websocket and SPDY support, system and application log streaming, ports as a service, persistent file system service, and much more, ActiveState is a small company in comparison to most. Our budget is miniscule in comparison to our larger competitors. Therefore, we decided that the best way to continue innovating and competing in the future was to add a lot of additional resources to Stackato; adding the product and team members to HP accomplishes exactly that and we think it’s a better bet than continuing to grow organically, or, for that matter, taking VC money.
The growth of Cloud Foundry (including the formation of the Cloud Foundry Foundation), Docker, and OpenStack during the past few years has been staggering. We feel that Stackato plus HP Helion is uniquely positioned to provide a powerful combination of these technologies to enterprises everywhere. No other OpenStack company has a Cloud Foundry distribution and no other Cloud Foundry distribution incorporates Docker. In addition, both HP Helion and Stackato support multiple clouds and hypervisors.
HP has acquired all Stackato-related assets. Stackato team members will become employees of HP’s Cloud business and will continue working on Stackato. Stackato customers are still able to use it under the same terms as before and will largely be serviced by the same staff they already know. Some details such as email addresses, phone numbers, and ticketing systems will probably change, but the basics will all be the same. If you’re a current customer or prospect that has been communicating with us, someone will be in touch soon to notify you of any of these minor changes. The product will continue to function as before and development will only accelerate with the additional resources HP brings to the table.
Non-Stackato customers won’t notice anything different, other than an increased focus by ActiveState on our non-Stackato business. We are currently expanding the team working on our “tools & languages” products and we expect to launch additional products in the future.
I’d like to thank all of our customers, partners, and the ActiveState team over the years for making this all possible. I personally will remain with ActiveState, rather than moving to HP with the Stackato team. I know that’s the right decision for everybody. Stackato will continue to thrive and grow more quickly at HP; ActiveState will re-focus on our core tools and languages business and will add additional features and products to serve our customers’ needs in the future. The Stackato team is like family to me and I will miss them and the customers very much, but I know I’m sending them into good hands and look forward to seeing the team thrive! Keep an eye out for our next ActiveState incubation. Our roots are in open source, and we are absolutely passionate about developers and building solutions that help the enterprise.
Read more at the HP Next blog or in the HP press release.