Dramatic Increases in ARR, Customers, and Users Validate SaaS strategy

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Jan. 30, 2020 – ActiveState today announced another year of rapid annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth and profitability driven by their innovation in open source languages and their expanding enterprise customer base. Building on the strength of their enterprise support, indemnification and custom runtime offerings, the company successfully launched a beta of the ActiveState Platform that attracted over 250,000 new users in 2019. The ActiveState Platform is SaaS that makes ActiveState’s powerful enterprise Open Source Language Automation tooling freely available to developers.

Click to Tweet: One year & 250,000 users already! With support for #Python, #Perl and #Tcl on Linux & Windows, the @ActiveState Platform beta is moving fast to its goal of making it easy to build stable, reproducible and easy-to-deploy runtimes in any language for any OS. https://tinyurl.com/rsn8jlg

In 2019, ActiveState took key portions of the internal systems it uses to create secure, curated, open source language runtime environments for its enterprise customers, and made them available as a free SaaS offering for developers. The ActiveState Platform, though still in beta, lets developers solve many of the open source language problems they wrestle with, including:

  • Cross-platform language use by providing up-to-date build environments for Windows and Linux that make it easy to create custom Python, Perl and Tcl runtime environments on demand.
  • Dependency management, which is largely eliminated by the Platform.
  • “Works on my machine” issues, which the Platform’s State Tool eliminates by enabling consistent, reproducible deployments to dev, test and production systems

Key plans for the Platform in 2020 include:

  • Adding support for macOS and Docker, as well as integrations with CI/CD tools and other important devops tools
  • Bringing other languages, such as Ruby and Java/OpenJDK, to the platform
  • Adding support for community (and other third party) contributions
  • Using insights from the Platform, together with a donations program, to help foster the sustainability and security of the open source language ecosystem

Raj Behera, Vice President, Development Engineering, MSC Software, said: “We chose ActiveState because it was the only firm that could provide on-demand, customized versions of the Python programming language. We gain speed, flexibility and engineering time, plus [can] better manage the risk of products running Python with a uniform and consistent approach.” 

Bart Copeland, CEO, ActiveState, said: “We had an amazing year, with almost 40% growth in ARR, great new enterprise customers coming on board and over a quarter-million people signing up for the ActiveState Platform beta – all driven by organic growth. With this enthusiastic market validation of our strategy, we look forward to expanding the ActiveState Platform with additional languages and platforms in 2020, and to doing our part to support the open source projects that we rely on.”

About ActiveState
ActiveState helps enterprises scale securely with open source languages and gives developers the kinds of tools they love to use. More than 2 million developers and 97 percent of Fortune 1,000 enterprises use ActiveState to support mission-critical systems and speed up software development while enhancing oversight and increasing quality.  

 

Media Contact:
Zak Greant
pr@activestate.com