Gartner recently named RackN a “2020 Cool Vendor in Cloud Computing.” It’s a coveted designation, and we are honored, but cool? Ask a VC and you’ll hear that the stuff we do is not cool: Infrastructure is technological plumbing and polar opposite of cool. And yet, our work solves real-world problems for scale operators.
To our customers, solving hard problems gracefully is cool. They get it and, clearly, Gartner gets it, too.
So, what did Gartner cloud analysts see in our infrastructure automation platform? They see that “cloud” was never a limited concept, it’s always been infrastructure that distributed across public clouds, on-premises, in co-location, and out to the edge locations.
Gartner recognizes operators are using “the cloud” to mean API-driven infrastructure without limiting the conversation to a handful of platforms. We’re not just talking about cloud-native technologies: cloud is about transforming the way IT is practiced via automation, integration and platforms. So Gartner paid attention when RackN showed how we solve real problems for real household name customers using cloud strategies in production to address long standing infrastructure challenges.
Our customers already know that adding cloud into the mix doesn’t make operating and managing infrastructure go away; instead, they tell us emphatically that the future brings an increasing mix of infrastructure locations, vendors and types. When operators say “the cloud,” it’s not a single thing but a complex aggregation of services. Our customers want software that helps unify and simplify their growing estate.
Ultimately, our customers think gaining unified control of infrastructure is cool.
How do we do this? RackN focuses on foundational IT problems from core principles. That’s why our software product is designed to be installed and managed by our customers instead of offered as a SaaS. It’s also why we focused on bringing infrastructure as code (IaC) automation to heterogeneous bare metal before we worried about managing virtualization layers. We’ve proven that building on a solid, repeatable foundation, the “digital rebar” of the data center, truly transforms the operation of everything layered above it. By design, we’ve ensured our solution scales into every type of infrastructure by starting from the hardest first.
But that’s just technology. What really makes us cool is helping real users regain operational control over ever increasing data acceleration without needless toil. Making infrastructure simple and repeatable, regardless of the vendor or location, really helps customers focus on the right things instead of the “cool” things.
Helping customers focus on building their own cool thing… that’s our ultimate cool factor.
(Oh, and if they think it’s cool to do that one site at a time, then wait until they see how we’ve applied those same principles to managing distributed infrastructure. The best is yet to come.)
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