HashiCorp at Nasdaq markets website, December 9, 2021.
Source: Nasdaq
When Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of cloud infrastructure, has suffered for a long time power-off on Tuesday, Disney+, Netflix, Robin Hood hero, Roku and many other popular websites and apps facing major disruptions.
The incident quickly rekindled a debate about how organizations can mitigate the impact of outages in an age where data and services increasingly depend on cloud data centers. Can large enterprises rely on a single supplier or do they need to spread their workloads in case the same thing happens again?
Two days after the AWS event, an upstart company called HashiCorp went public on Nasdaq, selling a big story that resonated among a large number of businesses. HashiCorp’s software helps engineers set up resources in multiple clouds – often some combination of AWS, Microsoft and Google, the three US market leaders.
HashiCorp ended its second trading day with a market capitalization of more than $15 billion, signaling an increase in demand for their subscription software and a desire to be able to operate in the cloud. Revenue for the latest quarter rose 49% to $82.2 million.
HashiCorp’s software is used at the retailer Target, runs applications in its data centers and stores, as well as on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform cloud services.
Mike McNamara, Chief Information Officer at Target, left, speaks as Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud Services, listens during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco on July 24, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | beautiful pictures
“I want to be commercially independent,” said Mike McNamara, Target’s chief information officer. “These are pretty big sums. They’re big expenses. And I really want to maintain control of deployment and management in Target, so that I can move my workload to Azure if GCP becomes a big deal. should be expensive or vice versa.”
Target did not report technical issues during the Amazon shutdown. Company escape from the Amazon cloud years ago, a spokesman said.
AWS doesn’t often promote the idea of using multiple public clouds, preferring customers to stick with Amazon for all of their cloud computing needs. For Google and Microsoft, which are eager to take market share away from their larger rivals, the multi-sounding trend is a boon.
‘You will become a multi-audio customer’
While learning multiple codebases requires an investment in engineering, the rewards are proven to be well worth the time and money.
“Resilience and reliability are among the drivers towards multi-cloud,” said Glenn Solomon, managing partner at venture firm GGV Capital and HashiCorp board member. GGV is HashiCorp’s second-largest investor, with a stake worth about $2.5 billion.
Companies can gain negotiating power because adopting a second cloud can put them in a better position to reduce their reliance on their primary supplier. Software companies have to face risk that their main cloud provider could become a competitor. And businesses may also want to access specific capabilities from different cloud service companies.
Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp co-founder and the company’s chief technology officer, told CNBC in an interview last week: “Whether by accident or by design, you’re going to become a multi-audio customer. if you are in Global 2000.
About 79% of the Fortune 500 companies have downloaded HashiCorp’s tools, the company estimates. IPO prospectus. HashiCorp sells subscriptions to commercial versions of the popular open source tools it releases, such as Consul for connecting application components and Vault for password management. It also sells licenses for software that companies can run in their favorite data centers.
The multi-sounding religion that HashiCorp preaches still has skeptics.
Sam Lambert, CEO of database software start-up PlanetScale, wrote in a tweet that just because AWS crashes, companies have other things to consider before deciding they need other options. It was a costly engineering feat, and AWS is available in many geographies, allowing users to diversify without going through multiple vendors.
“AWS crashing is still not a good technical reason to use multi-cloud,” Lambert wrote.
But Steve Mullaney, CEO of Aviatrix, said the move is ongoing. His startup provides software that helps organizations monitor networks over the cloud.
Aviatrix was founded in 2014 and as of three years ago none of their customers ran on more than one cloud. Now, half of Aviatrix’s 600 customers use a single cloud, but those using multiple public clouds include Aflac, Avis, Heineken and Roche, Mullaney said.
“Everybody we talked to said they would make a lot of sounds,” he said. “In a year or two, maybe 90% of our customers will be multi-cloud, not at all because we force them. I wish I had that superpower.”
Mullaney said he had planned to have dinner with some customers on Tuesday, but they canceled. They had to deal with the issues caused by the AWS shutdown.
CLOCK: HashiCorp goes public on Nasdaq at $14 billion valuation
