Joining as VP of Business Development

I am incredibly excited to be
joining such a talented, diverse group at Rancher Labs as Vice President
of Business Development. In this role, I’ll be building upon my
experience of developing foundational and strategic relationships based
on open source technology. This change is motivated by my desire to go
back to my roots, working with small, promising companies with
passionate teams. I joined Docker, Inc. in 2013, just as it started to
bring containers out of the shadows and empower developers to write
software with the tools of their choice, while redefining their
relationship with infrastructure. Now that Docker is available in every
cloud environment, embedded in developer tools, and integrated in
development pipelines, the focus has shifted to making it more efficient
and sustainable for business. As users look for more integrated
solutions, the complexity of interrelated services and software rises
dramatically, giving an advantage to vendors that are proactively
reaching out and collaborating with best of breed tools. This is, I
believe, one of Rancher Labs’ strengths.

The Rancher container management
platform implements a layer of infrastructure services and drivers
designed specifically to power containerized applications. Since
networking, storage, load balancer, DNS, and security services are
deployed as containers, Rancher is in a unique position to integrate
technology efficiently, holistically, and at scale. Similarly, Rancher
also makes ISV and open source applications available via
its application catalog. The public
catalog delivers more than 90 popular applications and development
tools, many of which are contributed by the Rancher community. In
addition to further developing the Rancher ecosystem via technology and
ISV partnerships, I will be working to expand the Rancher Labs Partner
Network. We will be building a
comprehensive partner program designed to expand the company’s global
reach, increase enterprise adoption, and provide partners and customers
with tools for success. From what I can tell after my first week, I am
in the right place. I’m looking forward to becoming part of the Rancher
Labs family, and collaborating with the broader ecosystem while
developing new relationships. As for immediate plans, I am coming up to
speed as fast as I can, and spending as much time talking to as many
people in the ecosystem as possible. If you’d like to explore
opportunities to collaborate, please consider becoming a
partner. Nick is the
Vice President of Business Development at Rancher Labs where he is
focused on defining and executing Partner strategy. Prior to joining
Rancher Labs, Nick was the Vice President of Business Development and
Technical Alliances at Docker for four years. At Docker, Nick was
responsible for creating and driving the overall partner engagement and
strategy, as well as cultivating many company-defining strategic
alliances. Nick has over 15 years’ experience participating in and
contributing to the open source ecosystem as well as 10 years in
management functions in the enterprise financial space.