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.