Today Red Hat announced a definitive agreement to acquire StackRox. This is an exciting milestone for StackRox and a tremendous validation of our innovative approach to container and Kubernetes security. It combines the industry’s first Kubernetes-native security platform with Red Hat’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, OpenShift – helping businesses further accelerate their digital transformation initiatives by more securely building, deploying and running their cloud-native applications anywhere. StackRox will continue to support multiple Kubernetes offerings such as Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE. You can gain additional insights from Ashesh Badani, Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat, in this blog post.
StackRox was founded over six years ago with an initial focus on runtime security for containers. Over time, based on customer feedback and industry trends around DevSecOps and shift-left security, we expanded the product footprint to cover use cases across the build and deploy phases of the container lifecycle.
Over two and half years ago, we made a strategic decision to focus exclusively on Kubernetes and pivoted our entire product to be Kubernetes-native. While this seems obvious today; it wasn’t so then. Fast forward to 2020 and Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto operating system for cloud-native applications and hybrid cloud environments. According to CNCF, Kubernetes is now used by 91% of its annual survey respondents, with 83% of them using it in production compared to 58% just two years ago.
Today, DevOps and Security teams at cloud-native companies, Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, rely on StackRox to implement security and compliance policies across the entire container lifecycle.
Why Is Red Hat Acquiring StackRox?
2020 was a watershed year for StackRox. Despite the challenges presented by the global pandemic, we grew over 2.5x while staying true to our core value of exceeding customer expectations as shown by our customer satisfaction, retention and expansion metrics. We delivered 17 major releases and launched KubeLinter, our first open source project, a static analysis tool to identify misconfigurations in Kubernetes deployments.
Red Hat recognized that StackRox’s innovative approach to container and Kubernetes security was a perfect complement to its vision of delivering hybrid cloud software architectures that can be deployed anywhere. With StackRox, OpenShift customers gain a single platform to more securely build, deploy and run cloud-native apps across their entire fleet of Kubernetes clusters.
By joining Red Hat, we will be able to accelerate product innovation and achieve far greater scale, on a global level, than we would be able to achieve as an independent startup. Red Hat sees the tremendous Kubernetes security benefits our customers have enjoyed, understands how security remains a top priority, and knows that together we can further increase the value we provide to our customers.
What This Means For Our Customers
As a company, one of our core values is to exceed customer expectations. We understand how important Kubernetes security is to our customers’ success. As we enter into this agreement, our customers remain our top priority, and we are excited about the additional resources we will be able to employ to provide our customers even greater business value.
By joining forces with Red Hat, we will be able to accelerate our product roadmap and be in a position to bring innovative capabilities to our customers faster; many of them were planned in collaboration with our customers and we know that they will help customers enjoy even greater benefit from our platform.
With its heritage and commitment to open source, Red Hat also identified synergies with StackRox as a cloud-native company with a high-caliber team and a growing open source strategy. As part of Red Hat, we will be able to share our expertise and technology with the open source community and build on the great work that Red Hat is already doing within the cloud-native ecosystem.
The Next Step
Bringing StackRox’s Kubernetes Security Platform to Red Hat’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, OpenShift, excited us from the day Red Hat approached us with the idea of joining forces. Over the past several weeks, we have gotten to know each other negotiating this agreement and there couldn’t be a better strategic and cultural fit between our two companies.
As we look forward to the next step in our journey, I would like to take a moment to sincerely thank our customers for trusting us for container and Kubernetes security. I would like to thank our major investors – Amplify Partners, Sequoia Capital, Redpoint, Menlo Ventures and Highland Capital Partners – for your belief in our vision and for your unwavering support.
Finally, I would like to thank our entire team for their continued dedication and relentless commitment to our vision, our customers and to each other. Ali, I and the entire StackRox team are thrilled to join Red Hat and accelerate our vision of enabling organisations to securely build, deploy and run their cloud-native applications anywhere.
