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Market Milestone: Tidelift Raises $25 Million B Round to Improve Open Source Business Models


Key Stakeholders: CIO, Enterprise Strategists, Enterprise Architects, Software Asset Managers, Software Developers, Open Source Maintainers

Why It Matters: Open Source is an increasingly important part of the enterprise software portfolio and yet the support, maintenance, and contributions to open source projects are often haphazard, risky, and poorly funded. Tidelift provides a channel to allow organizations and enterprises to effectively fund the founders and maintainers of strategically important open source projects.

Key Takeaway: With this round of funding, Tidelift is well positioned to continue supporting the mission of supporting open source developers through the Tidelift Subscription of security, maintenance, and licensing commitments, through 2019 and beyond.

On January 7, 2019, Tidelift, an Open Source subscription and maintenance company, raised a $25 million Series B round co-led by General Catalyst, Foundry Group, and former Red Hat executive Matthew Szulik. This round came only seven months after an initial $15 million A round and will be used to help Tidelift continue to support Open Source developers, creators, and maintainers seeking financial support so that they can focus on the Open Source projects and packages that they work on with a professional level of support.

Continue reading “Market Milestone: Tidelift Raises $25 Million B Round to Improve Open Source Business Models”

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Observations on the Future of Red Hat from Red Hat Analyst Day

On November 8th, 2018, Amalgam Insights analysts Tom Petrocelli and Hyoun Park attended the Red Hat Analyst Day in Boston, MA. We had the opportunity to visit Red Hat’s Boston office in the rapidly-growing Innovation District, which has become a key tech center for enterprise technology companies. In attending this event, my goal was to learn more about the Red Hat culture that is being acquired as well as to see how Red Hat was taking on the challenges of multi-cloud management.

Throughout Red Hat’s presentations throughout the day, there was a constant theme of effective cross-selling, growing deal sizes including a record 73 deals of over $1 million in the last quarter, over 600 accounts with over $1 million in business in the last year, and increased wallet share year-over-year for top clients with 24 out of 25 of the largest clients increasing spend by an average of 15%. The current health of Red Hat is undeniable, regardless of the foibles of the public market. And the consistency of Red Hat’s focus on Open Source was undeniable across infrastructure, integration, application development, IT automation, IT optimization, and partner solutions, which demonstrated how synchronized and focused the entire Red Hat executive team presenters were, including

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Autumnal Tech Advice from Amalgam Insights

Amalgam Insights has been busy the past month in exploring a variety of trends across IT subscriptions, DevOps, Brain Science, and Data Science. In case you’ve missed it, check out our seasonal newsletter and get educated on the key trends that are augmenting our use of technology including:

  • For IT budget and spend management, traditional asset and spend management approaches are falling short
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being treated as a ubiquitous technology
  • Open Source is now a foundation for enterprise IT
  • Learning and Development suffers from the challenge of taking on cognitive bias.

Catch up with Amalgam Insights’ analysts at work this Fall and find out how to:

And to subscribe to our newsletter, please sign up here.

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Hanging out with the Cool Oracle Kids

When I wrote my last article on open source at Oracle, I got some feedback. Much of it was along the lines are “Have you hit your head on something hard recently?” or “You must be living in an alternate dimension.” While the obvious answer to both is “perhaps…” it has become increasingly obvious that…

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Tom Petrocelli Provides Context for IBM’s Acquisition of Red Hat

In light of yesterday’s announcement that IBM is planning to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion, we’d like to share with you some of our recent coverage and mentions of Red Hat to provide context for this gargantuan acquisition. In February, DevOps Research Fellow Tom Petrocelli explained how Red Hat’s purchase of CoreOS was transformative for…

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Oracle Delivers a FOSS Surprise

An unfortunate side effect of being an industry analyst is that it is easy to become jaded. There is a tendency to fall back into stereotypes about technology and companies. Add to this nearly 35 years in computer technology and it would surprise no one to hear an analyst say, “Been there, done that, got…

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Google Grants $9 Million in Google Cloud Platform Credits to Kubernetes Project

Tom Petrocelli, Amalgam Insights Research Fellow
Kubernetes has, in the span of a few short years, become the de facto orchestration software for containers. As few as two years ago there were more than a half-dozen orchestration tools vying for the top spot and now there is only Kubernetes. Even the Linux Foundation’s other orchestrator project, CloudFoundry Diego, is starting to give way to Kubernetes. Part of the success of Kubernetes can be attributed to the support of Google. Kubernetes emerged out of Google and they have continued to bolster the project even as it fell under the auspices of the Linux Foundation’s CNCF.

On August 29, 2018, Google announced that it is giving $9M in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) credit to the CNCF Kubernetes project. This is being hailed by both Google and the CNCF as an announcement of major support. $9M is a lot of money, even if it is credits. However, let’s unpack this announcement a bit more and see what it really means.

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Microsoft Loves Linux and FOSS Because of Developers

Tom Petrocelli, Amalgam Insights Research Fellow
For much of the past 30 years, Microsoft was famous for its hostility toward Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). They reserved special disdain for Linux, the Unix-like operating system that first emerged in the 1990s. Linux arrived on the scene just as Microsoft was beginning to batter Unix with Windows NT. The Microsoft leadership at the time, especially Steve Ballmer, viewed Linux as an existential threat. They approached Linux with an “us versus them” mentality that was, at times, rabid.

It’s not news that times have changed and Microsoft with it. Instead of looking to destroy Linux and FOSS, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has embraced it.

Microsoft has begun to meld with the FOSS community, creating Linux-Windows combinations that were unthinkable in the Ballmer era.

In just the past few years Microsoft has:

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The Software Abstraction Disconnect is Silly

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been to two conferences that are run by an open source community. The first was the CloudFoundry Summit in Boston followed by KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 in Copenhagen. At both, I found passionate and vibrant communities of sysops, developers, and companies. For those unfamiliar with CloudFoundry and Kubernetes, they are…

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