Forrester identifies Rancher as a Leader in Enterprise Container Management.

Last week we got some exciting news here at Rancher, when the analyst firm Forrester published a report that identified Rancher as in its “leaders” category for Enterprise Container Management Software. Rancher was identified as a leader along with Docker Enterprise Edition and RedHat OpenShift, and was specifically called out for excelling in providing multi-cluster Kubernetes management.

The analysts ranked Docker EE first giving it high marks for supporting both Swarm and Kubernetes and providing leadership for the Docker open source community, and scored OpenShift highly for how well it integrates with the RedHat ecosystem of products, and for providing an integrated developer experience.

Still, it is fair to say we are absolutely thrilled by this report. It is an enormous validation of the work we’ve done over the last three years to develop a multi-cluster Kubernetes management platform, that is open-source, free to anyone, and offers a compelling option for companies looking to deliver a world-class Kubernetes platform that works for both IT teams and DevOps.

I can also tell you that the analysts at Forrester really worked hard on this report. They spent a long time looking at Rancher and asking us questions about our road map. They talked to two of our 200 customers and asked us to demo dozens of features. Most importantly, they treated us the same as the other companies in the study, even though we are not a Forrester client, and we’re obviously a much smaller company than Docker, RedHat, Pivotal, Mesosphere and nearly all of the companies in the study.

I’ve been a part of six startups, and this isn’t always the case. Often it is hard for startups to even get considered when analysts evaluate an industry, and even when we’re doing well, we’re usually put in the “challenger” or “emerging” quadrants. By looking at Rancher objectively, the team at Forrester realized that we’ve built something that is unique, and that has rapidly become a very compelling option for more than 10,000 teams who are making containers and Kubernetes a critical part of their infrastructure.

I hope if you’re thinking about how to implement Kubernetes in your organization, you’ll also take an objective look at Rancher. It isn’t a PaaS or a massive suite of tools that stretches from the desktop to the data center, but it is an intuitive platform that delivers a clean, native Kubernetes experience to every development team, and makes it easy for operations teams to manage every Kubernetes cluster deployed across the enterprise.

To find out for yourself what makes Rancher so unique, please request a demo with one of our field engineers.