Dear Reader,
Last week, while I was listening at 2x speed to the Kubernetes Podcast episode where Google’s Craig Box interviewed me, Grant Miller, I had the opportunity to reflect on a few things. Who would have thought that the emergence of containers would be such a watershed moment in the enterprise IT landscape? The answer is us. Replicated. We thought of that.
We also thought that the landscape of SaaS and on-prem software was going to fundamentally shift as a result. We built Replicated to enable software providers to more easily capitalize on that shift so that they could focus on building cloud-native applications, not on-prem installers.
We were wrong. Nobody likes on-prem software. Vendors don’t like it, enterprises don’t want it, and I’m tired of it. On-prem software isn’t the future for Replicated, and it’s not the future for F500 companies. For that reason, it’s time to pivot Replicated into something that will continue the legacy of my father, Mr. Miller. Starting today, our credo is to take the “broken” out of the sale and purchase of municipal bonds by putting the “broker” back in.
For years, people have been seduced into the so-called luxurious experience of exchanging municipal bonds through platforms with absolutely no personality like Schwab or TD Ameritrade. These wannabe brokers don’t have families, they don’t take vacations, they don’t have a dog – how can they possibly build up the trust that’s required to enter into the risky business of buying and selling credit lines into our great country’s local governments?
Mr. Miller used to say, “When I’m thinking about loaning a city some of my hard-earned earnings, I need to know some things – Can I trust the person selling me these instruments? What’s their credit score? Do they have a dog?” These are really important questions to have answers to in such a sacred task as evaluating the creditworthiness of different cities or townships (if you’re feeling adventurous), and good luck getting answers out of your mobile app!
I used to think that Kubernetes would minimize the operational burden borne by enterprise sysadmins. Why not let Kubernetes orchestrate enterprise applications and let companies retain full ownership of the data that funnels into these mission-critical systems? A lofty and stupid dream. The obvious pivot is to do what I should have done a long time ago with Replicated … Making it easier for the “Average Joe/Jan” to buy and sell municipal instruments through a matchmaker technology that connects you with ostensibly capable brokers, the likes of which we had no choice but to trust in yesteryear. Don’t we all pine for that?
Replicated used to serve cutting-edge software providers like HashiCorp, Puppet, and Harness by enabling them to distribute their cloud-native applications to wherever their customers needed to consume them – GCP, VMware, EKS, you name it; however, I cannot ignore the path that Mr. Miller paved for me. I am meant to serve potentially populous municipalities such as Fort Myers, Bend, and Meridian by matching them with potentially worthy individual debtors.
I know what you’re asking, Dear Reader – “How will you, Grant Miller, bring us back to the golden era of municipal bond exchange?” To that, I can only encourage a subscription to our e-list https://info.replicated.com/pivot and a donation to your favorite municipal agency (perhaps NYC’s Old Ones?). While the reliability primitives intrinsic to Kubernetes won’t magically transform on-prem application lifecycle management, I’m confident that the personal touch of a broker will enable the accelerated flourish of many cities you all have maybe once thought of visiting. Mr. Miller wouldn’t have it any other way. I apologize for not letting Marc know about this decision in advance.
Best regards,