Sailing Into 2023 at CIQ

January 11, 2023

In this CIQ “Happy New Year” blog, we’re going to enjoy both views from our deck chair: a look back and a look ahead. Pull up a chair, grab your favorite cruising beverage, and let’s soak it all in!

A Look Back at 2022: Wow, That’s Some Wake!

We really churned up some water with our accomplishments in 2022. There are too many “wins” to list them all, but in my view, these are the highlights:

In early 2022, we closed a $26 million Series A led by Two Bear Capital. We then built an incredible team, including an amazing senior leadership group, firing on all cylinders. Several members of our team have shared why they joined CIQ: check out the blogs from Art Tyde, Brock Taylor, and Glen Otero. We continue to make key hires, including Justin Burdine, who joins Zane Hamilton on our team, who both join us from Red Hat. We also established an Advisory Board stacked with veteran open source and industry leaders. Our workforce is quickly approaching 100 team members, comprising the most talented and passionate people I’ve ever met.

We delivered Rock(y)-solid Support for Rocky Linux. As the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, we joined with the community in establishing the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and the creation of its bylaws. This community of individuals and organizations is committed to ensuring the longevity, stewardship, and innovation of enterprise-grade open source software that is always available for free, and that is never dominated by corporate interests (including ours).

Several releases of Rocky Linux landed this year, most notably Rocky Linux 9, to which CIQ contributed Peridot, an open source and completely cloud-native build stack that allows anyone to recreate, build, enhance and manage Rocky Linux as we do. Release 9.1 followed, bringing Rocky Linux to the x86-64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures.

We partnered with several industry leaders to accelerate our growth. A big one was Google, whom we joined forces with to provide mutual customers with a direct and unified best-in-class support experience for Rocky Linux. Rakuten Symphony Telecom and CIQ announced a teaming to bring open source and open community to Open RAN edge and core deployments with Rocky Linux. Rocky Linux OS is validated on the Rakuten Mobile network in Japan and is available to other telecoms through Rakuten Symphony commercial deliveries. Additionally, CIQ partnered with Atempo to certify Rocky Linux for all of Atempo’s offerings. We joined the Oracle Partner Network to make Rocky Linux available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

The industry applauded and celebrated the growth and momentum of Rocky Linux. Rocky Linux is already among the most frequently adopted Linux distributions. According to metrics tracked by the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), Rocky Linux adoption is outpacing all other Enterprise Linux variants. Another encouraging data point here is from Hyperion Research, who concluded that Rocky Linux has already earned 20.7% of the market.

Rocky Linux received the HPCwire Readers’ Choice award in the “Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch” category. Since the project was launched, Rocky Linux has consistently been downloaded 250,000 per month. All this happened against the backdrop of some of the largest names in enterprise cloud computing stepping up as supporters of the community, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware.

The CIQ team accelerated innovation in a number of meaningful ways. CIQ received a 2022 Digital Innovator Award from Intellyx, recognizing our trailblazing approach and placing us among “the most disruptive and innovative firms in their space.” We were honored that Rocky Linux and Apptainer both received awards from HPCwire at the SC22 event in Dallas, where we also met with numerous partners as well as current and future customers. We played a lead role in the release of open source Apptainer 1.1.0 in September. Apptainer, the Linux Foundation’s successor to the popular Singularity container runtime, is the most widely used container system for HPC. CIQ is the primary support and services provider for the Apptainer project. Notably, in October, we demonstrated the power of Apptainer by containerizing OpenRadioss and subsequently deploying the code successfully on a crash model for the Toyota Camry. We’d already demonstrated this and other enterprise-focused computing workloads on our new, federated, cloud-native, hybrid SaaS platform: Fuzzball (HPC-2.0).

A Look Ahead to 2023: Open Seas and New Frontiers

In 2023, Rocky Linux—the free, open source Enterprise Linux operating system coupled with reliable and fine-tuned support models that drive down infrastructure costs—will be embraced as the replacement for CentOS that enterprises need for physical, cloud, virtual, and containers.

In 2023, we’ll see new tools that harness the power of containers, along with new ways to securely and easily automate software deployment, supply chain security, and lifecycle management at scale, transforming and modernizing performance intensive computing architectures for HPC/supercomputing and enterprise use cases.

New product innovations are on tap for the new year. These include a breakthrough managed provisioning, imaging, and repository-as-a-service offering. It’s designed to reduce complexity, enhance agility, and optimize TCO for systems infrastructure at scale. There’s also the GA of Fuzzball on the horizon as well as new capabilities in Warewulf and Apptainer. Plus, we’ll see the launch of our partner and Rocky certification programs, and who knows what else!

We’ve covered a lot of ground in 2022, putting in place many of the foundational elements that we’ll need to achieve our goals for 2023. It’s an exciting time for CIQ, for the projects we support, and for the growing list of customers who look to us for solutions in enterprise Linux and HPC 2.0. Thanks to everyone who made 2022 the success that it was, and to our team that already has 2023 off to a great start! And if you’re looking for an opportunity to work with the team that’s set the stage for an amazing year ahead, join us!