April 12, 2016
by Dmitri Zimine
Big change can be daunting. For us – from working in a tiny startup to a big Fortune 500 corporation. For you – from dealing with a tiny startup, to dealing with a big Fortune 500 company.
Those of you who invested your effort (and money!) in stackstorm have been understandably concerned of our future. We spent time reaching out to our customers and large users. We are still catching up with explaining the transition, and adding answers to new questions as they come up; check out FAQ and if there’s something you care to ask, please ask. Here, I’ll reflect on the first 14 days at Brocade, report our status to our dear OpenSource community, and share my first impressions and observations.
I wish to say we transitioned to Brocade without missing a beat. But I must admit, we did miss a beat or two. On-boarding paperwork, HR and new benefits. Moving to a new office and settling there. Setting up dev env on new better laptops. Meeting with so many new people. Some of us took previously planned PTO (myself included), some of us suffered from unplanned flu… So we missed few beats. But, as you can attest, the community activity, slack support to the users and attention to our paying customers didn’t suffer, and the 1.4 release of StackStorm is coming as planned.
At the same time, the number of new StackStorm trials doubled, we got much more activity on Slack community with discussions beyond installation troubles as AIO has been obsoleted by reliable deb/rpm package installation. We paid visits to some big-name new StackStorm users with kick-off sessions. Busy!
In Brocade, we continue to operate with autonomy. We keep our tools, processes, and ways of working life. Some big organization processes creeps in, but it’s quite reasonable (think securing phones, setting VPN, shipping forms to ship hoodies and mugs, gym orientation sessions…) and once solved or getting used to, it should be fine. We feel welcome here, with all the attention and support we continue to receive. The fact that StackStorm automation platform is not a side-kick but has a central place in Brocade automation strategy has been a key factor in our decision to join Brocade.
We miss Evan, StackStorm CEO and my co-founder who has not moved to Brocade. I’ll need a dedicated blog to express how grateful I am to Evan for going with him through these amazing three years, so I’ll short it here to a simple “thank you Evan. We miss you”. Everyone else – the rest of the team – is now here at Brocade – and still here, on the community.
In addition, we are reinforced – finally! – by two Brocade engineers with breadth and depth of networking experience and keen interest to DevOps: welcome Samir Salva, and Anirudh Rekhi!
And we met a whole gang of like-minded folks here – some of them are on the community for a while – please welcome Matt, Kurt, Lindsay, Yusuf, and Nabil! These are the guys “from the other side” behind Brocade vision of open, cross domain, workflow driven network automation, who saw StackStorm as a product that perfectly matches this vision. Now we are all working together to plot StackStorm’s course and make it reality.
To sum it up: we found a good new home for StackStorm, mostly completed the transition in short two weeks, and up and kicking at 110% from now on. Pretty good, don’t you think?
As always, your comments welcome here or on stakstorm-community.slack.com.