Although CIQ is a relatively young company, its leaders have deep roots in free software and Linux. In addition to Gregory M. Kurtzer, co-founder and CEO of CIQ, which created CentOS, the popular clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), its new management team includes two of the founders of Linuxcare, the first company to support Linux a priority.
Today, the first business model that comes to mind for Linux or open source software is to offer paid commercial support. It has not always been the case. In the early days of Linux, companies such as Caldera, Red Hat, and SUSE still believed that money could be made by selling boxed Linux to ordinary users.
Before Red Hat realized it, when it retired Red Hat Linux in favor of the retail version RHEL in 2003, Linuxcare had already emerged as the first major Linux support company in 1998. Unfortunately, commercial and the dot-com collapse did not allow Linuxcare to become a top company.
Bet on experience
Today, former Linuxcare founders Art Tyde, CIQ’s VP of Business Development, and David LaDuke, VP of Marketing, bring decades of hard-won experience to the table. Other well-known veteran technology leaders have joined them, such as Robert Adolph, co-founder and chief product officer, Rob Dufalo, vice president of engineering, John Frey, chief technical officer, Stephen Moody, vice president of support and technology, Marlin Prager, chief financial officer, and Brock Taylor, vice president of high performance computing (HPC) and strategic partners.
CIQ values maturity and experience over youth and exuberance. And with CIQ recently raising $26 million in a Series A round, led by Two Bear Capital, he’s not the only one who thinks he’s on the right track.
Rocky Linux, the free CentOS Linux clone from CIQ and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, is enjoying considerable success. It has reached Linux distro image downloads of up to 750,000 per month. But CIQ isn’t betting its future on being a Linux distribution provider.
It is true that CIQ offers Rocky Linux support. But it also offers several HPC offers. These include Warewulf, a cluster management and operating system provisioning system for HPC, Apptainer, an open source HPC container project supported by the Linux Foundation, Traditional HPC, an HPC approach based on Rocky Linux and Warewulf for internal servers and Fuzzball: HPC-2.0, an HPC designed to run in the cloud.
It will be interesting to see if this all works out well. Personally, I expect this bet on experience and hard-earned wisdom to be successful.
Source: ZDNet.com