Docker CEO Ben Golub In theCUBE

Docker Inc. seems to be gaining more momentum with each passing day as rising enterprise interest in containers nurtures a feedback loop of growth with it at the center. That traction is drawing all kinds of attention to the startup, not only from the developer and venture capital communities but also industry leaders such as Marianna Tessel, a former top VMware Inc. executive who officially came aboard this morning as senior vice president of engineering.

Designated as one of 2013’s Top 25 Most Powerful Women Engineers in Tech, Tessel joins other prominent recent hires such as one-time Puppet Labs Inc. technical support lead James Turnbull and Roger Egan, the former head of Docker partner Red Hat Inc.’s North American channel operations. The all-star management team is led by CEO Ben Golub, himself an outsider who took over the reins from co-founder Solomon Hykes last July after selling open-source filesystem maker Gluster Inc. to Red Hat for $136 million.

The addition of Tessel ups the ante for Docker. The executive brings with her two decades of industry experience and nearly as much running engineering teams, having first broken into senior management at dot-com era hotshot General Magic Inc. and later running product development at e-commerce powerhouse Ariba Inc., now a part of SAP SE.

Tessel most recently served as vice president of engineering at VMware Inc., where she was responsible for advancing various components of its flagship vSphere virtualization software. She also played a key part in the hypervisor’s marker’s pivot into the hyperconvergence space and led third party technology collaboration, including the firm’s August move to add integration with OpenStack.

Tessel will use that experience to foster Docker’s burgeoning technology ecosystem, which is riding the startup’s tailwinds on an equally aggressive growth trajectory. The number of contributors to the container engine tripled to over 650 since the beginning of the year, while the amount of funding injected into the ecosystem has increased exponentially. Shippable bumped up that statistic even further shortly before the appointment of Tessel with the announcement of a $8 million funding round that saw the participation of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.

The startup offers a continuous integration (CI) service for testing and debugging Dockerized applications that promises to drastically accelerate release cycle. Shippable boasts more than 20,000 users across 2,500 organizations, but it’s also facing the prospect of having to compete with Docker in the wake of the latter’s acquisition of a rivaling CI provider called Koality Inc. last month. Customers will no doubt be asking themselves why the container specialist opted to buy over the other,

But the rivalry aside, the funding marks yet another vote of confidence in Docker, which itself netted $40 million from investors in September just nine months after landing its first $15 million in theCUBE alumnus Jerry Chen’s first venture capital deal. The future is shining for the startup, especially now that Tessel is on the team.

photo credit: Éole via photopin cc