With entire companies being founded in and operated from the public cloud, using all-digital Software-as-a-Service, an established company can start to feel like a lame duck. Will a new disruptive innovation come in and make them obsolete any day?

Luckily for the older companies, along with their years of experience and name recognition, there are additional means for them to stay relevant and compete with younger players — and, ironically, it’s the younger companies providing them.

Docker, Inc. is a company that prides itself on accessibility and portability. That means that whatever your base of operations, you can use its container technology to move applications around — say, off of an on-prem database and onto a public cloud. Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock Partners, told Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and John Furrier (@furrier), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that’s why “incumbents” are extremely interested in Docker.

“If you want to have a role in IT in the next 10, 20, 30 years,” Chen said of older companies like IBM, HPE and Cisco, “you have to catch the Docker train.” He said containers boast the unique ability to incrementally bring a company into the cloud and into the new IT universe generally, one application at a time. That is a prospect highly attractive to older companies with large existing bases of infrastructure.

New tech remix apps will dazzle

Chen said that buzzwords like IoT, AI, machine learning and mobile are interesting enough by themselves, but we haven’t seen anything yet. He said that the “next wave of apps” made possible with tools like Docker will combine these technologies to produce highly advanced new applications.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the DockerCon 2016. Plus, join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting live with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE