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CoreOS, San Francisco, CA

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company:CoreOS, San Francisco, CA
Company Description:CoreOS provides the components needed to build distributed systems to support application containers. The strategies and architectures that influence CoreOS allow companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to run their services at scale with high resilience. CoreOS can run on your existing hardware or on most cloud providers.
Nomination Category:Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category:Tech Startup of the Year

Nomination Title:CoreOS

Tell the story about what this nominated organization has achieved since January 1 2014 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Begin this section with the date since January 1 2013 on which this organization began operations.

At the inception of CoreOS in 2013, the founders, Alex Polvi and Brandon Philips, set out to focus on a project with a meaningful mission and big commercial impact that would fundamentally improve the security of the Internet.

The overarching goal of CoreOS is to secure the Internet’s backend infrastructure, while also propelling forward the development cycles of organizations. CoreOS automatically updates servers running the operating system, which CoreOS believes is the best way to keep servers secure. Just the way Google Chrome auto updates Internet browsers, CoreOS does this with servers, vastly accelerating security patching and feature additions. DevOps teams spend less time patching and have more time and resources to focus on application development and speeding time to market of their applications.

Today CoreOS is providing pluggable web-scale infrastructure that is secure and reliable. The strategies and architectures that influence CoreOS allow companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to run their services at scale with high resilience. CoreOS provides the OS that automatically sends the most up to date software and patches to any server running CoreOS. When vulnerabilities such as heartbleed or shellshock happen, CoreOS can send a patch or update within hours unlike traditional operating systems that often take days or weeks to update. This philosophy has inspired Red Hat and Canonical to explore ways to do this as well, which all helps to make a safer Internet.

In addition to the operating system, the first project and company namesake, CoreOS is the creator of Tectonic, an enterprise-ready platform that combines Google's Kubernetes and the CoreOS stack for running Linux containers. CoreOS is the creator and maintainer of open source projects CoreOS Linux, etcd, fleet, flannel and rkt. CoreOS provides a secure container for companies to store their applications, as well as tools to manage server clusters to help with master election. This ensures applications stay online even if one server has to come down. Containers are also ideal for interoperability between clouds and bare metal.

CoreOS is strategically positioned to secure the backend of the Internet and help companies run distributed systems. CoreOS has funding from Google Ventures, KPCB, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. CoreOS also has meetups and developer communities around the world. Thousands of developers have participated in meetups worldwide.

All types of companies can be considered technical today given the Web-connected and mobile way to conduct business. Computing environments are massively growing across distributed systems and cyber vulnerabilities are rising. To stay ahead of competition and decrease time to market for products and services, more companies across industries are seeking to emulate how Google manages its infrastructure and software updates.

CoreOS delivers Google’s infrastructure for everyone else. It builds the components that helps companies manage and automatically update their distributed systems. They benefit from the security and capabilities of running the latest version of software, all while keeping business running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

With the rising need for all companies to modernize and run distributed systems, CoreOS is well-positioned to help companies and all industries and sizes to run the servers of the Internet securely.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief accomplishments of this organization since the beginning of 2014 (up to 150 words).

-In June 2014, CoreOS received $8M in Series A funding from top VC firms: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator.
-A month later, CoreOS announced its first stable product release - CoreOS 1.0, along with its first commercial products, starting with CoreUpdate.
-In August 2014, CoreOS acquired a company called Quay.io and immediately turned its product into the second commercial offering, Enterprise Registry.
-In December 2014, CoreOS announced its container runtime, rkt, which is the first implementation of the App Container spec. The App Container spec is what CoreOS is proposed as an open and interoperable standard for containers. rkt is designed foremost for simplicity, composability and security, and while it is at an early stage of development it is ultimately targeted for server environments with rigorous security and production requirements.
-In April 2015, CoreOS announced Tectonic, a next generation enterprise software stack for businesses seeking the benefits of a container-based infrastructure. In addition, CoreOS announced a $12 million investment round led by Google Ventures, with additional investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Fuel Capital and Accel Partners, bringing its total funding to $20 million.
-In June 2015 CoreOS and many industry influencers like Google and Docker launched the Open Container Initiative (housed under the Linux Foundation) to establish common standards for software containers. As creators of the App Container spec, CoreOS is working to harmonize the work from App Container into the Open Container Initiative.
- In July 2015 CoreOS announced the Tectonic Preview in coordination with Kubernetes 1.0.

Of the following measures of success, which ONE do you want the judges to most appreciate about your organization's story of achievement since the beginning of 2014?

Technical Innovation