Mirko Novakovic, one of the founding fathers of Instana and codecentric
Voices on the Acquisition
"Our clients today face the challenge of managing a complex technology landscape full of business-critical applications and data running across a variety of hybrid cloud environments – in public and private clouds, as well as on-premises," says Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Cloud and Data Platform at IBM, as quoted in the official press release. "IBM's acquisition of Instana is another important step in providing companies with the most comprehensive portfolio of automated AI solutions to tackle this enormous challenge and prevent unforeseen IT incidents – which can burden a company with revenue losses and reputational damage."
Mirko Novakovic, co-founder of Instana and codecentric and Instana CEO, comments on the deal in a blog post as follows: "My team and I are excited to become part of the IBM teams, to collaborate with them, and to develop the most advanced AIOps and observability solutions on the market to help our customers automate their day-to-day operations. This way, we save developers from burnout; instead, they can focus on innovation and building great software that has a tangible business impact!"
Instana: The Story So Far
In April 2015, Instana was founded by Mirko Novakovic, Californian Pete Abrams, Fabian Lange, and Pavlo Baron. The startup achieved a truly meteoric rise. Since its founding year, one success story has followed another:
In June 2016, codecentric and venture capital investor Target Partners invested $6 million in the company.
In autumn 2016, the first product was released. That same year, Instana was honored by the renowned IT analyst firm Gartner with the designation "Cool Vendor."
In 2017, Instana received $20 million from investors in its second funding round – led by Accel, the venture capital firm that had also previously invested in companies such as Facebook, along with Target Partners, who had already participated in the first funding round.
In 2018, late-stage investor Meritech Capital and additional investors contributed a further $30 million in a third funding round to the startup, which by then employed over 100 staff worldwide.
In spring 2020, Instana celebrated its fifth anniversary and was also pleased to be included in Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" for Application Performance Monitoring.
Companies such as eBay, Vodafone, Bosch, and PayPal are now among the impressive roster of Instana customers. Major media outlets such as TechCrunch, Handelsblatt, Die Wirtschaftswoche, and Die Welt have reported on the success story of the young company, which currently employs around 150 staff.
Further Founding Successes from the "codecentric Family"
Also emerging from codecentric are the companies CenterDevice and steadybit (formerly chaosmesh). CenterDevice, also co-founded by Mirko Novakovic, is a modern document management system that, as a German cloud service, also offers an alternative to US counterparts in terms of data protection.
steadybit, founded in 2019 by three former codecentric employees, is entirely dedicated to chaos engineering, which aims to make IT systems more resilient.
Thanks to codecentric's innovation model, numerous technology and business ideas have already been created. Every week, employees invest one day in the future.
Instana website: https://www.instana.com/
More information about codecentric as an Instana partner: https://www.codecentric.de/ueber-uns/partner/ibm-instana