DEVOPSdigest

MacStadium announced the many pivotal initiatives and company successes over the last year as it prepares for future growth serving the Apple enterprise.

In 2023, MacStadium focused on identifying opportunities to strengthen its team, internal processes and Mac DevOps solution offerings in preparation for growth in 2024. This played out most visibly in the addition of key executives — Ken Tacelli as CEO, Jason Davis as CPO and Sherry Grote as Head of Global Marketing. Each of those leaders joined the company in the second half of the year, filling out critical vacancies and building processes where none existed previously for the larger go-to-market team. Performance improvements were evident by the time of the successful launch of MacStadiumOrka 3.0 in early November. Over the last 12 months, MacStadium saw a 61% increase in overall Orka customers demonstrating the efficiencies and increase in productivity that customers are realizing with the virtualization of Macs in their CI process.

“I knew when I joined MacStadium that the company was poised for success,” Tacelli said. “As highlighted by our key executive hires, we are strategically building a path of immense growth for 2024 as the rise of Mac DevOps continues, shaped by our digital-first world. With MacStadium’s unique position in the industry, we will continue to be a leader in simplifying Mac cloud solutions in the Apple ecosystem.”

Upleveling the Developer Experience Is a Key Priority

Google’s 2023 State of DevOps Report highlighted the crucial need to support the developer experience, saying, “Teams that focus on the needs of users build the right thing AND build the thing right.” MacStadium honed in on that concept, evidenced by its preparation for product-led growth. In 2023, MacStadium launched an impressive cadence of several offerings, products and innovative solutions to support the Mac DevOps industry.

■ In February, MacStadium announced a seamless transition path from VMWare to Orka Platform after VMWare shared it will not support Apple Silicon-based machines.

■ Also in February, MacStadium’s proprietary virtualization platform became available to purchase on AWS Marketplace.

■ In April, MacStadium launched a new version of Orka, catering to self-service purchase options and giving DevOps teams immediate access to its Orka platform.

■ In May, MacStadium debuted Workspace with Pulse, enabling high-definition audio and visual streaming on virtual Mac desktops. This marked the first application of WebRTC on macOS VDI.

■ In July, MacStadium secured two patents: one for injection molded “helmets” providing keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) and precise power-button control remotely, and one for a new rack shelving design with optimizing server density along with the KVM system to further drive innovation across the Apple enterprise.

■ In November, MacStadium unveiled its proprietary virtualization platform, Orka 3.0, aiming to improve the developer experience by enabling OCI and Kubernetes-native technology, putting security first and improving the container startup time.

With over a decade of experience in Mac Servers, MacStadium has mastered the architecture to deliver enterprise-grade Apple Mac infrastructure, providing scalable and secure enterprise cloud solutions exclusively for macOS.

“With the Orka platform, Thumbtack migrated from VMWare with a virtualization platform that will support future Apple OS upgrades and the speed equated to 'quite an improvement' in cost per compute,” said Scott Southerland, Thumbtack iOS staff software engineer.

Vertical Traction In Fintech Marks Importance To Put Security First

MacStadium serves companies like CapitalOne, a publicly traded American bank holding company specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking and savings accounts, and Nubank, the largest fintech bank in Latin America with over 82 million customers. These types of customers require a high level of security and systems availability to secure their customers’ banking data. MacStadium has always prided itself on security certifications and superb performance and technical support of its software products. This year, it released SSO for Mac cloud user management and expects to release additional SSO upgrades across additional product lines in early 2024.