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Dec 22nd, 2022 - The Cycle Team

2022 A Year In Review

Life at a startup often feels like a 100-meter sprint, head down, and focused until you cross the finish line. Only then do you really know what you have achieved. While a startup's work is never finished, every year we take a pause to reflect on what we have achieved over the past twelve months. And boy, was 2022 a good one!

So, What Have We Been up to in 2022?

Here are a few of the highlights from 2022 and a sneak peek into what lies ahead for 2023.

A Busy Year for our Technical Team

We started out the year with a slew of platform and portal improvements and continued to roll out hundreds of new additions and fixes throughout the year. Included in these updates were several strategic releases that garnered a lot of attention and positive customer feedback:

  1. Infrastructure Abstraction Layer: In November, we released one of the most significant releases in recent years by adding our Infrastructure Abstraction Layer, or IAL. With IAL, companies can now use Cycle to manage infrastructure anywhere, including on-prem, edge, and IoT devices. For more details on this important release, check out our blog.
  2. GPU Support: In July, we announced the release of GPU support for all datacenter class NVIDIA GPUs, enabling companies to manage GPUs alongside VMs and Bare Metal using Cycle. If you are not familiar with the GPU update, check out our GPU support post and technical documentation on configuring GPU nodes with Cycle.
  3. Changelog: The introduction of our Changelog earlier this year has made it easy to keep up to date with all of our improvements and new features. All Cycle account holders receive our Changelog automatically but you can also find them on our Changelog page on our website.

Ramping Up our Sales and Marketing Efforts

During the year we added significant expertise to our sales and marketing efforts and it's already bearing fruit. In 2022, we saw the average MRR for new customers more than triple, a sign that our value proposition is resonating with increasingly larger organizations. On the marketing side, there were a number of initiatives that made headlines!

  1. In The News: We received a lot of good press in 2022 that helped promote our opinionated view of where the market is today and where it's heading in the future. Charles Humble wrote an article that was published in TheNewStack that discussed the complexity around Kubernetes and how companies like Cycle can fill the void. We were also featured in a DZone article by Twain Taylor who argued the case for needing alternatives to Kubernetes. Bill Doerrfeld published a Thought Leadership piece in DevOps.com discussing the benefits of abstracting infrastructure and highlighted the work we are doing here at Cycle to address this need. Great timing as the article was published soon after we released IAL!
  2. Cycle Podcast Series: Our podcasts have proven to be a wonderful way to get our story out, speaking with industry executives and experts in an informal environment to talk about a wide range of topics including technical integrations, partnerships, challenges of startup life, and deep conversations around leadership. Check out our list of podcasts and keep an eye out for more that are currently in the works. We'll be dropping our next one on January 11th, 2023.
  3. Partnerships: Cycle has been fortunate to have some great partners over the years, collaborating on technical opportunities and working together on related co-marketing initiatives. Given the positive experiences we have had through these relationships, we decided it was time to launch our own partner program earlier this summer. The initial launch of the program is focused on Venture Studios and Software Development Agencies. You can find out more about this program by reading our partnerships blog page.

With in-person meetings back, we spent an increasing amount of time working with partners, attending conferences, and meeting with customers.

  1. KubeCon:, This past October, we sent a delegation down to Detroit to attend KubeCon 2022. KubeCon is all about Kubernetes, but we continue to hear an increasing number of grumblings and complaints around the complexity of deploying and maintaining this behemoth. Feels like the tide is turning and the LowOps story we tell around simplicity and reduced cost is starting to resonate with more and more companies.
  2. Gartner IO: The last event of the year was a trip down to Vegas to attend the Garter IO conference. While there, we managed to spend a little time at Rising Cloud's booth, one of our long-time partners who are making waves of their own. Much of the conversation at the conference was focused on the need for simplification of DevOps and the trend back to on-prem and bare metal. It is yet another indication that Cycle is on the right track.
  3. Meetups Are Back: After a two-year hiatus, Cycle held our first in-person developer meetup. It was great to be back out in the community, talking with so many talented and passionate individuals and to hear about all the exciting work that is going on around us. We are planning a lot more Meetups in 2023 so stay tuned!

Looking Forward to 2023, Expect More of the Same!

As we discussed above, there are plenty of indicators to suggest that the message of simplicity and cost will continue to dominate the conversation in 2023 and Cycle is positioned very well to take advantage of these trends. We will continue to talk about LowOps/reducing complexity and the implications of a move back to bare metal and on-prem infrastructure. Expect many more exciting features that support this message!

Finally, as 2022 comes to a close, we can't help but think of what made this year truly special: the people who have supported our journey. Thank you to all our investors, customers, and partners. Without you, this year would not have been the same.

On behalf of all of us at Cycle,
Happy New Year!

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