TriggerMesh Goes Open Source

TriggerMesh, whose tools provide application integration across hybrid cloud environments, has re-launched its TriggerMesh Application Platform as an open source project available under Apache Software License 2.0.

The move is significant on a few fronts. The market for cloud-native DevOps solutions is founded on open-source software, which allows developers to work faster with tools that are flexible – that don’t depend on waiting for a vendor’s approval and creation. By taking its platform to the open-source level, TriggerMesh should widen its influence. Meanwhile, the company will continue to provide commercial support with extras that include a graphical user interface for its platform.

“From early on, we knew that we wanted to both open source TriggerMesh and build an enduring business,” stated TriggerMesh co-founder and CEO Mark Hinkle, in an email. “Releasing high-quality open source software is part of this, and developing complementary products and services is the other part. We expect to grow a thriving open source community of users, some percent of which will opt into one of our commercial editions.”

TriggerMesh Focused on DevOps

The announcement’s context also is key. In this age of multicloud networking (MCN), some of the biggest challenges are to DevOps, or the merged forces of software development and IT operations. These are the folks who must ensure that the applications on which business relies operate smoothly across on-premises and MCN infrastructure. Their demand for tools has spawned a flourishing market in “infrastructure as code” solutions such as Ansible, Chef, HashiCorp, and Puppet, all designed to configure, automate, and manage cloud-native applications.

TriggerMesh claims to be distinguished by its combination of Kubernetes and Knative. Both are microservices-based, open source tools that help streamline the process of creating event-driven software solutions using a modern, declarative programming approach.

TriggerMesh identifies multiple use cases for its platform. These include feeding data from multiple Internet of Things (IoT) sources to a data lake; modernizing legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with Salesforce.com integration; and unifying applications across clouds. For example, an image uploaded to an AWS S3 bucket can be set up to activate Google Vision to classify the image.

TriggerMesh On the Rise

A Futuriom 40 company founded in 2018 in Cary, North Carolina, TriggerMesh was founded by CEO Hinkle and now-head-of-product Sebastien Gosguen (both Apache platform experts). And so far, signs point to the company’s success. Customers include PNC Bank, which has used TriggerMesh software to create a “policy as code” platform. Others include “a Fortune 500 bank” that TriggerMesh says used its software to rework a risk-assessment application that used to take 30 days to one that runs within a few hours; and a “global FinTech” that used TriggerMesh to reduce complexity by 50% in a system that paired data from Salesforce and Apache Kafka.

TriggerMesh also has built a small but impressive ecosystem of partners, which includes Amazon AWS (Nasdaq: AMZN), Confluent (a privately held supplier of a Kafka-based streaming data platform), Alphabet Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL), Oracle (NYSE: Oracle), SUSE/Rancher Labs, and IBM Red Hat (NYSE: IBM). VMware (NYSE: VMW) also has integrated TriggerMesh Sources for AWS into their Cloud Native Runtimes capability in Tanzu.

Further validation of TriggerMesh’s approach came with a $5 million Series A investment round in July 2021 led by Cisco Investments. TriggerMesh’s ability to support hybrid cloud workloads appears to have made it a good fit for Cisco’s Intersight development platform.

All of which leads to the question of what’s next for TriggerMesh. Its big-name alliances tempt thoughts of M&A. But there are other alternatives. In this world of remote work and digital transformation, the way is clear for vendors with effective toolsets supporting cloud-native DevOps across multicloud environments. TriggerMesh is well positioned for its slice of the pie.