Coder named as an IDC Innovator for Cloud Development Environments

Coder takes its role as a market pioneer seriously. Seven years after founding, we’re still fanatically focused on developing Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) that make developers’ lives easier, provide a seamless user experience, and give organizations a path to cost efficiency. Getting recognition for the role we play in the industry is secondary to our mission. However, it’s especially gratifying to receive when it comes from a respected market evaluator like IDC.

That’s why we’re thrilled to report that Coder has been named an IDC Innovator in the IDC Innovators: Cloud Development Environments, 2024 (doc #EUR152107824, May 2024) report.

IDC profiled three select CDE vendors, honing in on how they support organizations’ journeys from local dev workspaces to cloud-based platforms. Beyond revenue, emerging vendors demonstrated either a groundbreaking business model or an innovative new technology – or both.

What makes Coder an IDC Innovator?

The report cited several reasons for naming Coder an IDC Innovator:

1. Our early market entrance: IDC described Coder as having “one of the most mature and feature-rich environments in the market.”
2. Our product features: IDC cited Coder’s ability to 1) accelerate project onboarding; 2) improve governance and security by centralizing source code and data on one platform; and 3) control costs through monitoring and guiding developer runtime environments.
3. Our unique approach: IDC also described Coder’s ability to self-host and self-manage the environment relative to standardized SaaS-type CDEs as a “key differentiator” in the market, especially in relation to meeting compliance and control prerequisites. Self-hosting, coupled with a full centralization approach to the source code, enables platform teams to bring that environment where they need it and have end-to-end control over it, including in air-gapped environments.

Why the ‘self’ matters

“Self-hosting and self-managing the source code and all the dependencies of the dev and compute environment can be a key demand of many businesses and is particularly important for organizations that are bound by strict security provisions, compliance or regulatory requirements,” IDC analyst George Mironescu, Associate Research Director, App Development and Delivery, wrote. “Self-hosting, coupled with a full centralization approach to the source code enables platform teams to bring that environment where they need it and have end-to-end control over it, including in air gapped scenarios.”

We agree. While most CDEs are only available via SaaS, we believe in giving organizations more freedom to host and run their environments their way.

SaaS CDEs are prepackaged environments that limit user choice. That may be fine for mid-market and some enterprises that want to standardize all tool sets and processes, but they’re not for everybody. CDEs are still an early adopter market, and users tend to be sophisticated software development shops. Developers in these settings like to turn the knobs, so to speak, so organizations prefer to give them the freedom of a flexible environment to operate in.

The digital-native and digital-forward organizations that dominate the early adopter category also prefer self-hosting because it allows for better security by keeping the IP on the enterprise’s infrastructure. This allows IT departments to put access controls in place and exert greater oversight over developer activity.

“By moving the workspace to cloud, dev teams can focus on actual app dev as opposed to toiling with the maintenance of local code and local machines, including dependencies, pipeline and infrastructure resource configurations,” Mironescu continued. “Furthermore, by centralizing development in the cloud, organizations get to lower their app dev risk position. This can include improvements in security, compliance and scaling, leading to gains in agility and time to market.”

Seven years in, we’ve established our position in the market: Coder is the CDE solution that balances the flexibility of deployable software with the ease-of-use of SaaS. We are innovators, and we are focused squarely on giving developers the environments they need to do their best work and stay in flow.

About IDC Innovators:

An IDC Innovators report presents a set of vendors – under $100M in annual revenue at the time of selection – chosen by an IDC analyst within a specific market that offer a new technology, a groundbreaking solution to an existing issue, and/or an innovative business model. It is not an exhaustive evaluation or a comparative ranking of all companies, but rather a document that highlights innovative companies in a specific market segment. IDC INNOVATOR and IDC INNOVATORS are trademarks of International Data Group, Inc.