Stu Miniman, senior analyst with Wikibon, and Jeff Frick, GM of theCUBE, kicked off their coverage of the second DockerCon with some impressive stats. This year’s event is about four times bigger than the first, with over 2,000 people attending, a very physical reminder of the growth of interest in the company. They’ve had a huge impact on the ecosystem thanks to the networking effect, despite their small profits.

Miniman quoted Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO of Docker, Inc., saying that their goal is to “build tools of mass innovation” that will have a global impact. “It’s interesting,” Miniman said, “because when you look at what containerization in Docker’s doing … [it’s] that catalyst to help unshackle us from [how] infrastructure has been holding us [back] in the past. But that’s a real tough thing to do. Because while virtualization created a layer of abstraction, it broke a few things. So we spent the last decade fixing the storage and the networking problems caused by the virtual machine.”

Speeding up application development

But he is optimistic about the potential for innovation. “When you write code … so much of that code is, how does it work with what sits underneath it? And if I can really standardize some of that and make it so that it’ll work across a lot of environments, it just speeds up my application development.”

Frick weighed in with his take. “What is Docker? It’s kind of like if you download the SnapChat app, you don’t have to tell the app whether you’re on an Android device, or an iOS device, or a 6, or a 5, or a 4, or whatever,” he said. “It really takes that complexity away. This is really the next gen of that for enterprise applications. And as Solomon was talking about in the keynote, they’re not thinking about applications. They’re looking at a whole different layer of control.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon.