Docker Inc. founder and Chief Architect Solomon Hykes has left the enterprise software provider a year after it hired a new chief executive, former SAP SE exec Steve Singh, to replace Ben Golub.

Hykes said in a blog post today that although he will no longer be involved in daily operations, he will help find a new chief technology officer with experience running larger businesses.

“Docker has quietly transformed into an enterprise business with explosive revenue growth and a developer community in the millions, under the leadership of our CEO, the legendary Steve Singh,” he wrote. “Our strategy is simple: every large enterprise in the world is preparing to migrate their applications and infrastructure to the cloud, en masse … This puts Docker at the center of a massive growth opportunity.”

Hykes said that mandated a new role: “to help find that ideal CTO, provide the occasional bit of advice, and get out of the team’s way as they continue to build a juggernaut of a business.”

The San Francisco-based company’s open-source Docker software kicked off massive interest in software containers, a sort of Tupperware for applications that enables them to run unchanged on many kinds of computers and operating software. Docker has raised about $243 million in 10 funding rounds, most recently a $75 million round late last year that reportedly valued the company at $1.3 billion. Indeed, there were reports that Microsoft Corp. bid as much as $4 billion to buy Docker at one point.

But the company has struggled to get traction on the business side. That’s partly because other open-source software companies such as Red Hat Inc. and cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. have provided their own container technology. In January, Red Hat upped its bet in containers by buying Kubernetes-focused startup CoreOS Inc. for $250 million.

Moreover, the Google LLC-developed open-source software Kubernetes, which “orchestrates” containers in data centers and the cloud, has stolen much of the interest among developers in Docker’s own Swarm orchestration offering. “Docker is facing much more intense competition,” said Charlie Dai, a principal analyst with Forrester Research Inc.

One problem cited by some observers was Docker’s introduction a year ago of Moby, an open-source container project conceived by Hykes. He said at the time that “we needed our teams to collaborate not only on components, but also on assemblies of components, borrowing an idea from the car industry, where assemblies of components are reused to build completely different cars.” But the delineation between Docker and Moby confused many in the industry, said Jay Lyman, principal analyst with 451 Research, though he added that “they’ve done a decent job of addressing it.”

Docker is currently betting on an Enterprise Edition announced last March. “Docker is building a platform that supports the entire application lifecycle with security, orchestration, container management and more,” Singh told SiliconANGLE shortly after he joined last year. He cited large customers such as ADP, MetLife and Visa.

It’s not yet clear how well that product is doing, and Singh has not been very visible in the industry of late, but some observers say the direction is promising. “I’m very confident that Docker EE is one of the most competitive enterprise container platforms in the cloud-native market,” said Forrester’s Dai.

In any case, it’s hard to underestimate Hykes’ role in changing the nature of enterprise computing in recent years.

“Solomon can be credited with bringing containers to the masses,” said Stu Miniman, a senior analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE. “For years, many would say that he was the fanatical dictator of the community. He was deeply engaged with the code and was the lead architect of developing the entire ecosystem.”

Although Miniman said the departure is a surprise, the arrival of a relatively new management team means it’s “good timing for Solomon to move on.”

Hykes founded the company in 2010 as dotCloud, hiring a CEO and remaining as longtime CTO, becoming chief architect last September after Golub left. In 2013 Hykes proposed releasing the software into open source, and the company rebranded itself as Docker.

SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE talked with Hykes at the DockerCon conference last year:

With reporting from Paul Gillin

Image: Docker