Datum’s fundamental premise is that connectivity between clouds, services, agents, and applications should be open and vendor-neutral. That’s why we build solutions with our open-source community, with adjacent open-source projects, with technology partners, and with the startups and scale-ups defining what comes next.

Our pillars

Vendor neutrality

We welcome service providers, ISVs, channel partners, startups, scale-ups, and incumbents to:

  • Partner with us to offer IAM, security, and connectivity
  • Build solutions on Datum’s platform
  • Offer networking and gateway products to LLM, inference, and data workloads

End users benefit from access to the latest and best products without jumping between portals and APIs. Our terms and agreements are simple.

Open source

Datum is built on open source, and we consider open source — and working in the open — part of our DNA. We actively look for contributors and maintainers to sponsor, and we work to foster a real community around the projects we depend on.

Community

We’re working toward a more interconnected internet for AI, both in terms of networks and also humans. This is why we’re so passionate about building an active community across all levels of the alt cloud ecosystem.

Partnerships

We seek partnerships with “best of breed” technology creators, and we’re currently focused on companies that include a strong open-source ethos. Current examples include:

  • Tetrate — Envoy and the AI Gateway that powers our Internet Edge
  • Unikraft — the unikernel runtime behind UFOs, our edge compute units
  • Iroh — secure, QUIC-based tunnels behind our Connectors

Design wins

Early platforms are made or broken by the first handful of serious customers. Our Biz Dev investment is built around serving these “magnetic” providers and helping them win.

A “design win” at Datum means a partner or customer who:

  • Has a real, in-production use case that exercises the platform meaningfully
  • Is willing to work in the open with us: co-developing, sharing what works, and surfacing what doesn’t
  • Becomes a reference — public or private — that others can follow

In practice, this means we invest disproportionate engineering and other resources into a small number of early relationships, instrument them carefully, and turn what we learn into reusable patterns: reference architectures, integration guides, and the next generation of product capability.

Accountabilities

  • Partner management
  • Design win process
  • Use cases
  • Solutions
  • Startups, scale-ups, and accelerators
  • Innovation labs