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Tag: acquisition

  • DevOps Market Consolidation Gets Real: CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud

    DevOps Market Consolidation Gets Real: CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud

    You may have already seen the news today: CloudBees has acquired Electric Cloud in a move that marks a true market consolidation in the DevOps space. I had a chance to speak with CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey to discuss the acquisition. We discuss the motivation for the deal, what the combined entity may look like going forward and more. The video of our conversation is at the bottom of this article.

    In my mind, this acquisition represents true consolidation of the DevOps tool vendors market. My reasons for this are as follows:

    1. Until now, many of the acquisitions in the DevOps space have been by large, established public companies such as CA, HP or IBM. Typically, these kinds of deals are not as much consolidation as they are large companies using M&A activity in place of R&D. CloudBees is not a large vendor—this isn’t R&D dressed in an acquisition.
    2. Electric Cloud is not your typical venture-backed startup that is looking for exit opportunities. The company has been around for many years. It has a large base of enterprise customers and an enterprise-tested product.
    3. With the recent changes in the DevOps vendor market involving CA (now Broadcom), HP(E) now Micro Focus and IBM preoccupied with Red Hat, there is a vacuum for enterprise leadership. The combination of these two vendors of scale is really a consolidation move.

    Best of luck going forward and congratulations to our friends at CloudBees and Electric Cloud. It will be interesting to see what repercussions this deal brings to the rest of the DevOps market.

    For more details on the acquisition, check out Mike Vizard’s article in devopsy.kinsta.cloud today. In the meantime, enjoy the video and conversation with Sacha. Also, let us know what you think about the acquisition—and other M&A activity in the DevOps space—in the comments section below.

    — Alan Shimel

  • CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud to Advance Continuous Delivery

    CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud to Advance Continuous Delivery

    CloudBees announced it has acquired Electric Cloud as part of an effort to extend the reach of its DevOps portfolio further into the realm of continuous delivery and application release automation (ARA).

    Announced at the CloudBees Days event in San Francisco, the deal follows CloudBees’ acquisition of Codeship, a provider of a cloud-based continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform, last year.

    CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said both deals are part of an effort to start rolling up many of the smaller companies providing DevOps tools that have not been able to achieve the critical mass required to operate at scale. As organizations of all sizes realize how much they depend on software to differentiate their company from competitors, he said, they are looking for a single vendor that can address all their requirements end to end. At the time of the acquisition, which closed earlier this month, Electric Cloud had 110 employees.

    Labourey added the acquisition of Electric Cloud is also notable because it extends the reach of the CloudBees Jenkins and Jenkins X CI/CD platforms to the realm of application delivery for both legacy applications and emerging modern applications based on cloud-native microservices architectures.

    While application development teams have largely embraced continuous integration, getting IT organizations to successfully implement continuous delivery has proven more challenging. The next phase of DevOps, Labourey said, will need to focus on applying machine learning algorithms to automatically discover the environment in which an application is to be deployed. Armed with those insights, it should be much easier for organizations to continuously deploy and update applications across diverse IT environments, he noted.

    As DevOps continues to evolve, it’s apparent that legacy categories such as application release management are going to be subsumed into larger software development lifecycle frameworks based on best DevOps practices. The debate many organizations are currently engaged in is determining how much they need to change their IT culture before acquiring the tools and platforms required to successfully adopt DevOps. However, Labourery said this “chicken and egg” debate overlooks the importance of getting the tools to the teams that need to make the transition to DevOps occur. Otherwise, IT leaders will find themselves advocating for a theoretical cultural change without creating the opportunity for anyone to gain hands-on DevOps experience, he noted. In short, there’s no substitute for on-the-job DevOps training.

    A consolidation of DevOps vendors is underway. In some cases, those acquisitions will be driven by leaders in a category, such as CloudBees. In other cases, providers of software development tools commonly used in legacy application environments will need to extend their reach further into the realm of DevOps. IT leaders, going forward, will need to consider carefully just how and where they want to place their bets, at a time when DevOps teams tend to add and discard DevOps tools, often with little to no regard for any larger IT strategy.

    For more insight on the CloudBees/Electric Cloud acquisition, check out Alan Shimel’s video conversation with Sacha Labourey.

    — Mike Vizard

  • DevOps Chat: F5’s NGINX Acquisition, with F5’s Lori MacVittie

    DevOps Chat: F5’s NGINX Acquisition, with F5’s Lori MacVittie

    F5 Networks has acquired NGINX, the leading open source web server player. The move clearly puts F5 in the DevOps space, as well as the open source market.

    In this DevOps Chat, we speak with Lori MacVittie of F5 along with Sidney Rabsatt of NGINX. Some great insights into why this acquisition makes sense for both parties.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, DevOps Chat, and you’re listening to another chat. Today’s chat features two folks from an acquisition announced yesterday. In case you haven’t heard, F5 Networks has acquired NGINX. We’re going to hear more about it from two folks. Number one is our friend, Lori MacVittie from F5 Networks. Lori, welcome. Glad to have you here.

    Lori MacVittie: Thanks, happy to be here.

    Shimel: Fantastic. Joining Lori and I is Sidney Rabsatt. Sidney is VP of product at NGINX. Correct, Sidney?

    Sidney Rabsatt: That’s right, and I’m happy to be here too.

    Shimel: Well, everyone’s happy to be here. That’s not a bad thing. Are you happy to be here at the DevOps Chat or are we happy to be here talking about F5’s acquisition of NGINX? Let’s hope it’s both. Lori, give us a little background here. When I saw the deal yesterday. I said, “Wow, that’s a big deal.” I’m not sure – it’s certainly an expansion, up the stack, if you will, for F5.

    MacVittie: Up the stack, deeper into the app. It’s all about application delivery. One of the – Sidney mentioned earlier when we were chatting, building on NGINX’s vision, which as I read it, is flawless application delivery. That’s certainly something that F5 has always aspired to achieve as well, but there’s just pieces in the application stack that we don’t play in, or haven’t played in until yesterday with the acquisition. NGINX is the leading webserver. They’ve got an app server. They do some app delivery. They’re very prevalent in many, many places. So we’re very excited to have them on board to see how we can bridge the gap between those two worlds.

    Shimel: Absolutely. What about the perspective of NGINX? Money is always nice. Don’t get me wrong. What’s the attraction to F5 here?

    Rabsatt: I think there’s at least two sides of it. Working with the folks on this early on, we got to get a sense of the culture of the organization. It felt very compatible. The people we met were great. We had a great time talking, hanging out, sharing ideas. There’s some real optimism about what can be done together. The thing that really gets folks excited, especially on my side of the house, on the NGINX side of the house is the opportunity to do even more faster. We’re a startup. It’s grown to a good size. The set of resources that we have, but looking at F5 and talking to those folks, understanding that they have a shared vision. They see the world very similarly and bringing more resources to bear to execute on the vision that we’re always working towards. It’s something that’s very exciting for us.

    Shimel: I can’t disagree with you. I think we’re in violent agreement on it. It is a great opportunity. I guess the next question is how do we integrate, Lori or Sidney, how do we integrate the NGINX webserver, appserver, and the rest of the toolset into the F5 family? Or do we not?

    Rabsatt: Do you mind if I take a stab at it?

    MacVittie: Go ahead, Sidney, please.

    Rabsatt: Sure. Look, I think on the surface of things it might seem as if there’s a ton of integration that needs to happen, and a lot of overlap needs to be addressed, but quite frankly, I’ve been pleased to see how much complementary capabilities we actually have. Oftentimes, in the marketplace, folks will actually deploy both solutions side by side. It’s because we do slightly different things, both super important to folks. When we think about integration, there’s opportunity for F5 customers to be able to leverage NGINX solutions in places where they couldn’t necessarily before. That should be a net benefit to them.

    There’s the ability for folks that leverage NGINX solutions to take advantage of things that F5 does, that we don’t particularly do. I think that’s going to be another win for them as well. The integration is really focused on making sure we have the right extensions to the product line identified so we can really give customers the things they need to succeed in delivering those end to end applications, and yes, of course, we’re going to be looking to bring the best of both sets of technologies together in the places where it makes sense, but we’ve been pleased to see it’s not as many overlapping things as we might have found in some situations. We’re very optimistic about the path forward here.

    Shimel: So crystallize for me, where do you see things that overlap versus things that play well together? Can you give us some specifics?

    Rabsatt: Sure. Things that play well together fall into the category of “Hey, can I bring better scrutiny, better analytics, to the types of solutions that I might already have with NGINX?” On the NGINX side, I’m sorry – on the F5 side, “Hey, can I leverage solutions to give me a little bit more freedom and flexibility to build my apps wherever or however I might choose to?” So I think there’s some goodness there that folks will definitely get access to.

    On the integration side, you’ll find most of it is just around making sure that the products work seamlessly together. So to the extent of I have multiple devices in my environment. How do I have a single solution that gives me the ability to manage it the way that I need to? We still need to go through the work of understanding exactly how the different buyers are going to need to interact with the different solutions that we use going forward, but all that work is in progress and again, the overlap tends to be the little stuff. Oh, do you draw a report? Oh yeah, we draw a report. Do you guys do that too? Sure. So how do we bring the best of those technologies together? It’s that kind of thing.

    Shimel: Got it. Lori, interested to hear, you heard Sidney here. What do you add to that? What are your feelings on it?

    MacVittie: I think he encompassed everything well. We already – you already see both of us in F5 and NGINX together in a lot of environments. From our perspective, I think we’re looking at – one, continuing to invest and amplify the NGINX vision and what they’re trying to execute on, but also where can we add security? Security is a big deal that has to extend from end to end. Right now, that’s a very disjoint process sometimes. That’s why we keep telling security to shift let. I think this is an opportunity that we’re going to be looking for to be able to do those kinds of things and shift that security even lefter with NGINX.

    Shimel: Absolutely. It’s funny when you think about security being a driving force behind this acquisition. With NGINX being a webserver, that’s been an area and app server, that’s been an area where security has been required and important forever, even going back to IIS in the day, Internet Information Server and stuff. Here’s an area though I was thinking about. So many people in the public cloud use NGINX as their webserver of choice, whether we’re talking about Amazon or even Microsoft Google or any of them. Lori, does F5 maybe view this acquisition as a way to expand your footprint in public cloud? If so, how?

    MacVittie:  I don’t think we looked at exactly how that’s going to play out, and what we’re going to do with that. The webserver is something different from the proxy technology that most of our products are built on. So there’s some differences there in how that works. We’re still looking at roadmaps and trying to figure that out. For right now, we’re just going to keep going ahead with both sets of road maps and moving forward. As we continue to explore what we can do together, we’ll figure out where it makes sense.

    Shimel: Sidney, same – flip side of that coin – of that question to you around public cloud. Do you see an angle where F5 helps there?

    Rabsatt: Yeah, I think F5 already had strong relationships with quite a few of the cloud vendors as do we, and we expect that – we ultimately want to give folks a choice. This all boils down to organizations are trying to build the applications that make sense for them. They want to be able to leverage the best tools and capabilities that help them deliver those applications while giving them the freedom to build the application they want. So whether that is on one cloud, on multicloud, across clouds, and on prem locations, they need that flexibility to do what makes sense for them. A big part of what we’re trying to accomplish here is making sure that F5’s large customer base has the capabilities that NGINX large user base has, which is again, that freedom of flexibility. That means that whether it’s on Amazon Google, Microsoft, any cloud, or any on prem solution, they get to deliver their applications with the security, controls, the visibility that they desire.

    Shimel: Excellent. I’m just – in hybrid situation, what about – one of the hottest topics certainly in technology today is the whole Kubernetes container thing. I know both F5 and NGINX had Kubernetes-related solutions and playing in that market. What, if any, does this acquisition, what if anything does this acquisition bring to that? Either one?

    Rabsatt: I would say it should be a net benefit. NGINX, there was a recent report I saw. It’s in the public domain. NGINX is the most commonly used ingress controller for Kubernetes environments today. If you think about what Kubernetes means for organizations that are building these modern applications, it’s giving them an environment that allows them to build typically microservices-based applications. So getting those applications exposed to the outside world requires the first thing, the foundational element, the hierarchy of need. It’s getting traffic in and out of that Kubernetes environment. How do you do that? Through the ingress capability.

    Our ingress controller is pretty much the number one solution out there for doing that today. That’s the first place people have to start before they get into some of the more complex or exotic things they’d like to be able to do. So our customers, our users are already benefitting from that. It’s allowing them to do what they need to do when it comes to adopting or testing Kubernetes for their own uses.

    Shimel: Sure. Lori, even independent of NGINX, what effect is this whole move to Kubernetes and container-ized environment having on F5’s business?

    MacVittie: Wow. On the business? Don’t really know. No. There is – we see a lot of customers asking. One, they want guidance on how to do this at scale and safely. A lot of our customers are very concerned about security, about performance. How do they bridge those two worlds, coming out of Kubernetes and trying to get into an environment where there’s a lot more traditional apps and infrastructure still supported? It’s trying to bridge those two worlds.

    Our customers are looking at it and they’re bringing it in and they’re adopting it, but they’re also having challenges with the deployment side where NetOps traditionally sit that they don’t have the skills to do the automation. They have problems with integration of the toolsets to build those pipelines. So one of the things that this kind of an acquisition does is bridge that gap. Hopefully we’ll see better integration and easier in and out, both actually in the flow of traffic, but also just between the teams in the businesses, so we think this will help address some of the pains at the people level in organizations by having this end to end delivery chain with both F5 and NGINX.

    Shimel: Sure. Sidney, maybe you would know. What are the plans with some sort of common interface or more integration between the two lines?

    Rabsatt: I’d say it’s still very early on. We have some good ideas, but we’re not really in a position to preview too much. I will say there’s going to be a focus on again, making sure we’re bringing the best of both solutions together. Again, not nearly as much overlap as you might have expected, or we – I should say as we might have expected. Yeah, what we’re looking at is really the opportunity to bring more features to the things we already have, more so than trying to get rid of things. We’re looking forward to getting this innovation stuff underway. We’ve had some very early conversations, but over the next days and weeks, we’re going to be digging into it very deeply.

    Shimel: Makes sense. Lori, so this was as we said right from the outset, what we’re turning to is a move up the application stack. What – is F5 done with that? Will we see more F5 potential either via the acquisition or holistically – organically moving up this stack here in the application world?

    MacVittie: I can’t obviously comment on any kind of [laughter] –

    Shimel: Can’t tell _____ acquisition is. I get that one.

    MacVittie: That’s right. With any company, that’s always a possibility. We have been transforming ourselves in the past year really moving forward with a lot more innovation in terms of exploring things and looking at – we’ve got Aspen mesh going, which is service mesh trying to bring some sanity to Kubernetes inside for scaling. Cloud services, we’ve made a lot of our services as a service. You just hook them up. We’ve been moving deeper into the application stack for a while. This is just going to accelerate that transformation from ADC to application services company.

    Shimel: Understood. Understood. Well, guys it really is exciting. One of the things I sit here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud and Security Boulevard and we go to all of the conferences and we cover all the news, and you hear so much “What’s bleeding edge, bleeding edge, bleeding edge?” We tend to forget, or we overlook what are the nuts and bolts, the bread and butter that keeps the internet and these applications going? It is things like the NGINX web server that is the dominant web server in the world today. It is things like the F5 lineup of software and of _____ actually that have been delivering the internet to the public since 2002 or whatever it is. Lori, you probably know, but so it’s good to see innovation continuing to happen. It’s good to see new combinations taking place.

    I’m excited to see what comes out of – Sidney, as you said, it’s very early on. It’s a day after the acquisition was announced. Maybe we could check back in six months and see how things are progressing along these lines. In the meantime though, just the usual questions. Everyone from NGINX is staying on? There’s not going to be layoffs as part of the consolidations and stuff, or again too early to tell?

    Rabsatt: I mean what we know is F5 is interested in our organization and not just products. They’ve made it very clear they want the vast majority of folks to stay and we expect that to continue to be the case. We look forward to what the future holds together.

    Shimel: Yep, understood. Look, I wish you a lot of success, both you guys individually, as well as F5 and NGINX. It’s an exciting combination. Congratulations to both organizations and Lori, I think congratulations on especially to F5 for really making a real great addition to the family there.

    MacVittie: Thank you. I know there’s a lot of us. We’re just really excited about this and about the future and what we can do together.

    Shimel: Cool, cool, cool. All right, congratulations, guys. We’re going to call it a rap on this edition of DevOps Chat. Lori MacVittie for F5 networks. Sidney Rabsatt for NGINX, soon to be F5 Networks. Thanks for being our guest today on DevOps Chat. Thank you everyone for listening. You’ve just listened to another chat. Bye bye.

     

    — Alan Shimel

  • F5 Networks Acquires NGINX to Meld NetOps with DevOps

    F5 Networks Acquires NGINX to Meld NetOps with DevOps

    As part of an effort to better align DevOps and network operations (NetOps), F5 Networks plans to acquire NGINX, a provider of widely employed open source loading balancing software.

    The two companies revealed in a call with financial analysts that the primary goal of the $760 million deal is to meld the two companies’ combined expertise to develop application delivery controllers (ADCs) that are optimized for modern applications based on microservices.

    F5 Networks CEO François Locoh-Donou said F5 Network plans to continue operating NGINX as an independent brand in addition to maintaining support for the NGINX open source community. NGINX CEO Gus Robertson will become general manager of the NGINX business unit. NGINX founders Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov also plan to stay on.

    Locoh-Donou also disclosed that while NGINX software is employed today at more than 375 million sites, the company only generated $26 million in revenue in 2018, mostly by providing commercial support to enterprise customers. F5 Networks will move to combine investments both companies have been making in containers to deliver a next-generation ADC optimized for microservices-based applications spanning multi-cloud computing environments, he said.

    As part of that strategy, however, both companies will need to come to terms with Envoy, an open source load balancing project led by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Envoy is already providing the foundation for multiple service mesh projects that make load balancing a feature of a higher-level mechanism for managing services running on a Kubernetes cluster. Obviously, F5 Networks hopes to fulfill an opportunity to manage multiple instances of service meshes running on multiple Kubernetes clusters that.

    In fact, Locoh-Donou cited industry research that forecasts by 2022 there will be more than 198 million workloads running on some form of a microservices-based architecture. In contrast, 44 million workloads are expected to be running on legacy platforms.

    Locoh-Donou said F5 Networks also expects to leverage NGINX to expand its presence in application programming interface (API) management and associated web application services, which he noted collectively represent multibillion-dollar market opportunities.

    The decision to acquire NGINX reflects the inevitable melding of NetOps and DevOps, he added, noting that inconsistent approaches to managing application service across emerging microservices-based environments are a recipe for creating unstable IT environments.

    While it’s still a little too early to determine to what degree NetOps will be subsumed into DevOps processes, Locoh-Donou said F5 Networks plans to advance adoption of NGINX software by educating its core base of NetOps administrators on how microservices applications are deployed across extended networks and the rigors of the DevOps processes required to manage them.

    Both F5 Network and NGINX made a name for themselves by interconnecting IT environments made up largely of virtual machines. While virtual machines are not going away anytime soon, so-called cloud-native applications built using containers running on Kubernetes clusters require a different approach to delivering infrastructure services. The challenge facing the combined company is finding a way to deliver those services in a way DevOps teams want to consume.

    — Mike Vizard

  • DevOps Chat: JFrog Acquires Shippable

    DevOps Chat: JFrog Acquires Shippable

    The big news in DevOps today was the acquisition of Shippable by JFrog. This adds a CI/CD solution to the JFrog Enterprise+ platform and further expands JFrog’s end-to-end DevOps offering beyond Artifactory and more.

    In this DevOps Chat, we speak with Shippable CEO Avi Cavale, JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim and JFrog VP of Marketing Ayally Goldschmidt about the thinking behind this acquisition and JFrog’s plans going forward.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat has some breaking news. It was just announced this morning—JFrog has acquired or merged with Shippable in a rather, you know, this is big news within the DevOps world, and we’re very, very happy to be joined by the CEOs of both Shippable and JFrog. From Shippable, we have Avi Cavale, and from JFrog, of course, our friend, Shlomi Ben Haim. And joining us from JFrog is Ayalla Goldschmidt, who really runs marketing at JFrog. I’m not sure of your exact title, Yes, Ayalla?

    Ayalla Goldschmidt: VP of Marketing, thank you, Alan.

    Shimel: VP of Marketing—thank you for joining us. So, first of all, to all three of you, congratulations, Mazel Tov as they say in Seattle. [Laughter]

    Goldschmidt: Thank you, thank you.

    Shlomi Ben Haim: [Laughter] Thank you, Alan.

    Shimel: Thank you. And so, you know, Avi, let’s turn it over to you first. I think a lot of our audience is familiar with JFrog, and most of our audience have heard of Shippable, but let’s just lay that right out there. What’s Shippable about?

    Avi Cavale: Shippable is about a modern CI and CD platform. So, our focus is to streamline the delivery—packaging and delivery of software, and that’s kind of where we are focused on.

    Shimel: Fantastic. So, Shlomi, I think I already know the answer, but I’m gonna ask you—why Shippable for JFrog?

    Ben Haim: That’s a great opening question. Actually, Alan, you know JFrog very well. You know that everything starts with the culture, and when we met Avi and the team, it looked like we’d found the brother Frogs in a different company. So, for us, it was just to make sure that the technology and the strategy are aligned. And when we looked at the technology and the next generation of CI/CD that was built by the Shippable team with Avi’s leadership, it was a no-brainer for us.

    Shimel: Absolutely. But the other thing I think we should mention is, you know, JFrog, many people know JFrog from Artifactory, maybe Xray, you know, point solutions that we can call up. Artifactory is a whole platform in and of itself.

    But, really, the big move for JFrog—and if I’m wrong, correct me; Ayalla, you’re the Marketing person—the big move for JFrog was, you know, this JFrog enterprise platform. And, to me, if you’re gonna have an enterprise platform in the DevOps space, you need that CI/CD pipeline kinda delivery capability.

    So, to me, you know, this really kinda helps fulfill that vision of the JFrog platform. Yeah, no, wrong?

    Goldschmidt: Yeah, that is exactly right, Alan. That’s the vision that we have for it. Obviously, we’ll be doing a lot of work here in the coming weeks to clarify the roadmap and the timeline, but you hit the nail on the head. That’s the value that we’re seeing for our customers and what they’re looking to, what they’re asking us for as far as, you know, we love JFrog, we have very happy customers, they love what we do, and they’re looking to take it to the next level.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, let me ask my next question to Avi and Shlomi, and that is, you know, I guess it’s part of the maturation of the DevOps market where all—you know, there are now, everybody wants to offer the whole enchilada. Do you know what I mean?

    Ben Haim: [Laughter]

    Shimel: People aren’t content any more just offering a piece of it, we wanna offer it all, that whole SDLC, we’re gonna help you throughout that life cycle. It seems everyone is pointing towards that, and the money—look, JFrog, it’s no secret, raised $165 million. Some of your competitors have raised also eight figures. That’s where the smart money’s going, towards companies that are building out this end-to-end DevOps framework.

    Avi, is that what you saw at Shippable, and is that what attracted you guys to want to do this deal with JFrog?

    Cavale: Yeah, I think what we are seeing is that there is one thing which is very critical for customers. It’s like—yes, they want the whole enchilada as a single platform, but at the same point in time, they also want a platform that is open, and they want to make sure that they can plug in the tools that they like in certain places.

    So, of course, they want to see the native capability end to end, but extensibility is also super important. And so, what we kind of saw with what JFrog was doing and what we were doing also was that we were being open to everything. I mean, yes, we want to have a standard of how we think about an end to end platform, but we want to be open and make sure we embrace all the practices that developers want to do and extend the platform to DevOps capabilities.

    Shimel: Absolutely. So, Shlomi, Avi makes a very good point here, and that also goes to the heart of JFrog. One of the things about JFrog is that they play nice with everyone, basically, right? You could pick whatever CI/CD platform you wanna work with or whatever—you know, whether it’s Puppet or Chef or the Red Hat software, you know, JFrog works with everyone, so to speak.

    But now, you have an in-house CI/CD solution, so how do you balance that in your go to market?

    Ben Haim: That’s a great question, Alan. I think that what we’ve started to see in the market for more than 12 months now is that DevOps is maturing and the organization and enterprises are looking to get an end to end solution, yet the driving force of DevOps production is still in the hands of the developers, which, obviously, would love to see the freedom of choice and the best of breed options kind of open to them.

    So, you are right. Our universal approach is something that always led us. We always provided our users with the power of choosing their tools pack, and it will still be the case.

    However, on the JFrog platform, what we call the enterprise class, we want to make sure that we take artifacts seriously, from the moment you build it from code all the way to production. And, together with Shippable automation power, together with the integration and the visibility that technology like Shippable can provide to the platform, I think we will be able to combine the two, to allow a better universal approach. So, you can still use your Jenkins, your CircleCI, your other DevOps tool sets. But you will also have a JFrog end to end solution that takes you all the way from code to production.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, Avi, you know, how do you—I’ll reverse, mirror that question back to you, right? How do you see the Shippable team, the Shippable product fitting into that JFrog Enterprise Plus, you know, the Artifactory platform, all of the different tools that JFrog and services that JFrog is putting together—how do you make sure you fit in there?

    Cavale: So, as Shlomi mentioned, right, what is happening is—so, the artifact is something that is immutable, and that’s something that you build and you want to kind of take it through your entire value chain of how you deliver software to your end customers or end devices or whatever they might be.

    The issue is that, if you don’t have the pipes to kind of control that in a high fidelity fashion, you lose a lot of information as you go from stage to stage. Because you’re leaving it up to the customer to make sure all the data is being persisted and you’re keeping all the hooks so that eventually what you’re really trying to do is, you want to be able to go to something that’s running on the end device and be able to track, if there are problems, what are all the pieces that went into actually building that piece of software that is running there?

    So, losing that ability to connect that entire life cycle, all the way from code to the point where it’s running on a device is a very critical piece of DevOps. And what we see is, that kind of, now, our marriage to the whole Artifactory plus Xray and plus distribution, all of those pieces now can be connected through a common pipeline and we’re making sure that we have high fidelity information exchange as things move through this work flow end to end. And I think that’s kind of the critical thing that we are adding to the product.

    Shimel: Excellent. Ayalla, a question for you—you look at, all of a sudden, you’re embarrassed by the riches of JFrog in terms of their product, right, in terms of the product that you have to work with, the products that you can bring to market. But at the same time, at some level, it’s a double-edged sword from a marketing perspective, right? You have so much now, too, that you need to market, that you need—how do you make sort of a holistic message for market that includes all of these pieces and how they fit together and how, if you don’t want to use all the pieces, you don’t have to, either?

    Goldschmidt: You know what, I feel like the luckiest marketing person on the planet. And, you know, Shlomi promised me when I joined this company a little over a year ago that there will be no shortage of news, and he has delivered.

    Shimel: [Laughter]

    Goldschmidt: So, since I’ve joined, the acquisitions, our Series D announcement, and of course, all of the new technologies that we’ve supported along the way, and the most recent exciting edition of support for Go and Go Center, we love all of these audiences and we do actually put in a big effort in tailoring our message to make sure that we’re communicating with a developer first mindset, and that seems to be working for us.

    So, you know, until today at JFrog, everything we’ve built has been through an inbound marketing funnel with an inside sales team. We haven’t had field people knocking on doors, and that seems to be working great for us, and now we’re ready to take it to the next level. But we’ll always remain developer first.

    Shimel: Excellent. Let me—Avi, let me ask you some sort of typical M&A kind of questions. So, is your whole team staying on as part of this acquisition?

    Cavale: Absolutely, and we’re all joining the JFrog family, and so there is really no change to the business and how we are running it. And I usually tell my team that I have a new boss, that’s all—nothing else is changing, and we’re gonna keep marching towards the vision, and all we have is an opportunity to broaden that vision that JFrog brings to the table and we are part of a much bigger family than what we were before.

    Shimel: Excellent. And so, Avi, what do you see particularly as your role going forward, here?

    Cavale: Sorry, was that for me?

    Shimel: Yes, specifically you—what’s your role going forward? Is it just heading up Shippable? I mean, I’ve been in your role, to tell you the truth. I’ve had my company acquired more than once. And, while you still want to maintain your team and run the team, you also need to integrate now, right? You’re part of an executive team at JFrog that has—I will tell you, I think one of the best cultures in the DevOps world or in the tech world, period.

    You know, how do you see yourself? How do you see this changing your role? It’s more than just having a new boss.

    Cavale: I think the way—I’m actually in Israel right now, and we have already started collaborating. So, one of the things that I actually see is that the team is like, it’s all about brainstorming, quick integration. So, my role is to make sure that I’m delivering the products that JFrog’s customers love as well as most importantly the trust that it actually runs the way it needs to be running. And we’ve focused on the CI/CD aspect of it; nothing is changing from that perspective.

    But what I have now is more brains who are kind of helping me think through what we need to actually do so that we are focused on the enterprise and driving towards that, so that’s kind of how I see myself, as part of the team.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, Shlomi, let me ask you, now—what’s next? What worlds are left to conquer? What pieces of the puzzle are missing? What’s next?

    Ben Haim: You know, Alan, I’m sitting here and listening to Ayalla and Avi and this is great. And from people from outside JFrog, they might think that JFrog is trying to complete the pipeline with all kinds of pieces.

    But the one great feedback that I’m getting from the community is that there is no question mark. People understand what are we doing, it all makes sense. Every tier, every brick that we put on the DevOps wall sounds like the right, next logical step.

    But we are the binaries people, and we will stay the binaries people. We will just make sure that this pipe is completed, and when we speak about the liquid software vision, when we speak about continuous update and solving the pain for the DevOps world, we are taking it seriously, and, as you see, we are super determined to complete our mission.

    What next? We have to stay focused, we have to be a great solution to our customers and users as a community. We are very active in the community, providing them with more tools and more capabilities. It is now our responsibility to make sure that Shippable is fully integrated and the user experience is smooth and fun to use, and as Ayalla mentioned, thinking of the developer first and not the full platform story, but the user experience and the fun and simple-to-use solution.

    Shimel: Excellent, excellent. Alright. Guys, we’re about out of time, I think. We’re probably over time. But again, Avi, congratulations. Welcome to the JFrog family.

    Cavale: Thank you.

    Shimel: It’s an amazing culture, and I’m sure you probably already know that, but you’ll continue to find out. Shlomi, my friend, congratulations to you. Keep up the great work. I can’t wait to see you.

    Ben Haim: Alan, thank you.

    Shimel: Thank you.

    Ben Haim: Thank you so much, partner. Thank you so much.

    Shimel: Alright. And Ayalla, always a pleasure.

    Goldschmidt: [Cross talk]

    Shimel: You, my friend, have work ahead of you now. [Laughter]

    Goldschmidt: [Laughter] Yes, I do. The work is just beginning.

    Shimel: Good for you.

    Goldschmidt: Thanks for having us on.

    Shimel: Alright. So, big news today—JFrog acquires Shippable, and another brick in the wall, as Shlomi mentioned. I tend to think of it as more of a Pink Floyd song than any political thing, but it certainly is continuing this DevOps maturation.

    Guys, congratulations. We’ll see you all soon. And for now, that’s a wrap on this DevOps Chat. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Have a great day, everyone.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Datadog Acquires App Dev Testing Platform Madumbo

    Datadog Acquires App Dev Testing Platform Madumbo

    Datadog announced it is extending its reach beyond IT monitoring to include application testing by acquiring Madumbo.

    Madumdo CEO Gabriel-James Safar said it’s become increasingly apparent that application testing needs to be more informed by the metrics gathered by IT monitoring tools. The combined Datadog/Madumbo will bring intelligence to automated testing processes using both application and infrastructure data gathered via the Datadog platform.

    The Madumbo platform already makes extensive use of machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics to inject artificial intelligence (AI) into the application testing process. The more data those algorithms can access, the more precise the AI models become over time.

    That approach made it possible for Madumbo to build a bot that checks for errors using code running on a real browser, which Safar said means DevOps teams can capture the same defects as they are experienced by end users. That’s critical because much time is wasted by IT organizations that are unable to prioritize tasks to either identify the root cause of a problem or, arguably more importantly, prevent issues in the first place, said Safar. Because of that issue most organizations lack the time required to develop best-in-class DevOps processes.

    Datadog provides a complimentary set of IT monitoring tools that are consumed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. That data will then become a trusted source for Madumbo, which in turn will increase confidence in the AI recommendations being made by Madumbo, said Safar.

    How many of those customers will wind up replacing whatever application testing tools they currently employ with Madumbo remains to be seen. But if Datadog can provide a more efficient approach to testing, testing tools may wind up driving organizations to replace their monitoring tools. Most organizations spend an inordinate amount of time trying to correlate data across tens of monitoring tools that often generate either conflicting alerts or alerts about issues the IT organization has already been informed of by another tool. Most IT organizations eventually will see the rise of AI platforms that will drive consolidation across the entire DevOps tools category.

    In the meantime, the more issues that get addressed during the application development process, the fewer number of problems that will raise their ugly head in production environments. In fact, it’s arguable the whole point of investing in best-in-class DevOps processes is not just to roll out applications faster, but also make sure those applications are of a markedly higher quality than previous generations of applications. That’s not going to happen, however, unless DevOps teams can derive actionable intelligence from the millions of alerts that get generated up and down the IT stack.

    — Mike Vizard

  • How IBM’s $34B Bid for Red Hat Will Spur DevOps Adoption

    How IBM’s $34B Bid for Red Hat Will Spur DevOps Adoption

    IBM’s proposed acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion will have an immediate impact in raising awareness for a programmatic approach to managing hybrid clouds based on best DevOps practices.

    A recent survey published by International Data Corp. (IDC) finds most organizations (64 percent) have already embraced multiple clouds to varying degrees. Only 7 percent of respondents said they have built a truly hybrid cloud. Another 24 percent, however, said they have achieved a high degree of interoperability across multiple clouds. IBM made it clear this week that its primary motivation for acquiring Red Hat was to tap into a trillion-dollar opportunity that will manifest itself as hybrid cloud computing continues to evolve. In fact, IBM is betting that Kubernetes clusters will play a key role in advancing the state of hybrid cloud computing.

    But for hybrid cloud computing to take hold, it’s also clear the level of mastery over DevOps within enterprise IT organizations will need to improve substantially. In fact, hybrid cloud computing might not even be the ultimate destination, said CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey. Enterprise IT is increasingly being defined by programmatic services rather than platforms, he noted, and those services need to be weaved together to drive modern applications. But where each of those services resides is becoming less relevant as organizations become more DevOps proficient, Labourey said, noting the rise of hybrid cloud computing will drive more organizations to embrace DevOps to bring order to the services being consumed.

    “Within a hybrid cloud DevOps will be required,” said Labourey.

    While platforms are still relevant, they increasingly are being hidden behind services that expose an application programming interface (API), added Chip Childers, CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which oversees the development of the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment. A developer consuming a service might have little to no idea what platform that service runs on.

    “IT teams are building on the abstractions that have gone before,” Childers said.

    The ability of one organization to differentiate itself will come down to the maturity of the DevOps processes they rely on to most efficient consume a service, he added.

    Demand for that level of DevOps expertise is already starting to accelerate, said Tim Beerman, CTO of Ensono, a provider of managed IT services. As IT continues to transform into microservices enabled by containers and serverless computing frameworks, the complexity of the overall IT environment requires a more sophisticated approach to managing the overall environment, he said.

    But, he added, “A lot of organizations simply don’t have the talent.”

    Of course, IBM is betting that once it owns Red Hat, more organizations will look to IBM Services for that expertise. But as always, competition across the IT services space remains fierce. IBM is also betting that it will provide the management plane through which hybrid cloud services will be unified. But even there, competition from rivals small and large will be significant. Vendors such as Rackware are already providing frameworks for managing hybrid clouds.

    While hybrid cloud computing is still relatively immature, organizations that embrace DevOps will be much further down that path than others, said Todd Matters, chief architect at Rackware.

    “DevOps will absolutely be a critical part of hybrid clouds,” he said.

    IT has always been about striking a balance between people, process and products. It’s too early to say whether IBM will recoup its $34 billion investment to acquire Red Hat. But the deal inevitably will lead to a greater awareness for a more comprehensive approach to DevOps capable of spanning a hybrid cloud computing environment that includes multiple platforms.

    — Mike Vizard

  • IBM Acquires Red Hat to Create DevOps Behemoth

    IBM Acquires Red Hat to Create DevOps Behemoth

    In a move that has massive implications for DevOps teams across the enterprise, IBM today announced it is acquiring Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion.

    Red Hat will join IBM’s Hybrid Cloud group as a distinct independent unit. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat’s current management team. Whitehurst will join IBM’s senior management team and report to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat’s headquarters, facilities, brands and services practices.

    IBM expects to close the deal, which will be financed using both cash and debt, in the latter half of 2019. IBM also said the deal will be accretive within 12 months after close, as the combined entity moves to address a total market that spans application development and deployment, IT services and security and collectively exceeds $1 trillion, or more than one-fifth of the total global IT market valued at $3.7 trillion in 2018 by Gartner.

    IBM and Red Hat have had a partnership in place for 20 years, spanning everything from reselling and supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to collaboratively working on open source projects such as Kubernetes.

    IBM officials said they expect Red Hat to significantly bolster IBM’s hybrid cloud business, which already generates $19 billion a year in revenues. IBM noted that about 80 percent of application workloads have yet to move to the cloud.

    The move to acquire Red Hat comes on the heels of Red Hat acquiring CoreOS, which augments the company’s existing open source expertise with a container management platform built on top of Kubernetes.

    Once the deal is closed, IBM said the two companies will remain committed to open source software licensing, including initiatives such as Patent Promise, GPL Cooperation Commitment, the Open Invention Network and the LOT Network.

    IBM and Red Hat also plan to continue to build and enhance existing Red Hat partnerships, including those with major cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba and others that compete directly with IBM Cloud.

    It’s too early to say to what degree those cloud service providers will be open to continuing to work with Red Hat as unit of IBM. In recent months Red Hat increasingly has been positioning itself head to head against VMware, which operates as a unit of Dell Technologies. IBM also has a strong relationship with VMware that could change in the years ahead. What is clear, however, is that any deal of this magnitude usually begets others in very short order.

    — Mike Vizard

  • DevOps Chat: Perforce Acquires Perfecto Mobile

    DevOps Chat: Perforce Acquires Perfecto Mobile

    Consolidation is in the air, as two well-known players in the DevOps space—Perforce and Perfecto Mobile—are joining forces. Perforce has announced its intent to acquire Perfecto Mobile for its mobile and web automation testing technology, which, when combined with Perforce’s existing portfolio, will better enable organizations to achieve continuous testing at scale. It’s a great combination and one I believe will be well-received in the industry.

    Perforce CEO Mark Ties and Perfecto Mobile COE Eran Yaniv spoke with me about the acquisition and its potential impact on the testing space as a whole, and Perforce’s plans for more acquisitions down the road.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. It’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat is breaking some big news. The news involves the merger – acquisitions and merger of Perforce and Perfecto Mobile, two pretty well-known brands in the DevOps space. News just came out this morning and we have with us the CEO of Perforce, Mark Ties, as well as the CEO of Perfecto, Eran Yaniv, and if I mispronounced anyone’s name I do apologize in advance. But gentlemen, welcome.

    Eran Yaniv: Thank you.

    Mark Ties: Thank you very much. Great to be here.

    Shimel: Thank you. So guys, you know, I was lucky enough to sell a company or two in my time, and then one of the companies I helped found we did about 30 acquisitions in 36 months so it was almost one a month. It was a little crazy. But, you know, a wise man much older, wiser, and wealthier than myself told me that any time you can, you know, found a company and someone buys it, whether it be a merger, acquisition, whatever you want to call it, but you find a suitor who’s willing to pay significant money, it is a – it is something to be proud of, right? It’s an accomplishment. So congratulations to you,  Eran. You know, any time you can CEO a company that has some sort of liquidity in that, it’s a good thing. So congratulations. And Mark –

    Yaniv: Thank you very much.

    Shimel: – on the other hand – thank – you’re welcome. Mark, on the other hand, any time you could, you know, take the helm of a company that’s out here and getting entrepreneurs to actually, you know, trust you with their baby, so to speak, and it shows a level of trust that you will do right by them and right by their customers, so congratulations to you as well.

    Ties: Thank you.

    Shimel: Let’s dive in a little bit though, Mark. What kind of drove this? What drove the acquisition here or the merger?

    Ties: Since we acquired the management team at Perforce, acquired Perforce a couple years ago, and we’ve been on a journey here to create what we believe will be a strong DevOps player in numerous assets of the space, and as of recently we’ve been very focused on the testing environment witnessed by our earlier-in-the-year acquisition of PRQA and Static Code Analysis and now Perfecto, so Eran and I have been chatting for a number of months here and we’re just, you know, absolutely excited, ecstatic, that we’ve gotten the opportunity here to partner with his cofounder Yoram and himself and the rest of the Perfecto team to bring their capabilities in web and mobile testing into the Perforce family, so that’s really what drove it, is our focus on testing and then their industry-leading capabilities.

    Shimel: Sure. Eran, what about you? You know, Perfecto Mobile – I mean I’ve had devopsy.kinsta.cloud now for four and a half years with publishing. Perfecto’s always been on the scene. We’ve had the pleasure of doing webinars and reports and conferences, sponsorships with Perfecto. What was the, you know, impetus to do this deal now?

    Yaniv: Well we were kind of discussing this internally for a while now, and when we look at the market we believe because the market is evolving more and more towards implementing DevOps-related processes when there is a requirement with which we call internally a gorilla in the market. The decline of CAs and, you know, IBMs and the HPs of the world is actually opening up – has actually opened up quite a few opportunities and we thought that – we think that the development of a very strong leader in the DevOps market is something that is required, that the market is actually requiring. And so we, you know, were looking around to see what companies are out there that would make sense for us to merge with or acquire or get acquired; something that would create something of a bigger size and a bigger voice in this market.

    And, you know, there were various options but we – you know, I really like this notion Perforce because I think nobody in the market really saw it coming, and for us it’s a very exciting opportunity because the offerings are complementing – even complementing status in terms of the install base, so the opportunity was there to actually make it happen and, you know, it aligns really nicely with what we were thinking about the market, so we went forward.

    Shimel: Absolutely. Well, you know, if I may add my own armchair quarterback –

    Yaniv: I’ve got to say one more – I’ve just got to say one more point that I think is very important, and that is the initial chemistry with the team at Perforce made it a very easy decision.

    Shimel: You know, Eran, on that point I will tell you just this culture is important in DevOps in doing mergers and deals like this. The chemistry of the teams is as important or more important sometimes than even the numbers in the books, right? Because the merger doesn’t end on the day of the merger; it only begins. And, you know, it’s important that you have that in there. If I can offer my two cents as an armchair quarterback, I think what we’re seeing here is also the result of a larger trend in the DevOps space.

    You spoke about CA, which is, you know, now getting acquired by Broadcom and there’s perhaps uncertainty there, the IBMs – you know, certainly while these companies played in the DevOps space they weren’t necessarily perceived leaders in DevOps, in the DevOps space and, you know, when you see a company like GitHub, which started out as a code repository, right – it did open source good – getting purchased for, you know, this $7.5 billion by Microsoft, it wasn’t just as a code repository, obviously. And, you know, just recently in the last two, three, four weeks companies like GitLab, you know, with $100 million raise, $1 billion-plus valuation, last week it was JFrog with a DevOps platform with $165 million raise, over $200 million raised – you would have to assume they’re also over $1 billion – it certainly seems like the time is ripe for size.

    Size matters in DevOps, right? Size and scale matter. And so, Mark – go ahead.

    Yaniv: I was going to say that we are seeing these things actually happening in the market. _____ is making all kinds of –

    Shimel: Sure.

    Yaniv: _____ primarily in the _____ area. The thing that I like about the Perforce Clearlake, if you will, in conversations with – and this is what I really like, is the fact that they are dead serious about what they are doing and their moves are very, very quick and they’re very nimble in their decisions and that’s something that makes a lot of sense and it also coincides with what DevOps is all about, right? So I think that’s a great addition.

    Shimel: Absolutely. Mark, let’s hear from you. You know, what’s Perforce’s take on this? Are you in violent agreement or maybe something else to it?

    Ties: I’m in violent agreement with the number of the comments that you’ve made. You know, the space – you know, the research that we’ve done around the space for the last three-plus years now is that this space and environment is going to consolidate, and as a result of that consolidation, you know, those players that can put together best-of-breed technology, that can bring the value that the customer’s ultimately desire or need will be – you know, they will be the players that will rise to the top, and we believe we’re doing that with our version control solution _____ Perforce with our _____ solution and now with web and mobile solutions with Perfecto along with the other technologies that we have. So I’m in violent agreement with that. You know, this won’t be the last acquisition that Perforce will do.

    I mean we’ve done five now; I could see us easily, you know, doing five additional acquisitions and continuing to grow this business. So that’s one point I’m in violent agreement with. The other point is that, you know, to your earlier point about the people and the culture and Eran’s as well, you know, it’s hard but it’s easy to buy a company. It’s harder to make that company successful –

    Shimel: Exactly.

    Ties: – during the acquisition, and I think all of the personalities on both sides of the fence with the Perfecto team and with our team are focused on one thing, which is creating a great company that has great products, phenomenal customer support, and then ultimately new customers. So it’s just – this is a great marriage and, you know, I look forward to continuing to drive it with my team with Eran and with Yoram and the entire Perfecto team.

    Shimel: Absolutely. On that point, let me ask what are the plans? Eran, will you be staying on? What will your role be? What about the rest of your executive team?

    Ties: Yeah so, you know, again, we’re in the days – we’re in the early days here, but the hope on my end is that Eran and team stay around and Eran will be leading this business as an independent segment, subsidiary, whatever you’d like to call it of the Perforce family reporting directly into me, so that is the plan. Now we do have teams obviously from both sides of the house working on the formal integration and how we’ll bring the companies together over the days, weeks, and months to come. We’ve just signed the agreement here earlier this week and we hope to close it by the end of the month.

    And, you know, we will take our time. We will be very diligent in what we’re doing here so that we do not disrupt either businesses, because right now both businesses have been very successful.

    Shimel: Excellent. Mark, I’ve got a question for you. You know, with each of the kind of deals and money raises that I mentioned earlier, I’ve spoken one-on-one with the CEOs, and one of the things I’ve asked them is what is their vision for how their company – you know, where does their company fit into the larger DevOps? You know, so for instance, GitLab wants the first true end-to-end DevOps product line. Shlomi Ben Haim at JFrog, they want a true DevOps platform that handles all artifacts, anything related to artifacts.

    Can you succinctly give us what is the vision – right? – for Perforce? What – you know, when you’ve done 5 more acquisitions, 10 more acquisitions, whatever it is, what’s the vision for what Perforce will become and what you’re striving for?

    Ties: Yes. So there are some very grandiose visions out there, and you’ve mentioned a couple of them. Ours is very simple; we want to be the enterprise player at scale. I mean we provide a very strong solution to enterprise customers that are looking for speed, scalability, security – to name a few of the attributes of the products that they’re purchasing and look to acquire as their providers. So that’s what we’re looking to do, win every inch. All right? We’re not gonna win every market vertical, but the verticals that we choose to go down our plans are to do nothing but dominate them, and so that’s why we’re looking for industry leaders like the Perfecto solution, like the Perforce solution and the others that we’ve acquired, to make sure that we continue to demonstrate the need that our enterprise customers have.

    Shimel: Fantastic.

    Yaniv: And this – and if I may, investing in the vision that Mark articulated around the enterprise aligns extremely well with what we were thinking back in a narrow – if you will, in a narrow space, which is around the continuous testing. But in the notion of addressing the enterprise and the specific ____ that we would be strong at, would make the vision, the joint vision, something that is really great, and that made it also very, very easy for us to _____.

    Shimel: Excellent, excellent. Well, gentlemen, let me wish you both success and congratulations. We’re about out of time here on this DevOps Chat, and I’m sure you’re both very busy. It is an exciting day. Maybe we can check back in a few months when the dust settles a little bit and see how things are going and where you’re headed from there, all right?

    Ties: Great. More than happy to –

    Yaniv: I’d be happy to.

    Ties: – continue the conversation. Thank you.

    Shimel: Okay. Mike Ties, CEO of Perforce, Eran Yaniv, CEO of Perfecto, Announcing the merger of their two companies, and as Perforce continues to scale in the DevOps space. Thanks for being this episode’s guest on DevOps chat, gentlemen. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and you’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Perforce Acquires Perfecto Mobile to Drive DevOps Consolidation

    Perforce Acquires Perfecto Mobile to Drive DevOps Consolidation

    Perforce this week announced it plans to acquire Perfecto Mobile, a provider of automated application development tools, in a move that signals a potential wave of consolidation across the DevOps sector. Perfecto Mobile is the fifth acquisition Perforce has made in the last two years, and company CEO Mark Ties said there will be more to come.

    Schedule to close later this year, the acquisition is estimated to be about $200 million.

    The primary driver of this wave of consolidation is access to inexpensive capital coupled with mainstream adoption of DevOps processes that is requiring many startup companies to scale beyond their means, Ties said.

    As a provider of a cloud-based set of tools for automating the testing of web and mobile applications using a variety of open source frameworks, Perfecto Mobile will complement a portfolio of application testing tools based mainly on the technologies Perforce gained when it acquired PRKA earlier this year. Perfecto Mobile currently has more than 3,000 customers.

    Application testing, along with application development and deployment, increasingly is shifting to the left as developers assume more responsibility for the overall application environment. Instead of relying mainly on a dedicated team to test applications after they have been developed, companies now are continually testing modules as they are developed. Sometimes that’s done by the developers themselves, while other organizations prefer to maintain testing teams made up of individuals who did not write the code being tested. Proponents of the latter approach contend that approach leads to higher-quality code because the individuals testing the code are not as invested in how the code was written. Of course, in an ideal world, an organization would be able to embrace both approaches.

    Regardless of the approach taken, the one thing that is clear is that the rate of at which applications are being developed requires more reliance on automated testing than ever. Not only are there more applications being developed, but increasingly each one is made up of microservices. There often are multiple versions of those microservices that are subject to frequent change. To make matters even more challenging, the number of dependencies between microservices that make up an application are increasing exponentially. That means the days when organizations could rely mainly on manual testing are coming to an end.

    There may come a day when machine learning algorithms are able to play a bigger role in automating application testing and DevOps. But for now, that day is still far off. In the meantime, most organizations are still incorporating multiple approaches to automated testing into their application development processes. The issue is no longer so much about whether to automate testing as much as it is to what degree.

    In the meantime, the more acquisitions that occur across the DevOps landscape, the greater the validation of DevOps becomes as vendors scramble to extend portfolios that, in many cases, are still optimized for legacy approaches to building and deploying applications that increasingly are falling by the wayside.

    — Mike Vizard