Azul this week acquired Payara, a provider of a Java-based application server and microservices framework that extends the scope of the company’s portfolio beyond Java runtimes.
The two companies were previously allied in 2018 when Payara embedded the Azul Platform Core into Payara Server Enterprise. In addition, both companies have a long history of contributing to open source Java projects, including OpenJDK and Eclipse Jakarta EE Platform.
Azul CEO Scott Sellers said the acquisition will meld that commitment to open source to provide an alternative to legacy applications server platforms such as IBM WebSphere or Apache Tomcat, an open-source web server and servlet container used for running Java code.
Additionally, Payara has developed a lightweight application server, Payara Micro, to build and run cloud-native Java microservices.
Based on Jakarta EE and MicroProfile, an open source project for encapsulating Java code in containers that along with OpenJDK and Jakarta EE is being advanced under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation.
The acquisition is the first ever for Azul, and comes on the heels of an undisclosed majority shareholder investment made earlier this year in the company by the venture capital firm Thoma Bravo. The combination of the two companies provides Azul access to an additional application server revenue stream that is estimated to be a $26 billion total addressable market that is projected to grow 11% to 14% at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
Azul has been at the forefront of a push to replace legacy Java virtual machines with OpenJDK and Jakarta EE to enable organizations to reduce their dependency on commercial Java software provided by Oracle and others. The acquisition of Payara provides organizations a pathway to modernize Java applications without having to rewrite them, noted Sellers. Azul has also partnered with Moderne to gain access to a platform that is used to accelerate application modernization initiatives, noted Sellers.
As a provider of a platform that leverages an open-source OpenRewrite Lossless Semantic Trees (LSTs) project to create structured representations of complex codebases developed by Moderne, the alliances with Diffblue and Azul provide deeper integrations with unit testing tools and a Java code analytics platform, respectively.
Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering at the Futurum Group, said the acquisition of Payara strengthens an open, enterprise-grade Java platform at a time when many organizations are reassessing their long-term dependence on proprietary platforms.
Enterprises want to move Java applications forward into cloud native and hybrid environments without rewriting what already works, he noted. Azul and Payara together are a more complete, open source-based platform that aligns with many of the realities of how Java is used in production today, added Ashley.
It’s not clear at what pace organizations are modernizing Java applications, but as the most widely used programming language in enterprise IT environments it’s not likely Java will be supplanted by any rival programming language any time soon. The challenge, as always, is finding a way to reduce the cost of running those applications while improving performance.
A spate of initial public offering (IPOs) has resulted in billions of investment dollars being poured into JFrog, Snowflake and Sumo Logic and is likely to fuel of wave of merger and acquisition activity in the months ahead.
While each of these software companies addresses fundamentally different IT requirements, they are all tapping into a massive amount of liquidity now available, as investors dump the stocks of companies in other sectors that have been adversely impacted by the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In fact, the reason all these IPOs appear to be occurring all at once now is the plans to go public that many software companies had earlier this year were delayed by the onset of the pandemic. The backlog for potential IPOs is already staggering. Currently there are more than 400 private startup companies with valuations in excess of $1 billion, which according to the financial research firm CB Insights officially makes them “unicorns.” Familiar names of software companies on that list include GitLab, Docker Inc., HashiCorp, Snyk, Postman, OutSystems, Digital Ocean, Auth0, Redis Labs, Databricks, Collabra, Cohesity, Tanium, Rubrik, SentinelOne, Illumio, Netskope and Kaseya.
The reasons IT organizations should pay attention to these IPOs are twofold. The first is that it signals the company now has ready access to a stream of investment dollars required to fund ongoing innovation, said Scott Bickley, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group.
The second, he noted, is that many enterprise IT organizations tend to limit their amount of reliance on a startup company. Venture capitalists that fund these companies often sell them to other companies to recoup their investment as an alternative to launching an IPO. Most enterprise IT organizations don’t want to wake up one morning to discover a key vendor has been acquired by a vendor they would prefer to not do business with, said Bickley.
That issue can be especially problematic when cloud service providers such as Amazon, which has operations that reach well beyond IT, are involved, he added.
In fact, one of the reasons many organizations prefer to rely on IT vendors that are public companies is they have a lot more visibility into the overall viability of the vendor, said Bickley.
“Assessing risk is part of the due diligence process,” he said. “With public companies, there’s a lot more data available.”
Of course, public companies do get acquired. The fact that they are public companies usually makes the effort a comparatively expensive proposition, depending on the stock price and the number of shares outstanding.
However, one of the first things many companies do once they go public is to look to acquire other companies that enable them to expand their overall portfolio, said Mitch Ashley, CEO and managing analyst at Accelerated Strategies Group, a market research firm.
“We’re in a bit of a roll-up period right now,” he said.
Many enterprise IT organizations tend to welcome those acquisitions because it allows them to deal with fewer vendors, Ashley noted, adding support also tends to improve because the larger vendor typically has more resources.
On the downside, he said, large vendors tend to raise prices after acquiring smaller vendors in part to help cover the cost of the acquisition.
Like it or not, however, mergers and acquisitions are now a fact of IT life that organizations just need to accept, Ashley said.
Based on the amount of capital available at the moment, IT leaders should also assume the pace of merger and acquisition activity is about to accelerate, even more as more fuel in the form of capital is added to the fire.
As Mike Vizard reported yesterday, CloudBees, as part of its mission to build “the world’s first end-to-end automated software delivery system,” announced another acquisition: Rollout, a developer of a feature flag application that allows for simplified testing of new modules within an application.
Not to repeat the gist of Vizard’s article; you can read it for yourself. But this continues what has become something of an acquisition tear by CloudBees. The company has acquired CodeShip and Electric Cloud, among others, while becoming one of the founding members of the new Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), under the Linux Foundation and a sister foundation to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Cloud Foundry Foundation. The CDF is now managing the Jenkins project, as well as Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton.
CloudBees’ Mission
Make no mistake: These acquisitions, along with the CDF formation, represent a major change for CloudBees. The team there is clearly trying to separate from the pack of “end-to-end” DevOps contenders. CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey is pushing hard to raise CloudBees above the noise and the rest of the market. The company announced a $62 million round of financing about a year ago.
You don’t have to be Warren Buffet to see that CloudBees sees an opportunity here. The company is driving toward achieving scale in product and revenue on the path to some sort of liquidity event (perhaps an IPO?) or market leading opportunity.
For now, though, back to the Rollout acquisition. I had the chance to sit down with Labourey and the CEO and founder of Rollout, Erez Rusovsky. We discussed what Rollout does, its history and how it will fit into the CloudBees product portfolio.
It is always great to interview a founder about his company being acquired. What a tremendous feeling of accomplishment to found and build a company, and have another entity value it so much that you are willing to sell it to them. This goes so far beyond validation.
Congrats to Erez and the whole Rollout team and, of course, congratulations to Sacha, KK and the rest of the CloudBees team. This seems like a perfect fit.
In the meantime, here is my conversation with Sacha and Erez on the acquisition and more. Enjoy!
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.
Atlassian this week announced its plans to acquire OpsGenie as part of an effort to apply DevOps principles to incident management. The announcement was made at the Altassian Summit Europe 2018 conference.
Atlassian plans to integrate OpsGenie, which provides incident alerting and communications software, with its Jira service desk software to enable organizations to automate responses to a major incident such as a site outage using a Jira Ops incident management command center unveiled this week.
Jens Schumacher, head of software teams for Atlassian, said that while most organizations today have processes in place to respond to minor incidents, very few have incident management processes in place to deal with significant catastrophic events. OpsGenie already has been adopted by more than 3,000 customers to enable organizations to put together a set of structure processes to recover as quickly as possible.
Schumacher said a more structured approach to recovery is now required because so much more of a modern organization’s ability to drive revenue is tied to the availability of IT. Whenever there is a significant amount of downtime, the urgency attached to recovery process is now much greater. The combination of OpsGenie and Jira, available now via an early access program, makes it possible to predefine a structured set of workflow processes to be followed in the event of an emergency, he said, adding that by defining those processes within a common framework, IT organizations also will be able to significantly reduce the number of point products they need to navigate during a crisis.
The combination of the two products will also aid in applying forensics to discover the root cause of any outage, Schumacher said.
Incident management within IT environments over the last few years has been evolving into a science. There are several dedicated incident management platforms that mange everything from who needs to be alerted in what order to providing detailed instructions bringing applications back online. The challenge many organizations wrestle with today is that all the silos of IT make it difficult to approach incident management comprehensively.
But as it becomes easier for finance officers to draw a straight line between IT downtime and lost revenues, interest in more structured approaches to recovery is on the rise. In fact, regardless of whether the root cause of an issue is a cybersecurity breach or a geological event, the recovery process is usually consistent. Incident management platforms provide the means to capture those processes in a way that creates institutional memory. Access to those best practices is often critical, because organizations can never be sure which members of the IT staff will be available during a crisis. If the one person who knows how to provision a storage system is unavailable, there should be enough information in an incident management system to enable another member of the IT team to accomplish that task.
As is often the case when it comes to IT, the tools at hand only enables the battle to be joined. It’s the quality of the processes attached to those tools that decides whether the battle will be won or lost.
Big news in the world of continuous testing today as continuous testing market leader Tricentis announced it is merging with QASymphony. Tricentis, a leader of continuous testing, is adding QASymphony’s leading testing automation platform to the mix. The full text of the press release is below.
With the worldwide testing market pegged at more than $34 billion, this is a big move in a very big market. Tricentis raised $165 million last year from Insight Venture Partners and has put this money to good use: The QASymphony merger is Tricentis’ latest move. Previously, it acquired Q-Up, in June, and last year acquired Flood IO.
Tricentis’ merger with QASymphony is happening at a time when continuous testing is becoming one of the hottest areas in DevOps. The demand for automated, continuous testing is driving a revolution in the QA market as companies recognize that quality is as important as speed when it comes to deploying new apps. It is a key cog in the modern software factory.
I had a chance to sit down and speak with Tricentis CEO, Sandeep Johri, about today’s announcement, the testing market and what the future may hold. Sandeep, who has previous experience at HP and other large providers, has a great vision of the market and where it is heading as well as the details that escape many “professional manager” CEOs. His hand is firmly on the wheel as he drives Tricentis forward in this space.
Have a listen to our conversation below, and stay tuned—we will update and continue this breaking story as more details emerge.
Tricentis and QASymphony Merge to Drive Innovation in Continuous Testing for Enterprise DevOps
Next Gen platform disrupts the $34B testing services spend and transforms software testing for DevOps
Mountain View, CA— June 20, 2018 — Tricentis and QASymphony announced their agreement to merge under the name of Tricentis. Tricentis’ market-leading Continuous Testing platform has earned the company unanimous “leader” recognition among the top industry analysts. QASymphony is recognized as the industry’s leading test management solution. The combined solution represents the most modern platform for transforming software testing to keep pace with digital transformation.
“Tricentis and QASymphony are both recognized for their innovative testing solutions,” explained Sandeep Johri, CEO of Tricentis. “Tricentis is known for helping enterprises transform testing from a burdensome manual process that delays software delivery into an automated, continuous process that drives ‘quality at speed.’ The addition of QASymphony’s test management solution strengthens our leadership position and builds on our momentum replacing legacy testing tools.”
“Today’s CIOs are responsible for ramping up innovation through accelerated software delivery,” explained Barry Libenson, Global Chief Information Officer at Experian. “Amid this demand for rapid innovation, CIOs are recognizing that software testing often delays their digital transformation goals. In fact, testing is now commonly cited as the #1 bottleneck to delivery speed. When testing lags behind development, the organization is forced to delay their innovation and that’s no longer an option. It’s inevitable that software testing must be transformed to keep pace with Agile development and DevOps.”
“Global 2000 organizations remain locked into legacy testing platforms that were designed decades ago to enable manual testing processes,” explained Dave Keil, CEO of QASymphony. “Scaled agile and enterprise DevOps initiatives have changed the game. Yet, legacy testing technologies such as those by HPE (now Micro Focus) and CA are throttling speed and innovation. QASymphony has experienced triple-digit growth over the past year—allowing us to aggressively invest in our technology, infrastructure and people to meet the emerging needs of our customers.”
QASymphony’s 100+ employees will be joining Tricentis’ 450+ employees. Sandeep Johri will lead the organization as CEO and Dave Keil will assume the role of COO. The combined company will have a global presence with offices in the US, EMEA and Asia. The transaction is expected to close within 90 days. EMBARGO UNTIL WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2018 @ 8:00 AM ET USA
The integration will reflect the commitment to innovation and customer success that both companies share—to learn more, register for the upcoming webinar. Additionally, the company will be showcasing the roadmap and solution at Accelerate 2018 in Vienna.
DevOps Impact
The market for software testing (recently estimated at $34 billion)1 has reached an inflection point. DevOps adoption is rising rapidly, and both Gartner and Forrester report that transforming testing is a primary factor for DevOps success.2 Yet, software testing remains a predominantly manual activity that delays releases and consumes 30-40 percent of an organization’s application budget3,4 Tricentis Continuous Testing solutions accelerate delivery and free up significant budget that can be reallocated to underfunded innovation initiatives.
Gartner’s Joachim Herschmann and Thomas Murphy report: “As DevOps principles gain significant traction in enterprises, testing and QA is no longer a stage in delivery but an integral DevOps activity that exists in various forms through all areas. Automation has become an indispensable element in these efforts, and there has been renewed focus on software test automation tools as part of a larger toolchain that enables DevOps.”5
About Tricentis
With the industry’s No. 1 Continuous Testing platform, Tricentis is recognized for reinventing software testing for DevOps. Through risk-based testing, scriptless end-to-end test automation, and the industry’s most extensive technology support, Tricentis breaks through the barriers experienced with conventional software testing methods. Our innovative technologies simplify testing for even the most complex enterprise applications—transforming testing from a roadblock to a catalyst for innovation. The result is accelerated software delivery speed, improved cost efficiency, and reduced business risk.
Tricentis is the only vendor to achieve “leader” status in all three top analyst reports (i.e., the “Triple Crown.”) This honor is based on our technical leadership, innovation, and a Global 2000 customer base of 800+ companies, including global enterprises such as Allianz, ANZ Bank, Experian, First Data, HSBC, Lexmark, Merck, Sentry Insurance, Starbucks, Telstra, UBS, Vantiv (now WorldPay), Vodafone, and Whole Foods. These customers rely on Tricentis to achieve and sustain test automation rates of over 90 percent—increasing risk coverage while accelerating testing to keep pace with Agile and DevOps. EMBARGO UNTIL WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2018 @ 8:00 AM ET USA
Tricentis has a global presence in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, India, Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, Poland, United States and the UK. To learn more, visit https://www.tricentis.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
About QASymphony
QASymphony accelerates digital transformation with software testing solutions that help enterprises prioritize quality, develop reliable software and increase speed to market. The qTest platform streamlines software testing in agile and DevOps environments and centralizes testing efforts across the enterprise. By taking a strategic approach to quality, QASymphony enables enterprises to develop higher-quality software, faster, to better support new business models and customer experiences.
The qTest platform streamlines development workflows by seamlessly integrating testing with leading automation, development and delivery tools including Atlassian’s Jira, CA Agile Central, Github, Selenium, Cucumber, Jenkins and many more. QASymphony is trusted by leading enterprises including Forcepoint, PFSweb, Cisco, Samsung, Verizon and Office Depot.
As part of its effort to get even closer to the developer community, Microsoft is acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion. GitHub controls the open source repository that is at the center of millions of DevOps processes and is home to up to 28 million developers worldwide.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub will remain an open platform that developers will be able to employ for any programming language to deploy software anywhere. As part of that commitment, GitHub will continue to operate as a Microsoft business unit led by Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin who will assume the role of GitHub CEO. Current GitHub CEO, Chris Wanstrath, will become a Microsoft technical fellow, reporting to Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie. Wanstrath previously announced his intention to step down as the CEO of GitHub. The deal is expected to close before the end of this calendar year.
Nadella said Microsoft is committed to acting as a steward for GitHub rather than making the open source repository an element of the application development business unit.
Microsoft recognizes that GitHub is the platform through which millions of developers now collaborate, said Nadella. Acquiring GitHub presents the company with an opportunity to get closer to the developer community by providing both the platform they collaborate on as well as the tools many of them rely on to build applications. That’s critical now because as more organizations transform into software companies, those organizations are pouring more resources into application development and workflows than ever, Nadella said.
Friedman said GitHub will focus on making it easier for cloud service providers to plug their platforms into GitHub, adding Microsoft is also committing to making all its application development tools available on the GitHub marketplace. The company also will make GitHub services available via its direct sales and reseller channel.
It’s unclear yet how the open source community that relies on GitHub will react to the stewardship of Microsoft. There are plenty of smaller repository options that might benefit from developers deciding to shift their allegiance. Microsoft clearly is aware of the potential downside, which helps account for why Friedman is stressing that any effort to make it simple to integrate GitHub with cloud services would apply to all services, not just Azure. At the same time, however, given its long history of delivering application development tools, there’s probably a deeper appreciation for how GitHub plays to a Microsoft customer base that counts developers as its largest segment.
On the plus side, Microsoft will become a much bigger advocate for application development based on open source code. The company steadily has been making large swaths of its application development tools available as open source code. Less clear is to what degree it will be willing to embrace open source across its entire portfolio. With more than 2 million commits made to GitHub a year, Microsoft claims to be the largest contributor to GitHub.
The challenge from a DevOps perspective, however, is not the repository employed to house code, but rather how well that repository fits into a larger continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) environment.
Thanks to the rise of DevOps, there has been a lot of focus on various forms of application lifecycle management (ALM) spanning multiple application development methodologies. But as IT organizations become more comfortable with multiple methodologies, it turns out they are not replacing one with another as much as simply trying to figure out where to employ one over another. That, in turn, is driving some consolidation across the ALM category.
CollabNet this week announced it is merging with VersionOne, a provider of an ALM framework optimized for agile application development. While CollabNet has made some forays into the space, historically its primary focus has been on waterfall methodologies commonly used across larger enterprise IT organizations. CollabNet CEO Flint Brenton says the goal now is to combine the best of the ALM tools provided by both companies to enable IT organizations to leverage agile and waterfall methodologies as they best see fit. In fact, he says the biggest ALM issue facing organizations today is the need to balance developing applications faster and the inherent risks associated with potentially moving too quickly.
Robert Holler, formerly the CEO of VersionOne, will assume the post of chief strategy officer for the combined company. He says there’s very little overlap between the two company’s product portfolios, and the one thing that will distinguish CollabNet going forward is an open approach to ALM that enables organizations to employ whatever tools they prefer. Instead of forcing organizations to rip and replace those tools, Holler says ALM frameworks need to foster collaboration rather than trying to impose a closed ALM environment. That environment also needs to be deployable on-premises or in the cloud, depending on the requirements of the customer.
Holler notes that once any segment of the IT industry reaches a certain level of maturity, consolidation is all but inevitable. The opportunity CollabNet has is providing an ALM environment that makes it possible to automatically package and deploy applications that includes strong version-control mechanisms. Those capabilities will become even more critically important as IT organizations expand usage of microservices based on, for example Kubernetes, alongside traditional virtual machine deployments across the enterprise. Accomplishing that goal will require a common management layer capable of spanning both environments, he says.
The combined companies have more than 20,000 customers. That number may not collectively represent the lion’s share of the ALM market, but it does make CollabNet a serious contender against a host of rivals that are both a lot older and larger. CollabNet’s challenge now is convincing customers of competitive organizations to switch to an ALM platform that CollabNet contends is a whole lot more flexible.
In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to wait and see if the combination of CollabNet and VersionOne will drive any additional acquisitions at a time when IT organizations are becoming a lot less religious about what type of application development methodology gets employed by who and when.
Together PagerDuty and Event Enrichment HQ Integrate Event and Incident Management
I had a chance to speak yesterday with CEO Alex Solomon, PagerDuty’s Product VP Jonathon Wilkinson and Ophir Ronen, Event Enrichment HQ Co-Founder and now Product Director at PagerDuty. They all believe that this is a significant move by PagerDuty to help overcome the desensitization that many IT teams suffer as a result of so many alerts about incidents and events. Trying to turn down the signal to noise ratio and allow IT team members to concentrate on what is most important is a big part of the Event Enrichment platform.
The company already has begun integration into the PagerDuty and the whole Event Enrichment team is staying on with PagerDuty.
Below is the press release:
San Francisco – November 3, 2015 — PagerDuty, the leader in operations performance management, today announced that it has acquired Event Enrichment HQ and their Event Enrichment Platform (EEP). IT operations teams are facing a flood of monitoring data and notifications as the number and sophistication of monitoring tools increases. Integrating the Event Enrichment Platform with PagerDuty reduces noise, surfaces actionable alerts, and delivers context-rich remediation information so businesses resolve critical incidents faster.
“Event Enrichment HQ realized early that the proliferation of tools within IT operations generates a lot of additional noise and wastes critical time,” said Alex Solomon, PagerDuty CEO and Co-Founder. “The company’s work directly aligns with PagerDuty’s continued commitment to helping businesses deliver uptime and great customer experiences.”
The integrated solution helps businesses decrease resolution times by reducing noise so incident responders can spend less time on manually triaging events and by providing remediation information within the notification itself as the first source of truth. PagerDuty’s core functionality has addressed the challenge of assembling the right incident responders on the issue, but now teams have even better focus with intelligent control of monitoring system events.
“Having felt the pain ourselves for many years, we set out to provide the IT operations community with the tools to suppress noise and enrich events” said Ophir Ronen, Event Enrichment Co-Founder and PagerDuty Product Director. “Joining PagerDuty allows us to continue that vision and extend into helping customers streamline the entire incident lifecycle to decrease downtime.”
PagerDuty now offers a private beta of the Event Enrichment functionality to select customers. Additional details are available here.
ABOUT PAGERDUTY
PagerDuty’s operations performance platform reliably increases the uptime of businesses’ applications, services and infrastructure. By connecting people, systems and data into a single view, PagerDuty helps all teams — from DevOps to Enterprise IT — deliver powerful visibility and improved incident resolution times. PagerDuty has over 100 platform partners, and is trusted by Fortune 500 companies and startups alike, including Adobe, Airbnb, Etsy, GitHub, Intuit, National Instruments, New Relic, Panasonic and Rackspace. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by leading venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, Ignition Partners and others. To try PagerDuty for free, or to get more information, visit www.pagerduty.com.
ABOUT EVENT ENRICHMENT HQ
Event Enrichment HQ’s Event Enrichment Platform (EEP) allows IT professionals to significantly reduce their downtime by eliminating noise and enriching actionable events with remediation information. IT teams using EEP have the ability to route, manage, and enrich their alerts without interacting directly with critical production monitoring systems or code. Privately held, Event Enrichment HQ is made up of IT operations veterans who are focused on providing solutions for reducing downtime. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. For more information, or to try EEP for free, visit www.eventenrichment.com.
After a relatively long hiatus from the M&A scene CA seems to be back with bang. Following on the heels of its nearly half a billion buy of Rally Software, CA yesterday announced the acquisition of Grid-Tools. Grid-Tools is a test data management market leader. Prior to the acquisition they were a partner of not only CA, but HP and Oracle as well. Post acquisition it will remain to be seen whether HP and Oracle remain important partners.
Taken with the Rally acquisition a week ago this buy makes a strong statement that CA is doubling down on DevOps. Of course Rally literally wrote the book on Agile and with Grid-Tools leadership position in its space, CA has in one week brought in two leading companies in their space. As with any acquisition integration is always a question. In this case it is a double helix of integration. Integrating Rally with Grid-Tools and both into the larger CA portfolio will take some work.
Last week I spoke to James Harvey, General Manager and SVP, IT Business Management Division at CA Technologies. One of the topics we spoke about was that CA in buying Rally was not only buying some great IP and products, but also getting some top people. The Grid-Tools acquisition brings another influx of new blood to CA as well. On top of this CA also announced the appointment of Otto Berkes as CTO.
Taken all together we get a picture of CA on the move. They are adding new ideas, new people and new products as they seek to transform from a software provider in the mainframe space to a major player in the new application economy.
One of the things that I think we will also see CA move into in a bigger way is SaaS and services in general. Unlike many of its competitors, CA has remained a traditional software vendor for a long time. But with the state of technology today, offering software as a service and offering consulting services around the software is more and more a requirement rather than a luxury. This may cause some angst among CA service delivery partners, but I feel it is an inevitable step in CA’s market evolution.
Another telltale clue will be CA’s ability to retain the talent at these acquisitions. All to often brain drain occurs after acquisitions. I have not seen any announcements around management teams staying on post-closing, but CA could use the talent. They have seen some executives leave recently.
The real winner in all of this in my opinion is DevOps. Large technology providers continue to load up on DevOps offerings in anticipation of the larger global enterprise market adopting a new way of IT that includes things like Agile, DevOps, Cloud, SaaS, etc. It also bodes well for future acquisitions in this space by CA competitors which should help make some VCs sleep easier about their investments in startups in the space as well.
BTW, in the interests of full disclosure CA is a sponsor/advertiser here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud, though we had no special notice or insight into any of this news.
