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Tag: merger

  • The Battle for End-to-End DevOps Champion Is On

    The Battle for End-to-End DevOps Champion Is On

    This past week’s CollabNet/Xebia Labs merger brings another challenger to the “end-to-end” DevOps market. There is a huge prize waiting for the winner. But which of the challengers has the right stuff to win this battle? Will any of the current pack even be around at the end of the day? Who will be the winners and losers? What will it take to win?

    The eventual dominant player in the end-t0-end DevOps provider market will be rewarded with what should be a great pot of gold. It is this promise of hegemony over DevOps and the rewards it commands that have so many chasing the prize.  CloudBees, JFrog and GitLab are some of the DevOps darlings in this market. Chef has a similar game plan, and now the new entity stemming from the CollabNet/Xebia Labs deal will also be a player. I believe GitHub/Microsoft will make a play in this market, too.

    At this point in time, who knows which company will be triumphant and which will be regulated to the trash heap of also-rans? One thing I learned from my friend Brad Feld is that if you are not in the top three in your category, get out. In the end-to-end DevOps or complete DevOps market, there will be some winners and there will be some losers.

    Sanjeev Sharma, principal analyst for ASG, had this to say about the market:
    As engineers strive to streamline their application delivery pipelines to be able to achieve true continuous delivery, a massive stumbling block becomes an end-to-end delivery pipeline with tools that are seamlessly integrated. At one end of this spectrum we have organizations that acquire best-of-breed tools and glue them together themselves, owning the resulting plumbing. At the other end there are organizations that want tools from a single vendor that ‘just work,’ integrated out of the box. The pendulum today has swung toward the single vendor, integrated out-of-the-box side. The growth of platform vendors like GitLab and the consolidation of CI/CD tool vendors with larger ones is the result of this swing.

    Right now, while several contenders have a great vision, none of them really have a bonafide end-to-end platform or suite with functionality all the way across. There are also other contenders that I have not mentioned, but here is my take on what is out there that I see:

                1. GitLab – The company recently won our DevOps Dozen DevOps solution provider of the year and it was well-deserved. Sid Sijbrandij and team have done a great job laying out a bold, ambitious vision of GitLab’s eventual full functionality. On top of this, they add almost 200 new features a month, every month. The company is growing by leaps and bounds, with almost 1,200 employees, and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars with a valuation of $2.75 billion. GitLab has the resources to go deep in this market and has built some tremendous momentum. On the other hand, the fact is today GitLab customers primarily use the Git repo functionality and the CI module. The other modules are still being built out to be market-competitive, including some good work in security. I suspect it may take a few acquisitions to give the company market-competitive solutions in some of the other areas it is building out. At the end of the day, you have to make GitLab a clear favorite to be one of the survivors/winners, especially with such a high valuation.
                2. CloudBees – The Jenkins train has pulled CloudBees to the top of the mountain, but to succeed in this race, the company is going to need more than that to stay there. Jenkins is a bit long in the tooth and Kubernetes has been a game-changer. Jenkins itself has been turned over to the Continuous Delivery Foundation (Linux Foundation) as has JenkinsX, which works very well in K8s environments. But CloudBees has shown it is more than Jenkins and made some key acquisitions including Electric Cloud, which have given the company great enterprise customers and added to its talent pool. Other, smaller acquisitions have given CloudBees some fresh new functionality such as feature flags, for instance, which are upgrading and refreshing the mix. At the end of the day, though, CloudBees’ potential in this market is based on its ability to execute on its vision of a dual-product lineup that features both software delivery management (SDM), which they have already announced, and upgrading their existing software, which helps people with their CI/CD pipelines. Having both working together could give CloudBees an unbeatable place in the market. This vision may not be as ambitious or broad as GitLab’s but could be more attainable, more quickly.
                3. JFrog – Shlomi Ben Haim and his “Frogs” have built a DevOps powerhouse by understanding developers’ needs and wants and using open source as a market-penetration weapon as well as or better than anyone else. The company’s community/customers are fanatical in their support and the “change the world with liquid software” culture it has built is contagious.
                  When you consider JFrog started with a repository for artifacts and what it built on top of it is pretty amazing. The company continues to add new repositories for many of the popular languages in use as well. The downside for JFrog is that it just added its JFrog pipelines via acquisition and is still working to make it a best-in-class solution. XRay is JFrog’s security product for testing artifacts and code prior to deployment, and I think it will probably make another acquisition to bolster its security chops. The Frogs have the energy and will to win this thing, but they have a lot of work ahead of them to compete with an end-to-end or complete DevOps vision. Rumor is a new version of the platform is on the way; we will have to see what this brings. The company may wind up being bought for billions by a larger player (GCP, Microsoft), which could make JFrog a winner in any event.
                4. GitHub – GitHub is just a repository, you say? Nonsense. Make no mistake about it, GitHub is going to be a player in this race. With the deep pockets and ambition to continue being a developer powerhouse at Microsoft, the company is determined to make sure GitHub is a complete DevOps solution. GitHub is adding functionality every day and has an amazing array of tools that plug into and extend GitHub. As the de facto standard—with something like 30 million developer accounts already and Microsoft’s Azure and war chest—don’t bet against GitHub being the last man or company standing here.
                5. CollabNet VersionOne/Xebia Labs entity. So, this is the new kid on the block—so new that we don’t even know its name yet. This merger was orchestrated by the private equity group TPG, which bought CollabNet last year and pledged $500 million to use to acquire and grow the CollabNet business into a complete DevOps platform. That $500 million probably represented a lot more than the firm paid for CollabNet, which was a 15 years-or-so-old company that had some good tools in the agile market. Since its merger with VersionOne, it has released a value stream management solution (it may not have been called that, but that’s what it is) and tried to market the whole thing as a suite. Obviously there was not a smooth path between the companies and some parts were missing; the street had the TPG transaction at less than $100 million. Some of its holes are getting filled with the Xebia Labs merger/acquisition. Rumor on the street was that TPG paid something like $226 million for Xebia—not a petty amount, but remember, Xebia raised about $100 million a while back. Again, the rumor is that a good chunk of that money was used to “buy” Xebia out of its ownership by the Dutch Xebia group. After paying that off, the current Xebia ownership used the remaining funds to try and keep Xebia competitive. You can do the math from there. In recent times we haven’t heard a lot from Xebia. It was assumed the company would either raise more money or look for a merger to gain enough girth to compete in this newly energized complete DevOps market. This deal seems to fit the bill.A real plus for this new entity is the addition of Ashok Reddy as CEO. Reddy is a seasoned player with large public company executive experience in the DevOps space, as well as GM of enterprise divisions. However, it is going to take more money and more functionality to create a market competitive entity in this space. There has to be a security module, for instance. The issue is with the inflated prices that companies in this space are garnering—what can be bought with the dollars left or what can be built holistically? Will TPG perhaps put more money on the table?  It’s too early to count this new player out, but as the new kid on the block, it has to play catchup against some of the other players.

    These are just five of the players. As I mentioned, Chef, one of the original DevOps darlings, also wants to play in the complete DevOps space. There are others lined up behind Chef, but we have to end this article somewhere. It is going to be an interesting few months as we see the winners in this space emerge.

    In the meantime, if you like this kind of analysis—no-holds-barred, tell it like it is, open and free—check out Accelerated Strategies Group at https://accelst.com. ASG is the new analyst firm MediaOps is working with, and it is doing to analysis what open source is doing to software. Knowledge wants to be free.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Deeper Dive: DevOps Consolidation This Way Comes

    DevOps Deeper Dive: DevOps Consolidation This Way Comes

    The merger of XebiaLabs and CollabNet VersionOne announced this week will accelerate the ongoing consolidation of providers of DevOps platforms that has been slowly gaining momentum for the better part of two years.

    Under the terms of the agreement, the unnamed combined company will be led by Ashok Reddy, formerly with Broadcom, CA Technologies and IBM. Current XebiaLabs CEO Derek Langone will become president of the combined company. Current CollabNet VersionOne CEO Flint Brenton is stepping down from the combined company.

    CollabNet has been trying to make a case for employing value stream management tools to better align application development projects with business objectives ever since it merged with VersionOne, a provider of an application lifecycle management (ALM) platform anchored around version control software, in 2017. Late last year, CollabNet VersionOne was acquired by TPG Capital, which pledged to make $500 million in funding available to drive organic and inorganic growth. The decision to appoint Reddy as CEO of the combined company was made by TPG.

    XebiaLabs, meanwhile, raised $100 million capital in early 2018 to drive investments in building a continuous delivery platform. The goal now is to more tightly integrate the respective platforms of the two companies to advance value stream management with Global 5,000 class organizations, says Langone.

    “There is no enterprise-class player in this space,” said Langone.

    Rival offerings either don’t scale to meet the needs of larger enterprises or they are simply too shallow to meet business requirements, he noted.

    Of course, value stream management is where most of the rivals of the combined entity are also focused. CloudBees, for example, has already rolled out value stream management modules as an extension of its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said the company is now taking that concept to the next level by building a software delivery management (SDM) platform that normalizes data from multiple data sources. The open source Jenkins CI/CD platform, along with the Electric Cloud application release platform CloudBees gained via acquisition last year, would be one of many data sources for that platform, he said, while value stream management would be one of several applications available to different classes of users within that SDM platform.

    While mergers and acquisitions among DevOps vendors have been occurring slowly, Labourey said he expects the pace of such deals to increase in the months ahead as organizations embrace more complex modern application architectures based on microservices.

    “The destination is now clear,” he said.

    GitLab, meanwhile, has already signaled in 2020 that it will be adding value stream management capabilities to its namesake platform. Rather than trying to merge disparate code bases acquired by acquisitions, GitLab is building an end-to-end platform on a common code base, says Jackie Meshell, a senior product manager for GitLab.

    “We’re seeing the market follow that fast,” Meshell said.

    There are, of course, other approaches to value stream management applications that span multiple application development platforms, including offerings from Plutora, Tasktop and Panaya.

    Value stream management has become an industry buzzword of late as more organizations appreciate the degree to which their businesses now revolve around the rate at which software gets built and delivered. Value stream management applications are roughly the equivalent of business intelligence software for business managers, who pull metrics and data from application development platforms to determine whether projects are falling behind and what impact those delays might have on the business.

    Most business leaders are going to lean toward value stream management applications that can be applied across multiple application development platforms, said Bob Davis, chief marketing officer for Plutora. Few organizations are standardized on a single application development platform, he noted.

    While it’s still early days in terms of adopting value stream management applications, Davis said it’s already apparent that in the age of digital business transformation the category is red hot.

    “Value stream management these days is everywhere,” he said.

    It remains to be seen whether a strategy that focuses mainly on slower-moving enterprise IT organizations will succeed at a time when more agile startups continue to gain share at the expense of larger incumbents in almost every industry. Many of those enterprise IT organizations may get exposed to value stream management by acquiring a rival that has already adopted an application. Of course, it’s also just as likely that by the time many of those enterprise organizations reach the point where they need value stream management applications, it may be past the point where they remain relevant.

    Regardless of how they get there, however, wider adoption of value stream management as an extension of SDM is coming. The only unknown now is how and when.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Software AG Acquires Built.io to Advance Integration Strategy

    Software AG Acquires Built.io to Advance Integration Strategy

    Software AG has acquired Built.io as part of an effort to provide a multitier approach to application integration designed for different classes of developers.

    Subhash Ramachadran, senior vice president for product management at Software AG, said Built.io adds a low-code approach to integration in the form of a platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment developed using Node.js to a portfolio of technologies that include the webMethods platform.

    Ramachadran said the low-code approach will appeal more to so-called citizen integrators who are trying to integrate business processes with minimal intervention on the part of an IT team. Many of those capabilities are now expected to be delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that citizen developers can invoke on demand. Built.io, for example, already provides built-in support for more than 300 applications and services. Those tools, however, don’t replace the need for a set of integration frameworks aimed at more complex tasks that require professional developers, Ramachadran said.

    Increasingly, there are large numbers of use cases for integration that simply don’t require a professional developer to accomplish, he noted. In fact, the number of use cases that can be addressed by tools such as Built.io might be substantially larger than the use cases requiring a platform the size and scale of webMethods.

    Software AG’s goal is to create a single platform to provide organizations with multiple classes of integration frameworks that can be applied to different personas within an organization, Ramachadran said. A common platform eventually would make it possible for integrations of varying skill levels to collaborate more easily.

    Those frameworks could then be plugged into any continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform to enable various Software AG integration platforms to be natural extensions of a DevOps environment, he added. The webMethods integration platform already supports Kubernetes clusters and Docker containers as a runtime environment.

    As DevOps processes continue to evolve, Ramachadran said Software AG is betting that organizations will want to make it easier for different classes of developers working with multiple types of tools to collaborate.

    To facilitate that transition, Software AG now enables everything from sharing code via GitHub to deploying micro gateways for managing application programming interfaces (APIs) within the context of a set of microservices, he noted, adding those capabilities will only become more important as organizations begin to build highly distributed internet of things (IoT) applications running on a wide variety of platforms.

    Microservices, however, create something of a paradox when it comes to integration. On the one hand, frameworks such as Built.io will make it simpler for more organizations to integrate multiple microservices and legacy monolithic applications. On the other hand, microservices are making integration more challenging for many professional developers as they continue to expand across the enterprise.

    The challenge facing most organizations will be striking the right balance between microservices and existing monolithic applications, many of which don’t naturally lend themselves to being re-engineered into a series of microservices. In fact, in many cases it may be difficult to distinguish from an integration standpoint what constitutes a microservice versus a monolithic application, so long as both can be invoked using a simple API.

    — Mike Vizard