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Tag: XebiaLabs

  • Digital.ai: The Companies Formerly Known As XebiaLabs and CollabNet Plus

    Digital.ai: The Companies Formerly Known As XebiaLabs and CollabNet Plus

    Another shoe has dropped in the continuing story of TPG Capital‘s foray into DevOps. The company formed by the merger of XebiaLabs and CollabNet VersionOne is now Digital.ai. Additionally, the company has acquired Arxan, a leader in application protection.

    Digital.ai logo

    I had a chance to catch up with Digital.ai’s CEO Ashok Reddy and Arxan COO Mark Lorion, who will be Digital.ai’s COO of Platform going forward. The video of our discussion which is also available on TechStrong.TV, appears below.

    What They Said

    Reddy made it very clear that Digital.ai is not content with simply adding this AppSec company to the mix. It is actively involved in due diligence operations on several other acquisitions. Reddy and the TPG team feel that the current COVID-19 situation affords those with cash to pick up some bargains. That may have been the case with Arxan, which was owned by private equity firm TA Associates, which acquired Arxan in 2013 for $132 million. TA may have decided it was time to get off the merry-go-round, given the unsettled state of things right now.

    In any event, TA’s loss is Digital.ai’s gain. Arxan adds some much-needed security muscle and a blue-chip bank customer list. But, of course, the real play here is building out the end-to-end DevOps company that will compete with GitLab, GitHub, CloudBees, JFrog and others. We detailed this market in an article when the original merger was announced.

    My take is that indeed Digital.ai is not a complete company just yet. It may not even be done in the DevSecOps space, as Arxan is not your typical DevSecOps technology. It may have been more of an opportunistic acquisition.

    Also, in terms of executive team, Reddy has been quietly assembling a team made up of some of the best people he worked with at previous stints at IBM, CA/Broadcom and the executives from the acquired companies.

    Stay tuned for more on Digital.ai’s continued evolution in the months to come.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chats: XebiaLabs/CollabNet Version One Merger Executive Discussion

    DevOps Chats: XebiaLabs/CollabNet Version One Merger Executive Discussion

    In this special DevOps Chats Video Edition we dive into the XebiaLabs/CollabNet Version One Merger. Joining us for this video discussion is the CEO of the new company, Ashok Reddy and President and former XebiaLabs CEO, Derek Langone.

    Ashok, Derek and devopsy.kinsta.cloud editor-in-chief, take a deep dive into the reasons for this merger and what it means in the end-to-end DevOps market.

    Have a listen for some great background on this merger and what we can expect to see in the market soon. Below is the transcript of the conversation if you would like to read along.

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another one of our—actually, our video DevOps Chat edition. Thanks for joining us.

    We have a great DevOps Chat video lined up for today. As many in our audience know and in the DevOps community, last week was a pretty exciting week with continued consolidation in the DevOps space. The big story was a merger, acquisition, private equity—I’ll let them define it, but the joining of XebiaLabs with the CollabNet VersionOne team, financed by a private equity company. And then kinda the surprise cherry on the cake was the addition of a CEO, a pretty well-known name to us in the DevOps community for both his days at IBM, CA/Broadcom, Ashok Reddy, as CEO. And we’re lucky enough to have Ashok Reddy, CEO of the new company. I’m gonna let Ashok handle the name.

    And joining Ashok is a friend of ours who needs no introduction in the DevOps space, our friend Derek Langone. Derek is the CEO of XebiaLabs, you know, one of the main companies in this merger, and Derek will be the president of the new entity going forward.

    So, Ashok, Derek—welcome to DevOps Chat. Thanks for joining us.

    Ashok Reddy: Thank you, Alan. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting us.

    Derek Langone: Hi, Alan.

    Shimel: Yeah—no, it’s great. Okay. So, guys, let’s jump into this. Ashok, as I said, you need no introduction in the DevOps space. You’ve accomplished, between mainframe and DevOps and IBM and CA, you’re an accomplished executive in this space. What motivated you to come on board here as the CEO of this new entity, and also would you mind—I don’t even know, I’m not sure what to call the new entity. Should I call it Xebia, CollabNet, some Newco? I’m not sure. So, go ahead.

    Reddy: Yeah, so start with that. I think we are working on, obviously, we’re doing a branding initiative. We’ll be coming up with a new name shortly.

    But as well, Alan, I think in terms of, you know, why did I join this is, it’s really, in the past, if you look at what I personally have done is focused more on transforming existing businesses, very large businesses, whether it’s in the Mainframe or in the large existing portfolios, and I think that was very good in terms of what I did there.

    But what I found here with TPG, as a private equity firm, which is very well known for transforming, the investments they make are really transforming industries. As examples, TPG was an investor in Spotify or Uber, an early investor in Airbnb and some other companies like Chobani and others where, they’ve kind of transformed the industry. So, when they had this thesis around DevOps is one of the most important transformational things going on in the industry, and there’s really, it’s not just a consolidation, but really, coming up with a true platform all the way from end to end, from how do you define value to how do you measure value and how do you plan and track and deploy and secure?

    To me, it was more of a sort of just transforming existing things to build out a new platform with, starting with some of the best of breed companies, right, technologies. So, to me, that was really what the attractive part is. Plus, you know, we can define—there’s no boundaries in terms of which industries and customers we want to, but really, truly focus outside in from the market perspective, and every company is becoming digital, everybody talks about that, but I don’t think we have a platform which really provides that.

    So, I think that’s really why I changed. And also, you know, in terms of the naming, as I said, we are still working on something which is, represents the broader platform we are building and not just the things, what we have today.

    Shimel: Fair enough. Derek, I’m gonna ask you a slight—I’m gonna ask you the same kind of subject, but slightly different. Hey, man, you’re CEO, you know, you’re the boss, and now you’re president of the new company which obviously still covers a lot of territory, a lot of responsibility. But, you know, as an organization, why did you feel it was best for Xebia to do this, and then you personally, right? Is this—where do you see, you know, what gets you excited about your role in this new adventure?

    Langone: Yeah, so, I’ll try to answer that a couple ways, Alan. First, from a business perspective, why this made sense—I mean, as you followed our progression at XebiaLabs over the years, you know, we’ve established ourselves as a premier vendor to large enterprises and helping them, you know, sort of realize real release orchestration and deployment automation and now reporting on important aspects of the software life cycle.

    And we’ve been able to gather meaningful clients, you know, the largest banks, insurance companies, airlines, health insurers use our platform because it’s so scalable and so robust. However, the feedback we got from customers quite often was,  “Hey, you know, you really only own a small slice of my life cycle, and what is sort of adjacent to you is a tapestry of individual tools that we’ve woven together, and it would be great if you had a wider footprint.”

    So, the opportunity with TPG, looking at the market, and the opportunity at the very, very top of the market in the Global 5000 to create an enterprise scale platform gave us the chance to consolidate with CollabNet VersionOne to put two best of breed technologies together to have much more of a horizontal influence on the software life cycle and the power of those two pieces together really does give you that formula of one plus one equals three or greater. So, that was what was exciting from a business perspective.

    For me personally, it’s terrific to be able to have Ashok as a leader in our organization and someone that I can learn from. And you’re absolutely right, I’ve been the CEO, so I’ve sort of been the boss. However, I’ll tell you, it’s an easy transition, for two reasons. Number one, Ashok’s a great leader with an incredible track record and a skill set that I would like to learn from. And then, number two, I haven’t been the boss at home for many years, so it was sort of an easy transition to not being the boss at work.

    Shimel: [Laughter] Amen to that, brother. I’m with ya. We won’t tell anyone—no one’s listening, though, don’t worry.

    So, we’ve got this new entity now, which represents the assets of CollabNet VersionOne, XebiaLabs kind of put together. Ashok, you mentioned sort of best of breed technologies within their places.

    Let’s lay it out for our audience, right? Where are the strengths of this new entity? Where is the best of breed functionality? You know, when we look, I call it the end to end DevOps kinda market, right, the players who are trying to do end to end DevOps. No one has the whole enchilada yet.

    But as you sit here today, gentleman, where do you see the strengths? Where are the real assets of this new entity today?

    Reddy: Yeah, no, I think it’s—so, let me start with, you know, when you start with the overall, it’s really, the focus is value stream management, for example. Companies who look at how do I measure value; how do I look at agile? From an agile planning perspective, I think there is, VersionOne is best of breed in the sense it was built ground up to be almost like a reference architecture for the same framework. If somebody is adopting the new, say, 5.0, for example, updated where it’s got value streams and how do I drive value streams—it’s actually built for it. All the way from how do I blueprint things to how do I create epics and stories to be able to plan and do the resource planning?

     So, that’s one aspect of it, but then the second part is, even with CollabNet, you know, people kind of forget CollabNet started many of this open source movement around Subversion and it’s, 35% of the market today still uses Subversion.

    But the Git part, which is where I find not many people know that, but you have Git which is secure Git. Because many times, there is many vectors, the three security vectors in enterprises—if you used distributed Git, you don’t get. And something like CollabNet actually has implemented really strong security protocols and a centralized way of managing, so you can actually manage Git in a centralized way with secure. And the people like Intel, you know, tens of thousands of people use it.

    So, you have a system of record in agile planning and resources to the source control and version management in CollabNet and in the TeamForge SCM, which is a part of GitAgile. Then, of course XebiaLabs. I mean, I think, you know, we competed with XebiaLabs in the past, but it’s really in terms of how XebiaLabs was, you know, both from a release automation to release orchestration, because it can do it without actually having scripts and people—scripts break in a transformation. Things change. The technology is platform agnostic. It can run on any cloud, supports on any cloud. And just being end to end, and now they have complete visibility with AI and machine learning.

    So, I think those are the three elements which I feel like are the best of breed. And then there are some things which we, you know, obviously, we’ll organically develop and then we’ll acquire other best of breed technologies. But I would say those are the strengths is connecting all the way—it’s not just orchestrating releases, you can now orchestrate business outcomes in a very agile fashion.

    Derek, did you want to add anything else?

    Langone: Yeah, I think, Ashok, you covered most of it, and you also said something important, which is our goal, to be that software life cycle system of record.

    But really, Alan, if you look at these two pieces together, what VersionOne has done for the engineering side of software life cycle, giving you that velocity and that sort of iterative agile approach. We’re trying to apply to the entire software life cycle. So, take those principles and apply them to release orchestration, deployment automation, and collect data along the way to be used for value stream, for compliance reporting, security reporting—things like that.

    So, essentially, create this platform that does a couple of things—gives you the ability to increase your velocity, scalability and so forth in your software factory, but the important element to understand about our approach is, even though we’re building an end to end solution, it’s going to be reliant on its integrations with all the best of breed tools that have already been invested in by these big organizations, right? So, I won’t name tools, but they’re very common CI tools, planning tools, provisioning tools, ITSM tools. We have all those integrations built out of the box. So, we leverage all of those investments as part of the process, so we’re not displacing any technology. Quite the contrary—those technologies come along with our process, and it allows them to be a part of the solution of that system of record validation for software life cycle.

    Shimel: You know, and I think it’s worth mentioning—many of those tools, Derek, are actually open source projects as well, right? Because open source plays such a big part in this.

    You brought up, what both you and Ashok said here brings up kinda two thoughts in my mind. Number one is, no one just wants a collection of disparate tools. We all want things that work together, right? And Xebia actually—truth be told, I’m much more familiar with XebiaLabs than I am with the CollabNet VersionOne suite. Xebia did a great job of integrating with open source tools, right, as well as third party tools.

    I wasn’t aware of a XebiaLabs CollabNet VersionOne integration, though. Are there any? What are the plans for them? Let’s hit that first and we’ll go from there. I don’t know if that’s an Ashok or a Derek thing, or maybe it’s too far in the weeds.

    Reddy: Yeah, we’ll—I think I’ll just say that, you know, as far as from a VersionOne and CollabNet perspective, I think there has been, I think, as you said, XebiaLabs has done a fantastic job with this periodic table type of things, tools in the DevOps tool chain. So, as part of that, the whole integration on SCM, the Git with CollabNet’s support for the GitAgile, there is already integration.

    There are some things in terms of more of API level integrations between VersionOne and a couple of the other things at XebiaLabs, but we are now strengthening that. But Derek, you may have, you know, some things based on what we have done in the past with Xebia and the CollabNet VersionOne that you may want to add other things.

    Langone: Yeah. So, Alan, to your question about the integration that exists today between CollabNet VersionOne and XebiaLabs—that’s been a long standing integration. We have several customers in common that have benefited from those technologies together, and frankly, that was one of the validation points when we decided to become part of this merger, that we had already seen customers benefit from these two technologies together and felt like if we did that in a more purposeful way, we could built out a higher degree of value for these customers and benefit ourselves by expanding our functionality on sort of both sides of the balance sheet.

    So, I think you’ll see much deeper integration and a lot of our opportunity to build out that value stream thesis by building these bridges to other products, including, you know, these two companies’ products, collecting that data, and then providing that data for these purposeful value stream management reports.

    You know, I look at it from a couple of perspectives. The data that we are collecting from all the tools in the process is used to give high degree performance measurement metrics, KPIs, things like that. Some of the unanswered questions that CIOs have been struggling with for years are, “Hey, I’m spending $500 million a year on Devs,” and now, for the first time, they will have that. And then, for really practical reasons, a lot of these customers that we have—big banks, insurance companies, airlines are heavily regulated, so we’re able to give them chain of custody reporting, compliance reporting, security reporting, testing coverage. Things like that, that have largely been unanswered questions for years.

    So, I think the power of these two technologies together and that deeper integration will only serve to provide more and more value from the information we collect.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, guys, excellent answers from both of you, and I understand what you’re saying. I think one of the—it’s sort of a, you know, this balancing act that we’re seeing, maybe it’s because it’s early in the game for the end to end DevOps provider. Because on one hand, you have to be open—you know, you have to be able to integrate with this whole multitude of tools that have grown up, some open source, some not, within that DevOps end to end software development and delivery life cycle, right?

    You know, so that’s out there, and if my hands go off the screen, I apologize. But at the same time, part of the allure, part of the benefit that we would get with an end to end DevOps solution is that, maybe I could use less. I don’t have to have all of these different tools that I have—I have one suite, one platform, right, that gives me a lot of it, right?

    And I understand, Derek, you framed it well, and Ashok, I know you’re familiar with it is, there’s this balancing act of, you gotta play nice with everyone. Because all of these companies are using all of these different tools, but at the same time, you know that your end game has to be, “I’m gonna try to give you as much as you can from one provider.” Is that—you know, and it’s a tough balancing act, frankly.

    Reddy: Yeah. No, I think, to me, if you look at the DevOps landscape—yes, there are, some of the vendors would say they have built out a single application or whatever. But the reality of it is that, you know, we can actually do the same thing with the type of capabilities from planning to tracking to SCM and, you know, some of the release, and as we buy other companies. We build it out, it’s completely integrated, and we make that work, right?

    But the only thing is, it’s, in enterprise Global 5000, many people already are using different things, and it’s, what’s an application in an enterprise? It’s typically a multi-tiered application. Some of it will be, you know, maybe an Android aspects, there will be a mobile app in iOS. So, you have to use Xcode, you have to use Git for something, you have to use Jenkins and you may have to use now, in a multi-cloud, Spinnaker.

    So, I don’t think there will be a choice to just use something from one vendor on everything. But even if it did that, we are saying that we can still provide that entire end to end from one vendor, or you actually have an option to replace parts of it because you’re already using something, and things get updated, even open source. You said open source is everywhere, and it’s going to continue to change because of innovation. So, accommodating that, and then, is it compliant, is it secure? That’s a big aspect of it.

    And one other thing which I think is important, Alan, is it’s not—you know, from a DevOps and agile perspective, it’s not just about the tooling and the end to end. It’s really about the transformation and the cultural parts of it and coming in with more of agile cultures and others, which is what we do a lot, and customers start with that. You know, people can use all sorts of tools, they deploy a thousand times a day, but that doesn’t get them the business outcomes and how do I transform them to work? To me, that’s another aspect of it which we are to consider. Even if you have one tool, how do you change the culture, how do you get people to change in a constantly changing world?

    Shimel: Absolutely. Guys, I’d like to move in a different area, if it’s okay. We’ve spoken about sort of what the market looks like and what the strengths are. You know, we wouldn’t be fair and balanced if we didn’t talk about maybe what the weaknesses are or where. And I don’t mean weaknesses, but where—where do you see places where this new entity can improve from the current lineup? Whether it be building organically or buying, right? You know, it was—at the announcement of the merger, it was made pretty clear that this isn’t gonna be the last acquisition or merger, that there were funds set aside for more acquisition activity. I assume you’ll also be building holistic additions to the platform in the suite.

    In what areas can we expect to see additional functionality added here?

    Reddy: Yeah, I think it’s a great point. I mean, we—I mean, you start with the life cycle. I mean, obviously, in the front end, you know, we have the whole notion of planning and then how do you actually track things and how do you deploy. But then, you know, the quality is a big aspect of it, right? The whole continuous quality, the continuous testing is something we obviously can integrate today with many of those things, other products and open source technologies. But if you think about from a platform perspective, I do expect, you know, some sort of continuous testing and quality as a key aspect.

    The other one is, you know, security. Because I think, especially with applications and the more and more data driven applications, security is a key aspect. And some form of more feedback—we have some feedback loops built into every aspect of our platform, but I do say from a customer experience monitoring perspective, being able to bring in some of the feedback loops is important.

    So, Derek, do you have any other thoughts in terms of the various areas we could improve based on some of the customer interactions you’ve been having?

    Langone: Yeah, Ashok, I think you hit on the fundamental part to DevOps transformation. So, I think that, you know, we’ve got an eye towards that functionality, and whether we have, you know, sort of an inorganic, acquisitive approach to that or primarily a partnering approach. I think we’ll continue to kinda round out that functionality.

    And again, it has to dovetail back with our thesis. We are building a platform for the enterprise that has all of the elements required of enterprises, right? These businesses are heavily regulated, so security is front of mind, quality of what they release out to their customers and consume internally is top of mind, right?

    So, again, when we look at how we build out this platform, there’s gonna be a few elements to it, but it will all be towards the approach of giving best of breed functionality and then always staying open, because we are gonna have to work around investments that have been made in the enterprise.

    So, we recognize that this is not the end of the story and we’re moving aggressively to round out the story from a product and messaging standpoint, and that’ll be an endeavor that happens in earnest throughout the rest of this calendar year.

    Shimel: Fantastic. I’ll just add one thing to that—Ashok, I long for the day that when you say, quality, we mean security. Right? Security has to become synonymous with quality, and then, hopefully, we’ll really start achieving what we need to achieve in security—not just in DevOps, but in IT in general, and in business in general.

    Guys, I wanna thank you. We’ve only got a few more minutes, here. I wanted to just kinda bring us towards our end goal line with this thought and get both of your opinions on it. You know, you’re talking to the devopsy.kinsta.cloud community. It’s probably the largest singular focused community on DevOps in the world today, worldwide, right? It’s a worldwide community. I want you to look in the camera and talk to the audience. As DevOps practitioners, why should they care? Why is this new entity important to them? Why do they need to take a good look at this?

    Reddy: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, part of the—I mean, I’ve worked with the DevOps community for many years now. And I think, you know, I find they’re really the, what I call, the digital athletes of the digital transformation, right? Because I think, when you look at the DevOps engineers and the community, they are the ones who are helping change the companies they work for. I mean, everybody is trying to become a digital business. They are the heroes—I mean, I use the Nike analogy of just get it done, just get IT done. And who does that? It’s the DevOps community.

    And so, what happens is, it’s the ops, to me, is the constraints enterprises have, which is, I want to go fast, everybody talks about going fast and speed, but you need a direction. But you have the constraints of, you need to still be reliable. SRE is a big aspect. So, I want to shift left. So, you want to be compliant, you want to have quality. So, you can’t just go fast.

    So, the challenges with what DevOps engineers are trying to do is, how do I go fast, but still have the reliability, the quality, the security, and still transform the companies they’re trying to do and remove the constraints for the business to go faster in an ever changing world? To me, that’s what we provide with this platform is really to help them make much more productive and make sure that we remove the constraints. They can—even if they are working for a large enterprise, they can still have the benefits of being a born in the cloud company and not have the constraints.

    That, to me, is one of the fundamental things. And they are the digital athletes of the world. And so, to me, that’s really what we are here for, to support the chief digital officers to everybody who is transforming, but the DevOps engineers of the community is who are making this happen.

    Shimel: Fair.

    Langone: That’s a great point, Ashok. And I think, Alan, to just add a little emphasis—you know, what we’re trying to build is a platform that provides functionality that’s complementary to the activity that’s already going on today, right? So, you had mentioned it earlier that, you know, as you’re making these changes inside an organization, a lot of it is sort of people changing their day to day routines, right? So, you know, being more agile, following new processes and things like that.

    What our goal is, is to provide functionality that a lot of the change has abstracted from the user, right? So, in other words, DevOps engineers continue to use the same tools that they were using months ago and weeks ago in the same way, but they plug into a process that’s largely abstracted from them, but gets all the benefits that—delivers all the benefits that an enterprise needs, right? So, to try to make the change and the transition that’s required to really embrace DevOps as, you know, as lightweight and as little impact on people’s days as possible.

    So, that’s really the goal, is to provide functionality that has not existed before, and do it in a way that doesn’t have to require changes of behavior.

    Shimel: Fair enough. Ashok Reddy, CEO of CollabNet VersionOne Xebia, until we find a different name; Derek Langone, president of the entity as well—thank you for joining us, both, today on DevOps Chat.

    We’re gonna—you know what, we’re gonna be watching. This is a great story, it’ll be interesting to see how it progresses, right, both in terms of mergers and acquisitions activity as well as in terms of just—hey, man, this end to end, as I wrote about last week, this end to end DevOps market is open for the taking. There is no one, I think, who really has that whole story yet. It’s a developing thing, and it’ll be interesting to see, you know, how the market in our community helps pick the winners here as well as what you guys do with it, right? It’s yours for the taking.

    Best of luck to both of you and to the combined company.

    Reddy: Thank you, Alan.

    Langone: Thank you. Good to talk to you.

    Shimel: Great talking to both of you. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Thanks for joining us on this DevOps Special Edition Video Chat. Stay tuned, and we’ll see you soon.

    — 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

  • CollabNet VersionOne and XebiaLabs Combine to Create Integrated Agile DevOps Platform

    • Combined Company announces new CEO to drive next phase of growth

     

    • Transaction, backed by TPG Capital, marks a transformational step in a broader strategy to create a leading, integrated Agile DevOps platform for enterprises

     

    Atlanta and Boston – January 21, 2020 – CollabNet VersionOne (CollabNet), a leading provider for Agile planning and collaborative development, and XebiaLabs, the leader in release orchestration, deployment, and continuous delivery, announced today that the two companies have merged. The combination, which was backed by TPG Capital, unites CollabNet’s upstream Agile planning and enterprise version control functionality with XebiaLabs’ downstream release orchestration and deployment automation capabilities to create an Agile, end-to-end, DevOps platform for enterprises.

     

    In connection with the transaction, Ashok Reddy, an accomplished industry veteran and former Broadcom executive, has joined the combined company as CEO. He replaces Flint Brenton, who is stepping aside to focus on family and personal interests after nearly five years of successful stewardship. Derek Langone, current CEO of XebiaLabs, will serve as President of the combined company. Stephen Gregorio, EVP and CFO of XebiaLabs, will serve as the combined company’s CFO.

     

    “The combination of CollabNet and XebiaLabs will provide enterprise customers with the end-to-end visibility and management capabilities needed to develop software quickly, reliably, and securely, ultimately helping accelerate their digital transformation and drive business outcomes,” said Nehal Raj and Art Heidrich of TPG Capital. “We congratulate Flint on a successful tenure, and look forward to partnering with Ashok, Derek, and the broader team to further accelerate our strategy to create a leading enterprise DevOps platform company.”

     

    Founded in 2008, XebiaLabs is a high-growth provider of release management and automation developer tools. The company provides release orchestration and application delivery software that enables enterprises to orchestrate, automate, and analyze the entire software release pipeline at enterprise scale. XebiaLabs’ downstream capabilities complement CollabNet’s upstream product portfolio, which includes VersionOne for enterprise Agile planning and management, VS for connected workflows and visibility throughout the entire delivery value stream, and TeamForge for enterprise-scale version control management and application lifecycle management. Both companies’ platforms and tools are recognized by analysts as industry-leading offerings that drive innovation into the market.

     

    “We are on a mission to fundamentally transform how enterprise software development and delivery is done,” said Reddy. “The combination of CollabNet and XebiaLabs will provide a platform that enables digital transformation at scale with Agile and DevOps processes to continuously adapt, learn, and improve, especially in a world of AI-driven intelligent apps and experiences. I am thrilled to be joining at this critical juncture and look forward to working with the entire team to lead the combined company through its next chapter of growth.”

     

    “XebiaLabs has established itself as the standard for DevOps in large enterprises. Counting among our clients the world’s largest financial, healthcare, and manufacturing companies, our focus has been on creating a platform that takes advantage of existing tooling and processes while providing the scale, standardization, security, and reporting that large companies require,” said Langone. “I am thankful for what we have been able to achieve with the support of Susquehanna Growth Equity and Accel. By combining XebiaLabs and CollabNet, our mutual clients will now benefit from the most capable Agile DevOps platform available in the market. This is a game changer for businesses that need to maximize their software application assets while navigating complex regulatory, compliance, and security requirements.”

     

    Most recently, Reddy led Broadcom’s multibillion-dollar Enterprise Software Division, where he helped create a platform for global enterprises to scale their digital transformations and become real-time digital businesses. With a career spanning more than 25 years in enterprise software and deep experience in Agile and DevOps transformation, Reddy has held leadership positions at several Fortune 500 companies including IBM, CA Technologies, Rational Software, Honeywell, and Novartis. Reddy will work closely with Langone and Gregorio, both experienced software executives, to lead the combined company.

     

    “I thank my colleagues at CollabNet for the success created by their hard work and dedication,” said Brenton. “While I am proud of all we have built together, I have decided it is the right time for me to return to California and begin the next chapter of my life. CollabNet and XebiaLabs are in strong and capable hands with Ashok, Derek, and TPG Capital, and I am confident that under their leadership, the combined company will achieve even greater success and scale.”

     

    Barclays, Evercore, and KeyBanc served as financial advisors to TPG Capital and CollabNet, and Ropes & Gray LLP served as legal counsel. Shea & Company served as financial advisor to XebiaLabs, and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP served as legal counsel. XebiaLabs’ existing shareholders, Susquehanna Growth Equity and Accel, have sold their respective stakes in the company as part of the combination. Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

     

    About CollabNet VersionOne

    CollabNet VersionOne is a leading platform provider for Value Stream Management, Agile planning, DevOps and source code management. Its offerings provide global enterprise and government industry leaders a cohesive solution that enables them to ideate, create and orchestrate the flow of value through continuous delivery pipelines with measurable business outcomes. To learn more visit: www.collab.net  

     

    About XebiaLabs

    XebiaLabs’ mission is to help large companies accelerate their software releases with more reliability – no matter how diverse the infrastructure or complex the processes. The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform is the industry’s only end-to-end DevOps toolchain orchestration and reporting solution, providing the automation, control, and visibility enterprises need to deliver software faster and with less risk. With the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform, organizations can connect all their DevOps tools, manage their interactions, deploy to any environment, and create a data hub for reporting, without ad-hoc scripting and endless maintenance. For more information, please visit www.xebialabs.com.

     

    About TPG

    TPG is a leading global alternative asset firm founded in 1992 with more than $119 billion of assets under management and offices in Austin, Beijing, Boston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Hong Kong, Houston, London, Luxembourg, Melbourne, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, and Singapore. TPG’s investment platforms are across a wide range of asset classes, including private equity, growth equity, real estate, credit, and public equity. TPG aims to build dynamic products and options for its investors while also instituting discipline and operational excellence across the investment strategy and performance of its portfolio. For more information, visit www.tpg.com

     

  • New XebiaLabs DevOps Prediction Engine Uses Machine Learning to Deliver a “Weather Forecast” for Software Delivery

    BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–XebiaLabs, the recognized leader in enterprise-class DevOps and Continuous Delivery software tools, today announced the first predictive risk solution for DevOps that warns teams of delays and risks in the software delivery process. Using a new DevOps Prediction Engine, the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform’s Risk Prediction Module combines machine learning with a proprietary algorithm to give teams a “weather forecast” for their releases before those releases even start to run.

    Software Releases Often Plagued by Unforeseen Release Delays and Failures

    It’s hard for DevOps teams to predict factors that will delay releases or cause them to fail—and teams are often surprised by failures after release processes have already started, leaving them scrambling to roll back changes and resolve errors.

    DevOps Prediction Engine Shines Light on Release Problems Before They Happen

    The XebiaLabs DevOps Prediction Engine highlights potential bottlenecks before release processes start, so Release Managers, Developers, and DevOps Engineers can take preventative action, adjust timelines, and keep the business in the loop. Powerful predictive risk analysis enables DevOps teams to answer questions such as:

    • What are the chances this release will fail, and what can we do about it?
    • Is this release likely to be delayed, and by how long?
    • How likely is a team member to skip specific release tasks, and why?
    • What caused releases like this one to fail or be delayed in the past?

    Predictive Risk Analysis Prevents a Release Disaster

    XebiaLabs already provides customizable risk scoring that identifies warning signs during a release process to indicate when it is not on track. Now, the company has added a new Risk Forecast Function to the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform. Powered by a machine learning-based DevOps Prediction Engine, it offers the following capabilities:

    • Risk alerts that warn the team when a release is likely to be delayed or to fail, before the release pipeline starts running, so they can take preventative action
    • A comprehensive Risk Forecast view that summarizes predicted delays and failures for every task in the release process, so teams can drill down into the specific parts of the process that are likely to cause issues
    • An overview of statistics for similar releases, so teams can see historical analysis at a glance and identify trends in both release and task failure, across all tools in their release pipeline
    • Release forensics that uncover flaky automated tests, problematic build setups, long-running deployments, and time-consuming manual tasks, so teams can identify their biggest pain points and make the changes that will have the most impact on their ability to deliver software quickly and reliably

    “The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform has long included advanced features for enabling organizations to reduce the potential for risk failure,” said Andreas Prins, Vice President of Product Strategy for XebiaLabs. “The XebiaLabs Predictive DevOps Engine is another huge step forward towards increasing IT teams’ ability to move away from reactive management of their releases, to a proactive approach that preempts failure and optimizes their pipelines for success.”

    Learn More

    About XebiaLabs

    XebiaLabs develops enterprise-scale Continuous Delivery and DevOps software, providing companies with the visibility, automation and control they need to deliver software faster and with less risk. Global market leaders

     

  • DevOps Chat: The CEO’s View with Derek Langone, XebiaLabs

    DevOps Chat: The CEO’s View with Derek Langone, XebiaLabs

    This DevOps Chat features “the CEO’s view” as seen by XebiaLabs CEO, Derek Langone. Derek is one of my personal favorite CEOs in the DevOps space because he is very articulate, to the point and sharp. I think all of these characteristics come through in this DevOps Chat. As CEO of XebiaLabs, Derek is leading one of the leading companies helping transformations in enterprise DevOps. In this chat, Derek talks about with us about cloud and cloud migration.

    As usual, the streaming media of our conversation is below. The transcript of our conversation follows below that.

     Audio

    Transcript

    [su_pullquote align=”right”][su_custom_gallery source=”media: 122032″ link=”post” target=”blank” width=”200″ height=”200″ title=”never”]Derek Langone
    Derek Langone has been the Chief Executive Officer of XebiaLabs, Inc. since April 21, 2015. Mr. Langone served an Executive Vice President of Global Sales at Telerik, Inc. since February 2014. Prior to Telerik, he served as the Chief Executive Officer of 5nine Software where, in less than a year, he significantly increased revenue, lead generation and conversion rates. He served as the Chief Executive Officer, President and Chief Operating Officer of SmartBear Software, Inc. (also known as AutomatedQA Corporation). He served as the President and Chief Operating Officer of SmartBear, Inc. He began his career on Wall Street focused on technology investing. For over 15 years, he has focused on building and scaling Technical Sales Organizations. Prior to SmartBear, he served as Vice President of Sales at Quest Software and IMCEDA Software. He held senior Sales Positions at Vality Technology, (now IBM), Embarcadero and SAP America. He is an Industry Veteran, has more than 15 years of expertise in cultivating enterprise IT and application development adoption. He has been a Director at XebiaLabs, Inc. since April 21, 2015. Mr. Langone holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management from Boston University.[/su_pullquote]    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another DevOps chat.  Happy to be joined today on DevOps chat by Derek Langone, CEO of Xebia Labs.  Hey Derek, how are you

    Derek Langone: Alan, I’m excellent, thanks very much for having me today.

    Shimel: Thank you. Just a heads-up to our audience, I had been working on this for a long time. Derek’s agreed to be sort of a regular guest here on DevOps Chat and we’re looking forward to hearing from him, oh, maybe once a month or so on topics that are of interest to hopefully our whole audience so you know they’ll be around DevOps and related to technologies.

    So, this is the first one we’re doing and we were going to talk today a little bit about cloud and whether you already are a cloud customer or new to the cloud, how can DevOps and related technologies help you.

    But before we do, Derek, in case there’s anyone out there who maybe is not familiar with Xebia Labs, you want to give them a real quick kind of pitch on Xebia Labs and what you guys are doing?

    Langone: Sure, here’s the 30-second commercial. So, Xebia Labs is entirely focused on enterprise DevOps. We provide a software platform for large enterprises that encompasses three primary components, released orchestration so basically create your pipelines in our technology that are templated, repeatable, standardized, use our automated deployment engine which is a model-based agentless engine.

    And then lastly, we have a machine-learning and AI-oriented reporting engine that collects all the data associated with your journey from development to production. It allows you to report on that for things like compliance purposes, regulatory purposes, security, and just a good old-fashioned scorecard – am I going faster? Is my quality up? Are my customers happier?

    Shimel: Couldn’t have asked for more than that in 30 seconds, Derek, thanks. So, here’s the deal, we are approaching I think this year a threshold in cloud adoption where it’s something like 50 percent of enterprises will have significant infrastructure in the cloud, not just a toe in the water or an R&D project, but significant infrastructure in the cloud.
    And that’s big, right?That means half of all enterprises have a large investment in cloud. But it also means half, don’t, right? And that’s always the flip side of the coin. I want to talk today to both of these audiences but let’s first start with the half that already has, right?

    They’ve invested a lot time, a lot of money, probably a lot software or tools and personnel, but maybe they’re not getting everything they need out of their cloud deployment? How can DevOps help?

    Langone: Well, DevOps by principle is sort of an accelerate opportunity, right? And if you look at a cloud investment, it’s a similar value proposition that you don’t have the requirement to manage this infrastructure, you’ve got less administrative overhead, you’ve just got on-demand, scalable infrastructure. So, that’s all oriented around speed.

    The challenges we see with our customers that are generally large enterprises, the biggest banks, insurance companies, airlines, in the world represent our customer base. They’re moving aggressively to the cloud because it’s just generally less expensive and certainly much less administrative overhead.

    But the consequences, the applications they’re trying to get there are very complex and don’t necessarily lend themselves to moving to the cloud very neatly. And what I mean by that is if you use an example like a large bank might have a money transfer application, core to every business that’s a big financial institution.

    That application lives in many places; the back-end horsepower may be a mainframe, there’s referential databases that do some validation every time there’s a query. You’ve got distributed architecture, maybe a containerized front end that gives you your mobile banking access and things like that.

    Moving all of that to the cloud is not simple, it really requires an incredible amount of orchestration, some very sophisticated deployment functionality. And we see most of our customers when we get engaged, them trying to do that with either the simple tools that come with the cloud platform providers, you know, the out-of-the-box Amazon or Azure tool portfolio.

    Or in most cases, just using the good old- fashioned, using extremely talented valuable developers to write tons of scripts to try to move these components around and shift them to the cloud. Neither of those initiatives are generally successful.

    Shimel: And I think you just hit it, Derek. Those are the two ends of the dumbbell if you will, right? One is to use the vanilla tools that the cloud providers give you and not to bang anyone but AWS is notorious for this, right?

    They give you 60 percent of the functionality at a really low, low price of some of the best __ tools but it comes bundled. Or you go the other way, right, just totally customize the heck out of things, which is not scalable usually, nor repeatable.

    Langone: No, it’s not, that’s the challenge. And just to hit those two ends of the dumb-bell as you said, the tools that come with the cloud providers, I mean, look, they’re sort of minimalistic by nature because it’s not the core business that they’re trying to provide. They’re infrastructure providers, they’re really not deployment technologists, right?

    So they’re gonna give you a little bit to get some basic applications there but anything complex is really gonna fall down. And like you said, the other side of it is, and the more traditional approach, is just using your engineering assets to write a ton of scripts to provision infrastructure, to migrate applications, to request instances.

    You know, it’s just an incredible amount of plumbing code that gets written that is super low-value and basically comes at the expense of much higher value activities that those engineers could be participating in, things like building new features and fixing bugs and just basically delivering more customer value.

    Shimel: And with that approach, Derek, to me it’s always been, well, what happens next month when I have to do this again? I’m gonna rewrite all the scripts, waste all that time? It just doesn’t make sense. But you hit on this with your opening, the reality is that most of these organizations who may already have significant infrastructure in the cloud are not totally in the public cloud certainly.

    They still do have mainframes, they have stuff in the closet, they have stuff in the data center. They’re living in a hybrid world, right, Derek? And so for whatever reason, and I’ve heard this from numerous, they hate the idea of using one tool for their public cloud stuff, one tool for their on-print stuff, one tool for their private cloud. They want one throat to choke, right? They want one tool.

    Langone: Well, I think they want one platform that can kind of account for the migration and IT landscape that they are going through, right?

    Shimel: Yes.

    Derek Langone:And that’s sort of what we’ve tried to build at Xebia Labs. We work with the legacy infrastructure and give you velocity, repeatability, standardization for your mainframe deployments in the exact same way that we will accelerate your journey to containers and leveraging Kubernetes and Docker as well as, you know, getting onto what is generally hybrid cloud infrastructure.

    We definitely see large organizations leveraging things like Amazon but in most cases, they’ve got some combination of a data-center cloud that they’ve got under their own control, as well as the sort of less mission-critical applications or the things that don’t represent the family jewels if you will in true public cloud infrastructure.

    And when I talked to CIOs in these organizations about their aggressive shift to the cloud, they look at me and say, look, we’re moving to the cloud with a lot of new development and some of the less mission-critical applications but the five apps that we run the bank on are gonna be running on mainframes five years from now.

    That’s not changing. We can’t break them up into micro-services and they don’t lend themselves to refactoring. We’re gonna continue to just add, you know, additional workload front ends but for the most part, they’re gonna stay intact. And that just represents I think the reality in enterprises.

    Shimel: And that is dead on the reality. And I just want to make sure we’re talking about tools like Xebia actually give these organizations the ability to use one platform across these multiple infrastructures.

    Langone: Yeah, I mean, look, I don’t want to just plug our platform because there’s others out there, there’s others out there, but at the end of the day, yes, what we’ve tried to do is basically build the technology that can accommodate the mission-critical requirements of a large enterprise. So, not only have we baked in the ability to deploy any technology from any starting point to any destination including public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, containers, you name it, right?

    We’ve also baked in all of the things that enterprises need to account for, like the compliance steps, the security steps, the who did what and when to the software reporting, so that all of these standards are met if you’re migrating to infrastructure that’s off of your own premises.

    None of those business requirements go away. In fact, in most cases, they get a little bit more stringent as the security team start to understand that if you’re gonna move applications outside of the firewall of the organization, then we need to put even more validation steps and security procedures in place.

    And again, if you’re doing this manually with engineers, they need to script for all of that activity and maintain it every time there’s a slight change in the application.

    It just becomes 50 percent of an engineer’s day managing these scripts that were built to move applications around when they could be using that 50 percent of their day to do things that are much, much more interesting for them and much more valuable to the organization.

    Shimel: Sure, I mean, and again, we’re not tooting Xebia’s horn here but you know what, Derek, from a manager-executive point of view maybe listening to this, knowing that there are tools like that that will allow them to go across these different infrastructures, single platform, is important. I mean, that was always one of the big inhibitors.

    Langone: No, you’re absolutely right, and look, what we’re tried to build into our platform is this templated approach. We have a model-based architecture, it’s agentless so you create templates and every single application that you have to move from development to production follows one of maybe three or four templates.

    And we’re talking 3 to 4 templates account for 500 different applications, whereas the alternative is you’re basically hand-scripting 500 different paths to production. So it’s much easier to maintain, it’s centralized, it’s controlled, there’s reporting, there’s visibility, there’s sort of all the things that you need to be able to score your process for migrating applications, whether it be to the cloud, the containers, or just frankly, to an existing data center.

    So, that’s really an important consideration. The other piece to consider, and again, a place where we’ve put a lot focus in our platform is leveraging what you’re doing already. So, we are a part of the process but you’ve got provisioning tools, like Puppet and Chef, you’ve got service ticketing, like Service Now or Gira, Jenkins on the CI side.

    A lot of technologies are required to move applications from one destination to the next, so we integrate with all that infrastructure that’s already running right out of the box, and we basically allow you to pick best-of-breed components so that you’re not locked into one specific vendor. And that’s been a lot of the feedback that we get from our particularly big financial services customers.

    They like the fact that if they want to switch cloud providers on the fly and move from Amazon to Rat Space or from Rat Space to Azure, they can do that with changing one configuration file in our product rather than having to rescript everything from scratch to reach a new destination.

    So, it really comes down to you avoid vendor lock-in, but when you want to make a pivot, that pivot in our technology and our platform takes five minutes versus months of scripting. 

    Shimel: Months, exactly. So, Derek, let’s make our own pivot, let’s talk about the other 50 percent of companies that aren’t moving major infrastructure to the cloud, or big parts of their infrastructure to the cloud. Let’s first of all say should they? Should they feel they’re getting left behind? Is it fatal to their business? What’s your feeling?

    Langone: You know, I think every IT organization makes choices that line up to the business objectives of their firm. I wouldn’t say that the shift to cloud is mandatory. There’s certainly a strong value proposition associated with it. It’s very, very expensive to keep technology infrastructure fresh. That’s always been the issue.

    You could build the data center but then, you know, 18 months later, all the technology in there is sort of out of rev, right? So you’re forced to buy it over and over and over again versus the cloud providers. You’re certainly paying the rental fee and that rental fee can be steep but you’ve always got state-of-the-art infrastructure to work against, and that’s just a very compelling argument.

    The other pieces, the administrative element goes away so there’s less people required to maintain it because it’s getting maintained for you. But the majority of our customers are moving to the cloud but for specific reasons and with specific applications, right? They’re not just wholesale-lifting their entire application portfolio to the cloud because it’s just not practical.

    So in the cases of customers that are still on premise, and that’s still the majority of large enterprises, I am not at all a cloud-denier. People are moving there and moving there aggressively, but when you look at large enterprises, I think your number was 50 percent are using and 50 percent are not.

    My on the ground sort of feeling is it’s less than 50 percent that are aggressively using the cloud for many different reasons, not the least of which are just security concern that still sort of haunt these large organizations. But the fact is anywhere your applications reside, right now DevOps is a good investment.

    Being able to increase the velocity at which you can build technology and deliver value through software to your end users is sort of a fundamental requirement nowadays in order to stay competitive in your own given space.

    So, we help with velocity, like I said earlier, on mainframes distributed technology, legacy systems, building a repeatable standardized release and deployment process with all the reporting that you’d expect to be able to identify where you’ve got areas of friction that can be remedied.

    So, we sort of approach with the same – our approach is the exact same whether it’s a legacy application or a nimble application that’s being written in containers to run in cloud infrastructure.
    The templates are the same, the mechanics of how you release and deploy those applications is the exact same.

    So, the beauty of our platform becomes anybody can use it, it’s understood, it’s centrally managed and it scales infinitely versus writing code which just is difficult and impossible to maintain over time. 

    Shimel: Sure. So, Derek, you brought an interesting point up though and it was one that I wanted to hit on. And that is, look, for those who are just moving to cloud, right, there’s a choice to be made. Do I take my inherited legacy, not so much infrastructure as much as my legacy stack and just port this existing stuff to the cloud?

    Or do I really just bite the bullet in Greenfield, right? Like, my stuff hasn’t been built on containers, maybe it wasn’t even built on hypervisors and virtualizations – who knows? But you know what, if I’m gonna move to the cloud, the heck with it, I might as well containerize and take advantage of micro-services and all of this.

    But my goodness, that’s such a major, you know, throwing out babies with bathwater potential. What’s your advice to companies faced with do I just port my existing architecture, or do I go for broke in more ways than one and adopt the new stuff?

    Langone: Yeah, I’ll tell you, in my experience, and I wouldn’t want to give advice ’cause every company sort of has to line up against their business objectives. But what I will tell you, what we see most often is people threading the needle, right? Basically taking these monolithic applications and starting to build components of those applications in containers on sort of more nimble infrastructure.

    You know, a good example, as I mentioned earlier, a money transfer app, right? That’s a legacy application that’s been running in a big bank for 25 years. The horsepower on the back end that does all the computations is still a couple of IBM mainframes strung together. But you’ve got referential databases that are living in distributed architecture maybe onsite, maybe offsite in the cloud somewhere.

    You’ve got containerized and mobile-centric front ends so you could do your mobile banking, web banking, things like that. So, that application lives in a lot of different places and you can, with some small investment in more nimble development platforms and infrastructure on the front end, really energize and give life to these legacy applications.

    So, there isn’t a need to move the entire thing to the cloud. You can move components of it to the cloud, but again, when you do that, you get the benefit of the faster architecture and the ability to deliver value through your software more frequently for your end users.

    But the consequences, getting those components to the cloud becomes really complex and that’s where our technology really lends a hand, where we understand those complexities, we’ve accounted for them already.

    We do this sort of every day for the biggest banks in the world so you can take advantage of not having to reinvent the wheel and still get the benefit of the velocity that you’re looking for and the flexibility you’re looking for in these applications that need to live on.

    Shimel: You know what, Derek, that was one of the best examples of hybrid cloud that I’ve heard. I think for too many people they think of hybrid cloud, they say, well, this application lives in the cloud, this application lives on my mainframe, this application lives in a data-center, my payroll system is here, my HR system is there, but that’s not really hybrid cloud.

    Hybrid cloud is we have one application that different elements and components of it live in this hybrid world, right?

    Langone: Yes, I think there’s a misunderstanding that you’re either in the cloud or you’re not, right? The fact is, I think, that in most cases, most of our clients, you’ve sort of got one leg in both places.

    Shimel: Yeah, at the same time.

    Langone: You’ve got I’m somewhat in the cloud, and they make decisions relative to where can I get the biggest bang for my buck? Some of this application needs to be in the cloud for a bunch of reasons so let’s do it, and then we’re just not gonna forklift up our mainframe apps and dump them on AWS. It’s a cost-ineffective strategy; we’d have to refactor them like crazy.

    So, yeah, and I don’t think that trend is gonna change, right? There’s certainly a bunch of Greenfield development that’s going on, containerized apps micro-services, just cloud-centric development. And that’s great but that represents generally less than ten percent of the application portfolio in a large organization.

    And that’s the fact is that 90 percent of the apps have been around for five years or longer, and those apps are critical to the business.
    And they, over time, will migrate to the cloud and be refactored and rewritten.

    But it’s just too big of an endeavor for any large company to take a 1000-application portfolio and say, hey, this year we’re going to rewrite all these for the cloud. I mean, I don’t know anybody that’s doing that.

    Shimel: I would hope not. Hey, Derek, I think I told you before we started, time goes really quick here. We’re at maybe 25 minutes now, we were supposed to be 15, so we could probably talk about this all day, but we’ll continue the conversation on our next visit with you.

    But, hey, this was great, Derek Langone, CEO, Xebia Labs. Thanks for being our guest on DevOps Chat today and we hope to have you back real soon here.

    Langone: Thanks, Alan, talk to you soon.

    Shimel: All right, this is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, we’ll see you soon on another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Automic Chart Maps Out Its DevOps Ecosystem

    Automic Chart Maps Out Its DevOps Ecosystem

    Everyone who follows me knows that I’m a fan of XebiaLabs’ Periodic Table of DevOps Tools. It was the first attempt I am aware of to arrange things in a way that helped DevOps teams navigate the increasingly bewildering world of DevOps toolsets. In fact, my friend Colin Walker over at ExtraHop and I have been planning to pick some up for our offices for a year or so.

    (Add on note: It sounds like I’ll be getting a copy of the XebiaLabs poster. Woo hoo!)

    Visit the interactive version.

    So this week when I found out about Automic’s chart—let’s call it “The Spider” because of the way it branches out—I thought I’d let you all know that it is also out there. The cool part about The Spider, in my opinion, is the interactivity (which means I still want the XebiaLabs poster for my office). You can click on a node, get information about the tool and be presented with a link to the tools’ website—and, if they’re integrated with Automic, a link to the integration in their marketplace.

    For quick research, this is a nice chart. I wouldn’t want to have to maintain it, at the rate the market is changing, but it’s a useful starting point for “I need a tool that does X” and exploring short one or two paragraph descriptions of each of the options. It’s not complete, but it would be a full-time job to make such a chart complete and keep it up to date, and it’s pretty far along. You won’t miss any major vendors in a space by starting with The Spider.

    I clicked around and looked at the writeups for several products, and they read well. Considering that Automic is a vendor (they’re owned by CA, so kind of an über-vendor) in the space, it would not have surprised me to find they were limited or slanted in their writeups, but they weren’t. So I asked Scott Wilson, product marketing director for release automation, about that, and he told me they actually wanted to couch the details in the framing that each vendor used. Considering that Automic has a plug-in architecture that interfaces to many of these products, I suppose that makes sense. And making sense or not, it’s good for us, because we don’t have to pry apart two layers of vendor-speak to figure out how a product can help.

    If you’re trying to figure out the CD market, or a subset of that market, this is another good tool to have access to, so thought you all would be interested. The plan is to keep it up to date, so hopefully it is useful for a while moving forward.

    — Don Macvittie

  • DevOps Chat: DevOps & CD with Tim Butel, XebiaLabs

    DevOps Chat: DevOps & CD with Tim Butel, XebiaLabs

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud caught up with Tim Butel, VP of Products at XebiaLabs. Tim discussed some of the latest trends in DevOps & continuous delivery (CD) with us. He also gave us a great update on what XebiaLabs has been up to recently and why organizations including Gartner and others consider XebiaLabs a leader in the category.

    Tim also gave us some great insight into how he has progressed in his own career. How can someone listening to this try to set out on a similar career path? Tim’s journey may prove helpful to you.

    As usual, below is the streaming audio of our conversation and below that is the transcript of our conversation, Enjoy!

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud here, for another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat’s guest is Tim Buntel, VP of products at XebiaLabs. Tim, welcome.

    Tim Buntel: Thanks so much, Alan. It’s a pleasure to be joining you today.

    Shimel: Yep. Well, no, it’s our pleasure to have you here. So, Tim, I know you’re fairly new, though not really new new to Xebia, but how long have you been on board there now?

    Buntel: Yeah, so it’s coming up on about six months now, so long enough to have had a couple releases and seen where we’re going as an organization and start to chip in, but can’t take too much credit for all the success of the company yet.

    Shimel: No. Okay, fair enough. And then, Tim, VP of Product. So you’re—give our listeners what exactly does that entail in terms of your responsibilities.

    Buntel: Yeah certainly. So, you know, my team brings together product management, user experience, and all of the folks who are basically bridging the needs of the market to the rest of the organization. So we’re looking strategically at where we want to invest in new features in the products, we’re bringing requirements back to the engineering team, we’re designing the solutions for the features, and then we help bring that back out to the market. So interacting with the analysts and press, interacting, you know, in the support capacity to sales and that sort of thing. So really being that conduit between the market and the customer’s needs and all of the activities that are happening in the organization.

    Shimel: Great. And Tim, you know, we might have some people out there who are a little younger, starting out in their careers, and they hear, wow, this guy is VP of Product at a company like Xebia. Can you give you listeners, give us a little bit of background, so what sort of qualifications, what experience did you bring to this position that kind of, you know, makes you able to succeed at it?

    Buntel: Hmm. Yeah, I mean, product is a great role for folks who really want to help be the advocate for their customers. So in my case, my whole career has been in Dev tools and building businesses that create product that other software engineering companies, you know, sell and use. So I ran the developer tools business at Atlassian, I’ve worked for Microsoft and Adobe, I’ve done a couple of startups that are in the Dev tools space myself.

    But the most important thing was originally I came from a development background myself. So as a developer, I was able to understand the challenges that development organizations faced. So often when I talk to professionals who are in this space, you know, maybe you are a DevOps engineer or you’re a software professional and you like solving problems, and you have a keen sort of interest in the people, right? So talking to people, understanding what their problems are, and then being able to creatively come up with solutions to those problems, that you can turn into a product so that you’re not only solving one person’s problem, but you can turn it into a product that solves that problem at scale for a market. Those are really the qualities that are most important for the job. So understanding the space and the domain—understanding, you know, in my case, what it means to build software—and then wanting to work with other creative people to find solutions to those problems, that can translate into a road map of features in your product portfolio.

    Shimel: Excellent, excellent answer, and I hope our listeners or anyone who might be interested in that topic takes that to heart, Tim. I think there was some great advice and lesson there. So let’s turn a little bit, Tim, though, and talk about Xebia, right, and to kind of lay the groundwork, to you, what is XebiaLabs really all about? What is the secret sauce of XebiaLabs, if you will?

    Buntel: [Laughs] Yeah. I mean, I think for me, the most important thing about us is that we’re really focused 100 percent on continuous delivery. We’re an independent company and that’s all we do. So every day we wake up and we figure how can we help other software organizations, generally they’re enterprise IT teams, how can we help them deliver better software faster, with less risk, right? So we combine many years of experience in that area. We were looking at deployment automation, as much as seven years ago now, I guess, so really before the term DevOps was even broadly adopted, we were solving these problems for large enterprises. And to this day, we continue to do that. So we are able to solve really large-scale enterprise problems because it’s 100 percent of our focus.

    Shimel: Excellent. And so that being said, Tim, now that we know sort of what Xebia is about, I guess fair to say what attracted you to this position? You have a long resume of success with some very, very successful companies, obviously. What was it about Xebia that said, man, this is where I want to be?

    Buntel: Yeah. Well, it’s really the culmination of a lot of the pieces that I’ve been working on in my whole career. So if you look at a software engineering organization today, many of the products that I’ve worked on constitute elements of that technology landscape that they have, right? So everything from issue tracking systems and collaboration tools at the beginning, through source code control and build tools and deployment tools, all the way to the end, to monitoring and user feedback, right? This is a great assortment of individual products, but it also results in a fairly chaotic landscape. So if you’re an organization trying to apply all of that at scale, keeping track and orchestrating all of that together has consistently been a challenge, right?

    So for me, this opportunity to step in and say, okay, the next really important challenge in doing continuous delivery at scale is to orchestrate all of those pieces, and that’s what we’re really focused on at XebiaLabs right now. So XL Release, for example, is release orchestration automation tool that does just that. So we can help organizations automate and manage that process for even the most complex pipelines, and for me, that was a great next step, right? So I had worked on some of these individual pieces that were solving very specific parts of a development team’s challenge, and now I’m able to step back and offer a solution that helps sit above all of that and really make all of those pieces fit together. It’s like a conductor in a symphony, you know, being able to get the most out of each individual musician. That’s kind of what we’re doing for all of these other great parts of the continuous delivery pipeline.

    Shimel: Excellent, excellent, excellent. So, Tim, why don’t we—we’ll continue on the Xebia topic here for a while. What’s new? What’s new, what’s exciting coming out of Xebia these days?

    Buntel: Yeah, there’s some great work that we’re doing. You know, we continue to get great recognition from the analysts and press, we’re getting some great coverage from Gardner and Forrester recently, which is really exciting for us. And what we continue to hear both from them and from our customers themselves is that because we’re focused entirely on the continuous delivery piece, we’re able to offer some insight into our users in a way that, you know, individual point solutions aren’t necessarily able to do that. So a large emphasis for us is on this kind of reporting and insight, being able to analyze the performance of your continuous delivery process and kind of your DevOps organization. That could be through reporting, it could be through analytics, helping organizations find out where bottlenecks might be in their process. So it’s not just managing things, but it’s helping guide you toward ways to improve the efficiency of your program, and even to help folks measure the ROI of that.

    So lots of organizations are trying to adopt DevOps and continuous delivery, and in many cases, it’s difficult for them to know what’s the ROI of that. So a big emphasis on our tools lately is on that aspect. So helping you get insight into your continuous delivery process, and we’re doing that in a way that’s extensible and supports integrations with pretty much any technology that you’re likely to find in the enterprise DevOps stack.

    So that’s one piece, the insight and analysis part. The other piece that I think is a real strength of ours, that’s very exciting for me, is the breadth of participants in the process that are successful with our products. So a lot of solutions that are out there helping organizations with continuous delivery are really focused on the most technical people in the process, right? So they’re very script-focused, they tend to be very technical, and really, in the enterprise, the people who are participating in continuous delivery or DevOps initiatives more broadly, they’re coming from a lot of different backgrounds. You might have, you know, less-technical business owners, you might have risk or compliance professionals, and a host of managers and other stakeholders besides the real technical teams.

    And one approach that’s been really centered to our product development recently is to make sure that the products are approachable, they have a great user experience, they are easy to use, they’re easy to understand, regardless of the degree of technical expertise in the user, while at the same time still satisfying all the needs that the most technical parts of the team have. So you can fully automate and fully script all of our solutions. We’ve got full API access and CLI capabilities as well. But the spirit of DevOps as a social process as much as a technical process can only be successful when the products are appropriate for folks with a range of different experiences. So that’s another really key focus for us now.

    Shimel: Yep. What about the bigger—Tim, what about the bigger DevOps market, and how Xebia is sort of playing in that. We’re starting to see, you know, DevOps Express, for instance, was announced two weeks ago at Jenkins. But, you know, I think that’s a symptom of a bigger—I don’t want to say disease, that’s the wrong word, but a symptom of a bigger thing, which is sort of interoperability, right? No one DevOps tool is gonna do all your DevOps for you, right? So what – you know, what do you think about that kind of trend, if you will?

    Buntel: Sure, certainly. You know, in fact, I can point to something that XebiaLabs has been running for the last couple of years now, probably, that really illustrates that beautifully. That’s our periodic table of DevOps. I don’t know if your listeners are familiar with it, but you can find it on our site, and it’s a, you know, a play on the periodic table of the elements, that’s cataloguing all of the different technologies that are typically present in, you know, a DevOps or continuous delivery stack. Everything from ticketing systems through STMs and builds and provisioning tools and all that.

    And it’s community-sourced, so folks vote on the technologies that they use and the things that are most important to them. And we have a new tool now that’s part of that, that allows you to define the pieces of technology that are part of your enterprise IT environment, and it’ll help display kind of what your DevOps environment might look like, based on the combination of all of those technologies. But my point there was that, yeah, exactly as you said, it’s such a cluttered landscape and it’s growing at such an explosive pace, right? There seems to be a new open-source technology that’s looking at a different piece of the puzzle that comes up almost weekly, right?

    So the challenge that we see for professionals that are in this space, especially in the enterprise, where you might be managing the development initiatives across different geographic locations and teams who are trying to be empowered to select their own technology is how do you centralize that and manage that while still balancing the control that you need as an enterprise, with the autonomy that you want to give your individual development teams to pick and choose the technologies that are best for them. our approach for it in our product is to really focus on integrations. So we have, you know, both of our products really emphasize integrations first, so that we can build integrations as they come to all of these emerging technologies, as well as the established and even older technologies. Everything from mainframe to the most recent sort of container or container management systems, we’re able to integrate with because we’ve built our products in this loosely coupled integration-based way. So that’s certainly something to look for if you’re considering how to construct your own continuous delivery or DevOps, you know, sort of landscape. Make sure that the products put integration at the center of how they’re able to hook together.

    Shimel: Got it. So, Tim, believe it or not, we—I told you we’d do this for 12 minutes, and we’re at 15.

    [Laughter]

    Shimel: It happens. Just one last question, and if you have an answer for it, fine, if not, it’s okay, but I usually always like to ask my guests if you had to recommend a book to our audience to read, a must read, what book would you recommend? It can’t be “The Phoenix Project,” by the way. We’ve already got that one, but go ahead.

    Buntel: [Laughs] Yeah. Well, yeah, well, you know, on my desk right now I’ve got sort of the following on “The Phoenix Project,” right? We have the new “DevOps Handbook,” from Gene Kim and Jez Humble, and we’re getting a lot of interest from our customers in that book, and, you know, we talk to Gene a lot and he has some really great insight. So I’m pretty excited—I’m about halfway through that, and there’s some really terrific case studies and great, practical, you know, kind of illustrations of how this actually works in real world technology and organizations out there. So that’s a great one for me, the latest.

    Shimel: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting, a very different sort of focus than the first one. But anyway—

    Buntel: I love that—I love that there’s a good focus on metrics in this one as well. That’s something that I’m personally really interested in, is, you know, this ROI of DevOps initiatives, and I think he’s got some great case studies in there that help measure that.

    Shimel: Well, Gene is a metric nut.

    Buntel: That’s right.

    Shimel: So anyway, Tim, we’re at the end of time, really, we’ve got to wrap. Tim Buntel, VP product XebiaLabs. Thank you so much for being this episode’s guest on DevOps Chat. Hope to see you soon, and we’ll catch up again, all right?

    Buntel: Thank you so much, Alan, and look forward to talking to you again sometime soon.

    Shimel: Okay. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. See you on the next DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • XebiaLabs Opens Sold-Out DevOps Leadership Summit

    BOSTON, MA–(Marketwired – Jun 16, 2016) –  XebiaLabs (http://www.xebialabs.com), a recognized leader in DevOps and Continuous Delivery software tools, today announced the opening of its DevOps Leadership Summit at the iconic EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

    The DevOps Leadership Summit is a full day event bringing together some of the most advanced DevOps experts sharing best practices and enterprise case studies. The event features industry thought leaders and authors Dave Farley and Andrew Phillips, along with DevOps experts from companies such as ING, KPN, NJM Insurance Group, Rabobank, DUO, Stater and Wirecard.

    “We are excited to bring together such an exceptional group of industry experts and welcome our customers from around the world,” said Derek Langone, CEO of XebiaLabs. “Attendees will have the opportunity to learn from some of the most experienced Continuous Delivery experts, discuss complex enterprise DevOps use cases and network with their peers throughout the event.”

    The event opens today, June 16th 2016 at 9am. To view the full agenda and learn more about the DevOps Leadership Summit, please visit www.xebialabs.com/devops-leadership-summit/.

    About XebiaLabs
    XebiaLabs develops enterprise-scale Continuous Delivery and DevOps software, providing companies with the visibility, automation and control they need to deliver software faster and with less risk. Global market leaders rely on XebiaLabs to meet the increasing demand for accelerated and more reliable software releases. For more information, please visit http://www.xebialabs.com.

    Media Contact:

    Victor Cruz
    Principal
    MediaPR
    vcruz@mediapr.net

  • XebiaLabs Unveils “Periodic Table of DevOps Tools” v.2

    Highly Popular Free DevOps Market Landscape Tool Updated With New Members and More Features

    BOSTON, MA–(Marketwired – Jun 14, 2016) – XebiaLabs (www.xebialabs.com), a recognized leader in DevOps and Continuous Delivery software tools, today announced the release ofThe Periodic Table of DevOps Tools v.2, a major update of its free, industry recognized DevOps landscape tool. The latest release of this highly popular tool provides an updated DevOps landscape and users can now dive deeper into each tool, finding tool descriptions, Twitter handles, plugins and related tools.

    Understanding the DevOps tooling landscape is a major pain point for IT professionals as enterprises are looking to deploy DevOps tools and practices to increase competitiveness and deliver better software faster and with less risk.

    With its unique market overview and simple format, the Periodic Table of DevOps Tools has become a standard reference tool for IT professions.

    “We have seen interest from hundreds of thousands of users across our website and in social media since we launched the first version of the Periodic Table of DevOps Tools,” said Gottfried Sehringer, Chief Marketing Officer at XebiaLabs. “Version 2 has been highly anticipated and we are delighted to have had the help of the entire DevOps community to update this free tool, and provide an easy to understand overview of the complex and fast moving DevOps market.”

    The second generation of the Periodic Table of DevOps tools adds some new members, provides a new look into the world of DevOps and adds more in-depth visibility into its various tools and categories therein. It also introduces new animations, a completely responsive platform for visibility on any device, and a tooling repository.

    The Periodic Table of DevOps Tools v.2 has been updated based on the crowd-sourced interactive tool “DevOps Hot or Not,” as well as community and industry expert feedback.

    The Periodic Table of DevOps Tools v.2 is available for free today and can be viewed at:https://xebialabs.com/periodic-table-of-devops-tools/

    About XebiaLabs
    XebiaLabs develops enterprise-scale Continuous Delivery and DevOps software, providing companies with the visibility, automation and control they need to deliver software faster and with less risk. Global market leaders rely on XebiaLabs to meet the increasing demand for accelerated and more reliable software releases. For more information, please visit http://www.xebialabs.com.

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