CloudBees will refresh its CI/CD pipeline automation tools with the intellectual property it acquired from ReleaseIQ, in a bid to alleviate setup headaches and refine the approach to its product under new leadership.
CloudBees has undergone many changes in management and product roadmap since 2019. Changes for CloudBees began that year with the acquisitions of Electric Cloud, which offers release orchestration and value stream management features, and Rollout, a feature flags vendor.
Those acquisitions laid the foundation for a planned software delivery management (SDM) tool next year, parts of which were delivered in late 2020. In 2021, the vendor appointed a new CEO, Stephen DeWitt, who integrated SDM into a centralized CloudBees Platform and led the company toward a focus on compliance automation with CloudBees Compliance. Earlier this year, however, DeWitt stepped down for undisclosed personal reasons, and another new CEO, Anuj Kapur, took over in August.
The ReleaseIQ acquisition for an undisclosed amount announced this week resets the company’s product direction. This time, the focus is on SaaS-based management, integration with the latest cloud-based CI/CD pipeline tools, ease of use and quick setup.
“One of the big differences [with ReleaseIQ] is the delivery model is SaaS, it’s hybrid,” CloudBees CMO Shawn Ahmed said last week at a media briefing. “We didn’t have it then.”
CloudBees officials originally outlined plans to offer SDM as SaaS, but this never materialized. CloudBees Platform also offers centralized views across multiple CI/CD pipelines, but only for CloudBees and open source Jenkins environments. ReleaseIQ also supports CI/CD tools from CircleCI, GitLab, Bamboo, ArgoCD and GitHub Actions. Users can drag and drop elements of these pipelines into the desired workflow using a low-code UI that displays near-real-time monitoring data on application deployments.
This approach to CI/CD pipeline management doesn’t require the kind of upfront “deep release orchestration thinking” that existing platforms do, according to Sacha Labourey, co-founder and chief strategy officer at CloudBees.
If you see the Jenkins ecosystem as a pyramid, we’re very focused on the end of the pyramid — what ReleaseIQ enables is opening new doors and new markets for us.
Sacha LaboureyChief strategy officer, CloudBees
“Historically, CloudBees has focused heavily on CloudBees CI on normalizing and cleaning up relatively large Jenkins environments, so mostly larger customers,” Labourey said at the media briefing. “If you see the Jenkins ecosystem as a pyramid, we’re very focused on the end of the pyramid — what ReleaseIQ enables is opening new doors and new markets for us, to start providing value to others’ t different types of Jenkins [users].”
Existing customers do not need to switch to ReleaseIQ. The two companies have integrated their products, and the CloudBees Platform will remain available for on-premises use. Existing CloudBees Platform customers will also get “aligned pricing” with ReleaseIQ’s SaaS and hybrid tools, Ahmed said, but he did not disclose pricing numbers. In the long term, the plan is to unify the data repositories underlying both ReleaseIQ and CloudBees Platform, laying the groundwork for possible AIOps automation features, according to Ahmed.
CloudBees fills the gaps, but has yet to disrupt a new industry
CloudBees’ newer products appear to address a difficult problem faced by one of its large customers, offering multiple stakeholder views of CI/CD pipelines for continuous compliance.
Fidelity Investments is still evaluating CloudBees Compliance for its use in its DevOps platform, according to Gerard McMahon, head of application lifecycle management (ALM) tools and platforms at the Boston-based financial services company.
Fidelity’s platform uses homegrown tools to collect compliance data, but the company is looking for ways to visualize and report that data for business stakeholders, McMahon said.
“We’re looking at how to make digital compliance data transparent, how that data can actually be used for compliance controls and also give auditors and risk managers visuals into what the world looks like inside Fidelity from a software perspective,” he said during a Q&A during the CloudBees media briefing presentation.
Meanwhile, “there’s a need for release orchestration” like ReleaseIQ offers, McMahon said. “Even the smallest of applications can have multiple pipelines.”
This may be the reality CloudBees has faced as it tries to execute its previous strategy to reduce pipeline sprawl and streamline Jenkins deployments for large enterprise customers, said Jon Collins, vice president of research at analyst firm GigaOm.
“The way the world has become is that deploying software is a more in-your-face problem than getting pipelines right — people have less brain space for these things than as we think,” Collins said in an interview. “It’s hard enough to make a decision about what to have for dinner tonight, let alone getting developers in 5,000 different apps to agree on a common core pipeline.”
That CloudBees is still growing top-line revenue amid management and product strategy changes is a testament to the strong advantage it has in Jenkins’ large and entrenched install base, Collins said.
But to expand its growth beyond that base, CloudBees will also need to focus on how to be a more strategic vendor for business stakeholders, and work on sales outside of engineering teams, he said.
“This acquisition is a gap-fill — ReleaseIQ’s big strength is SaaS, which is a necessary thing, but not really a feature play or the most impressive thing,” Collins said. “CloudBees still needs to expand its view of the world from being very tech-focused to providing more hooks for more non-tech-focused stakeholders.”
ReleaseIQ represents a few steps forward in that regard, “but we can all roll up data on a dashboard,” Collins said. Such “bottom-up” views of engineering workflows are necessary, but Collins said CloudBees will also need to refresh the “top-down” approach it started when it acquired the value management portfolio Electric Cloud stream.
CloudBees’ competitors such as Atlassian have made more progress in this area over the past two years, in Collins’ view. Atlassian and GitLab, for example, began offering enterprise service management and product management tools targeting business buyers. ServiceNow, which still primarily sells ITSM software, has also begun to compete for the attention of business managers tasked with digital transformation efforts with their own focus on enterprise services.
“Ultimately, the problem to solve is portfolio management, business deliverables and customer experience,” Collins said. “As long as you’re looking at things from that engineering perspective, you’re always looking to improve engineering, but it exists to serve a broader purpose.”
Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @PariseauTT.
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