CloudBees Revisited: Openly pushing for software delivery management mastery

An Intellyx BrainCandy Brief

It’s been just over six months since we last visited with CloudBees upon their release of JenkinsX at the KubeCon 2018 Seattle conference. And while we don’t usually revisit companies this soon, the rate of change at this open source DevOps powerhouse is worth mentioning.

In April 2019, CloudBees announced the acquisition of Electric Cloud — perhaps the original open-source oriented, cloud-ready release automation and build acceleration vendor that has always been a huge advocate of the DevOps movement.

In addition, this month they just announced the acquisition of Rollout, which adds a unique feature flagging capability that spans from design to customer feedback, as new features can be graduated and rolled out to users, or rolled back, somewhat independently of the codebase itself. Think of it as testing different customer options in production — with feature-level decisions based on measurable outcomes.

The net-net of all this fast change is that we are now looking at a firm ready to claim its place at the executive table for what it calls SDM, or software delivery management. They already had the geek cred of tirelessly contributing to the most popular CI tool Jenkins, with hundreds of thousands of developer users and many more installs.

Continuous delivery and DevOps practices are carried into the modern era by good integration with the cloud-native and Kubernetes ecosystems. But success here requires both software and soft skills like education and evangelism to reach its full potential. If CloudBees can succeed taking their new SDM automation message into the world and showing results for enterprises, while still maintaining the good will of so many developers in the process, look out for a new digital business pipeline.

© 2019 Intellyx, LLC. Intellyx publishes the bi-weekly Cortex newsletter, and advises business executives, IT leaders and enterprise software vendors on their digital transformation initiatives. At the time of writing, none of the other vendors mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers.