DevOps pioneer CloudBees has named Stephen DeWitt as its new CEO as the company positions for further growth and the possibility of an initial public offering.
DeWitt will take over the CEO role from company co-founder Sacha Labourey, who is transitioning to become the chief strategy officer. Labourey helped found CloudBees in 2010, and it has since raised more than $120 million in venture capital. The company got its start around the open-source Jenkins project, which provides automation capabilities to enable DevOps processes, including continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Today, CloudBees provides an enterprise software delivery platform for DevOps.
The market for DevOps tools is becoming increasingly competitive and lucrative, with multiple vendors trying to gain share, among them being JFrog, which had its IPO in September 2020. While CloudBees has not publicly stated when or if it plans to have an IPO, it is something that DeWitt has had experience with during his long career. Prior to joining CloudBees, DeWitt was the chief strategy officer at Automation Anywhere, and he has served as CEO of multiple vendors over the years, including WorkMarket, Azul Systems and Cobalt Networks.
"I don't think it's too early to talk about an IPO, but it's a journey," DeWitt told ITPro Today. "In order to go public — and I've taken companies public before — there are so many things you have to be ready for, as the public markets are unforgiving."
CloudBees Pushing Forward on Business Resilience Approach
At DevOps World 2020 hosted by CloudBees, business resilience was the primary message and the focus of new technologies that emerged from the virtual event — and that remains a focus in 2021.
Labourey told ITPro Today that his company is now doing a lot of work to provide automated audit and compliance capabilities across the entire software development lifecycle. Automated compliance is particularly important now, according to Labourey, with a distributed work-from-home developer base and the need to maintain consistency and software quality.
Looking Beyond Jenkins at CD Foundation
CloudBees is one of the founding members of the Continuous Development Foundation (CD Foundation) and has contributed both the Jenkins (the first project to graduate from the CD Foundation in August 2020) and JenkinsX projects to the effort.
Other projects at the CD Foundation include the Spinnaker continuous delivery technology and the Tekton cloud-native CI/CD platform. Labourey noted that Spinnaker and Tekton are both important projects in the DevOps landscape.
"We definitely think we have some ambition for some of those products to play a more important role as part of our offerings down the road," Labourey said.
