ReleaseIQ Acquisition – Sacha Labourey and Shawn Ahmed, CloudBees

This is Textron TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throne.

We're here with Sasha laberay. Who's the chief strategy officer for cloudbees? And we are joined by Sean Ahmed who's the chief marketing officer?

And we're talking about their acquisition of release IQ a provider of an orchestration tool. I'm gonna let them explain what that's all about. But Sasha welcome the show.

Thank you. Mike happy to be with you today. All right, same to you Shawn.

Thanks for being you. Thank you. Great to be here.

So Sasha, maybe you can explain just where does this fit into the overall Cloud B strategy since after all you're in charge of the Strategic? That's a good point. I should know.

Yeah, so so we're seeing a lot of organization phase the need to really orchestrate a number of pipelines across the organization and the lacking is the central way to do it in a very simple way and so really like you is very interesting because it solves a number or it has a number of characteristics that I think are extremely appealing to to our customers it is you know, we have this strategy at cloudbees. We talk about Embrace don't replace right. This idea is that companies have made a number of Investments different teams have done different Investments and yet all of this needs to to work together right in the end.

You might have a back-end team front-end team and so on and two days they tend to be isolated pipeline is already teams and it's pretty hard to both orchestrate the work across those easily, but also get a sense visualize how those things are taking place. So reason IQ is this amazing sass that makes it about that makes it possible to orchestrate using lots of different Technologies. Not just Jenkins anything that can do pipelines pretty much in the devops space.

And then you get to visualize all of this. It has also an easy-to-use front end. So low code type of user experience.

And yeah, so it's I'll pose there. But but essentially it's a great way to work history pipelines and teams. Now you guys already had flow.

So where does that fit in compared to this? And what is the relationship between the two women? Yeah, so really is IQ is a software as a service flow which is cloud.

BCD is software and so that participate to our journey towards assess where today more than 85% of our Revenue still come from software, but it's clear that our customers are moving towards SAS at their pace and so it participate to to that journey and it makes it very very easy essentially to to get started with those unification of pipeline wherever they are. They can be existing SAS, or they can be software assets we can do it all so so that's that's how it fits and and Cloud be CD tends to be also a software that has a lot of depths in in a lot of the I would say more classic use case in the organization, right so you can have everything from yes for Android to VMS to to doctor to kubern. So extreme depth to to automate a lot of those workloads and and really like you makes it very very easy and email yet to start orchestrating workflows in the cloud and it's also a great way to have a multi-cloud strategy.

For example John do you think that more and more of the control plane around devops tools is gonna be shifting up into the cloud and we're regardless of where the actual cicd platform since but the actual mechanism for managing the whole thing might be sitting up in the cloud more often than it is on premise over time. I think definitely there is a movement towards the cloud. I think most organization still do still continue to find themselves in a hybrid world one at which they have to manage both their assets as software behind the firewall some assets are you know going to be in the cloud but you kind of have to look at that picture and kind of divide it up a little bit.

It's your workloads first and foremost. It's your applications. It's your systems and processes.

These are all sort of across both the cloud and and behind the firewall. So when we look at an organization that needs to support any type of application whether it might be a legacy app or a, you know, a core application, whether it's more Cloud native and modern applications the key is that they need to have the flexibility to manage them as they need to without doing a ton of retooling and and rebuilding everything from Ground up. So the approach we see our customers take is is try to manage them all together.

And in that scope, I think with Cloud beasts what we are able to do with release IQ is now to address each and every one of those use cases whether it's modern whether it's Legacy, whether it's software whether it's Cloud they have a place to start with us and we meet them where they are. All right, Sasha people have closely associated Cloud bees with Jenkins over time in southern the question becomes what kind of company is Cloud B is going to evolve into these days is it's going to be so Jenkins Centric or to your point the tool it works with other ci/cd platforms. So how should people be thinking about Cloud these days is a company and what is the longer term vision?

Yeah, so Jenkins is clearly core asset of and of our culture. It's it's a key element a lot of things revolve around Jenkins and Jenkins is here to stay right it's it's easy to imagine a planet without oxygen. It's a bit harder to imagine the Earth without oxygen.

So I think it's hard to imagine the devops landscape without Jenkins. So it's it's here to stay and it's it's doing really well. So it's it's core to our strategy but it's not the only thing that defined our strategy and we've already made a bunch of moves in the last few years.

We feature management with compliance with flow as you call in your Cloud be CD with electric Cloud acquisition and so on. So we're a lot more than current would just Jenkins but Jenkins is definitely a key part of what we do to that effect. If you look at realize you for example, I'm very happy about what it's enables because it also It possible for cloud bees to further extend the type of interaction.

We're having with the Jenkins communities of Jenkins user base. Because typically historically cloud-based has been a relatively focused on on very I don't want to call it calls them sophisticated, but at least large scale type of Jenkins deployment right several thousands of developers and so on. So that's really an area where where we can bring a lot of value.

We really like you interestingly. I think we will be able to bring value to a lot of Jenkins accounts. Lots of Jenkins companies is that are of very different sizes.

You might have two Jenkins or one for you know development QA production. So three Jenkins and and yet you need to work as trade that you need to extract insight and so on and maybe you don't want to Accord migrate the cloud BCI and normalize your environment you just want value as is. Well, we really like you you just create an account on the SAS put a plug-in in your Jenkins instances and voila in 10 minutes you have even Use that you didn't have before.

So if anything when we do those type of moves moves, we're very sensitive about what it means for our Jenkins Community because it's it's very important to us. John how is the devops community evolving and early on everything was kind of driven from the bottom up by practitioners and they worked on individual projects and they brought in Jenkins are we starting to see more sea level people getting involved because they've discovered that devops is kind of corded digital transformation and there's a larger conversation starting to occur. And what does that look like?

It's it's a great question indeed the devops efforts today. I think is no longer a bottoms only motion for practitioners. It's in fact a as much a business oriented plenty of view and its connection to the business is ever.

So more important. You've got sea level Executives that make large amounts of investments in their devops efforts, whether it's tooling the practice whether it's the organizational aspect of it. And one of the things they struggle with a lot is to just get a view of that value stream from you know, what we put input into it the ideas that we add and how is it actually getting to the customer ultimately generating and creating value.

So from the aspect of just managing the value chain on a day-to-day basis of how is my software being produced but all so the next level which is how it's a generating value is a critical question in in sea level executive's mind. And this is one area where I think release IQ does I really tremendous job is to pray create essentially a value stream view above the orchestration layer such that the very very large amount of ease, you know a business user or a manager or a developer or even a sea level executive can take a look into the system. And look at software being created see it by application see it by a team see it by a release and view its journey into end very easily and how and where that value is being released how often it's being released where it's being released to and furthermore connected to business-centric metrics Etc to do more definitive analysis around the value impact is having and that's sort of the power of release orchestration as a use cases in itself.

Is that once you start tying in these disparate pipelines and automations that you have in your organization. You get a real true first opportunity for sea level Executives to see the value stream in a single flow connected in such a way that you can draw value from the view in a very easy way. All right, Sasha speaking of that.

This orchestration tool is released in my mind very closely tied to continuous delivery. We have seen people do well with continuous integration continuous delivery has been more of a challenge and more of a struggle for a lot of organizations. How do you think this will advance that whole issue because it seems CD is kind of core to digital transformation these days and there's a lot more focus on the whole issue.

Yeah, it's a good question. I think every journey is different but it's a journey in any case and so whatever we can do to further the path to that destination is is a right step in the right direction. Right?

So some other organizations might have a challenge in the way they can link those different pipelines together. Well, that's great. That's exactly what research situation will help them achieve others feel like there is a lack of ownership in terms of getting the release, right?

They still want to get that process and they feel that it's not an easy thing where they have a unified view on maybe multiple different applications. Well that can that can help it we can help her is there as well, right? It might be around mastering that last mile of actual deployment which a number of organization haven't been able to do.

Well you can do it here or you know, we talk about Cloud this compliance. It might be because they feel like They they're doing good progress in terms of gaining the last City, but maybe there is a loss of peace of mind that organization are are suffering from and so there is always this balance right? I want to go faster but not if it comes at the expense of security and and peace of mind.

So how you keep those two things in check. So I think organization need to find their own way. It doesn't it's not just around tools.

If you don't have tools it's going to be very complicated. But if you have tools doesn't magically solve it and so that's why I think with our approach we get to come and help organization a different steps and known bottleneck along the way. We're typically we see heartburn take place.

Hmm Shawn Jenkins has been around for a long time and it's been extended and there's there's a these tool chains that exist in their quite complicated in some cases. Are you seeing an effort to consolidate the tool chains a little bit or are we still seeing developers want to be able to swap in whatever new tool they find and they want that kind of flexibility and and freedom and so how do we balance? You know, the Need For Freedom in some sense of centralization?

Yeah, that's A an observation that is is very good observation. And so the question look I think technology in general and the methods by which were writing code the tools that we're using. These are not slowing down that technology landscape continues to accelerate quite a bit new tools are popping up all the time, whether they're open source or commercial new methodologies new types of ways to make applications.

The best tool for the job is going to continue to rain dominant in my opinion because developers need to be able to use the tools that they believe are the right tools to do the job. Which is why it's so fundamental that you get a Best of Both Worlds because you want to let developers have the choice to choose the tools that they're going to use whether it's the Ops Team whether it's the developers whether it's security teams, they have to use the right tools along the way and be able to choose the best tool for the job. So I think that continues to stay so how do you get the best of both worlds that centralization at the same time as freedom of choice and that's where we think release IQ is incredibly unique in its approach in that and and this goes for cloud bees ethos in general.

We've always been a company that Embraces that tool chain instead of trying to replace in centralize it we understand that we can connect to that and generate a tremendous amount of value for our customers to get the same outcomes that you get from centralization without having to replace the tool chains. I think that's key to our value proposition in the same goes with This acquisition of release IQ. The whole concept is connect to the tools that you already have.

We're not going to force you into making centralization or replacement choices and your tool chain because we recognize so the ease with which you connect to that tool chain the ease with which you then orchestrate it is superior. So you get the effects of having, you know, a single pipeline you get the effects of having and the impacts that you want to drive from having a single release orchestration flow in a single value stream, but you get all of that value without having to replace and that's going to continue to be I think the right winning combination in the devops space moving forward and I think we're poised pretty well to to capitalize on that. Sasha there are any number of tools and they all have interesting metadata that's inside them.

It's part of this whole effort some way to capture that data in a way that makes it actionable for the business versus, you know forcing some sort of overlay on top of the process to gather that level of intelligence. Can we just pull the data that's already in the tools and find some interesting way to capture that and present that in a way that the business can go aha. We see what's going on and we know where help is required or we know what application is going to be delivered when and what dependencies there are.

Yeah, it's a great point a hundred percent. So it's sometimes confusing because it feels like by saying oh Embrace don't replace. We mean our chaos, right?

We're we're embracing chaos and the fact that you have a thousand things around you but those thousand things are the reality. Can you get to less? Chaos, yeah, potentially and it's always good to simplify things.

But you're still gonna get diversity of tools within an organization. And so it no question you're gonna have a diversity that being said embracing doesn't mean that you cannot have a unified brain as we like to college refer to it a brain of software delivery and capture all of that beta to make something useful out of it. So that's absolutely what we're doing.

Right? So if you look at through these like you for example, And has this very strong data model and independently of whatever pipeline technology you're going to be using can be Jenkins can be Cloud. BCI can be a gitlab CI can be gitab action can be Circle CI whatever you're going to be using we get to capture all of those make sense of them so you can start orchestrating but at the same time we capture metadata and we offer insights across those tools and and that's a beauty of that right?

It's it's across those different tools because ultimately it doesn't matter you want to know what's your velocity? You don't want to know what your velocity with that tool of the whole what's what's a business impact you can reach and and when we were talking and Sean was all you know, also talking about this controls this notion of control and and peace of mind. Well, we need that same brain that same metadata to reach those conclusion right those conclusion.

Don't come out of in air. You actually leverage all of the data coming from Different tools to reach different conclusion. It can be our customers making up their reaching out their their own conclusion or it can be ourselves with our own tool extracting extracting that data to for providing insights to to our customers.

So that data is absolutely a hundred percent key to to software delivery. Shawn in reality. We're kind of talking about moving up in terms of devops maturity.

Do you think as we make this shift to Cloud native applications in this next generation of admittedly more complex applications to build that that will force the issue an organizations are going to have to kind of rethink their whole devops workflow to deal with it. I think it'll be definitely a progression I think for devops. Devops teams that are providing pipelines providing devops systems platforms and tooling for the developers to use they will have to continue progressively think about the needs of the developers.

I think at the end of the day the developers are critical to the efforts they are very much the consumers of the platform as is the Ops teams as is the security teams and so on in Greater degrees. So the challenge of the future is going to continue to become how do we bring these teams together in such a way that they can provide value into the platform itself, but an increasing degree, how do we make it easy for developers to consume lots of progress to be made in that space in the next few years to come for? Sure.

All right speaking in the next few years to come Sasha last question. Things are clearly getting more complex. Will AI save us from ourselves.

What's real and what's not real about a It's it's we anytime there is a new technology. We put all kind of dreams around it and hope and and so on so as always reality somewhere in the middle you remember in 2000. We're supposed to have a flying cars and such that that was that is the vision from the 60s didn't see many of those in the last few days and and self-driving cars if they are around the corner they seem to be for the most part stuck around the corner.

So no, I'm a half kidding. I actually think AI as a huge role to play in softer delivery. We see some amazing things take place.

It's it's exactly it's essentially augmented developer, right and you get to augment and developers and that's amazing. Will it solve everything and we can just sit down relax and say I'd like I'd like an application that does exactly not but the type of augmentation Provides the developers and organization is definitively providing an inflection point to the software world. So yeah, it's amazing.

All right, Sasha. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you.

Mike. Sean same as you thank you very much. It's always a pleasure.

All right guys. Thanks for watching and back to you in the studio.