CloudBees becomes Enterprise Jenkins company

CloudBees, Inc. has announced plans to focus exclusively on the Jenkins market and ecosystem. Open source Jenkins is experiencing significant growth in business activity driven by increased enterprise adoption of Jenkins for continuous integration and continuous delivery. To accommodate the strategic shift, CloudBees will discontinue its runtime PaaS, RUN@cloud, and will help existing RUN customers migrate their applications to other platforms.

Jenkins has become the clear leader in the emerging continuous delivery market, with over 85,000 active installations in use, globally. Many of these organisations are using Jenkins as their hub for continuous delivery and DevOps, both of which align well with CloudBees focus. The success of Jenkins is attributable to three key items: the openness of the Jenkins platform and the ease with which it can be extended, the number of Jenkins plugins available for many different technologies and the vibrant community that has grown up around Jenkins. The community is responsible for the development of about 1,000 plugins, enabling Jenkins to integrate with almost any popular technology available today. Active installations of Jenkins increased by 160 percent in calendar year 2013 and by more than 300 percent in the three years that ended December 31, 2013.

In parallel with the growth of open source Jenkins, annual recurring revenue (ARR) from the CloudBees continuous delivery products is expected to quadruple by the end of 2014, versus 2013. The CloudBees on-premise Jenkins products offer additional enterprise-level functionality layered on top of open source Jenkins. They enable the use of Jenkins at scale and extend its functionality to meet enterprise-class requirements. With the growth of its Jenkins business, CloudBees has tripled its sales force in the last year and continues to build an impressive set of enterprise customers. Because of its business results from the Jenkins-based products, CloudBees is focusing 100% of its resources developing, selling and supporting products that optimise Jenkins for use at enterprise scale.

The products offered by CloudBees include: Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees, Jenkins Operations Center by CloudBees and Jenkins in the cloud - a cloud-based service called DEV@cloud.

CloudBees is already deeply involved in and committed to the Jenkins community. CloudBees’ CTO, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, is the founder and community lead for the open source Jenkins project. CloudBees was instrumental in founding and organising a series of annual Jenkins User Conferences around the world to bring the community together. CloudBees employees have contributed a significant portion of the core Jenkins code and CloudBees has donated software to the Jenkins community. Finally, any fixes made by CloudBees to the Jenkins code in support of its Jenkins customers are donated back to the Jenkins project.

"I'm excited to hear of CloudBees' even stronger focus on Jenkins - Kohsuke and his team of engineers at CloudBees have already made immense contributions to the maturity and functionality of the Jenkins project and ecosystem, and I can only see this continuing and growing now," said Andrew Bayer, build and tools architect at Cloudera, Jenkins governance board member and member of the Apache Software Foundation. "No one's got more expertise in the Jenkins and continuous delivery space than CloudBees, and it shows through their work both on the open source Jenkins core and plugins and CloudBees' enterprise offerings."

“Our Jenkins business is experiencing dramatic growth, and we are refocusing our company to take advantage of this great opportunity,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees. “We are committed to helping our customers develop and deliver software to meet the needs of their business, by leveraging the power of Jenkins. Jenkins has become the hub of continuous delivery and we are positioned to capture a dominant share of the growing continuous delivery market.”

Jenkins is at the center of some very powerful market trends within the IT industry that are transforming the way software is developed and delivered. These trends include:
· A CIO-level focus on moving IT organisations to continuous delivery in order to gain competitive advantage
· Adoption of a DevOps culture, to support continuous delivery processes
· Increasing usage of the cloud for faster software delivery and leverage of both on-premise and cloud resources (hybrid environments)

“Building software frequently and reliably and testing the fitness of every build is the foundation for modern software engineering practices,” wrote Kurt Bittner, principal analyst, and Glenn O’Donnell, VP, Research Director in a Forrester Research report. “The more you automate, the faster you will be able to go, the more reliable your software will be, and the lower your total costs will be.”¹ The report also states that Jenkins is one of the popular open source CI tools available along with other commercial offerings.