CloudBees acquires CodeShip as devops consolidates

More consolidation is afoot in the busy world of backend developer tools. Today, CloudBees — the company closely associated with support and services for the open source Jenkins continuous integration and delivery engine — has announced that it will acquire CodeShip, another startup in the dev-ops space focusing on continuous integration and delivery.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees, said in an interview. The entire team of CodeShip will be joining CloudBees and will continue to serve its customers — numbering some 2,400 mostly smaller organizations and 100,000 developers — and will keep its branding.

The move underscores a trend of smaller vendors in the world of services for developers getting snapped up by larger players, Labrouey noted, in part to improve momentum and business growth.

“Developers are the new kingmakers,” he said, quoting a phrase made popular some years ago with the book of the same name, which underscored the power that developers hold today for companies that want to move forward and upward in the world of tech. “But today you need to buy from between 10 and 15 vendors to serve those developers, so we are seeing a wave of consolidation take place [to simplify that].”

It should also help CloudBees the business position itself as a bigger player for its future strategy and growth. The company today has raised just over $52 million from investors that include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix, and Verizon Ventures, and was last valued at just over $210 million in 2015. Labourey confirmed to me that the startup is on the route now to raising more.

CloudBees has made a name for itself as a developer of Jenkins-based solutions — with one of its perhaps most notable customers being Netflix — and this acquisition is aimed at expanding that to cover other kinds of environments, “to serve a growing segment of the market looking for SaaS-delivered continuous integration and continuous delivery solutions that are easy to use,” the company noted.

“If you look at CloudBees, it has great enterprise customers, which is a very good fit with us,” Moritz Plassnig, the co-founder and CEO. “We help provide service across different sizes, and architecture types.” Specifically, the company will be bringing more Clojure expertise to the business. “The Jenkins community is very important, but there are others who use Clojure. We really need different products to serve different workloads,” he added.

Continuity post-acquisition will include offering both Codeship Basic and Codeship Pro, available in several pricing tiers starting at $39/month depending on features and usage, including whether you want to run a build in the cloud but still host your code on-premise. CloudBees’ pricing is available on request.

The deal is expected to close this month.

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