CloudBees CEO Kapur: Effective software delivery at speed is tablestakes - organizations need ... [+] enterprise applications and services with quality, security and compliance guaranteed, because this is the next frontier in creating exceptional customer experiences

Software gets delivered. Well, in a sense, it always has. Even when software applications and their parent suites came on a 3.5-inch floppy disk and a CD-ROM, they still got delivered when the software was posted to you, it was picked up from a bricks and mortar store, or perhaps peeled off of the front of a print magazine.

But those heady days of Windows 95 nostalgia (and earlier) are all gone now.

Today software gets delivered continuously, cumulatively and concurrently (when users download more than one item at once) to our machines at a cadence that would have seemed simply laughable back when we quaintly used to call our devices personal computers (PCs).

The shape of modern software delivery in the age of web and cloud is of course very different. We now talk about the Continuous Deployment & Continuous Integration (CI/CD) of software that may often update without users even noticing that updates, patches and upgrades have been applied at the backend. The marketingspeak term is ‘seamless’ and it’s overused, but the word was chosen for a reason.

Match all this with the cultural conjoining that comes from DevOps with Dev (developers) and Ops (operations back room IT staff) now working towards new unified common goals… and we get to a new age of software delivery.

As a firm that thinks of this role and function in the widest possible sense, San Jose, California-headquartered CloudBees has now appointed Anuj Kapur as president and chief executive officer to drive the company’s broader definition of software delivery forward.

For Kapur and team, software delivery is not just installing a new word processor or clicking on a game download; this is a process that encompasses substrate-level software architecture engineering, application design, wider software development and integration and the onward stages and phases (compliance checks, security provisioning, scalability assessments, governance and so on) that see enterprise software committed into a state of what is known as live production i.e. in users hands… and now intelligent machine hands too.

Kapur replaces Stephen DeWitt, who has stepped down for personal reasons after a relatively short tenure starting in February 2021. He replaces Sacha Labourey, co-founder and interim CEO, CloudBees, who had been filling an interim role until Kapur was appointed. Labourey remains as CloudBees chief strategy officer.

Previously a C-suite executive at Cisco (chief strategy officer) where he worked heavily on the company’s AppDynamics business (a cloud application observability and monitoring technology), plus also at SAP (president for corporate development and strategy), Kapur has also held advisor-level positions at Lightlytics, Armorblox, Prosimo.io, Airgap Networks Inc. and others.

CloudBees says that Kapur joins CloudBees at a pivotal time as all enterprises face the reality that software – and the speed, quality, and security with which such innovation gets into their customers’ hands – defines their competitiveness and dictates their success. Kapur will focus on accelerating product innovation, strengthening the go-to-market approach, furthering geographic expansion and scaling the company’s global operations.

“Enterprises know that the software they build and deliver will make or break their future,” said Kapur. “They also know that speed is tablestakes and that quality, security and compliance are the next frontier in creating exceptional customer experiences. CloudBees is at the center of enabling some of the world’s largest and most influential brands to make software their most significant differentiator. The opportunity to join CloudBees to shape this next chapter of growth for our customers and employees is an absolute honor.”

The appointment of Kapur comes during a time of growth for CloudBees. Since its founding in 2010, CloudBees has raised $246 million in venture capital. The company cites key customers including Capital One, Fidelity Investments, HSBC, Morningstar, Pegasystems, Salesforce and a number of U.S. federal government agencies.

As noted here previously on Forbes, CloudBees is the custodian of Jenkins, an open source software development, testing and deployment tool that sits firmly in the CI/CD space referenced at the start of this story. The company’s custodial position means that it looks after the welfare of the open core software kernel that comprises Jenkins. Today it also offers a commercially-charged set of enterprise services for Jenkins that encompasses services, training and support to deploy and integrate Jenkins with other DevOps tools.

To be more specific in this area, CloudBees’ enterprise Jenkins product, CloudBees CI, is an important part of the company’s offerings, but it is just one piece of the total offerings that are available today. CloudBees explains that it is moving towards a platform focus that integrates CI into an end-to-end open ecosystem software delivery and value stream management platform.

As even wider clarification, CloudBees confirms that it provides upstream and downstream Jenkins support, but Jenkins today is homed with the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). “This change has been enacted within the past couple of years to hand Jenkins off to CDF, which is part of the Linux Foundation. CloudBees is still a major contributor to Jenkins and is proud to have a community team that works with Jenkins and the community,” noted the company, in a press statement.

CloudBees is obviously not alone in the software delivery platform zone. Key competitors to its technology proposition include Weaveworks, Harness and of course GitLab, all of which are typically thought of as younger operations with more ephemeral and customizable technology stacks.

Kapur is not phased by critical swipes that suggest CloudBees might have a heavier level of technical debt that the operation he is now stepping up to direct. In response to such comments - and having worked in firms like SAP which now celebrates its 50th anniversary this year in 2022 - Kapur says that there are plenty of reasons why firms older than five years have a wide remit to operate and innovate.

Where we go in the future in this section of the technology stack is (very arguably) more of the same along with better and better.

In the CloudBees hive that means not just CI/CD and not just DevOps and DevSecOps (DevOps with a large side order of security) and the next DevOps portmanteau extension that will inevitably probably follow. It’s also about XOps, a point where we can apply software delivery management goodness to the entire software stack right across data analytics down to infrastructure and architecture.

Kapur has a new chapter to write and he’ll be hoping that it’s a case of making honey and making customers’ money in the software delivery hive. Software delivery used to have a sting in the tail, let’s see if the future is sweeter.