CloudBees Preps for DevOps World and a New Phase of Growth – Inapps 2022

As continuous integration and delivery provider CloudBees prepares for its annual DevOps World conferences, the company also is gearing up for a new phase of growth with a greater focus on security, AI and making DevOps easier.

DevOps World will run Sept. 28-30. Last year, the event drew around 30,000 virtual attendees. This year the event is again virtual and is also free. With a tagline of “building the future of software delivery together,” the focus of DevOps World will be to reach out to the entire DevOps ecosystem to share knowledge on the tools, techniques and best practices currently in use and those anticipated for the future.

In this latest episode of Inapps Makers podcast we interview Sacha Labourey, co-founder and chief strategy officer of CloudBees, about both DevOps World and the future of the company. TNS publisher Alex Williams hosted this episode, with the help of TNS news editor Darryl K. Taft.

CloudBees Preps for DevOps World and a New Phase of Growth 

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“We talk about DevOps — we have multiple tracks, we have tracks that are specific more to exactly and what it means to do digital transformation and the concepts associated to that, while we have others that are a lot more focused on practitioners,” Labourey said. “We also care about shared-services engineering managers so, depending on who you are and what you care about every day, you’re going to find the right track that focuses on your needs.”

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak will be a keynote speaker along with Labourey, CloudBees CEO Stephen DeWitt and a host of others.

In the podcast, Labourey also talked about his move from CEO to chief strategy officer, which occurred in February when the company named DeWitt as CEO.

“Stephen and I are very complementary, we’re wired differently,” Labourey said. “And that leads to good things. We’re not you know… he’s not just a Sacha plus-plus or Sacha plus one… We get along extremely well, and for me it means I get to focus on things I really love, and I’ve been away for too long [focusing on] products, strategy, the market. And I really love that [the move to CSO] requires me to rewire my brain because I was used to switching from one topic to the other constantly.”

CloudBees has big ambitions and is looking ahead to a new period of growth. The company added a new product leader, a new chief information security officer (CISO), a new chief marketing officer and a new head of human relations.

“We’re really building the foundation for the next phase of growth,” Labourey said. “You will see a lot of sparks coming out of the CloudBees engine in the next few months.”

CloudBees hired Prakash Sethuraman as its chief information security officer because customers require more secure tools and practices for building software, Labourey said. And although CloudBees will itself not build security products, the goal is to bake more security into its offerings to help developers shift left. Labourey also talked about how CloudBees will be applying machine learning to provide more automation to its toolset.

In addition, for all the old-school Java heads, Labourey shared some fun anecdotes from his days as CTO of JBoss and some of the lessons he learned working with JBoss founder and CEO Marc Fleury. Fun, informative stuff for sure.