By Dick Stark

Earlier this month, I received an invitation to the Raymond James “Software Disruptor Day,” featuring several private software companies in the Automation, Developer, DevOps, Security, and Identity spaces. The event was a fireside chat format with key executives from each company presenting. Participating companies included: Redis Labs (Database), Nintex (Workflow Automation), Illumio (Zero Trust), Auth0 (IDaaS), Puppet (Infrastructure Automation), DataRobot (Data Science) and GitLab (DevOps). Below I’ve summarized the content from three companies that apply to RightStar’s business.

DevOps Tools: GitLab is an Atlassian competitor and strong player in the DevOps tool marketplace. While starting out as a code repository, GitLab is now doing more than $150M in revenue annually. Its DevSecOps toolset platform supports the entire software development lifecycle including Agile development, CI/CD, source code management, and value stream management.  

And it is gaining in popularity. GitLab claims its end-to-end lifecycle model is unique among competitors such as Atlassian and Microsoft. The good news is that this is a growing space–Raymond James estimates the DevOps toolset space at $14B, meaning there will be plenty of business to go around.

Automation: Puppet and Nintex highlighted a recurring theme: Customers are increasingly automating processes wherever possible to improve efficiency while reducing IT/developer workload. This is also true in the ITSM space as BMC and ServiceNow use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and run book tools to speed up repetitive processes such as onboarding tasks.

Nintex was founded in 2006 with a current revenue run rate now in excess of $200M annually. Their target market is IT Ops managers looking to automate basic IT process using a “low code” process similar to DocuSign. Nintex focuses on visual business process mapping, automated document generation and deep integration with SharePoint, O365 and Salesforce.

Puppet is an IT infrastructure automation company founded in 2009 and focused in the DevOps space helping customers manage and automate server configuration, security risk mitigation, compliance, and patch management. Puppet helps customers scale the management of their IT infrastructure across a large number of servers and across varied environments both on-prem and in the cloud.  (BMC’s TrueSight Automation for Servers performs similar functionality.)

So, what are the takeaways and how does this impact our customers?

• Automation is becoming increasingly important to our customers and partners. We’ve seen this firsthand with new automation functionality in both the Atlassian and BMC toolsets. And just last week one of our government customers mentioned that they made a huge investment in UiPath to automate many ERP functions.

• Ready or not, automation and especially RPA is here to stay.

• Developer/DevOps toolset consolidation is happening and will benefit the market leaders, especially Microsoft, Atlassian, and GitLab. This should be good news as RightStar continues to grow its Atlassian business.