CloudBees’ Acquisition of Rollout: The CEOs’ View

As Mike Vizard reported yesterday, CloudBees, as part of its mission to build “the world’s first end-to-end automated software delivery system,” announced another acquisition: Rollout, a developer of a feature flag application that allows for simplified testing of new modules within an application.

Not to repeat the gist of Vizard’s article; you can read it for yourself. But this continues what has become something of an acquisition tear by CloudBees. The company has acquired CodeShip and Electric Cloud, among others, while becoming one of the founding members of the new Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), under the Linux Foundation and a sister foundation to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Cloud Foundry Foundation. The CDF is now managing the Jenkins project, as well as Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton.

CloudBees’ Mission

Make no mistake: These acquisitions, along with the CDF formation, represent a major change for CloudBees. The team there is clearly trying to separate from the pack of “end-to-end” DevOps contenders. CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey is pushing hard to raise CloudBees above the noise and the rest of the market. The company announced a $62 million round of financing about a year ago.

You don’t have to be Warren Buffet to see that CloudBees sees an opportunity here. The company is driving toward achieving scale in product and revenue on the path to some sort of liquidity event (perhaps an IPO?) or market leading opportunity.

For now, though, back to the Rollout acquisition. I had the chance to sit down with Labourey and the CEO and founder of Rollout, Erez Rusovsky. We discussed what Rollout does, its history and how it will fit into the CloudBees product portfolio.

It is always great to interview a founder about his company being acquired. What a tremendous feeling of accomplishment to found and build a company, and have another entity value it so much that you are willing to sell it to them. This goes so far beyond validation.

Congrats to Erez and the whole Rollout team and, of course, congratulations to Sacha, KK and the rest of the CloudBees team. This seems like a perfect fit.

In the meantime, here is my conversation with Sacha and Erez on the acquisition and more. Enjoy!