The big news in DevOps today was the acquisition of Shippable by JFrog. This adds a CI/CD solution to the JFrog Enterprise+ platform and further expands JFrog’s end-to-end DevOps offering beyond Artifactory and more.
In this DevOps Chat, we speak with Shippable CEO Avi Cavale, JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim and JFrog VP of Marketing Ayally Goldschmidt about the thinking behind this acquisition and JFrog’s plans going forward.
As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.
Transcript
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, DevOps.com, you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat has some breaking news. It was just announced this morning—JFrog has acquired or merged with Shippable in a rather, you know, this is big news within the DevOps world, and we’re very, very happy to be joined by the CEOs of both Shippable and JFrog. From Shippable, we have Avi Cavale, and from JFrog, of course, our friend, Shlomi Ben Haim. And joining us from JFrog is Ayalla Goldschmidt, who really runs marketing at JFrog. I’m not sure of your exact title, Yes, Ayalla?
Ayalla Goldschmidt: VP of Marketing, thank you, Alan.
Shimel: VP of Marketing—thank you for joining us. So, first of all, to all three of you, congratulations, Mazel Tov as they say in Seattle. [Laughter]
Goldschmidt: Thank you, thank you.
Shlomi Ben Haim: [Laughter] Thank you, Alan.
Shimel: Thank you. And so, you know, Avi, let’s turn it over to you first. I think a lot of our audience is familiar with JFrog, and most of our audience have heard of Shippable, but let’s just lay that right out there. What’s Shippable about?
Avi Cavale: Shippable is about a modern CI and CD platform. So, our focus is to streamline the delivery—packaging and delivery of software, and that’s kind of where we are focused on.
Shimel: Fantastic. So, Shlomi, I think I already know the answer, but I’m gonna ask you—why Shippable for JFrog?
Ben Haim: That’s a great opening question. Actually, Alan, you know JFrog very well. You know that everything starts with the culture, and when we met Avi and the team, it looked like we’d found the brother Frogs in a different company. So, for us, it was just to make sure that the technology and the strategy are aligned. And when we looked at the technology and the next generation of CI/CD that was built by the Shippable team with Avi’s leadership, it was a no-brainer for us.
Shimel: Absolutely. But the other thing I think we should mention is, you know, JFrog, many people know JFrog from Artifactory, maybe Xray, you know, point solutions that we can call up. Artifactory is a whole platform in and of itself.
But, really, the big move for JFrog—and if I’m wrong, correct me; Ayalla, you’re the Marketing person—the big move for JFrog was, you know, this JFrog enterprise platform. And, to me, if you’re gonna have an enterprise platform in the DevOps space, you need that CI/CD pipeline kinda delivery capability.
So, to me, you know, this really kinda helps fulfill that vision of the JFrog platform. Yeah, no, wrong?
Goldschmidt: Yeah, that is exactly right, Alan. That’s the vision that we have for it. Obviously, we’ll be doing a lot of work here in the coming weeks to clarify the roadmap and the timeline, but you hit the nail on the head. That’s the value that we’re seeing for our customers and what they’re looking to, what they’re asking us for as far as, you know, we love JFrog, we have very happy customers, they love what we do, and they’re looking to take it to the next level.
Shimel: Excellent. So, let me ask my next question to Avi and Shlomi, and that is, you know, I guess it’s part of the maturation of the DevOps market where all—you know, there are now, everybody wants to offer the whole enchilada. Do you know what I mean?
Ben Haim: [Laughter]
Shimel: People aren’t content any more just offering a piece of it, we wanna offer it all, that whole SDLC, we’re gonna help you throughout that life cycle. It seems everyone is pointing towards that, and the money—look, JFrog, it’s no secret, raised $165 million. Some of your competitors have raised also eight figures. That’s where the smart money’s going, towards companies that are building out this end-to-end DevOps framework.
Avi, is that what you saw at Shippable, and is that what attracted you guys to want to do this deal with JFrog?
Cavale: Yeah, I think what we are seeing is that there is one thing which is very critical for customers. It’s like—yes, they want the whole enchilada as a single platform, but at the same point in time, they also want a platform that is open, and they want to make sure that they can plug in the tools that they like in certain places.
So, of course, they want to see the native capability end to end, but extensibility is also super important. And so, what we kind of saw with what JFrog was doing and what we were doing also was that we were being open to everything. I mean, yes, we want to have a standard of how we think about an end to end platform, but we want to be open and make sure we embrace all the practices that developers want to do and extend the platform to DevOps capabilities.
Shimel: Absolutely. So, Shlomi, Avi makes a very good point here, and that also goes to the heart of JFrog. One of the things about JFrog is that they play nice with everyone, basically, right? You could pick whatever CI/CD platform you wanna work with or whatever—you know, whether it’s Puppet or Chef or the Red Hat software, you know, JFrog works with everyone, so to speak.
But now, you have an in-house CI/CD solution, so how do you balance that in your go to market?
Ben Haim: That’s a great question, Alan. I think that what we’ve started to see in the market for more than 12 months now is that DevOps is maturing and the organization and enterprises are looking to get an end to end solution, yet the driving force of DevOps production is still in the hands of the developers, which, obviously, would love to see the freedom of choice and the best of breed options kind of open to them.
So, you are right. Our universal approach is something that always led us. We always provided our users with the power of choosing their tools pack, and it will still be the case.
However, on the JFrog platform, what we call the enterprise class, we want to make sure that we take artifacts seriously, from the moment you build it from code all the way to production. And, together with Shippable automation power, together with the integration and the visibility that technology like Shippable can provide to the platform, I think we will be able to combine the two, to allow a better universal approach. So, you can still use your Jenkins, your CircleCI, your other DevOps tool sets. But you will also have a JFrog end to end solution that takes you all the way from code to production.
Shimel: Excellent. So, Avi, you know, how do you—I’ll reverse, mirror that question back to you, right? How do you see the Shippable team, the Shippable product fitting into that JFrog Enterprise Plus, you know, the Artifactory platform, all of the different tools that JFrog and services that JFrog is putting together—how do you make sure you fit in there?
Cavale: So, as Shlomi mentioned, right, what is happening is—so, the artifact is something that is immutable, and that’s something that you build and you want to kind of take it through your entire value chain of how you deliver software to your end customers or end devices or whatever they might be.
The issue is that, if you don’t have the pipes to kind of control that in a high fidelity fashion, you lose a lot of information as you go from stage to stage. Because you’re leaving it up to the customer to make sure all the data is being persisted and you’re keeping all the hooks so that eventually what you’re really trying to do is, you want to be able to go to something that’s running on the end device and be able to track, if there are problems, what are all the pieces that went into actually building that piece of software that is running there?
So, losing that ability to connect that entire life cycle, all the way from code to the point where it’s running on a device is a very critical piece of DevOps. And what we see is, that kind of, now, our marriage to the whole Artifactory plus Xray and plus distribution, all of those pieces now can be connected through a common pipeline and we’re making sure that we have high fidelity information exchange as things move through this work flow end to end. And I think that’s kind of the critical thing that we are adding to the product.
Shimel: Excellent. Ayalla, a question for you—you look at, all of a sudden, you’re embarrassed by the riches of JFrog in terms of their product, right, in terms of the product that you have to work with, the products that you can bring to market. But at the same time, at some level, it’s a double-edged sword from a marketing perspective, right? You have so much now, too, that you need to market, that you need—how do you make sort of a holistic message for market that includes all of these pieces and how they fit together and how, if you don’t want to use all the pieces, you don’t have to, either?
Goldschmidt: You know what, I feel like the luckiest marketing person on the planet. And, you know, Shlomi promised me when I joined this company a little over a year ago that there will be no shortage of news, and he has delivered.
Shimel: [Laughter]
Goldschmidt: So, since I’ve joined, the acquisitions, our Series D announcement, and of course, all of the new technologies that we’ve supported along the way, and the most recent exciting edition of support for Go and Go Center, we love all of these audiences and we do actually put in a big effort in tailoring our message to make sure that we’re communicating with a developer first mindset, and that seems to be working for us.
So, you know, until today at JFrog, everything we’ve built has been through an inbound marketing funnel with an inside sales team. We haven’t had field people knocking on doors, and that seems to be working great for us, and now we’re ready to take it to the next level. But we’ll always remain developer first.
Shimel: Excellent. Let me—Avi, let me ask you some sort of typical M&A kind of questions. So, is your whole team staying on as part of this acquisition?
Cavale: Absolutely, and we’re all joining the JFrog family, and so there is really no change to the business and how we are running it. And I usually tell my team that I have a new boss, that’s all—nothing else is changing, and we’re gonna keep marching towards the vision, and all we have is an opportunity to broaden that vision that JFrog brings to the table and we are part of a much bigger family than what we were before.
Shimel: Excellent. And so, Avi, what do you see particularly as your role going forward, here?
Cavale: Sorry, was that for me?
Shimel: Yes, specifically you—what’s your role going forward? Is it just heading up Shippable? I mean, I’ve been in your role, to tell you the truth. I’ve had my company acquired more than once. And, while you still want to maintain your team and run the team, you also need to integrate now, right? You’re part of an executive team at JFrog that has—I will tell you, I think one of the best cultures in the DevOps world or in the tech world, period.
You know, how do you see yourself? How do you see this changing your role? It’s more than just having a new boss.
Cavale: I think the way—I’m actually in Israel right now, and we have already started collaborating. So, one of the things that I actually see is that the team is like, it’s all about brainstorming, quick integration. So, my role is to make sure that I’m delivering the products that JFrog’s customers love as well as most importantly the trust that it actually runs the way it needs to be running. And we’ve focused on the CI/CD aspect of it; nothing is changing from that perspective.
But what I have now is more brains who are kind of helping me think through what we need to actually do so that we are focused on the enterprise and driving towards that, so that’s kind of how I see myself, as part of the team.
Shimel: Excellent. So, Shlomi, let me ask you, now—what’s next? What worlds are left to conquer? What pieces of the puzzle are missing? What’s next?
Ben Haim: You know, Alan, I’m sitting here and listening to Ayalla and Avi and this is great. And from people from outside JFrog, they might think that JFrog is trying to complete the pipeline with all kinds of pieces.
But the one great feedback that I’m getting from the community is that there is no question mark. People understand what are we doing, it all makes sense. Every tier, every brick that we put on the DevOps wall sounds like the right, next logical step.
But we are the binaries people, and we will stay the binaries people. We will just make sure that this pipe is completed, and when we speak about the liquid software vision, when we speak about continuous update and solving the pain for the DevOps world, we are taking it seriously, and, as you see, we are super determined to complete our mission.
What next? We have to stay focused, we have to be a great solution to our customers and users as a community. We are very active in the community, providing them with more tools and more capabilities. It is now our responsibility to make sure that Shippable is fully integrated and the user experience is smooth and fun to use, and as Ayalla mentioned, thinking of the developer first and not the full platform story, but the user experience and the fun and simple-to-use solution.
Shimel: Excellent, excellent. Alright. Guys, we’re about out of time, I think. We’re probably over time. But again, Avi, congratulations. Welcome to the JFrog family.
Cavale: Thank you.
Shimel: It’s an amazing culture, and I’m sure you probably already know that, but you’ll continue to find out. Shlomi, my friend, congratulations to you. Keep up the great work. I can’t wait to see you.
Ben Haim: Alan, thank you.
Shimel: Thank you.
Ben Haim: Thank you so much, partner. Thank you so much.
Shimel: Alright. And Ayalla, always a pleasure.
Goldschmidt: [Cross talk]
Shimel: You, my friend, have work ahead of you now. [Laughter]
Goldschmidt: [Laughter] Yes, I do. The work is just beginning.
Shimel: Good for you.
Goldschmidt: Thanks for having us on.
Shimel: Alright. So, big news today—JFrog acquires Shippable, and another brick in the wall, as Shlomi mentioned. I tend to think of it as more of a Pink Floyd song than any political thing, but it certainly is continuing this DevOps maturation.
Guys, congratulations. We’ll see you all soon. And for now, that’s a wrap on this DevOps Chat. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps.com. Have a great day, everyone.
