CloudBees acquires Electric Cloud to further CI/CD mission

CloudBees has announced the acquisition of San Jose-based software veteran Electric Cloud, with the aim to become the ‘first provider of end-to-end continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment and ARA (application-release automation). The acquisition will marry two leaders in their respective fields. Electric Cloud was named as a leader in reports from both Gartner and Forrester around application release orchestration and continuous delivery and release automation respectively. CloudBees’ most famous contribution to the world of software delivery is of course Jenkins, an open source automation used for continuous delivery. The original architects of Jenkins are housed at CloudBees, including CTO Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Last month, CloudBees announced the launch of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), leading the initiative alongside the Jenkins Community, Google, and the Linux Foundation. At the time, Kawaguchi said: “The time has come for a robust, vendor-neutral organisation dedicated to advancing continuous delivery. The CDF represents an opportunity to raise the awareness of CD beyond the technology people.” From Electric Cloud’s side, the company bows to CloudBees as the ‘dominant CI vendor, CD thought leader and innovator’. “CloudBees recognised the enormous value of adding release automation and orchestration to its portfolio,” the company wrote on its acquisition page.