GitLab’s IPO and the Enterprise Wave

I was reflecting on the public debut of GitLab last week and why it captured the attention of many of us in the DevOps space. After years of teasing an IPO, GitLab went public last week and has since nearly doubled its targeted share price. The excitement in the enterprise space and the developer community — not to mention on Wall Street — is palpable. As the complexities brought on by the rise of cloud grow, so too does the opportunity for companies that are able to build innovative solutions.

Part of GitLab’s appeal is the company’s ability to simplify the workflow experience, democratizing access to continuous delivery tools. GitLab is directly addressing what we found in the 2021 State of DevOps Report: The lack of access to talent faced by organizations, especially large enterprises, is creating challenges when trying to execute their digitization goals.

The simple fact is, we will continue to have both monolithic and cloud-native applications (and everything in between) as well as on-prem and cloud-based infrastructure (and increasingly more edge, but that’s for another blog). This is the biggest challenge for those of us in the DevOps and enterprise infrastructure space — solving the challenge of deploying and managing large, and increasingly complex, estates that can run a wide variety of workloads.

Things are becoming far too complex for the average IT Admin or developer to manage. The scale is only growing and the challenges our industry needs to solve are complex, but the opportunity for innovative solutions is building just as rapidly.

The fact is that the increase in complexity around the technologies needed to run and manage environments at scale is increasing the value proposition for those companies that offer simple, smart solutions. This is why investors are so bullish on GitLab, why companies like Puppet can count 80 percent of the Global 5000 as users and why we’re going to continue to see enterprise technology that puts developers and operators first continue to rise to the top.