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JFrog's marriage made in ... well: Internet of Things, meet DevOps
What to do with $50m in VC funding?
CD vendor JFrog has proclaimed the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next frontier in DevOps as it ponders how to spend the $50m investment shot it received earlier this year.
The vendor announced a raft of alliances and product tweaks at its user conference in Napa at the end of last month, including binary and container scanner Xray.
Speaking to The Register just before the conference, CEO Shlomi Ben Haim said it was not content to increase sales organically, but intended to use the funding to rack up its headcount and embark on acquisitions.
“We raised this money not just to have cash aside, we raised this money to grow,” he said.
He said that current headcount was 140, but it was looking to double the team quickly. On the acquisitions front, he said it was considering tie-ups as it sought to hook up with other companies and groups where “we had the synergy for a long time from the community and we can take action with it.”
He said JFrog was licking its lips about two specific companies that would round out its solution. Unsurprisingly he wouldn’t disclose the names, but he insisted, “we are in the process now.”
However, Ben Haim was less reticent when we asked him what exactly was needed to round out the solution.
“We are looking at the future – and I think the biggest challenge for the whole devops industry is to not just provide an engineering solution but to solve the real future needs, and this is the Internet of Things.”
“We are binaries people, and for devices and machines this is the only language they speak, they speak binary,” he continued.
“Who is the consumer?” he asked. “The consumer will not be a human being, it will not be you or me. It will be devices or machines and this is what is called continuous update, this is where the world goes to.”
“We’re already got customers who are doing this like Tesla, like Bosch like General Motors and we are building our platform not just to support the best practices we see today but the IoT world that with or without us will happen in the next few years.”
“We are focusing on providing a very powerful pipe for binaries. We want to make software liquid.” The company already has Artifactory as its repository, Bintray for distribution, and Xray and Mission Control on top to secure the pipeline.
So, we’ll leave it to our IoT specialist readers to speculate exactly what tools JFrog needs to extend all the way down from the software pipeline to an actual oil pipeline, for example – or, of course, a fuel pipeline in a Tesla. ®