Enterprise Times caught up with Eric Billingsley, GM of SaaS at CloudBees, while he was in the UK for DevOps World, London. Billingsley talked about how CloudBees is working to support both cloud-native and traditional developers. To achieve that, it is developing separate products.
Interestingly, Billingsley said, “Rather than thinking of them as competing products, we think of them as two ends of a suite. We see both of those having a place in the industry for the next decade or more.”
That period of a decade is important. It tells CloudBees customers that this is not about forcing them down any one path, but rather, they can expect continued development of the products to help meet their needs.
But what about those who want to migrate? If these are separate products, how do you move customers? Billingsley said, “We think about it as a continuum. There are projects that are going to be easy to lift and shift, so you’re gonna be able to take them. If it’s a Java application, and you were running it over here, and you just want to move it over there, that’s very straightforward. We can do that with probably 10 lines in the DSL. That’s just a rewrite.”
More complex projects, however, will create challenges. There are some projects that Billingsley doesn’t see his team supporting, such as mainframe. However, he also goes on to say, “There’s nothing about our platform that prevents you from doing that. It’s just not the use case we’re building for.”
For customers worried about pricing, Billingsley also had a response for that. They will buy a single seat that will work on both platforms.
Away from the two platforms, Billingsley also talked about AI, compliance and auditing and confirmed that part of the roadmap for 2024 is to take CloudBees compliance product and import it completely into the SaaS solution. It is likely that many customers in regulated industries will be keen to see this.
To hear what else Billingsley had to say, listen to the podcast.
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