2014: A Year of Revolution in Continuous Integration
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9 min read
This note isn’t just a recap of 2014, it is our commitment to the future!
2014 was a crucial year for the development and DevOps world – an explosive inflection point with vendors integrating tools to capture and pass information from development to operations to automate the entire application delivery process. The industry hasn’t seen a major shift like this since the client-server revolution. Just four years ago, the software industry was happy enough with “version control” to host and manage binaries; no one considered automation as a “must” in the software build-to-release flow. And today, the landscape has changed so much; Maven is not the only build tool and Maven central is no longer the main repository. It’s not a question of “if” anymore; it’s a question of “how”, “when”, and what tools we should use.
JFrog is proud to be part of this revolution. We received huge recognition and adoption by the industry this year. Artifactory is now running on more than 35,000 OSS servers, and in the last few years, different communities (Ruby, Scala, .NET and Java of course) picked Artifactory to be the one-stop solution for their local binary repositories.
Bintray, our Distribution-as-a-Service platform, saw an important milestone with the distribution of more than 100,000 unique software packages of all forms, becoming the world’s only solution that integrates with both Dev and CI environments, as well as the distribution point to automate the whole software delivery workflow. Repositories like Maven Central became a “junk-yard” to push to. JFrog has more than doubled its customer base with almost all F500 companies as active customers. We finally feel that the JFrog way has become the new technical and commercial standard!
 Listen to the community; give your users the freedom of choice! It takes an ecosystem to automate the application delivery process and at JFrog, we’ve made integration as easy as possible with freedom of choice, destroying the concept of “vendor lock-in”. We are proud to be the only vendor offering multiple choices to our customers. Artifactory supports integration with a variety of build tools (Maven, Gradle, Ivy… just to name a few) and CI servers, with full support for YUM, Debian, npm, Python (PyPi) and that hot new kid on the virtualization block, Docker. We also added RubyGems and NuGet, which combined with our Java support, means we pretty much cover every significant development technology in use today. JFrog led the binary repository market providing wide support for 3rd party tool integration, and keeps doing it – always first, always with the best and full support! The $7M Series B investment by VMware and Gemini Israel Ventures was also a testament to JFrog’s position in the Continuous Delivery ecosystem. The synergy climbed even higher when VMware announced its new DevOps solution and embedded Artifactory in its flagship product, vRealize CodeStream. From now on, VMware’s product will be shipped with Artifactory as an integral part of the solution they offer to the DevOps market . We’ve also promoted our partnership with our friends at CloudBees and the Jenkins community, Gradleware, Jetbrains (home of TeamCity), Atlassian (home of Bamboo) and Black Duck the unequivocal domain leader with the largest open-source security database on the planet. Stronger than ever, JFrog now plans to support all leading solutions, and in early 2015 we will announce new partnerships with more vendors and tools per our community’s request.
JFrog’s enterprise customers extended their use of Artifactory, both on-premises and in the cloud. Over 700 customers chose Artifactory, including market-leading companies like Oracle, ANSYS, Netflix, Cisco, Pivotal, VMware, Twitter, Apple, Linkedin and others. As their binary repository manager, Artifactory has become the heart of their application life-cycle. Over the last two years, key customers migrated from Nexus to Artifactory including huge companies like Oracle, CA, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Cap Gemini. Out of the many prospects that evaluated Artifactory vs. Nexus and Archiva in 2014, 97% chose Artifactory. In fact, we can proudly say that not a single Enterprise Customer ever moved from Artifactory to Nexus or Archiva – that’s a fact! Why Fortune 500 companies choose Artifactory over Nexus and Archiva Customers tell us they choose Artifactory for a number of reasons: it fully supports every major software technology and is offered in High Availability and SaaS solutions (no other company offers this); Technical leaders and Architects understand that it provides unique checksum-based storage which is not just a web layer on top of a file system, or in their words “While Artifactory is more like GIT, Nexus is just a CVS”; reasonable pricing along with an easy-to-scale licensing model (pay per server, not per seat) also makes JFrog’s offer fair and unique; and finally the SLA support service that JFrog provides is simply unbeatable. This virtually perfect adoption rate is remarkable, given the critical central role of a repository in the CI and Delivery pipeline, not to mention the rigorous evaluation process enterprises go through before deciding who to work with on software automation and application delivery.
A quick review of the community tweets, makes it clear – we chose wisely to leap forward with Bintray. Users got tired of the painful process needed to distribute their software packages, of closed and antisocial repositories that make you miserable and feel managed by a vendor that is still trying to educate this evolving market or promote their security solution under the hood. Last year we gave the OSS world Bintray; this year we announced Bintray Premium! Bintray has become the next logical step, with more communities than ever taking full advantage of Bintray’s DaaS features. Google Android, Gradle, Vagrant, Ruby, Scala, Groovy, Gradle, Spring projects, GO Continuous Delivery, and more turned Bintray into the leading repository and #1 platform for software distribution. When TechTarget asked Guillaume Laforge (Pivotal Groovy project manager) about his Bintray experience, he replied, “Previously, deployment and delivery of a new software release were a nightmare. We would need — if we were lucky — a full day to release a new version, involving error-prone manual steps. Server connectivity issues were common, and the open source code foundation infrastructure used wasn’t actively maintained and up-to-date. With Bintray, the Groovy team is able to fully automate deployment, and I can trigger the whole release, deployment [and] delivery process from my continuous integration tool chain. Also, Bintray integrates with the Maven Central repositories”. In September we announced Bintray Premium and traction for our automated commercial software distribution has also increased, providing organizations a download center in a box. Bintray is more than just a distribution platform. It’s the natural leap forward in offering a full application delivery platform when combined with Artifactory (a full platform is on the horizon). GigaOM Research said it best in its November report, “…Bintray Premium defines the value of continuous deployment for an Agile world.” Bintray already supports Debian, RPM and Maven, and offers solutions way beyond Java. If you’re still reading, you understand that JFrog provisions an end-to-end solution that offers developers and Ops teams a platform to build, manage, host and distribute their software packages in a much easier and automated way. JFrog will stay focused and support your binaries from creation to distribution; this is what we do best.
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#1 choice of the world’s leading companies!
Goodbye Central, Hello Bintray
What next, you ask?
2014 was a fantastic year, thanks to you. But expect 2015 to be even better. You can expect to see cool new features like the Artifactory Query Language, an administration dashboard, a flashy new UI and support for the latest packaging technologies voted for by our users .We will also focus on OSS, our ecosystem integration, enterprise tools, and Bintray Premium.
We plan to keep leading the market and boosting our integration with more vendors to make sure developers will always own the right to choose their tool stack.
Leading PaaS vendors are offering Artifactory as their repo, and in 2015 Artifactory will be the leading tool offered by the world’s software leaders.
Bintray will support more technologies and serve more communities, and as we leap forward JFrog will offer the market a full platform to manage and distribute their binaries.
This year we are also planning to hold the “SwampUp”, JFrog Users conference in San Francisco, and will share our best of breed new features and new partnerships with the world!
Made by the community and for the community, JFrog’s vision is to provide one platform for development and DevOps, automating the full process from beginning to end, extending and changing the way the world distributes software. We are determined to continue establishing Artifactory and Bintray as the pillars of software development, deployment and distribution in the new era of Continuous Integration. We are aware of the fact that JFrog is the world’s only company that aspires to solve this pain. However, we are positive that the seeds we planted in the last 5 years will become a defacto standard in the CI world and push the revolution forward.
As we leap forward toward 2015, our thoughts turn to our users, customers, and partners who have made our success possible. I take this opportunity to thank you for your trust and for a wonderful 2014. Here’s to an exciting and eventful 2015!
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