Originally reported by Computer Weekly, April 2020.
GitLab Deepens Its Presence in the Australian Market
DevOps platform vendor GitLab has made a significant push into Australia, growing its local headcount to 48 employees across sales, marketing, customer success, and solutions architecture. The move is part of a broader global expansion strategy that reflects strong revenue momentum and rising demand for integrated DevSecOps tooling.
The expansion follows GitLab reporting 116% year-over-year (YoY) growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR), bringing the company’s total ARR to $100 million at the time of the announcement. From fewer than 10 employees in 2015, GitLab had grown to more than 1,250 staff spread across 65 countries and regions — all operating under a fully remote model.
Why Australia, and Why Now?
Anthony McMahon, GitLab’s regional director for Asia-Pacific (formerly with HP and SAP), framed the expansion around a pressing concern: that many Australian businesses are still building software the same way they were a decade ago.
“There is a big concern that Australian businesses are still developing software in the same way they were 10 years ago and risk falling behind. The future is more remote collaboration, agile secure development, and rapid cloud-native deployment.”
Anthony McMahon, Regional Director APAC, GitLab
McMahon highlighted what GitLab calls the “toolchain tax” — the hidden cost of integrating and maintaining multiple point solutions across the software development lifecycle. By consolidating developer, security, and operations workflows into a single application, GitLab argues it eliminates the silos and inefficiencies that fragment most enterprise DevOps pipelines.
All-Remote Operations Across Australia
True to its globally distributed model, GitLab’s Australian team operates without a central office. Staff are located across Darwin, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Katherine, Brisbane, and Geelong — a spread that reflects GitLab’s belief that remote work expands access to talent while reducing overhead.
“We believe an all-remote workforce is more prosperous for both our business and employees, with cost savings on office space and access to a broader pool of talent.”
Anthony McMahon, GitLab APAC
This model also proved prescient: the announcement came in April 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when remote-first operations shifted from a competitive differentiator to a business necessity for most organisations.
The Business Case: Speed, Security, and Simplicity
GitLab CEO and co-founder Sid Sijbrandij articulated the core value proposition succinctly:
“To be competitive in the market today, companies need to be 10 times faster to market, and that requires a dramatically different way of developing, managing and securing software. GitLab’s single application provides customers a more unified, less complex approach to achieving this speed.”
Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO, GitLab
The single-application argument targets a real pain point in enterprise DevOps: organisations often stitch together separate tools for source control, CI/CD, security scanning, container registries, and monitoring. Each integration point adds maintenance burden, licensing cost, and cognitive overhead for developers and platform engineers.
Australian Market Demand: Data Points
The expansion aligns with survey data from the TechTarget/Computer Weekly IT Priorities 2020 study, which identified cloud-native application development and legacy modernisation as top priorities for organisations in Australia and New Zealand. Key findings relevant to DevOps vendors included:
- Nearly 60% of ANZ organisations planned to adopt agile project management software.
- More than one in three had plans to invest in DevOps tooling.
These numbers suggest a regional market still in the early-to-mid stages of DevOps adoption — precisely the stage where a platform consolidation pitch is most compelling.
Competitive Landscape: GitLab vs. GitHub vs. Bitbucket
GitLab operates in a competitive three-way market alongside Microsoft’s GitHub and Atlassian’s Bitbucket. A notable competitive flashpoint around the time of this announcement was GitHub’s decision to make GitHub Free available for teams — including unlimited collaborators on private repositories, a feature previously restricted to paid tiers.
GitLab responded by pointing out it had offered free private repositories since its inception, and that it had recently open-sourced 18 additional features to further close the gap with paid tiers and encourage broader platform adoption.
For DevOps platform engineers evaluating options, the practical distinctions between these platforms go beyond repository pricing:
- GitLab offers an integrated CI/CD pipeline, built-in container registry, security scanning (SAST, DAST, dependency scanning), and Kubernetes deployment tools within a single product. It is available as SaaS or self-hosted.
- GitHub integrates with the broader Microsoft ecosystem (Azure DevOps, Actions, Copilot) and benefits from a large open-source community. GitHub Actions provides a flexible CI/CD layer.
- Bitbucket is tightly integrated with Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence suite, making it a natural fit for teams already invested in that ecosystem.
Global DevOps Market Context
The broader tailwind for all three vendors was significant. According to IDC figures cited in the original report, the global DevOps software tools market was projected to grow from $5.2 billion in 2018 to $15 billion by 2023. IDC’s research director for DevOps, Jim Mercer, attributed the growth primarily to adoption of continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), infrastructure provisioning automation, and application monitoring and analytics.
For platform engineers and DevOps leads, this market growth reflects a shift in how organisations view software delivery infrastructure — less as a cost centre and more as a strategic capability directly tied to competitive velocity.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Teams
- Platform consolidation is an active trend. GitLab’s single-application pitch resonates in organisations tired of maintaining complex, fragile toolchains across their SDLC.
- Remote-first DevOps organisations scale geography more easily. GitLab’s all-remote model enabled rapid expansion into a new market without the capital overhead of office infrastructure.
- ANZ organisations are investing in DevOps — but adoption is uneven. Survey data suggests significant room for growth in the region, making it an attractive target for DevOps platform vendors.
- Competitive pricing moves are accelerating. GitHub’s free private repository expansion and GitLab’s open-sourcing of additional features signal that the market is competing on platform breadth, not just licensing cost.