Originally published on devops.com. The following is an edited Q&A with Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees, ahead of DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019.
CloudBees Acquisitions and the Software Delivery Management Vision
When asked about CloudBees’ acquisition strategy, Labourey was measured but confident: “We’re always actively looking at deals that make sense. To be truthful, we’ve set the bar pretty high at the moment. Not only are we focusing hard on executing on those acquisitions, we’re delivering on a vision we’ve laid out for the future in a category we call Software Delivery Management.”
Software Delivery Management (SDM) was CloudBees’ framing at the time for a broader platform vision that extended beyond CI/CD tooling — connecting engineering workflows, business outcomes, and cross-team visibility into a unified layer.
What Labourey Was Looking Forward to at the Conference
For Labourey, the value of DevOps World | Jenkins World was always fundamentally about community: “Always the same: Meeting with great people, hearing about the great innovations in the Jenkins and Jenkins X community, and really, checking out everything all these talented companies are doing. The amount of creativity and innovation we see year after year at DevOps World | Jenkins World is truly amazing.”
Diversity and Inclusion at DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019
Labourey detailed a range of diversity-focused activities CloudBees sponsored at and around the 2019 conference:
“We have supported diversity at DevOps World | Jenkins World for a very long time. We’ve tried to encourage diversity in our recruitment of speakers and in our acceptance of them. Specific to this year’s conference, on Wednesday, August 14, CloudBees is sponsoring a Women in Tech mixer. On Thursday, August 15, we’re sponsoring a Diversity and Inclusion luncheon, where a panel of speakers tackle the topic ‘Connecting Diversity and Inclusion with Business Outcomes.’”
Beyond the conference itself, Labourey outlined several ongoing CloudBees diversity initiatives:
- Hiring benchmarks: CloudBees was benchmarking its workforce diversity against industry peers, with Labourey acknowledging dissatisfaction with the results and a stated commitment to improvement.
- Partnership with PowerToFly: CloudBees was working with PowerToFly to attract more women into technical roles, including hosting a Women in Tech event at its Raleigh office in June 2019.
- Women in DevOps content: CloudBees maintained a blog series focused on Women in DevOps and held dedicated breakout sessions at previous conferences.
- Grace Hopper Conference support: CloudBees supported an internal team of women who applied to speak at the Grace Hopper Celebration, with two accepted.
- Customer Advisory Board: Female representation on the board grew from two to six members out of approximately 30 total.
Labourey was candid about the limitations of these efforts: “As positive as this is, it’s not enough and we are not satisfied with our gains in diversity. We continue to focus on this important area.”
How DevOps World Has Mirrored CloudBees’ Growth
Labourey reflected on the long arc of the industry and CloudBees’ place within it: “We’ve really witnessed it all since 2010 and before. We’ve been part of the first steps of CI, the move to the right and the quest for ever-increasing automation. We’ve seen the fantastic chain reaction where cloud has enabled organizations to do so much more in DevOps and DevOps has returned the favor, opening up so many opportunities for cloud. We are really witnessing the birth of a new tech era. It is a unique privilege for CloudBees to be part of that small group of change agents!”
Labourey’s Personal DevOps Superpower: Open Source
One conference session explored the idea of becoming a “DevOps superhero.” When asked about his own superpower, Labourey didn’t hesitate:
“That’s easy: open source. After years in the JBoss community, at Red Hat and now at CloudBees, where we are the leads on the Jenkins and Jenkins X projects, I still love open source. It is part of our DNA here at CloudBees. There is so much innovation going on in the open source communities, and the developers who are involved are so passionate about what they do. I do think, for the most part, open source developers are among the best in the developer community. They are also inclusive and really have a desire to impact the world.”
Labourey’s background is closely tied to the Jenkins project — CloudBees was co-founded by former members of the Kohsuke Kawaguchi’s extended Jenkins ecosystem — and open source stewardship remained central to the company’s identity heading into 2019.
About DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019
DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019 took place in San Francisco in August 2019. The event served as the flagship annual conference for the Jenkins open source community and the broader CloudBees ecosystem, bringing together practitioners, vendors, and contributors focused on CI/CD and DevOps automation.