Originally reported by sys-con.com. Source material: CloudBees press release, September 2019.
Overview
The 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, produced by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Google Cloud and sponsored by CloudBees among others, found a clear correlation between open source software adoption and DevOps performance. Elite and high-performing teams reported significantly stronger use of open source tools compared with low performers. At the same time, the share of organizations classified as Elite performers — the highest tier — nearly tripled compared with the previous year’s survey, signaling that DevOps maturity is accelerating across the industry.
Key Findings: Open Source and DevOps Performance
The report highlighted a statistically meaningful relationship between open source software use and DevOps capability:
- Elite performers were 1.75x more likely to make extensive use of open source software compared with low performers.
- Elite performers were 1.5x more likely to plan to expand their open source usage in the near term.
- The highest concentration of fully proprietary software was found among low performers; the lowest concentration was found among high performers.
- The proportion of Elite-tier teams nearly tripled year-over-year, suggesting DevOps practices are delivering measurable performance improvements at scale.
Dr. Nicole Forsgren, lead research scientist for the 2019 report, framed the finding in terms of strategic trade-offs:
“The strongest concentration of fully proprietary software is seen in low performers, while the lowest concentration is seen in high performers. Proprietary software may be valuable, but it comes at great cost to maintain and support. It’s no surprise that the highest performers have moved away from this model. Companies should be thoughtful about which software provides strategic value to organizations, and which is merely utility. By addressing their utility needs with COTS solutions and minimizing customization, high performers save their resources for strategic software development efforts.”
— Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Lead Research Scientist, 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report
Why Open Source Supports DevOps Performance
The correlation between open source adoption and DevOps performance aligns with several well-understood benefits of open source in enterprise software delivery:
- Customizability: Access to source code lets teams adapt tools precisely to their workflows, rather than working around vendor-imposed constraints.
- Community innovation: Open source projects aggregate contributions from thousands of developers, making it easier for teams to benefit from advances they did not have to fund themselves.
- Talent and recruiting: Familiarity with widely-used open source tools is common among engineers, reducing onboarding friction.
- Security through transparency: Publicly auditable code allows the broader community to identify and patch vulnerabilities, though this benefit requires active community engagement.
- Reduced vendor lock-in: Open source toolchains make it easier to compose multi-vendor or multi-cloud pipelines without being tied to a single proprietary ecosystem.
These advantages are especially relevant for DevOps pipelines, where the toolchain itself — covering source control, CI/CD, artifact management, monitoring, and orchestration — must evolve as quickly as the applications it supports.
Open Source in Regulated Industries: The HSBC Example
One of the more notable findings cited in conjunction with the report is the adoption of open source DevOps tooling in heavily regulated industries such as financial services — sectors that have historically been cautious about adopting non-proprietary software.
HSBC, one of the world’s largest banking and financial institutions, was cited as an example of a regulated-industry organization embracing open source DevOps practices. The bank uses CloudBees Core and Jenkins to build and manage applications across a multi-cloud environment. Dinesh Keswani, CTO of Shared Services at HSBC, explained the strategic rationale:
“Financial services organizations like ours see open source and the cloud as strategic opportunities to embrace, rather than a risk to shy away from. The use of open platforms for our DevOps teams enables us to innovate on new applications, especially in the banking retail space, and rearchitect legacy applications to be more agile in the cloud. Creating new services that can be deployed on demand and easily updated are less of a risk than maintaining monolithic applications that can’t be changed.”
— Dinesh Keswani, CTO Shared Services, HSBC
This perspective — treating open source as a risk-reduction strategy rather than a risk factor — reflects a broader shift in how enterprise risk and compliance teams are approaching software supply chains.
CloudBees’ Role and Position in the Open Source Ecosystem
CloudBees was one of the sponsors of the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report and is commercially aligned with open source DevOps tooling. The company is a major contributor to Jenkins and Jenkins X, two of the most widely used open source CI/CD platforms, and is a founding member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) — a Linux Foundation project providing a vendor-neutral home for open source continuous delivery projects.
Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees, commented on the survey findings:
“The use of open source software in DevOps has become strategic for organizations of all sizes. Open source provides a jumpstart in developing applications and accelerating time to delivery. It also enables organizations to benefit from the innovation of a larger community, as well as contribute their own innovation back to the community.”
— Sacha Labourey, CEO and Co-founder, CloudBees
CloudBees also announced a partnership with Google Cloud to co-develop a modern DevOps platform built on open source technologies and powered by Google Cloud’s Anthos hybrid and multi-cloud platform.
Industry Perspectives: Open Source Supply Chain Considerations
While the report’s findings are broadly positive about open source adoption, other voices in the ecosystem cautioned that open source usage must be managed deliberately. Derek Weeks, VP and DevOps advocate at Sonatype, noted:
“All companies are now software companies. In the race to out-innovate competitors they’ve put open source software at the core of their digital transformations as the only way to truly keep up in today’s world. But, open source doesn’t come without the need to consider quality across suppliers. As the need for open source in the enterprise grows, companies must understand what open source they’re using and where it is being used.”
— Derek Weeks, VP and DevOps Advocate, Sonatype
This is a significant operational concern: as open source components proliferate across software supply chains, visibility into dependencies, licensing, and known vulnerabilities becomes a critical DevOps discipline in its own right — a practice now often referred to as Software Composition Analysis (SCA).
John Coyle, VP of Business and Corporate Development at Sumo Logic, added a perspective on scale and multi-cloud adoption:
“We are seeing a dramatic shift in the future of the modern application stack as companies look to multi-cloud and open source technologies, like Kubernetes. Open source empowers our customers to scale and build at the rate they need, with the support of the community as opposed to a siloed approach that limits the growth that could be achieved otherwise.”
— John Coyle, VP Business and Corporate Development, Sumo Logic
Takeaways for DevOps Teams
The 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report reinforces several actionable principles for engineering and platform teams evaluating their toolchain strategy:
- Audit your proprietary vs. open source split. Low performers tend to rely more heavily on proprietary software. Identifying which tools are “utility” vs. “strategic” can help justify open source alternatives where appropriate.
- Contribute back where possible. Upstream participation helps maintain long-term influence over projects your teams depend on.
- Manage your open source supply chain. Adopt tooling to track dependencies, licenses, and vulnerability exposure — especially as open source usage scales.
- Don’t over-customize commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions. Heavy customization of proprietary tools increases maintenance burden without necessarily delivering strategic advantage.
- Regulated industries are not exempt. The HSBC example illustrates that compliance requirements and open source adoption are not mutually exclusive.
Additional Resources
- 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report — DORA / Google Cloud (available via the DORA community site)
- Open Source is Essential for Modern Application Delivery — CloudBees research report
- Continuous Everything: Why Software Delivery Management Matters — CloudBees whitepaper
- Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF)
This article is based on a CloudBees press release originally published in September 2019 and reported by sys-con.com. Quotes are reproduced as originally published.