This article is based on a report originally published by it-online.co.za in 2017, covering XebiaLabs’ 2016 financial year results and product announcements.
XebiaLabs Closes 2016 with Triple-Digit Revenue Growth
XebiaLabs, a DevOps and Continuous Delivery software vendor, reported triple-digit year-over-year growth for 2016. The company positioned itself as the only enterprise DevOps vendor focused exclusively on Continuous Delivery, with its Application Release Automation (ARA) platform at the centre of that proposition. In South Africa, XebiaLabs was represented by channel partner 9th BIT Consulting.
According to then-CEO Derek Langone, the growth reflected a measurable shift in enterprise thinking: large organisations were beginning to treat accelerated software delivery not as an IT concern, but as a direct competitive advantage.
“As software has become the primary way that enterprises interact with their customers, the need to deliver innovation, value and high quality user experience has become fundamental to a company’s potential to compete in its respective market. XebiaLabs lives at this convergence of software and business.”
Derek Langone, CEO, XebiaLabs (2017)
Why Application Release Automation Became a DevOps Cornerstone
Application Release Automation (ARA) addresses one of the most persistent pain points in large-scale software delivery: the complexity of coordinating deployments across heterogeneous IT environments. ARA platforms automate, orchestrate and audit the end-to-end release pipeline, giving operations and development teams a single control plane for:
- Automating deployments across diverse infrastructure stacks
- Tracking release progress and compliance status in real time
- Managing dependencies between application components and environments
- Reducing manual handoffs that introduce risk and delay
- Providing audit trails for regulated industries
Barry de Waal, Chief Executive for Strategy and Sales at 9th BIT Consulting, summarised the value proposition for enterprises in the region:
“The Application Release Automation capabilities we offer the enterprise is the cornerstone of successful DevOps endeavours. 9th BIT Consulting provides enterprises with the visibility, automation and control they need to deliver software faster and with less risk, empowering them to meet the increasing demand for accelerated and more reliable software releases.”
Barry de Waal, Chief Executive: Strategy and Sales, 9th BIT Consulting (2017)
Key Product Advancements Driving Adoption in 2016
XebiaLabs shipped a series of product updates throughout 2016 that expanded the platform’s capabilities and broadened its integration ecosystem. Notable additions included:
- Customisable reporting and analytics dashboards — surfacing release progress, risk indicators and compliance status in a single view
- Enhanced productivity features for teams managing large-scale, multi-environment deployments
- New DevOps tool integrations — including Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Compose and Ansible, reflecting the industry’s rapid shift toward container-based delivery
- Advanced release orchestration — featuring dependency management, Release Folders for grouping related releases, and Release Tags for flexible categorisation
- Automatic cloud environment provisioning — enabling on-demand infrastructure creation as part of the deployment pipeline
The container and orchestration integrations are particularly noteworthy in hindsight: Kubernetes was still maturing in 2016, and vendors that invested early in Kubernetes support were better positioned as container adoption accelerated through 2017 and beyond.
Analyst Recognition: Leaders Quadrant and Forrester Wave
Industry analyst firms validated XebiaLabs’ market position during 2016. Gartner placed the company in the Leaders Quadrant of its Magic Quadrant for Application Release Automation. Forrester ranked XebiaLabs highest in the Strategy category of the Forrester Wave: Application Release Automation, Q3 2016.
Placement in both major analyst reports simultaneously is significant for an enterprise software vendor, as procurement teams at large organisations frequently use these reports as a shortlisting tool. Recognition in the Leaders Quadrant and a top Strategy ranking would have materially supported XebiaLabs’ sales cycles with risk-averse enterprise buyers.
Market Context: What Was Driving Enterprise DevOps Adoption?
The triple-digit growth figure did not occur in isolation. Several converging forces were pushing large enterprises toward formal DevOps tooling in 2016:
- Digital transformation pressure — incumbents in banking, retail, insurance and telecoms faced competition from software-native challengers and needed to ship product changes faster
- Container adoption — Docker’s mainstream breakthrough (roughly 2015–2016) created new deployment complexity that ARA tooling could help manage
- Compliance and audit requirements — regulated industries needed automation that could also generate deployment records for auditors
- Talent constraints — automation reduced reliance on institutional knowledge held by individual engineers during release cycles
De Waal highlighted economic pressure as an additional driver in the South African context, noting that tighter budgets and increased competition were forcing companies to optimise software delivery as a cost and agility lever rather than treating it purely as a technical function.
What This Means for DevOps Practitioners Today
While this report covers 2016 results, the underlying dynamics it describes have only intensified. ARA capabilities — release orchestration, pipeline visibility, environment automation, compliance tracking — are now expected features of mature DevOps platforms rather than differentiators. The vendors and practitioners who invested early in these areas established a foundation that continues to compound.
For teams evaluating release automation tooling today, the evaluation criteria that mattered in 2016 (integration breadth, analytics, orchestration depth, cloud environment support) remain relevant, with the addition of GitOps patterns, policy-as-code and cloud-native deployment targets as contemporary requirements.
Source: Originally reported by it-online.co.za, August 2017. XebiaLabs was subsequently acquired by CollabNet VersionOne in 2019, and the combined entity was later rebranded as Digital.ai.