GitLab expands into Australia as DevOps tooling market heats up

DevOps platform supplier GitLab has expanded its footprint in Australia as part of its global expansion plan.

The company has recently grown its sales, marketing, customer success and solution architect teams, bringing its total staff strength in Australia to 48.

GitLab’s Australian expansion follows its year-over-year (YoY) growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) of 116%, bringing its total ARR to $100m.

The company has grown from fewer than 10 people in 2015 to currently over 1,250 employees in more than 65 countries and regions across the globe. Its all-remote workforce has enabled it to continue its worldwide growth into the Australian market.

Anthony McMahon, GitLab’s regional director for Asia-Pacific, said the company is uniquely positioned to help Australian firms accelerate digital transformation via a single DevOps platform.

“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,” the former HP and SAP Asia executive said.

“GitLab’s single application approach to the DevSecOps lifecycle is providing a solution to the high costs and inefficiencies that come with multiple tools, as well as silos between developer, security, and operations teams. The business teams are no longer able to tolerate this ‘toolchain tax’.

“The local market needs new ways to design, develop and deploy software that are far more agile and address the need to innovate quickly for their customers and employees,” McMahon added.

GitLab’s Australian operation will maintain the company’s global all-remote model, with staff already working nationally from locations including Darwin, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Katherine, Brisbane and Geelong.

“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. Our team works in a flexible way to address the needs of our customers while also balancing their family and personal life,” McMahon said.

“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,” said Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO of GitLab.

“GitLab’s single application provides customers a more unified, less complex approach to achieving this speed. Expanding our support to the Australian market allows us to equip locally based companies with this competitive edge.”

According to the TechTarget/Computer Weekly IT Priorities 2020 study, building cloud-native applications and modernising legacy software has been a key theme among organisations in Australia and New Zealand. Nearly 60% are planning to adopt agile project management software, while more than one in three have plans to invest in DevOps tools.

GitLab competes with Microsoft’s GitHub and Atlassian’s Bitbucket in the DevOps tooling market. GitHub recently announced that GitHub Free will be available for teams and includes free private repositories, with unlimited collaborators.

In response, GitLab said in a blog post it has been offering free private repositories as part of its core and free offerings from the start. “We also recently made 18 additional features open source, which will help teams collaborate more effectively in a single product,” it added.

Globally, the DevOps software tools market is expected to grow to $15bn in 2023 from $5.2bn in 2018, according to IDC. Jim Mercer, research director for DevOps at IDC, said the demand is being driven by adoption of continuous integration and delivery, infrastructure provisioning, as well as application monitoring and analytics.