GitLab makes foray into Southeast Asia

GitLab has expanded its presence in Singapore in a bid to tap the DevOps market in Southeast Asia where more organisations are looking to bolster their software development capabilities.

The move by the DevOps platform supplier follows its recent expansion into Australia where it has grown its sales, marketing, customer success and solution architect teams.

The Singapore setup, helmed by GitLab’s Asia-Pacific regional director Anthony McMahon, will serve enterprises in Southeast Asia. The company currently counts Grab, a regional ride hailing, food delivery and payment platform, and Singapore mobile operator M1 as customers.

“The Southeast Asia region is an exciting one for GitLab, given the burgeoning growth of the enterprise DevOps market as more companies wake up to disruptive technologies and look to accelerate their own digital transformation,” McMahon 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.

“Business teams are no longer able to tolerate this ‘tool-chain tax’ – the future is more remote collaboration, agile secure development, and rapid cloud-native deployment,” McMahon added.

GitLab’s new hires in Singapore include a mid-market sales executive and a strategic account lead, who will be focused on large enterprises and government. They will join the company’s all-remote workforce, which has grown from fewer than 10 people in 2015 to more than 1,250 people across the globe.

McMahon said GitLab’s immediate focus in the region will be to build and grow its local partner ecosystem through its recently launched partner programme. 

According to GitLab’s global DevSecOps 2020 report, 25% of companies are in the DevOps “sweet spot” of three to five years of practice while another 37% are well on their way, with between one and three years of experience under their belts.

As part of this implementation, many are also seeing the benefits of continuous deployment: nearly 60% deploy multiple times a day, once a day or once every few days – up from 45% last year.

As more teams become more accustomed to using DevOps in their work, roles across software development teams are starting to shift as responsibilities begin to overlap.

“Every company is now a software company and to drive business results, it is even more critical for teams to understand how the role of the developer is evolving – and how it impacts security, operations and test teams’ responsibilities. GitLab found that the lines are blurring between developers and operations teams,” McMahon said.