GitLab, a provider of a platform for driving DevOps processes, this week appointed Michelle Hodges to be its vice president of global channels.
Announced at a GitLab Commit 2020 event, Hodges says her primary goal is to create a base of partners that will foster additional consumption of software licenses and services across an integrated GitLab continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform.
The GitLab platform is already being employed to varying degrees by hundreds of thousands of organizations, notes Hodges.
“This company grew 50X in the last four years,” says Hodges.
The immediate challenge GitLab faces is getting each of those organizations to either consume the base CI/CD platform more broadly within their organization and then make broader use of all the modules GitLab makes available on top it.
GitLab last summer launched a 12.0 release of its CI/CD platform that is designed to not only accelerate application development and deployment but also provide business and IT leaders with more visibility into the process.
Hodges says GitLab has roughly 200 partners today. The initial focus will be on arming 30 to 50 of the most committed of those partners with the tools they need to further adoption of GitLab software and services, says Hodges. GitLab has been providing some services directly to its most valued end customers, which Hodges says the company would like channel partners to resell alongside their own services.
In general, adoption of best DevOps practices as an alternative to traditional ITIL-based processes is still uneven. Organizations are under more pressure than ever to build and deploy custom applications faster than ever to achieve digital business transformation goals. The challenge they face is that DevOps not only requires organizations to adopt and master new tools, it also requires them to fundamentally realign their processes. That level of cultural change requires partners to nurture strategic relationships with customers over an extended amount of time to succeed versus relying on historically transactional models of selling a new platform.
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