10 Hot DevOps Companies To Watch In 2023

Microsoft, Red Hat, Mondoo and Crowdbotics are among the DevOps companies CRN is watching this year.

Microsoft, Red Hat, Mondoo and Crowdbotics are among the development operations (DevOps) companies CRN is watching this year.

A mix of established tech giants and upstarts, these DevOps companies have a shared goal of offering tools to help customers bring coding projects to market faster and in a more secure way.

Even with multiple IT vendors reporting a slowdown in new business and laying off thousands of employees as a technology boom during the height of the pandemic gives way to customers optimizing their current tech stacks, some signs point to DevOps continuing to grab a piece of customer budgets.

DevOps Companies In 2023

A January survey of chief information officers conducted by investment firm KeyBanc Capital Markets showed DevOps as ranking among the least likely IT projects to get cut, ahead of consulting projects and technologies such as flash storage, PC operating systems, wireless local access network (LAN), systems management software and printers.

Eighty-one percent of those surveyed said they expect no change to the budget priority of infrastructure DevOps tools, and 13 percent said they expect an increase in priority for those tools – putting infrastructure DevOps tools ahead of contact center applications and IT maintenance services.

Few CIOs in the survey anticipated cutting developers and engineers in the next 12 months. And 59 percent said they would keep developer and engineer headcounts flat. Twenty-nine percent said they would increase the rate of hiring for those roles year over year.

What within DevOps is expected to get more budget priority over the year? At 46 percent, test automation received the highest response from the KeyBanc survey. Development security operations (DevSecOps) and application security came next at 44 percent of respondents, followed by Kubernetes platforms at 32 percent.

As for the vendors you need to know, here are the ones CRN is watching in 2023.

Microsoft

With its Azure DevOps offering and GitHub subsidiary, Microsoft was labeled the most strategic DevOps vendor in KeyBanc’s January CIOs survey.

The two offerings led with more than 40 percent of the 25 CIO respondents selecting the offerings as the most strategic DevOps vendor – ahead of Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Ansible, Atlassian, GitLab, VMware Tanzu and Puppet.

In October, Microsoft unveiled a preview for a Defender for DevOps service meant to provide visibility across multiple development operations environments for a central location to manage DevOps security. Defender for DevOps supports GitHub and Azure DevOps, with support for other DevOps platforms coming “soon,” according to Microsoft.

Another preview launched in October was for Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), which aims to deliver integrated insights across DevOps, runtime infrastructure, external attack surfaces and other cloud resources. Defender CSPM is built on Microsoft’s cloud security graph and provides a proactive attack path analysis.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has also kept DevOps top of mind. Back in July, he said the practice “ is fast becoming the default way to deploy code to production.” For partners, that means “a massive opportunity for all of you to help them (customers) adopt these new processes.”

As for the GitHub subsidiary – led by CEO Thomas Dohmke – on Microsoft’s latest quarterly earnings call, Nadella called GitHub Copilot the “the first at-scale AI product built for this era” with more than 1 million users to date – including Duolingo and Lemonade.

Copilot is an AI pair programmer that works off OpenAI codex to suggest code and functions in real time.

GitHub has 100 million developer users, Nadella said on the call.

GitLab

The KeyBanc survey named GitLab and Atlassian as the most strategic DevOps vendors outside of Microsoft offerings GitHub and Azure DevOps.

Based in San Francisco and led by CEO Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab has made several announcements that position it well as a major DevOps player in 2023.

This includes the Cloud Seed capability, which aims to simplify how developers procure and consume Google Cloud services, and enhancements to its security and governance offerings.

In November, the company announced limited access to GitLab Dedicated, which offers the platform as a single-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS).

GitLab also has a channel partner program for resellers, managed services providers, integrators and other partner types.

Atlassian

Atlassian continues to build upon the Open DevOps project built on its Jira offering with more capabilities for software teams.

Last year, Atlassian – Based in Sydney with U.S. headquarters in San Francisco – launched a toolchain page where users can create, manage and visualize their collections of vendor tools for managing and working with software and systems.

The vendor upgraded Jira with the ability to track development team pacing to predict if the team can deliver on time based on scope changes, blocked issues and stuck issues. And it introduced a “compass” feature to track software components.

A November letter to shareholders from Atlassian co-founders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar pledged that the company is “well-positioned to capture additional share in each of our three massive markets – agile/DevOps, IT service management (ITSM), and work management – and we’re working to do just that.”

Atlassian has a partner program for solution partners, marketplace partners, alliance partners and other partner business types.

Red Hat

IBM subsidiary Red Hat has a multitude of tools that aim to help with organizations’ DevOps capabilities, including its OpenShift container orchestration platform and its Ansible automation subsidiary.

Led by recently promoted CEO Matt Hicks, Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat has added more DevOps-supporting features to its portfolio.

In December, Red Hat added server side apply (SSA) for patching resources and application resources in any namespace to OpenShift GitOps.

In November, Red Hat OpenShift Data Science gained enhanced machine learning operations (MLOps) features, including a data science model serving based on open source projects for production deployment across various footprints. The vendor also released a Logging view plugin accessible through the administration console.

Red Hat has also stepped up its vendor partnership strategy, with extended infrastructure integration on Nutanix AOS, OpenShift on the Google Cloud Marketplace and working with Dell Technologies on combined services for DevOps among the examples.

HashiCorp

HashiCorp has multiple infrastructure automation products used by DevOps teams, including the Vagrant tool for setting up production-live development environments, the Consul monitoring tool and data plane, Nomad cluster manager and Terraform infrastructure provisioning tool.

The San Francisco-based company, which is led by CEO Dave McJannet, continues to launch updates to its tools, including dynamic provider credentials for Vault and official cloud providers, new projects organizational structure for Terraform Cloud and a public beta of a HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) for Consul global management plane.

HashiCorp has a partner program for resellers, system integrators, ISVs and other partner business types.

Mondoo

Mondoo offers a security and compliance platform aimed at development operations teams.

The platform is meant for finding and fixing infrastructure throughout the development life cycle, promising the ability to discover misconfigurations in real time, build security into every phase of software development and automate manual security processes to bring DevOps and security teams together, according to Mondoo.

Led by CEO Soo Choi-Andrews and based in San Francisco and Berlin, Mondoo works with public clouds, private clouds, Kubernetes, containers, servers, endpoints, software supply chain and other business-critical infrastructure, according to the startup. It also works with Terraform, Packer, Docker and other tools.

The company released Mondoo 7.14 in January, with updates including expanded GitHub support and new Center for Internet Security (CIS) policies for Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and VMware.

CodeSee

CodeSee provides a platform that visualizes, detects and automates code for development teams to save time and money on on-boarding, code reviews, quality and compliance—a solution for “continuous code understanding,” according to the company.

Led by CEO Shanea Leven, San Francisco-based CodeSee in August launched CodeSee Enterprise, which allows developers to create a Google Maps-like experience for their code workflow.

The maps are meant for companies with as few as 10 employees to companies with thousands of employees, said the company, which was launched in 2019.

After completing a $7 million add-on seed round of funding early last year, the company has been at work improving its product. Recent updates to CodeSee include improved support for elastic search in service maps, new Datadog support and improved support for Tomcat, Jaxrs, and Spring via OpenTelemetry.

Crowdbotics

In January, Crowdbotics announced that it had raised a $40 million Series B round of funding to invest in its tools designed around DevOps and DevSecOps.

New Enterprise Associates (NEA) led the round. Harrison Metal, Jackson Square Ventures, Homebrew and the House Fund participated, according to Crowdbotics.

The Berkeley, Calif.-based company, headed by CEO Anand Kulkarni, wants to use the funds toward bringing more product planning tools to market, adding more enterprise-level features such as prefab catalogs support and owned DevSecOps compatibility.

Crowdbotics also promises to deliver thousands more modules of code for more tasks and templates plus more automations and deeper integrations with large language models.

Crowdbotics also has a partner program, with spots for independent software vendors (ISVs), cloud companies, agencies and other business types.

Copado

A DevOps marketplace for enterprise software-as-a-service tools and a quality integration framework with integrated robotic testing are some of the most recent developments from low-code Salesforce DevOps vendor Copado that position it as a leader in the field in 2023.

The Chicago-based company, led by CEO Ted Elliot, promises 95 percent less downtime, 20 percent productivity savings and 20 times more frequent releases with its platform, according to Copado’s website.

Its exchange has more than 40 listings extending and enhancing Copado’s DevOps platform. And the framework was part of the fall version release, which also added a flow editor for regression and end-to-end test suite building with a drag-and-drop interface.

The company also won the 2022 DevOps tool and product of the year from CRN sister publication Computing.

Copado also offers a partner program for system integrators, technology companies and other business types.

## DevZero

DevZero announced a $26 million round of funding raised plus the general availability of its platform in a January post on the LinkedIn social media network.

The Seattle-based startup – founded last year by ex-Uber staff engineer Debo Ray, who also serves as DevZero’s CEO – offers developers production-level environments for writing and testing code.

DevZero offers centrally managed templates and promises about 40 percent of environment debugging time reclaimed through use of its offerings. Environments can be associated with cloud services, microservices and other dependencies to improve the development loop, according to the company.

Anthos Capital, Foundation Capital, Fika Ventures and Madrona contributed to the funding round, according to DevZero.