CloudBees announced today the appointment of Stephen DeWitt as its new CEO, taking over from Sacha Labourey, who will become chief strategy officer.

Labrourey said after leading the company for the past 10 years, and after a banner year that saw the company generate more than $100 million in revenue, the time was right to appoint a new CEO to take the company to next level. The move also allows Labourey more time to focus on product development.

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DeWitt most recently served as chief strategy officer for Automation Anywhere, a provider of a robotic process automation (RPA) platform. DeWitt previously served as the CEO of WorkMarket, a labor automation platform for enterprises, Azul Systems, a provider of platform for running Java applications and Cobalt Networks, a provider of Linux servers.

Without committing to a specific initial public offering (IPO) date, DeWitt said the ultimate goal is to put the processes in place that will enable CloudBees to grow to $200 million in revenues and beyond.

Achieving that goal will also require tighter integration across what has become a diverse portfolio of DevOps platforms, DeWitt said. The challenge is providing IT organizations with all the benefits of that integration without locking them into any specific component, DeWitt added.

Going forward, DeWitt said IT teams should expect to see CloudBees invest more in artificial intelligence (AI) to further automate DevOps processes. There are many low-level DevOps tasks that could be automated using machine learning algorithms to reduce the level of friction DevOps teams often encounter.

Becoming a $200 million company, however, is more difficult than becoming a $100 million company, DeWitt said. Not only does the company have to put the processes in place to grow, but CloudBees today faces more viable competition than it did when it first pioneered the adoption of DevOps best practices.

The number of organizations adopting DevOps best practices is not only increasing, but organizations that have implemented continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms also are employing them more widely. Instead of only being employed by pockets of development teams, entire enterprises are now using DevOps best practices and standardizing on a CI/CD platform. Many of those decisions are being driven by the need to accelerate digital business transformation initiatives in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the application development stakes rise, C-level executives are also getting more involved in application development and deployment decisions, DeWitt said. Those executives not only want to accelerate the rate at which applications are built and deployed, they also want greater visibility into processes that now have a direct impact on revenue streams, DeWitt said.

It remains to be seen just how quickly DevOps platform providers, as a whole, will grow, but with more venture capital pouring into the sector by the day, there is no shortage of fuel to throw on the proverbial DevOps fire.