Posted by “The Pandemic has brought more opportunity than challenges specific to DevOps,” says JFrog’s Kavita Viswanath – GM, India.
Certainly, the COVID-19 led pandemic has acted as a double edge sword. On one hand, it severely impacted almost every businesses around the world. And on other hand, it brought more opportunities for the software and IT sector. Software management companies like JFrog have been able to tap those opportunities amid the pandemic by leveraging its strengthens and capabilities in the DevOps space.
In this interview, JFrog’s Kavita Viswanath – GM, India talks to TechHerald about the opportunity in the DevOps space and discusses the company’s strategy and business operations in India. She also shares about the company’s customers, competition and growth along with JFrog’s journey in India.
Edited excerpts…
Q1. Given the ongoing pandemic for over a year now, what sort of major changes have you observed pertaining to DevOps’ overall functioning and roles?
Kavita Viswanath: The pandemic has brought more opportunity than challenges specific to DevOps. The lockdown has severely impacted almost all businesses forcing the tech teams to innovate, reduce costs and push themselves to become more relevant in the changing environment. All these have worked as a trigger for organisations to think about developing and releasing software much faster than before and automate more than ever.
DevOps is a very collaborative process involving developers and operations teams to come together, and with remote work kicking in, we are seeing more and more teams relying on tools to make this happen. This will only continue to grow in the future.
Q2. How has been JFrog’s business fared in India during the last year or so, in terms of products, solutions and services demands, customers base and partners?
Kavita Viswanath: It’s true that DevOps originally started in more progressive or new-age companies. However, with the increased complexity in code and the availability of multiple tools and packages, it has now become the need of the hour to invest in DevOps if you are a vertical company using technology.
Today our biggest customers are banks, automotive, digital commerce and manufacturing companies where business depends a lot on technology. The India team saw phenomenal growth of over 100% since last year despite Covid times. We have a diverse team of R&D, Support, Sales, HR and Operations. Our R&D teams do core product development for many products on our platform based in Bangalore while the Support team also provides mission-critical support for our global on-premise and SaaS setup.
Q3. What is JFrog’s go-to-market strategy in India against global competitors like GitLab, GitHub and CircleCI and others?
Kavita Viswanath: We have seen a steady growth of our customer base in India across different verticals. While there are many players in the package management space, when it comes to end-to-end DevOps automation, there is no single platform such as ours that offers great value to the customer from code to release process.
We engage with the developer community via meetups, events, webinars, etc. And they continue to leverage our trial software to ultimately become our customers.
Q4. When it comes to the package registry software companies like JFrog, GitHub and others, what are the key differentiator that most enterprises or organisations consider?
Kavita Viswanath: The key differentiator really is in customer use cases, security and ability to provide highly available solutions that can provide infinite scale. We are one of the unique players in the market to provide hybrid solutions since that is what customers are looking for.
There is no one size fits all approach and therefore, the right combination of Cloud and on-premise that is supported well by the tech ecosystem is what helps us win.
Q5. Within the DevOps space in India, what sort of growth opportunities you see this year for JFrog? Can you brief us about JFrog’s operations in India?
Kavita Viswanath: JFrog entered India in 2017 via two acquisitions – Cloudmunch and Shippable. In our first year of existence, we were mainly an R&D and Support centre. However, over the past couple of years, we have more than doubled our headcount and diversified our teams to expand beyond just R&D and Support to Sales, Marketing, Product, HR etc.
India is a strategic location for JFrog where we see a tremendous market opportunity for growth. It is also one of the fastest-growing R&D centres for us, as we see some top-quality technology talent that helps us build our core products.