The acquisition of data management firm Delphix by Perforce Software on February 14th addresses more than one key challenge in DevOps.
Increasingly the roadblock to full automation for many large firms – not least banks and insurance companies, with their particular compliance requirements – is how to connect data management and testing in the Cloud while maintaining the integrity and security of the data.
It also addresses a key opportunity.
Large firms – and, again, large financial firms especially – are trying to reduce the number of external technology providers they deal with.
Around the world, there is increasing regulatory scrutiny of how firms manage digital resilience, and less complex vendor management is going to be part of the response to that.
READ: Perforce confirms deal to take over test data management giant Delphix
Backed by two major Californian VC firms, Francisco Partners and Clearlake Capital, Perforce is successfully building a portfolio of leading solutions.
In 2022 it bought Puppet, the infrastructure automation and compliance platform, while a year earlier, the firm acquired the BlazeMeter testing platform from CA Technologies.
Meanwhile, in 2019, it snapped up Perfecto, a leading mobile and web testing company. Importantly, the plan seems to be to merge the brands, or at least very closely co-brand.
Delphix
Delphix, which was founded in 2008 and is based in Redwood City, California, provides an intelligent data platform that accelerates digital transformation for companies around the world.
The uptake of its DataOps platform surged in recent years as it supports a relatively broad spectrum of systems from mainframes to Oracle databases, ERP applications, and Kubernetes containers.
Talking about the Delphix deal, Mark Ties, until November 2023 the CEO of Perforce, said that “Delphix’s data management capabilities perfectly complement our existing solutions, enabling us to provide a comprehensive offering to our customers.”
The obvious comparison is with the sprawling Insight Partners portfolio.
In the DevOps and testing vertical, that New York-headquartered investor owns the majority test automation specialist Tricentis, with the first investment in 2016, as well as significant stakes in release management platform JFrog (obtained in 2018) and static analysis specialist SonarSource (2016), among others.
Consolidation coming
It seems inevitable that there will be further consolidation in the tooling marketplace – so could that portfolio be more tightly-knit?
And then there is the continuing ebb and flow of marketing partnerships between the major international systems integrators and different DevOps and tooling vendors.
Cognizant, for example, lists Delphix as one of its technology partners while Infosys lists Tricentis as one of its alliances, among dozens of others.
That model of SI marketing partnerships now has a long history.
But as other vendors merge and consolidate – as they surely will in 2024 and beyond – then the value-add of that proposition will have to be refined, slimmed down and reinforced.
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