Re:Gitlab from YC to IPO
by lmeyerov on Thursday October 14, 2021 @02:24PM
(#28868003)
As with GitHub, the bigger value is owning shift left disruptions for enterprise and cloud sw+he services: security scanning, backups, prod server hosting, ... .
It is hard to compete with AWS, and a lot easier if you own the UI+APIs for how software teams do CI+CD: you become a default preferred vendor for all IaaS/PaaS add-ins, and can proactively recommend and even trial them well before any competitor. IBM, Oracle, SalesForce, SAP, Alibaba, etc could all win big -- imagine if IBM bought GitLab instead of RedHat to fix their data center strategy.
It is hard to compete with AWS, and a lot easier if you own the UI+APIs for how software teams do CI+CD: you become a default preferred vendor for all IaaS/PaaS add-ins, and can proactively recommend and even trial them well before any competitor. IBM, Oracle, SalesForce, SAP, Alibaba, etc could all win big -- imagine if IBM bought GitLab instead of RedHat to fix their data center strategy.