GitLab Technology and Channel Partners Help Enable Enterprises’ DevOps Adoption to Embrace Digital Transformation
GitLab Inc., a company that offers a single application for the DevOps lifecycle, today announced it has expanded its Global Partner Program with new technology partner integrations as well as a new GitLab Certified Services Partner Program. The Services Program includes Certified Professional Services Partner (PSP) and Certified Training Partner (CTP) badges to help new as well as existing partners develop service portfolios around the DevOps lifecycle to support GitLab customers. DevOps adoption has rapidly increased over the past several years—and it’s constantly evolving. Many developers are looking towards adding AI/ML and security to their skill sets according to GitLab’s 2021 DevSecOps survey. GitLab’s technology partners and Open and Select partners are critical to guiding customers through their digital transformation journeys, with the same survey finding that more partners than ever are helping customers set developer priorities.
The GitLab Partner Program enables current and potential partners — including systems integrators, cloud platform partners, resellers, distributors, managed service providers, and ecosystem partners — to maximize the value of their DevOps expertise and the GitLab platform for their customers. The program has continued to expand since its last update at the 2020 GitLab Commit, GitLab’s user event, and GitLab’s internal channel team has grown with a variety of initiatives and programs launched to enable partner success such as the Partner Locator. Released in November, Partner Locator helps customers find the right partner for their needs. Additionally, GitLab’s first Worldwide Partner Summit held in February gathered a crowd of engaged registrants from across the globe for live interactive sessions on sales and services enablement and engagement.
“As companies adopt DevOps and work to stay competitive in today’s market, they are recognizing that they need to evolve their software development, management and security processes,” said Michelle Hodges, vice president, global channels at GitLab. “We value our partner relationships and are focused on investing back into partners that invest in GitLab. The GitLab Partner Program, and specifically our new Services Program, empowers partners to be the critical piece in their customers creation of a successful DevSecOps strategy that realizes the full value of their GitLab investment.”
New program offerings and strategic relationships include:
- Services Program: To further support new and existing partners, GitLab has added new Certified Professional Services and Certified Training Partner badges to the program to help partners deliver value added services for customers that are new to GitLab, expanding their deployments or optimizing their DevOps practices. These certification programs provide a technical enablement framework and individual training certifications for partners to use as they build their GitLab-related services practices. Additionally, these programs provide partners the incentive to attach their services to a GitLab opportunity. New service and training enablement kits are also being rolled out to ensure partners have the resources and guidance they need to be successful on their services engagements.
- Open/Select Partners: These partners provide high-value DevOps expertise and services to customers that drive the adoption and use of the GitLab platform. Partnerships have been expanded to key resellers, integrators, and other sales and services partners such as Axcelinno, Benchmark Corp., Computacenter, Clearvision, CPrime, Fujitsu Cloud Technologies Limited, Fujitsu Oceania, Li9, WWT and Zivra.
- Distribution Partners: GitLab has added new distribution partners to the program to help support Open partners and scale the channel go-to-market strategy. GitLab distribution partners now include industry leaders such as Amazic, Arrow Electronics and Carahsoft for the US Public Sector and Canada.
- Technology Partners: Simplified GitLab deployments through strategic partnerships and integrations with major cloud provider partners create a direct line to the environments developers trust most. This past year, GitLab announced collaborations and integrations with Aqua Security, Atlassian, IBM using Red Hat OpenShift, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Ampere A1 Compute and VMware Tanzu™.
- Aqua Security: To make it even easier for DevOps and security teams to shift left and get started with vulnerability scanning, GitLab will begin using Aqua Trivy as its default container scanning engine in its 14.0 release.
- Atlassian: GitLab supports bi-directional visibility between GitLab and Jira Software, and allows joint users to tie Jira issues to GitLab commits, merge requests, and deployments.
- IBM: GitLab announced GitLab Ultimate for IBM Cloud Paks in January 2021, which is an application to help streamline team collaboration and increase productivity with a comprehensive, easy-to-use DevOps platform. In addition, GitLab Ultimate for z/OS and the GitLab Runner for Red Hat OpenShift recently became generally available.
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): GitLab has extended and added CI/CD support for OCI Ampere A1 compute shapes. Users using Oracle Cloud can now easily deploy GitLab using the ‘Deploy to Oracle Cloud’ button, allowing developers to quickly build and deploy applications on both Arm and x86 platforms.
- Red Hat: The GitLab Runner for Red Hat OpenShift recently became generally available. GitLab Runner on OpenShift is available via a stable channel embedded in the OperatorHub of OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. Through OpenShift, cluster administrators can access a web console to discover and select Operators to install on their cluster.
- ServiceNow: Through the GitLab Source Code Management (SCM) and Continuous Integration for DevOps, customers can connect their GitLab pipeline to their ServiceNow DevOps Change process to share information like work items, commit information, test results, and change records between GitLab and ServiceNow. Change managers in ServiceNow can create policies that automate regulatory governance, tracking, approval, and audit recording, reducing administrative tasks for developers and keeping them in GitLab where they can be more productive and focused on innovation.
- VMware: VMware Tanzu™ Build Service™ now integrates natively within GitLab to automate the creation, management, and governance of Kubernetes containers at enterprise scale. Users can easily build and deploy compliant containers to their Kubernetes environments from within their GitLab pipelines.
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“The partner ecosystem is engaging more in DevOps and elevating their skills in areas like security and AI/ML. Partners are developing their own software to meet customer business challenges, but also enabling customer DevOps processes through a host of services,” said Paul Edwards, Director of Software Channels & Ecosystems at IDC. “GitLab’s new program offerings will help its partners work as trusted advisors in meeting customer digital transformation challenges through new support offerings and tools.”