Dive Brief:
- GitLab wants to position itself closer to hyperscalers amid the industrywide shift to incorporate generative AI into tools and products, the company said Monday in its earnings call for the period ending April 30.
- CEO and Co-founder Sid Sijbrandij said GitLab’s strategy, with AI in mind, “is to partner closer with the hyperscalers, and the toughest one is Microsoft. We try to partner there too, but with everyone else, we see a lot of momentum; that’s AWS, [Google Cloud] and Oracle.”
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“Incorporating AI throughout the software development life cycle is at the core of our AI strategy,” Sijbrandij said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.
Dive Insight:
GitLab is a competitor to Microsoft-owned GitHub, but GitLab’s CFO said the two platforms don't always compete head-to-head for deals.
“The trends with Microsoft remain pretty consistent where we still don't see any competition at about 50% of the deals,” Brian Robins, CFO at GitLab, said during the earnings call. “We see them in very little deals, but there is more discussion around OpenAI, ChatGPT and Copilot.”
The two software development platforms, however, are following similar strategies: implementing generative AI across the software development life cycle.
GitHub has been working on new capabilities for its AI-powered pair programming tool Copilot as it finds use cases in the enterprise segment. In the first three months of Copilot for Business under general availability, more than 10,000 organizations signed up, including Coca-Cola, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaking during the company’s Q3 2023 earnings call in April.
GitLab expanded a partnership with Oracle to enable customers to run AI workloads on Oracle’s infrastructure in April. The company also partnered with Google Cloud to expand AI-assisted capabilities in May.
GitLab expects to see AI transform software development in three ways, according to Sijbrandij. AI will help lower the barrier to entry for software development and lower the cost of software production by boosting productivity, fuelling demand for more developers to meet the expected increased software demand.
Quarterly revenue for GitLab grew 45% year-over-year, reaching nearly $127 million in Q1 2024.
