Developer-Led Landscape

This is a list of every company whose products were sold to, purchase-influenced by, or consumed by software developers.

I call this the Developer-Led Landscape. 

While there is a significant overlap with DevOps, many DevOps usually excludes developer tooling (like design IDEs) while also including IT Operations not part of a developer's workflow (like network monitoring).

Public Database

Announcement Blog

Announcement LI Discussion

Announcement Reddit Discussion

Cloud Native Development Blog

Definitions and Criteria

What Is Measured

This landscape only includes products that generate (or intend to generate) revenues. 

The companies that make these products may (or not) have raised venture capital. This landscape does not include open source projects, so the cumulative segment activity is broader than the landscape suggests.

Products listed may be downloadable, hosted as Software as a Service, or provided as a managed service offering.

Category, Segment, and Specialization Definitions

The major buckets are called 'categories': Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC), Developer Tools (DT), Developer Infrastructure (DI), and Developer Platforms (DP).

Products that provide similar capabilities are grouped into 'specializations'. Depending upon the nature of the specialization, we sometimes can apply verticalization (ie, what was done for API as a Product), or can apply horizontally (ie, what was done for App Servers). Specialization is not an exact science. Some are granular enough that products can exist in multiple specializations and categories. When a product can logically exist in multiple places, it is listed in one place that we feel is closest to the product's value proposition.

'segments' are groupings of products across different specializations used for aggregate reporting. When different specializations are closely related, they are grouped into a segment.

We provide definitions for categories, segments, and specializations when they are not already widely accepted, or where our definition deviates from norms.

Category: Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC)

Process solutions that coordinate how teams design, develop and test software. SDLC contains segments that create products - and in many cases services / solutions - that impact developers across the entire lifecycle of development. Conceptually, SDLC offerings are leveraged across Developer Tooling, Developer Infrastructure, and Developer Platforms. 

SDLC vendors monetize by selling corporate and individual SaaS subscriptions, on-premises software licenses and subscriptions, influence marketing such as recruiting and impression advertising, project and recurring professional services.

Category: Developer Tools (DT)

Individual (used by a single engineer) instruments used to facilitate software construction. 

DT vendors monetize by selling vendor and individual SaaS subscriptions, on-premises software licenses and subscriptions, various open source software strategies including open core and extended support, and freemium models that charge for upgrades (or in many cases for purchasing other products often times in the DI / DP categories).

Category: Developer Infrastructure (DI)

Hardware and software that support the distributed, repeatable construction of software. Some analysts call this the Software Delivery Supply Chain. If DT contains products targeted for the benefit of an individual developer, DI would be those solutions that a team of engineers would depend upon.

DI vendors monetize by selling SaaS subscriptions measured across a variety of criteria (seats, servers, sockets, containers, projects, source code repositories, pipelines, compute consumption, storage consumption, etc), on-premises software licenses and subscriptions, various open source software strategies including open core and extended support, and freemium models that charge for upgrades. Of special note, there are estimates that the cost to operate the underlying infrastructure stack that is running DI products are up to 15% of the global compute / storage consumption. Companies that sell DI products and with an already-profitable compute / storage offering can drive (mostly) free DI offerings compensated as loss leaders compensated through higher compute consumption.

Category: Developer Platforms (DP)

Developer-interfacing, code-first, and API-only runtimes. These are runtime products where the interface requires a software engineer, or the "assets" that are deployed into the runtime must be created by a developer.

DP vendors monetize by selling pay-as-you go measured across a variety of criteria (per request, compute consumption, etc.), SaaS subscriptions measured across a variety of criteria (seats, servers, sockets, containers, projects, compute consumption, storage consumption, etc), on-premises software licenses and subscriptions, various open source software strategies including open core and extended support, and freemium models that charge for upgrades.

Segment: RPA for DevOps

Solutions that automate the deployment and operations of developer tooling to increase the velocity of code to release while lowering the overhead associated with maintaining increasingly complex developer infrastructure.

Segment: Code + Application Security

The combination of Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), fuzzing, Software Composition Analysis (SCA), and Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST). These tools, while also used by security engineers, are often times developer-first.

Segment: Engineering Efficiency

Solutions that provide engineering intelligence to bring visibility and suggestions to improve software delivery. These solutions deliver insights that are consumed by all stakeholders, from engineers to product managers to business constituents to executives.

Segment: Value Stream Management

'Value Stream' is a term from the Lean Movement to describe the material and information flow to create value. It's the sequence of activities an organization undertakes to deliver on a customer need. Value stream management vendors provide solutions that increase the rate of flow for items moving through a value stream, usually by connecting and integrating numerous underlying developer and operations solutions.

Segment Overlaps

SDKs + Application Servers

I've included SDKs within this category as it's a broad term that encompasses many of the libraries and frameworks that developers include as they create software. Many SDK vendors choose to monetize in production, and while there is no duplicative vendors in SDKs vs. Application Servers, my selection of a product going into one category vs. the other is subjectively determined.

CI + CD + Build Automation

We keep track of these three segments separately. However, it is increasingly the case that these products have overlapping functionality and it's getting harder to distinguish between the differences, though they do exist. 

CI + CD + GitOps

Increasingly, the CI/CD vendors are adding in forms of GitOps into their offerings. And many of the GitOps vendors describe their solutions as forms of CD. There seems to be a convergence of configuration management and CI/CD platforms. Currently, we keep the categories separated.

Code and Application Security + Config + GitOps + CI + CD

Code and Application Security contains numerous sub-segments related to validating and testing code and systems. The market considers Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), fuzzing, Software Composition Analysis (SCA), and Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST). We do not include Runtime Application Security Protection (RASP) in our categories. These capabilities are often lightly provided within products that also offer configuration management, GitOps, CI, or CD. Companies that primarily provide code and application security solutions are placed into this category, whereas companies that tangentially offer these solutions are listed in other categories.

Application Servers + PaaS

The lines between hosted offering and downloadable software have blurred. Application servers are platforms for developers to build and run their applications in any environment. Platform as a Service products are hosted platforms for building and running those same applications. Many vendors are increasingly providing both - a downloadable application server that is also hosted as a PaaS. There are many companies that could arguably fit in either segment. A company ends up in the segment where we think most of their revenues are generated.

API as a Product + PaaS

A number of the vendors that provide an API as a Product offering are also a PaaS, especially in the integration PaaS and communication PaaS areas. Most of the iPaaS vendors are included in the PaaS segment because they require customers to create software systems deployed and hosted within the vendor's cloud. Most of the cPaaS vendors are included in the API as a Product segment because most of the software leverages callable APIs. This dynamic also appears frequently with headless CMS vendors, which are providing forms of APIs for managing content and PaaS for hosting content.

Low Code + PaaS

A few vendors are providing low code workflow solutions optimized for integration. This looks a lot like an iPaaS. Some of the i