R.I.P. Travis CI?

Travis CI, the Continuous Integration (CI) tool, is part of thousands of our daily, hourly, and even minutely routines. But, back in January, Idera acquired Travis CI. Will Travis CI survive?

Background

Travis CI is the dominant cloud-based continuous integration service on GitHub. Travis CI claims use by 700,000 developers worldwide and has 1.2M unique visitors monthly.

Will Idera kill Travis CI?

As a rule, a company acquires another company expecting to receive value. How the acquiring company defines that value makes all the difference in what happens post-acquisition.

Most often “value” means money in pocket now. But, “value” could also mean longer-term strategic value. “Value” could relate to synergies created between an acquired product or customer base and a company’s existing products and customer base. “Value” could even mean killing a competitor, especially if the acquiring company is Oracle.

Silicon Valley companies have a history of pumping investment money into projects with the long-game in mind — that longer-term strategic value. They would rather take over the world tomorrow than pay the rent today. The approach worked very well in the case of Facebook. But, it doesn’t always go to plan.

GitHub has provided tremendous value to the open source community without yet turning a profit. After Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub in June 2018, developers have had their fingers crossed, hoping that Microsoft won’t set out to extract immediate financial value from them. So far the lack of layoffs at GitHub and lack of changes to premium-service pricing suggests Microsoft is playing the long game — not wanting to alienate hordes of open source developers.

When Idera acquired Travis CI, Konstantin Haase, then CTO and co-founder, assured the world that everything would be “business as normal.”

Fast forward a few weeks and Konstantin’s Twitter profile no longer includes “CTO & Co- Founder at @travisci.” Idera has laid off at least a handful of Travis CI’s people.

Looking more closely at Idera, Inc., a Houston-based software company, we find two private equity firms HGCC, its controlling investor, and TA. (Interestingly, Steve Young, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, sits on the board of Idera, as an HGCC partner.)

Reading through HGCC’s, TA’s, and Idera Inc.’s materials, it is clear that these businesses are fully committed to the traditional “money in pocket now” business model. More specifically, Idera’s software offerings follow the proprietary software model, notably including “high-velocity sales.”

Travis CI joins a suite of other products at Idera, Inc. All of the testing tools sold by Idera are fee-based and lack an open-source software (OSS) free option. For example, check out Ranorex Studio and TestRail.

One of Idera’s products, Kiuwan, competes directly against Travis CI as a continuous integration (CI) tool but, unlike Travis CI, has no OSS free option. Idera does not provides public pricing for Kiuwan inviting you instead to discuss options with a salesperson.

Get to the Point Already! Will Idera kill Travis CI?!

In my view, the only way that Idera would not kill Travis CI, as we know it, is if they had a Silicon-Valley, longer-term, strategic-value play in mind. Nothing I’ve seen suggests that Idera has ever taken a significant strategic-value play rather than a financial-value play. Take from that what you will.

Other Options

There are many other open-source friendly Continuous Integration (CI) options.

• CircleCI: Free OSS Linux plan with unlimited builds, 4 parallel jobs; MacOS plan with 500 build minutes, 1 parallel job
• CodeShip: Free OSS with unlimited builds, 1 parallel job, unlimited teams (Linux)
• AppVeyor: Free OSS plan with unlimited builds, 1 parallel job (Windows/Linux)
• Azure Pipelines: Free OSS plan with unlimited builds, 10 parallel jobs (Windows/MacOS/Linux)