Split — Democratizing Facebook’s best software development practices
The world of software development has changed dramatically in the past decade. Packaged Software has given way to SaaS, Waterfall Development has shifted to Agile Development, and DevOps Practices are no longer just the topic of forward leaning blog posts.
To put things in perspective, can you believe it took Microsoft 2+ years and a small army of developers to write, test, and release Windows XP back in the late 90s?
In today’s world of Web Applications and SaaS, a 2 year release cycle seems like a complete anachronism. Facebook, Google, Netflix, and others have shown us how dozens of new software features can be written, tested and released in days or weeks, rather than months or years. And these companies constantly measure and analyze every action to further improve their software’s performance and yield.
To facilitate these modern practices, today’s technology leaders had to build their own sophisticated internal tools for controlling, managing and measuring their product releases. Concurrent with this shift in how software is built, is the trend that companies that haven’t traditionally been technology companies have realized that with the cloud and big data they need to become software providers.
For example, John Deere, the tractor company, is building a cloud to manage and measure farm sensor data. GE has aggressively built and marketed the Predix Cloud, a cloud focused on Big Data for Industrial Data. And Johnson & Johnson has publicly announced an ambitious plan to transition 85% of workloads to the cloud by 2018.
The challenge for these old world companies — as well as any new startup or software vendor — is one of resources and knowledge. Coming up the DevOps learning curve is hard. Building internal tooling is expensive and time consuming. And finding and retaining the right talent is a constant battle. And so, as the rest of the software world looks to the innovators for inspiration, they also scramble to either build their own rudimentary internal tooling or adopt a combination of open source and third party software. As a result, a healthy DevOps toolchain market has sprung up, including companies like Atlassian, Cloudbees, and AppDynamics.
We are still early in these shifts and many challenges remain to be solved, which is why we are so excited today to announce our Series A investment in Split.
Split’s founding team — Adil, Pato, and Trevor — has had a front row seat to the DevOps movement at companies like RelateIQ, LinkedIn and Google. But they didn’t just watch…this talented team helped build the platforms that facilitated the shift to a Data-Driven DevOps model at these technology innovators. The tools they built at LinkedIn and RelateIQ helped their internal teams release code faster, measure impact, and constantly iterate to optimize their product’s business and technical performance.
The Split platform allows engineering and product teams to create and manage customized product rollout plans in a controlled manner. In today’s “move fast and break things” environment, this lets companies target a specific customer segment for a new feature, measure the impact (on revenue, technical performance, or user experience), and then roll it out to broader audience or roll back the feature if there’s a negative impact. With Split, any customer that has embraced the DevOps movement can build, release, and measure their software the same way as companies like Facebook, Netflix, LinkedIn and Google. The ultimate result is that Split lets software teams move faster, without breaking things.
The team is just getting started and at Lightspeed we’re extremely excited about our partnership with the Split team as they democratize DevOps practices and allow any software company the best of Silicon Valley’s data-driven software release methodologies. . For more information on Split, visit www.split.io.
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He brings significant cloud, SaaS and DevOps expertise to the Split Board of Directors. In his free time, Arif plays ice hockey with his wife, who yells at him for never passing the puck to her.
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