Power

Move fast, break nothing: Why investors like JFrog’s approach to modern software development

If every company is now a software company, that means a lot of companies have to figure out how to be software companies. JFrog's tools help those companies ship stable software at a quick pace.

Move fast, break nothing: Why investors like JFrog’s approach to modern software development

"Every company is now a software company," says Shlomi Ben Haim, co-founder and CEO of JFrog.

Photo: JFrog

Velocity is one of the major driving forces behind modern software development, and JFrog quickly showed the public markets Wednesday why companies are interested in tools that help them go fast.

Shares in JFrog rose 47% Wednesday during its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, closing at $64.79, compared to the listing price of $44 per share. That values it at more than $6 billion, a pretty good return for the 12-year-old Israeli company's investors, who poured $226 million in the company as it grew.

"Every company is now a software company," said Shlomi Ben Haim, co-founder and CEO of JFrog, in an interview with Protocol on Wednesday. However, "every company was not created as a software company," and those scrambling to modernize their approach to software development need help making that transition, he said.

JFrog offers a series of software development tools that help companies manage the process of getting software from the idea stage to production. These tools allow companies to manage their code repositories, monitor the entire development pipeline for potential issues or problems, and deploy that code to self-managed servers or cloud services.

This entire process has grown more complex in the cloud era. Software construction used to proceed at a relatively plodding pace through various stages of development, with predetermined release cycles that introduced relatively large changes to the code base. However, the modern approach to software development involves making lots of smaller changes to the code on a more frequent basis, which helps stamp out bugs, introduce new features, and shift priorities according to market forces much more quickly than older processes allowed.

JFrog's software can be consumed as a service on all three major cloud providers or managed on a company's own servers, and customers also pay for support services. JFrog recorded $94 million in revenue during 2019, a 69% jump compared to the previous year.

The company and its investors are betting that the massive number of companies that have yet to contemplate modernizing older tech investments are starting to realize they have no choice, lest they be swept away by newer, more-nimble competitors. Tools like JFrog's are an extension of the DevOps movement, which is as much a cultural shift in thinking inside software factories as a technical one toward faster and more flexible software development.

Over the long term, emerging concepts like serverless computing and low-code development could upend the way companies think about building and shipping software, but JFrog's tools seem well-adapted for companies that built software around virtual machines — the basic processing unit of cloud computing — and are starting to embrace containers.

And as rings true for any company operating on the cloud in 2020, the cloud providers themselves are increasingly interested in providing similar tools to help big clients make the leap onto their platforms. But JFrog executives believe they can operate as a neutral party among cloud vendors and on-premises hardware vendors starting to get into application management services.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

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Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

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FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

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Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

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Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

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Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

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