Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels | Google Cloud & GitLab

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Stephen Orban

VP of Migrations, ISVs & Marketplace

Google Cloud

Ashley Kramer

CRO

GitLab

How GitLab and Google Cloud Marketplace streamline deployment and improve customer satisfaction

Organizations are increasingly turning to cloud-based security solutions to protect their data and streamline workflows in today’s digital landscape. These solutions provide flexible, scalable options that enhance security without compromising efficiency.The partnership between Google LLC and GitLab Inc. leverages cloud-based security solutions to reshape developer productivity and security by merging tools and resources, creating a streamlined experience that reaches customers faster and simplifies deployment. The collaboration enhances the developer experience by simplifying procurement and optimizing deployment through these cloud-based security solutions on Google Cloud Marketplace

play_circle_outline Unique integrations and security focus in the partnership

play_circle_outline Leveraging AI capabilities for code generation and security testing

play_circle_outline Differentiated capabilities in self-hosting model for regulated industries.

play_circle_outline Future of partnership: continued value, focus on joint customer excitement and needs.

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Google Cloud & GitLab

Stephen Orban

VP of Migrations, ISVs & Marketplace Google Cloud

Ashley Kramer

CRO GitLab

John Furrier hosts a presentation with guests Stephen Orban and Ashley Kramer from GitLab, partnering with Google Cloud to accelerate software development. GitLab, an AI-powered platform for DevSecOps, integrates with Google Cloud services to enhance the developer experience and streamline operations. The partnership focuses on delivering software efficiently, ensuring security, and increasing developer satisfaction. Integrations with Google services create a seamless workflow for developers. The joint mission is to keep developers happy and provide a robust ... Read more

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What partnership between Google Cloud and GitLab is being mentioned and how does it benefit developers? add

What is the importance of weaving AI throughout the entire software development life cycle and leveraging partnerships with companies like Google to provide the best customer experience? add

What is the core tenet of the Vertex platform built by GitLab and Google Cloud for regulated industries like financial services and healthcare? add

What are the benefits and future plans for the partnership between GitLab and Google? add

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>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE presentation here in the Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host of the CUBE, part of the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvel series. We've got two great guests here, Stephen Orban's back on. He's the Vice President of Migrations of ISVs of the Marketplace for Google Cloud. We've got Ashley Kramer, the CMO, Chief Strategy Officer, and the Chief Revenue Officer of GitLab. Ashley, great to see you. Stephen, of course, great to have this Marvel series continue to kick off with the innovators on Google Cloud. Thank you both for joining the CUBE.

Ashley Kramer

>> Thanks for having us.

Stephen Orban

>> Thanks for having us, John. Thank you, Ashley for doing this, of course.

>> So GitLab, Google Cloud, GitLab changing the game. Has been there, really helping software developers. In this market right now, Ashley, it's really an important time in our history as software developers are at the center of all the innovation, especially with this secular trend of gen AI obviously a huge deal. The appetite for AI is off the charts, large-scale distributed computing, distributed hybrid, wherever you look at it, this is the hottest time I've seen in generations. So this is a big point for you guys. I know you have a lot of action going on and partnering with Google. You guys are partnering together to really change how fast software can be consumed and built at the same time. GitLab is accelerating its momentum partnering with Google. Take us through what you guys are up to right now, specifically with GitLab, and then we'll talk about the Google relationship.

Ashley Kramer

>> Yeah, absolutely. And again, thanks for having me. So just for those of you that might not be familiar with GitLab, GitLab is the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform that helps customers across the world develop, secure, and deploy their software faster. And so that's really important because as you just mentioned, every company is a software company at this point, and particularly with the rise of gen AI, software and delivery and securing it and innovation has never been more important. And for us, the best way to move faster is to have great partnerships like Google Cloud.

>> One of the things that we're seeing as a a table stakes piece of the market right now is how fast can you get stable on the infrastructure and how fast can you start coding up these gen AI applications? Going to market, speed to market is a huge factor, and also the value proposition's changing. And in your role as CMO, chief strategy officer and chief revenue, you got to balance all the brand, the positioning, the value proposition. Also, you got to have the product out there. So what's it like to partner with Google? Talk about the relationship with Google Cloud and Google Cloud Marketplace because this is a faster accelerant. We're seeing marketplaces do extremely well as digital becomes first party citizen for how companies do business clearly with developers and that scale. Talk about the Google Cloud relationship.

Ashley Kramer

>> Yeah, for sure. I'll start with Marketplace. So we've been on Google Cloud Marketplace since 2019 and have done thousands of transactions and we see tons of benefits and as you as marketing and revenue officer, very important for particularly me in my role. Some benefits, the increased visibility and reach that we get. Being listed on the Marketplace really exposes us to a wider audience of Google customers that maybe we haven't reached just yet. Added benefit on the revenue side, customers can use their GCP spend to apply it to GitLab. After the visibility and reach, then there's simplified procurement for our joint customers. They can easily purchase and deploy GitLab, super important for us so they can find value faster. And then Google takes care of all of the rest. The billing through renewals, very, very important for us. And then on the deployment side, the streamlined deployment is really important. GitLab is available on the Marketplace as multi-tenant SaaS and what we call self-managed. We run our multi-tenant SaaS, by the way, on Google Cloud Platform. We've been doing that since we launched our SaaS product many, many years ago. But on the self-managed side, also really important is that we can very quickly allow these customers to have their deployment done seamlessly on Google Cloud. And for us, that's really important because in partnership with Google, we're getting our joint customers, value faster.

>> Stephen weigh in on this because we've talked in the past about Google Cloud Marketplace. It's not just a well-oiled machine in terms of speed to consume, there's a lot of integration and innovation at the core and with GitLab, the modern developer has needs. Can you talk about that piece of it around how you're helping GitLab there because this is really where the rubber hits the road here.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, that's right, John, and I think Ashley nailed it, where the rubber hits the road. Just really trying to help GitLab find more customers faster, then enable those customers to be able to buy procure and deploy GitLab solutions in a variety of ways, as Ashley pointed out, faster. But if you just take a step back and if I think about some of how GitLab and Google Cloud's motives at the highest levels are aligned, we just want to meet our customers where they are and we share a passion for developers. As an example, as customers, we want to be able to meet the developer with the right technology and the right tool wherever it is that they're doing their work. And sometimes that means that a developer is going to be using Google Cloud and come upon GitLab to help them to develop and manage and deploy secure code and their IDs and their pipelines around with it. Sometimes it means that they're going to be using GitLab and as Ashley pointed out, GitLab has been running on Google Cloud, their multi-tenant SaaS offering, for some time. So those customers also by extension are using Google Cloud behind the scenes. So that's why we're so excited that we've had this partnership with GitLab because it really helps us both meet customers where they are and then Ashley nailed some of the big value points that they help us bring to our Marketplace. We've done a number of unique integrations together. I think she'll probably touch on those, but security and developing secure software is job zero for us as the cloud provider, and the fact that GitLab provides a whole suite of tools that helps developers do that securely and is able to help lots of our customers, Ashley mentioned thousands of offers over the last couple of years is really a game changer and it helps our customers, the developers, be more comfortable using our platform when we have partners like GitLab who can offer them secure solutions to do so.

>> Ashley, I mentioned modern developers, this is your focus. You guys have a crosshair on this market, this is where you're targeting. GitLab known for that and with Google Cloud, talk about the relationship as integration as a value proposition. Can you talk about the security and automation features because this is where people want to know what's going on around how you're addressing the demands for security in the software supply chain, how customers are benefiting from these enhancements. What are some of the things with Google Cloud that help you continue to be that DevSecOps solution for the modern developer?

Ashley Kramer

>> Yeah, for sure. I love how Stephen positioned meet customers where they are. I'm probably going to steal that, so hopefully that's not trademarked. And that's really important for us because the sec in DevSecOps is to us the most important piece of the software development life cycle in general. We need to shift security left and we need to make sure that it's part of the everyday workflow of developers obviously of security and operations professionals. And when it comes to our integrations with Google Cloud, we have done really interesting integrations like we are integrated in their developer console. Why is that? Because now we're allowing developers to stay where they are, in the experience, not context switch. When it comes to integrations with other Google Cloud services, they can use the security services that they've been using seamlessly either in GitLab with Google, bringing that all together from authentication to security scanning to all of the different pieces that we need to keep top of mind as we're delivering software into really important applications and use cases. We really want to keep the developer in their flow using the services they need. And so we've done many integrations together with Google to help them achieve that.

>> And Stephen, the scale piece is huge here because not only do you help with the revenue side with the Marketplace, you got the integrations, you got the software supply chain, you address the security, but you also got the scale, the cloud.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, the integrations as Ashley pointed out, is key and I think one of the things that's awesome about the relationship we have with GitLab is it just continues to get better and build upon itself. Ashley rattled off a couple of these integrations we've done, but all those have taken time, things that we've been working on together for years and basically as more customers who are able to find their capabilities in the context of what they're doing, use it, they give us collectively more feedback around the more things that they want to see. So we make sure that then we're able to put GitLab in more places where our customers can find it in contextually relevant experiences, that we add more security capabilities together. And GitLab as a customer as Ashley said, running their multi-tenant SaaS on us also pushes us really hard to make our capabilities better so that we can help deliver the scale that they need as they reach their customer. So all these unique integrations, it's this reinforcing flywheel that just keeps getting better and better over time as we get more and more customer feedback to respond to.

>> What's great about-

Ashley Kramer

>> Can I touch something on the scale side there? Do you mind?

>> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Ashley Kramer

>> That's a really important one. We actually have a really happy joint customer, Airwallex. What they do is they provide a proprietary fraud detection system. It's a company based in Australia and they hit a pivotal moment within their journey as a company where a giant airline wanted them to do work for them and they realized that they were going to have trouble reaching the scale, the high availability numbers that the customer was requiring. So they turned to Google, which was beautiful because at the same time, they were also turning to GitLab to help consolidate their tool chain and bring more of those tools together into one. And so we were able to partner really closely together with Airwallex and as joint partners, GCP and GitLab, to get them really, really fantastic results. In the end, they were able to actually consolidate on 95% of their services on GitLab and Google Cloud and as a result, they saw eight times faster deployments and four times faster feature delivery because of the partnership and of course the Marketplace purchase that they were able to make.

>> Ashley, that's a great point about how scale and the partnerships with the integrations allows speed and agility to move fast, and this is really what developers want. Cloud's great, stand up a lot of scale, you guys got the integrations, but now the real unique value that everyone wants to know about is where's the competitive edge? So speed and now you've got the AI capability. So I want get into this of the competitive advantage and unique value to this modern developer because this is where we have more real push, right? Real and more acceleration with AI and machine learning capabilities become more prevalent in DevSecOps. You guys are leveraging this with customers and Google's got AI and ML, you guys are working on that as well within your platform. How are you leveraging some of the new stuff to enhance the developer experience and streamlining operations to get that speed because this is where we're seeing differentiation and specifically competitive and business value.

Ashley Kramer

>> When it comes to AI, super important. Our viewpoint is similar to Google's, which is it's important to weave AI throughout the entire software development life cycle. Lots of people are obsessed right now with generating code faster, but you need to make sure that code is secure and it deploys well and it integrates and it's not creating actually more tech debt in the future. And so our story there is the same with everything else. Google's AI capabilities and GitLab's AI capabilities are better together. We give the customer the choice used together. We also leverage large language models that Google provides. So we have worked closely with Vertex AI with the Gemini team to make sure that we are providing our customers the best and greatest experience. And so the way that we've developed our underlying architecture for large language models, we are not a large language model provider, so we rely on our partners for that is we build our capabilities on top and we're able to swap in and out models as they continue to evolve. And lots of our capabilities today do run on Google's large language models.

>> That's huge, Steve. This model integration for lack of a better word, means they can take advantage of that benefit. The goodness there, they have their own data coming in, they have their own customer relationships, that symbiotic relationship, not a lot of people talking about that, but that's the key to the deeper AI game going on here. What's your thoughts?

Stephen Orban

>> That's right. Symbiotic is a good word to use for it because as Ashley points out, they're using a lot of our models, our Gemini stack inside of their tools to help their customers do everything from generating code to do it more securely, but it is bidirectional and symbiotic as well. We have a capability that our customers use called Gemini Code Assist, where it's also helping customers complete the next line of code or give them context on what they might want to do next in their software. And GitLab has been a partner on that capability since day one where the context that GitLab has about a particular customer when they're a subscriber on Google Cloud also helps train that model to make it more effective for customers. So we actually have the capabilities going in both directions, again in the context of meeting customers where they are. And I think that GitLab has been even before the LLM craze that we've been seeing over the course of the last couple of years, I think GitLab has been a great partner in pushing the envelope and machine learning and artificial intelligence to help their customers get code out securely faster.

>> Ashley mentioned how AI's creating code assistance and help coding, like anything, more stuff's coming in. It's not the size sometimes, it's really the intelligence of the data and in this case, code, you guys have been helping developers, so there's a lot more coming in and it's got to be smarter and faster. What's your thoughts on that? Because this is where you get the benefits of, you said technical debt. I think you're being polite around, there's more tsunami of code coming in and it could be repurposed, but there's a lot more intelligence now that's needed in DevSecOps because there's zero tolerance for failure in this infrastructure and software game here. What's your thoughts there?

Ashley Kramer

>> Yeah. And it is just as important to make sure the code that's being generated has security scans run on it and is being tested properly. By the way, AI can rate those tests now as well. The developers don't always like to comment on their code. You can have that or when you're trying to ramp on an old code base, you can have it explained or even refactored for you. So from my perspective, there's been a lot of viewpoints in the world. Will there be a need for less developers? And I think it's exactly the opposite. I think AI will take care of a lot of the mundane, some of the things that we've just been talking about. It will help developers free up their time to use their mind for solving creative problems, things that maybe AI can't do, but also we need to get to a point where we're not just using generalized models that have been trained on generalized data or only open source code for instance, which is the approach a lot of large language model providers are taking, and actually has that context of the specific code base, of the code base relevant to the actual company. We will also see a trend coming, we're already starting to hear it more and more at GitLab. We sell a lot to highly regulated companies just like Google Cloud does, and it is a non-starter for them to share their IP of course or be using other companies' IP. So we'll see this need for more self-hosted models so they can be context aware of exactly their code base in their organization's needs.

>> Yeah, that's a great point. The whole automation of jobs, I remember every cycle of innovation is one, ATMs we're going to replace bank tellers. There's more bank tellers now than ever before. The big data wave and 15 years ago that started was going to eliminate need for software engineering. Now there's more platform engineers than ever before. Security is super hot. So I think you're totally right, the human in the loop really becomes just another creative problem solver. And I think Stephen, this is where the paving the way to the future with DevSecOps, with Google Cloud and GitLab is important because at the end of the day, the customers and the relationship you guys have with them is important. You mentioned one Ashley, they're looking at a holistic picture, They're looking at their platform, there's platform engineering, they got data engineering, and now they've got to make way for these agentic app systems, which is going to be a series of agents. Everyone's talking about that. So as we move from automation to semi-autonomous, this is going to be a Cambrian explosion for developers. And so you got to have the scale, you got to have the speed, and you got to have the intelligence. This is going to be the key. Talk about where you guys are with customers, how that frame is working into your relationship.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, sure. If anything, John, I think just from a scale perspective, I would just echo something that Ashley said where it's just going to make it easier for developers and I think it's going to make more of them. And it's just making it a much more accessible profession to have an assistant that can help provide contacts, write the unit test, do some of the things maybe sometimes are overlooked. Commenting is another example that Ashley pointed out, and I think GitLab does a wonderful job of taking things its learned from its massive scale and its customer base, rolling that back into their product innovation cycles using the latest AI capabilities from their partners like us and making that available to customers. So I think just nothing creates momentum like momentum is something I often say in our partnerships. As we get more and more customers, it becomes easier to get more and more customers and then they really have some differentiated capabilities in the self-hosting model that Ashley pointed out also. If you look at and regulated industries like let's say financial services or healthcare or even the public sector, all of which GitLab and Google Cloud have mutual customers in together, they really want to be able to make sure that their data and IP is protected and specific to them as their organization while still being able to take advantage of what some of these generative AI capabilities offer. And we've taken that as a core tenet for how we built our Vertex platform, which is our generative AI platform stack where customers, whether it be GitLab or other customers who are using it, can basically create own adaptive models in their own tenets, securing them with their own keys where they're in control of where and how that data moves and who can see it. And GitLab's been a great customer and partner taking advantage of those capabilities to benefit their customers.

>> Ashley, where's the momentum with the customers? Can you give some more examples of specifically is the CSE pipelines and the seamless integration, what are some of the customer success picture look like?

Ashley Kramer

>> From the way that we see customers mostly measuring success, whether it's just across DevSecOps or integrating gen AI or in partnership with Google, they're looking at ways to deliver software more efficiently. So we're constantly talking to them about the metrics around how efficient is your organization, are your developers? From a developer perspective, they want their developers to be more productive. And I would argue developers want to be more productive as well and enter gen AI, but also enter how you are able to measure the impact of that across the software development life cycle. And AI impact dashboards are a big thing that we're hearing more and more about. Obviously security. Is the software secure? Nobody wants a breach these days, nobody ever has. But we see it more and more and the interesting one that a lot of executives talk to me about, which is surprising sometimes to people, but it's a really important one to keep in mind, and this is an important part of our relationship with Google, is developer satisfaction. Are they happy with their jobs? It is really hard to ramp when a good developer leaves, to ramp another one. And so that's where it's important about having these integrations. They're familiar with Google Cloud services, they often really love GitLab. And so meeting them where they are and keeping that, a lot of people are running internal CSATs these days. And so all of these pieces play together, the integrations they've built, allowing them to not context switch all day, allowing some of the barriers like commenting code to get out of their way. That's a really important one that I think feeds into all of those other metrics of success that I just talked to that often companies aren't keeping top of mind. That's something we're talking to a lot of customers about now.

>> It's interesting. You got to keep your eye on the customer and market the value proposition to them. That's the modern developer. But now you got the Marketplace. At the end of the day when you make a sale, you got to deliver on it. And the developers work for a company that needs to generate revenue in their applications. So talk about the deals that go through the Marketplace, the go to market, what has been some of the experiences you've had versus say some of the traditional sales cycles out there because marketplaces are very efficient if done right, they drive business revenue, but you got to deliver on that. So that's where the integrations come in. So that's a flywheel there. Talk about some of the deals and the benefits of the Marketplace from a revenue perspective.

Ashley Kramer

>> So from chief marketing officer hat on, I love that Marketplace provides us with that faster go-to-market. The simplified process from discoverability through deploying. The chief revenue officer side of me loves the reduced sales cycle. And we see that with a lot of our customers. So you're able to streamline the entire procurement process from discovery to deployment, and that also leads to increased customer satisfaction, which is the number one thing we are always looking at. I'm sure that's the number one thing for Google as well. The customer experience is always something that we measure and the Marketplace offers a really great customer experience. And so keeping that top of mind and just in general, you mentioned it, being able to have all of these integrations with Google services, likely a lot of our prospects and current customers are already using, that's great. Now we seamlessly bring them together and there's no disjointed break. The number one thing that we talk to customers about outside of developer satisfaction is actually how jolting it can be when you're trying to get developers to use new services and new tools. But when you have a partnership like we have with Google Cloud and you have deployment like we have on Marketplace, that can be extremely seamless and not cause a break in their productivity.

>> Stephen, Google Cloud and GitLab partnership, pretty strong. You guys looking great here. You're really empowering secure, efficient, and real scalable software development. This has led joint mission, something that's super important for both of you guys and it's also going to set the table for this next wave. Your thoughts on how this is all coming together from the Google Cloud perspective?

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah. Look, our mission is to keep developers happy together. And we've been doing that for the last five years and running as Ashley points out. And from the very beginning of Google Cloud, we knew that in order to help our customers achieve the transformations that they aspire to achieve with the cloud, we were going to need to have the most robust ecosystem to help them do that. And when it comes to developers within our customer base, GitLab is at the top of the list of helping them achieve those transformations. But as Ashley pointed out, they've done a lot of work in this partnership together to both build unique integrations, market that solution effectively, both to customers but also to our field sales team so that our sales team is there working with customers, know how to position GitLab in the right place, and then made sure that they're pushing a lot of their deals in all of their different deployment models through our Marketplace to create that momentum. And like any partnership or any relationship, you get what you put into it. And I think GitLab has just done a remarkable job of putting in what it takes to build those integrations, educate our customers and our field teams on why it's amazing, and then selling with us hand in hand to our customer base. And that's why you see the momentum that we have together because we've collectively put in the work, but at the same time, I think the best is yet to come and we're just getting started.

>> Ashley, I'll give you the final word. Your relationship with Google, how's that working? And then what's next for GitLab?

Ashley Kramer

>> Yeah, we are extremely happy with our partnership and we see tons of value from the executive buyer that is able to seamlessly purchase and move faster on Marketplace to the things that we've co-engineered and integrated together. And so I echo what Stephen said, even though it's been five plus years in the making, I really believe we are just getting started. With the rise of AI, there's a lot more you'll see coming from us and we are extremely excited about the partnership, but most importantly, that our joint customers are excited about where we're going because at the end of the day, that's what it's all about, meeting customers where they are, and often that's GitLab and Google. So more to come for them.

>> Ashley, Stephen, thanks so much. It's been great. I think we're living in a new ecosystem world with this gen AI and speed scale. It's a connected ecosystem. It's not just partnering, it's engineering, it's go to market. It's an integrated and connected ecosystem. And think you guys are a great example of what success looks like and a lot more changes coming. So congratulations.

Stephen Orban

>> Thanks for having us, John.

>> Okay, you're watching this CUBE special presentation. I'm John Furrier, Google Cloud Marketplace Marvel series. We feature all the top partners of Google Cloud and also the innovation that's going on, that's going to power this next generation of software and applications. Thanks for watching.