Interview: Copado, DevOps Excellence Awards finalist
'We continue to focus on solving the biggest challenges our customers face as they accelerate their digital transformation projects'
Computing's DevOps Excellence Awards showcase outstanding achievements from organisations, personalities and solutions that have successfully applied DevOps methodologies.
One of those organisations, and a finalist in this year's awards, is Copado, which is shortlisted for DevOps Tool / Product of the Year.
Andrew Davis is senior director of research & innovation at Copado, with a passion for helping teams deliver innovation, build trust and improve their performance. Since 2014, he's focused on the Salesforce platform as a developer, consultant and architect, releasing book - Mastering Salesforce DevOps - in 2019. As part of his role at Copado he provides advice and guidance on how companies can maximise the creative potential of their teams while scaling their Salesforce implementations.
We talked to Davis about what the history, present and future of Copado before the Awards take place this month.
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers
Andrew Davis: Copado was formed in 2013 by two Salesforce Release Engineers, who at the time were managing hundreds of Salesforce deployments across a multitude of different orgs, sandboxes and even countries. Our founders experienced first hand the challenge of being able to deliver Salesforce with speed and quality, and they've built a solution that now enables organisations to deliver digital transformation on Salesforce. Today, Copado has over 700 employees across 18 different countries and is redefining how to achieve success on the Salesforce platform with its data-driven approach to delivering faster, higher quality releases and improving trust across customer transformation projects.
CTG: What makes you different from other technology companies?
AD: Copado is the first low code DevOps platform, enabling teams building on Salesforce, SAP and other clouds to collaborate more easily and build more reliably. Low code platforms make it easy for less technical users to create systems to manage their organisations data and processes, enabling them to compete and thrive in a digital economy. But even low code systems have reached a level of maturity and sophistication that demands powerful approaches like DevOps. Copado is optimised to be easy for these less technical teams to use, and is custom designed to work with these enterprise platforms.
CTG: What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
AD: Our recent Spring 22 release reflects the first time an AI-powered testing tool (Copado Robotic Testing) has been fully integrated with tools to collaborate, build and deliver software. Development teams use continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools like Copado to reduce the time it takes to release software. Now with this release, teams can embed Copado Robotic Testing throughout any part of the software delivery process to help ensure quality and prevent breaking changes from making their way to production environments.
We've also reimagined our platform to be modular so that our customers and partners can build custom solutions on top of Copado. They can customise the user interface, data model, and business processes. Partners like Accenture have already used this capability to build support for Salesforce Marketing Cloud on top of Copado.
CTG: What are you working on this year?
AD: We continue to focus on solving the biggest challenges our customers face as they accelerate their digital transformation projects. Copado is being deployed by enterprises that engage their customers across multiple clouds and require DevOps automation and alignment across these disparate platforms. Every company faces a more unpredictable market environment that moves faster and demands digital scale that was not possible just 12 months ago. Copado will continue to deliver the technologies and expertise required to transform quickly with the highest levels of quality to deliver maximum business value.
CTG: Why are events like the DevOps Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?
AD: The IT industry is an incredible competitive space. The DevOps Excellence Awards are great at recognising the innovators in the industry and the best-in-market products, as well as showcasing the high performing teams that are setting the benchmark. We were proud to be recognised for the last two years, and we're delighted to be a finalist again this year!