Interview: Copado, Best DevOps Start Up

DevOps is a fast-growing space, and never more so than now. This year, firms around the world realised the importance of the ability to move fast and flex to suit changing market conditions. They have had to adjust quickly to new ways of working, new rules, new guidance - and with even more change on the horizon in the form of Brexit, the ability to react quickly and safely has never been more important.

"DevOps has emerged from within the IT community to enable companies to move more quickly, unify multiple development streams, and ultimately deliver more value as business goals shift in today's unpredictable environment," says Andrew Davis of Copado - winner of Best DevOps Start Up at Computing's DevOps Excellence Awards.

Copado aims to enable digital transformation in its clients, which is important for modern companies to keep pace with - or exceed - their competitors. It specifically focuses on Salesforce customers, which Davis says is "the leading cloud platform for transformation":

"Copado was founded to address the massive demand from companies around the world who are making the transition to the new digital first marketplace. Every company around the world is accelerating their transition to digital due to the global pandemic. Salesforce is the leading cloud platform for transformation, and Copado provides Salesforce customers with a proven DevOps platform and methodology that results in the fastest way to deliver high quality, digital projects that deliver maximum business return."

On hearing that Copado's entry had won Best DevOps Startup, Davis said he was "delighted."

"It's great to receive the recognition for Copado's progress over the years, constantly more than doubling in size. We owe our leadership in the Salesforce DevOps space to our customers, and awards like this reinforce that message and help inform other companies that are struggling with stalled digital projects."

As for what made the entry stand out, our judges said that Copado demonstrated "attention to detail and one of the fundamental aspects of DevOps: continuous improvement!" Davis added, "We think there are multiple factors. The quality of our product and constant innovations with new tools such as DevOps 360 Analytics, where we are giving CIOs full visibility into their Salesforce Delivery process, really helped.

"Not only do we provide the software, but we also enable our customers' DevOps teams to learn about the product and best practices through the Copado Academy. The final factor that we think contributed is the size of our customers and the speed of our growth. We're able to demonstrate a clear ROI to our enterprise customers, helping them to maximise the return on their Salesforce investment."

"This award gives recognition to the product team for the incredible product they've built," he added. "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. It's great to win another award, and further cements Copado as the leader of Enterprise Salesforce DevOps."

As any IT leader will agree, you should never rest on your laurels - especially now. Davis says that Copado's focus now is on solving the biggest challenges its customers face as they transition to the new normal:

"Every company faces a more unpredictable market environment, which 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. Our Winter ‘21 release further expands our platform and will be available to customers in December. It includes new innovations for non-technical users, a new open APIs framework for partners, and multiple cross platform capabilities."

The DevOps Excellence Awards will return next year - we'll see you there.