Cycloid opens London office

Cycloid, the Open DevOps and Hybrid Cloud Collaboration Platform for building end-to-end frameworks, has opened its EMEA subsidiary in London, and the appointment of senior IT executive, Rob Gillam, as Sales Leader. The regional presence addresses demand from enterprises on the path towards cloud and microservices who are navigating an increasingly complex ecosystem of tools and an inability to scale DevOps due to a lack of available talent. Cycloid answers the call by helping organisations create a widespread DevOps culture that brings cloud, tools, teams and processes together - regardless of skills, expertise, or technology - on one, enterprise-grade platform.

As businesses strive to gain competitive advantage, improve customer satisfaction and create better day-to-day operational efficiency, time to delivery for new features has seen investment in IT and the cloud skyrocket. The challenge is that this leads to more tools, more complexity, and not enough people with the right skillset to contribute effectively to projects and products. According to the most recent Gartner Predicts 2020, 75% of DevOps initiatives fail due to issues around organisational learning and change. To combat these challenges, many organisations develop their own custom portals, which can be resource-intensive, expensive, and hard to maintain.

Cycloid offers a clear path for organisations: an open collaboration platform for teams that does not replace DevOps or cloud tools, and instead maximises value from these investments with simple, end-to-end frameworks to help organisations automate and scale.  Through a centralised project management window, roles and policies can be pre-defined to ensure Governance while allowing teams to have the agility they need to do their jobs. Deployment is handled with fluidity and flexibility using service catalogues to deploy stacks made by teams, with drag and drop cloud resources to auto-generate or migrate existing projects on a cloud provider to infra-as-code. Once projects have been deployed, Management tools and features bring visibility, automation, monitoring and budget control to ensure continued business and best practice. 

Pierre-Emmanuel Klotz, head of managed services at Orange Business Services, a Cycloid customer, explains, “With over 120,000 virtual machines under management, 2,400 DevOps experts on the books, and 70 data centres over five locations, our situation was a delicate, time-consuming puzzle.” He continues, “Cycloid acts as a cornerstone for all our tools, bringing the visibility to show us things we didn’t know before, and the frameworks to get the most out of things we hadn’t mastered previously. Using Cycloid, we can move four times faster on projects and accommodate existing tools, or whatever tools our customers want to use, instead of forcing them to adapt to a new set of tools, standards and solutions.”

Headquartered in Paris, Cycloid was founded in 2015 by ex-Red Hat EMEA Cloud Manager, Benjamin Brial, to change the perception of DevOps as an operational cost lacking clear value, and break down the silos that exist around projects. To lead the international expansion, Cycloid has appointed Rob Gillam, formerly a senior executive with leading enterprise IT companies, InfluxData and Canonical.  Gillam will lead the international sales of Cycloid across Northern Europe and USA. 

“We created Cycloid to change the mindset within organisations that you need an army of DevOps specialists and a custom-built portal to get the most from your investments in tools,” explained Benjamin Brial, Founder, Cycloid. “We give teams the capability to define and create a DevOps culture that flows through an organisation, enabling widespread automation and scalability. We are excited to welcome Rob to our team as we enter our next phase of international growth, and show that Cycloid and a few great engineers are all that’s needed to unlock DevOps and cloud adoption across an organisation.”