GitLab Grows with DevSecOps and AI Innovation

GitHub isn't the only Git DevOps platform vendor making progress in 2023.

This week, DevOps platform company GitLab reported its third-quarter 2024 earnings results, showing robust growth and profitability. 

GitLab's total revenue grew 32% year-over-year to $149.7 million in Q3, accelerating from 30% growth last quarter. In addition to strong top-line growth, GitLab demonstrated improving profitability. The company reported non-GAAP operating income of $4.7 million, compared with a loss of $21.6 million a year ago. The number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually grew 37% to 874 customers. And GitLab now has over 8,100 total customers spending more than $5,000 per year.

During the company's earnings call, GitLab highlighted new product capabilities in security, AI, and agile planning as key differentiators.

"GitLab is the only DevSecOps platform that brings together security, compliance, governance, AI, and enterprise agile planning," GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij said during his company's earnings call. "Enterprises face complexity from all directions in the form of rapidly increasing user expectations, more advanced cyberattacks, and more strict industry regulations. We believe they need GitLab to help them navigate this complexity and realize business value."

Related:GitHub vs. GitLab: Which One Is Better for Your Enterprise?

GitLab Announces DevSecOps Capabilities Expansion

GitLab has been busy in the past quarter expanding its capabilities. One key area of expansion has been in DevSecOps. Sijbrandij said that his company has added new security and governance into the GitLab platform that boost DevSecOps.

"Our platform enables organizations to integrate security directly into the developer workflow," Sijbrandij said. "A recent product innovation our customers are excited about is our new security findings workflow extension."

The extension, he explained, enables developers to see and address their security findings directly in their IDE while they work, without breaking their flow. In his view, organizations see the value of bringing security and compliance into the same platform where developers work.

Sijbrandij-GitLab

Security and governance are also behind the new GitLab Dedicated offering. With GitLab Dedicated, customers in highly regulated industries get the benefit of a DevSecOps platform while meeting complex and stringent compliance and regulatory requirements, Sijbrandij said.

Integrating AI Throughout the Software Lifecycle 

GitLab has multiple AI-powered features already generally available on its platform. Sijbrandij said his company's strategy is to integrate AI throughout the DevOps lifecycle.

Related:Atlassian Brings New DevSecOps Integrations to Jira

"We are the only platform that integrates AI throughout the entire software development lifecycle," he said. "As developers become more effective, we enable security and operations team members to keep pace." 

Sijbrandij highlighted the new GitLab Duo Chat bot and GitLab Duo Vulnerability Summary features as examples of AI innovation. With GitLab Duo Chat, Sijbrandij said users can quickly understand project status, get help with planning and configuration, receive explanations of suggested code, and generate tests, all without context switching. GitLab Duo Vulnerability Summary is a new feature that provides AI-generated explanations of security vulnerabilities and suggestions for how to fix them.

Agile Planning Launch Targets Atlassian Customers

To expand beyond just its target audience of developers, GitLab recently launched an Enterprise Agile Planning offering targeted at Atlassian customers.

GitLab Enterprise Agile Planning brings portfolio and project management capabilities into the same platform where engineers work, Sijbrandij explained. In his view, organizations see GitLab's Enterprise Agile Planning capabilities as a strong alternative to established tools on the market, like Atlassian Jira.

"Security and compliance, AI, and Enterprise Agile Planning strengthen our position as the leader in the DevSecOps platform category," Sijbrandij said. "The breadth and depth of our platform across the entire software development lifecycle differentiate us from point solutions and our main competitor, GitHub."