CloudBees has increased the pool of dollars it is aggregated to drive further consolidation across the DevOps sector by $10 million, thanks to an investment from HSBC. The investment comes on the heels of $62 million in funding that CloudBees raised last year, which brings the total amount invested in the company since 2010 to now more than $120 million.

CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said that funding announced this week will be used for, among other things, adding more products and services to the CloudBees portfolio via acquisition. CloudBees last month revealed it acquired Electric Cloud, a provider of a continuous delivery platform for both monolithic and microservices-based applications.

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Labourey said the HSBC investment represents of vote of confidence on two levels: Banks tend to be more conservative when it comes to investing in IT companies, and HSBC has already adopted CloudBees’ open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

Citing industry analysts’ estimates, CloudBees says the DevOps sector is currently valued at $4.61 billion. Within that sector, CloudBees estimate there are more than 15 million developers using some instance of Jenkins to automate their software delivery pipelines and 46 of Fortune 100 enterprises—including three of the Fortune 10—rely on the CloudBees Suite to implement Jenkins.

While CloudBees clearly is a dominant provider of DevOps tools and platforms, the category is starting to draw attention from financially well-heeled vendors such as VMware. The virtualization platform arm of Dell Technologies earlier this month announced it will acquire Bitnami, a provider of tools for packaging applications that has gained a following among DevOps proponents.

That wave of acquisitions coincides with a major shift from monolithic to microservices-based application development. CloudBees launched Jenkins X to provide a CI/CD platform optimized specifically for microservices. But just because CloudBees and Jenkins were able to dominate the first DevOps wave, it doesn’t necessarily follow that Jenkins X will be widely adopted as a de facto standard for building microservices applications. Competition to provide the CI/CD platform for next-generation cloud-native applications based on microservices is already considerable.

In the meantime, traditional enterprise IT organizations will continue to monitor with interest merger and acquisition activity across the DevOps sector. Enterprise IT organizations tend to be wary of standardizing on development tools and platforms when there’s a chance the provider of that tool might be acquired by another vendor or entity they’d rather not work with. On the plus side, all the money being invested in DevOps startups is one of the primary reasons why DevOps is one of the most vibrant category in all of IT.

It remains to be seen which company or tool will come out on top. But the contest will be fierce. The ultimate beneficiary of that competition is almost always the end customer—assuming, of course, they bet on the right DevOps horses in the first place.

— Mike Vizard