About Us & What We Do

Best-of-breed Continuous Delivery

The best software teams unlock incredible business value by continuously delivering and iterating on software. Although software teams use many tools, services, and processes, the beating heart of any software team is their Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline - how a change moves from source code to running in production.

The most critical moment in a CD pipeline, and, for many teams, the most difficult stage to automate, is the deployment process. Today, production deployments are, for the majority of software teams, a scary time. Processes are untested, unreliable, and manual. Beyond the simplest of applications, the sheer complexity makes automation daunting. Mistakes happen, which leads to downtime, finger-pointing, and a lack of confidence and trust. Because of this, teams put off and hold back releases to avoid the pain. They deploy to production once a month, once a quarter, or once a year. The longer the time between deployments, the more likely something will go wrong. It's a downward cycle that's hard to stop.

Our mission is for all software teams to look forward to every software release as a time of celebration, unburdened by broken delivery processes. Software teams should be excited about seeing their changes deployed and used by their customers, not dreading the weekend to come. When teams have confidence in the continuous delivery pipeline, they can finally look forward to release time. We want to turn the downward cycle of scary deployments into a positive feedback loop where cycle times are faster, batches are smaller, and teams feel 100% confident it will just work.

Octopus Deploy is the best-of-breed solution for how software teams release & operate software. Our long-term ambition is to be the industry standard for continuous delivery.

While other products focus on specific parts of the process (CI only) or specific technologies (cloud-native only), we tackle head-on the three hardest parts of continuous delivery:

• Deploy: we automate deployments - getting the software onto the production systems - consistently between environments and thus reliable. That encourages teams to deploy more frequently.

• Release: we help teams coordinate and add safeguards around their deployments. Not just anyone can deploy to production, and what's being promoted to production needs to be what was tested.

• Operate: we don't just automate deployments anymore; we also help teams to automate all the things they need to do outside of the deployment window, including GitOps and config as code principles.

We do this across a wide scope:

• Heritage and modern technology stacks - everything from physical servers and virtual machines to Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies, and from on-premises data centers to all the major clouds.

• Tackling the most complex deployment models, including when "deploying to production," means thousands of retail locations or customer-specific infrastructure

• Integrating with all the major CI services, secrets management tools, issue trackers, and clouds

• Delivered as a Cloud-hosted service (Octopus Cloud) or self-managed by you (Octopus Server)

We think that by doing this well - by focussing on building the best product, providing the best service, and being the best company for the job - we'll enable our customers not just to do daily builds or unit testing, but to continuously deliver working software to production, and to look forward to deployment time.

Our opportunity

Software is eating the world, and as a result, there are software teams in just about every company in the world.

Companies like Shopify or Spotify or Netflix popularised many of these practices, but historically they have required a huge investment in tooling and internal engineering platform teams to support. The reality in most smaller teams - companies with 5,000 employees or less, in which less than 300 work in software teams - most CD processes are manual or cobbled together with custom scripts. There's no consistency between teams and no visibility outside of the few people involved in the deployment.

Every software team is inspired by the practices that the tech giants follow, but few can get close.

Octopus enables world-class continuous delivery practices for teams of all sizes.

Unlike many in our space, we're not just focussed on the Fortune 500. Rather, we talk about the "Fortune 50,000" - companies of all sizes with software teams that can benefit from Continuous Delivery.

To get a sense of how big the market for Octopus is, consider Jira. Atlassian is a billion-dollar company today, off the back of essentially one product: a bug tracker. In 2005, a bunch of companies made bug trackers; Atlassian was tiny, IBM dominated the top end of the market, Bugzilla was the popular open-source alternative, and Microsoft had just released Team Foundation Server with their own attempt at bug tracking. But it turned out that there are 50,000 companies with software teams around the world that needed a bug tracker to track all the bugs that (let's be honest) they're never going to fix.

Every team that needs a bug tracker must also produce software, and therefore, needs a way to deploy that software. And deploying software is arguably a more valuable problem to solve. Somebody will build the "Jira for deployments", and be as big as Atlassian. We think that it can be - and should be - us.

Our long-term goal is to build a company that is around for 50 years, with 50,000 customers, that's known for building a best-in-class product with amazing customer service.