Salesforce DevOps solution provider Gearset gears up for US expansion

Cambridge UK start-up Gearset, is scaling fast and headed for the US, on the back of burgeoning demand for its Salesforce DevOps.

Its deployment engine and supporting DevOps, backup, and release management solutions are already helping teams with Salesforce DevOps at customers such as Accenture, IBM, and ThoughtWorks through to Johnson & Johnson, telco 3, Tripadvisor, Sonos, and Salesforce itself.

Founded just four years ago, the business has grown from 7 people at launch to hit the 100-employee mark in May and it opened a US HQ in Chicago in the Spring. US expansion follows a year of rapid growth in 2020 – much of which came from US customers. Over the last two years, it has experienced a 220% growth in customers – with 70% of those based in the US.

The company is planning on hiring 80 more staff this year – the bulk in the US.

Gearset sets out to end deployment frustrations for Salesforce pros

Gearset is a response to first-hand frustration when teams were prevented from taking full advantage of Salesforce by a gap in platform-friendly DevOps capabilities. The platform provided all that was needed to make great apps, but there was little to help in pushing those apps out to users. That required changesets or complex command lines. Gearset set out to make DevOps on Salesforce as simple as everything else.

Bringing development and operations together, DevOps combines software development and IT operations to shorten the development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. Many aspects of DevOps came from Agile. The DevOps lifecycle includes phases to plan, build, continuously integrate and deploy (CI/CD), monitor, operate, and respond to continuous feedback.

Among the core principles is the demand to automate everything you can, aligning with HFS’s Research Agenda.

Focus on simplicity delivers platform capable of handling complex workflows

Gearset’s focus has been on simplicity and deployment success. The result is a platform that can manage even the most complex workflows and which integrates with the likes of GitHub, Azure DevOps, and Atlassian. As you would expect for use with Salesforce, Gearset provides a fully SaaS solution.

Its qualities enable the scaling of DevOps/Agile in one of the most significant OneOffice Applications found at work in the enterprise today (Salesforce) – (Exhibit 1, The OneOffice Emerging Tech Platform). It means hundreds of people can work on parallel development and continuous delivery of Salesforce solutions. Gearset has become recognised as a good deployment tool for big projects and is proving particularly useful for the hot growth areas of Salesforce CPQ.

Salesforce continues to strengthen its offerings, requiring customers to stay abreast of the latest technology developments, to ensure maximizing their investments in the platform.

Exhibit 1: The HFS OneOffice Emerging Tech Platform maps the important roles of both OneOffice Applications such as Salesforce, and the DevOps required to maximize success

Source: HFS Research, 2021, examples are representative

The company – a spin-out from Cambridge-based DevOps specialists RedGate Software – already has partnerships with Publicis Sapient, 4c (a Wipro company), and Simplus (an Infosys company).

They are proud to be achieving all this while being named among the very best companies to work for in the UK (3rd best tech company to work for; 8th best mid-sized company to work for in the UK).

The Bottom Line: North America move makes sense – now Gearset needs a partner plan

Gearset is in the right place at the right time to ride a pandemic-powered wave of demand. The 150,000 companies using Salesforce globally have all been hit with an increasing need for speed of deployment, in reaction to the rapid changes of the pandemic economy. Salesforce revenues have risen 24.3% in the last fiscal year. The focus on North America makes good sense. Our latest Pulse survey (of 801 global 2000 executives) reveals North American execs are moving faster through their own gears – taking pilots to scale at a greater pace than global rivals. Gearset has a few Salesforce service partners, namely Simplus, an Infosys company, and 4C, a Wipro company. Its next focus should be on building out its service partner channel further.