13 ms·

Travis CI acquired by Idera

452 points by involans 8y ago

throwawaymath 8y ago
Interesting. All I can tell from Idea's homepage is that it likes to acquire companies: https://www.ideracorp.com https://www.ideracorp.com. It looks like it's just a private equity firm (or the acquiring arm of one, since it's owned by TA Associates). I've never heard of any of the software in Idera's brand portfolio. I wonder what the cultural change is like internally at a company joining the umbrella of a private equity firm.
- mawburn 8y ago
  Seems about right. They have acquired a lot in the last 2 years. https://www.ideracorp.com/brands https://www.ideracorp.com/brands and https://www.ideracorp.com/news https://www.ideracorp.com/news
- luckydata 8y ago
  All my ex coworkers at Sencha have been "promoted" then immediately laid off after the acquisition (2-3 months). Their business model is to milk long term support contracts, I wouldn't expect Travis to be relevant anymore (if it was before).
- superqd 8y ago
  Yeah, one of their "brands" is also called Idera, and I worked there for many years prior to the acquisition. But, yeah, just shortly prior to the acquisition, most of the dev group were let go to improve the bottom line, and a small group of 4 or 5 devs were kept and promoted to manage an outsourced team in some other country to continue developing the products. The atmosphere post acquisition was different, though, being at the company while it was growing, the culture also shifted as we grew from scrappy startup to "we are now in a high rise office tower" corporation.
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    And then from a high rise to a shitty office space where you could regularly see hookers on the elevators and at least while I was there the bank at the bottom was robbed at gun point twice.
    - superqd 8y ago
      Sounds so exciting! :^)
- amcintosh16 8y ago
  My last job was for a small company making a APM tool. We were bought by Idera and they fairly quickly laid off nearly everyone. We were cautiously optimistic when the purchase happened. Idera had just purchased a pair of similar applications with different target audiences, so we thought the products would stick around and there would be a lot of work to do integrating everything. We were right about that (they're all still separately available) but Idera didn't have us in mind to work on it. Our PM went to Idera's offices and found that it was basically a sales centre and that all the development was outsourced. A week or so later they came and laid off a third of the company. Within 3 months of the purchase, the only employees left were our PM, 2 sales reps, and 2 support. I can't speak to the software, but I don't like the chances of anyone employed by Travis.
andrewl-hn 8y ago
Looking at Idera portfolio, I see Embracadero (Delphi developers for many years), Sencha (Ext.js), Assembla (was GutHub of Subversion era). So it seems like they buy companies and products that were big and very important among developersin the past, but not necessary leading the pack today. I didn't think of Travis in that regard, though in a past few month I started to see Circle CI badges popping here and there for opensource repositories and anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their built-in CI offering. Probably a good time to sell the company, though I'd prefer if they would find a better buyer.
- cheez 8y ago
  That's exactly what they do, and the reason is that there is a long tail of subscription revenue that will continue to trickle in. They monetize that very well (for the owners)
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    This suggests that, at least from track record so far, for products in their portfolio one should not expect much more extensive development or innovation, they're just counting on the long-tail of revenue trickling in?
    - zitterbewegung 8y ago
      Some products are feature complete and since they are looking at long term earnings they won’t sunset the project which are two big pluses .
    - swasheck 8y ago
      as a former customer of idera (and a customer of their competitors), even their core products don't really get much ongoing development attention. they _were_ quite good for what they were, when they were current. after a while, though, they do just become subscription streams.
    - cheez 8y ago
      This is not true. They make strategic investments to keep their products relevant. They are not making the next Google/Amazon/Apple, just running a business effectively.
tnolet 8y ago
Curious to what this means for the Berlin tech scene in general. Travis was certainly one of the trailblazers and a high visibility local startup (next to probably Soundcloud).
- l5870uoo9y 8y ago
  European tech scene is completely dominated by US companies, this one company (unknown to people outside the tech scene) won't change that at all.
  - i_cant_speel 8y ago
    Why does it matter whether or not a tech company is known by people outside the tech scene?
- africajam 8y ago
  Yes, I have fond memories of hanging out in their offices above beta house. Amazingly welcoming bunch of people and one of the best things about the Berlin tech scene for me. Hope it works out well for them. I know they were never in it for the money but they deserve a decent payout for their years of commitment.
yingw787 8y ago
Congratulations on the acquisition!
andrew_ 8y ago
Circle CI has been steadily taking marketshare away from Travis for many, many years. And in my personal experience, mostly because of Travis' slow pace of improvement. Using containers for testing blows away performance on Travis for comparable tasks. Travis had made some improvements this last year to their workflows, configuration, and platform, but too little too late. My experience in dealing with their customer service (we did have a paid plan for some time) and customer feedback (feature requests, pleas for fixes, etc) was also quite poor. I'd moved to Circle CI two years ago, and the only tasks/projects of mine still running on Travis are those which are deprecated, in suspended animation, or abandoned. For myself and my immediate peers, Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves. With Azure pipelines now a thing (and also far superior to Travis) I see another slow, slow death of a pioneering service.
- bithavoc 8y ago
  Does Circle-CI offers Mac runner for public/open-source projects? This is the reason I haven't been able to migrate from Travis to Circle-CI for all my projects, I have an open-source Electron module that I need to test cross platform so Travis covers Linux and Mac and AppVeyor for Windows.
  - andrew_ 8y ago
    I was able to acquire that ability by emailing them and explaining the open source need. They were quite reasonable.
  - dschep 8y ago
    It's worth noting that Travis also supports windows builds now. Which to me is a HUGE value proposition over CircleCI.
    - andrew_ 8y ago
      It's a decent point, but if I need Windows based testing, I'll get myself a free Azure Pipeline account and get Windows in CI from the same folks.
  - 8y ago
jrochkind1 8y ago
I've been worried about travis' lack of urgency in dealing with the fact that the existing travis-ci.org github hooks used for open source products are going to stop working in a week or two... https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/9745 https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/9745 Now bought by a private equity firm, which usually doesn't indicate lots of innovation or an increase in quality on the way. I wonder if I should be worried and start migrating my projects. I really liked travis for so long.
- DrTorte 8y ago
  Hey there, (Disclosure: Travis CI Employee) The migration from GitHub hooks is actually just about complete. You can see the changelog entry here: https://changelog.travis-ci.com/migrating-from-github-services-to-webhooks-86328 https://changelog.travis-ci.com/migrating-from-github-servic... Apologies for the lack of public updates on this!
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    Thanks! Good to know. Really kind of down to the wire though, eh? It would be really disastrous if the deadline were to be missed, but even if it goes smoothly in the end, how it's been handled does not inspire confidence. One documentation page still says "The migration was planned to start at the end of Q2 2018, but has been pushed back. We will announce a new date as soon as we are able." --https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/open-source-on-travis-ci-com/ https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/open-source-on-travis-ci-com...
    - DrTorte 8y ago
      It's definitely not ideal, but it is less dangerous and close-to-the-wire than it sounds. It's actually separate from the migration to .com - which is something we haven't been great at communicating, and after talking it over yesterday, we're going to post something to clarify it a bit further. (Even working here, I was personally rather confused about it, and was running around yesterday chasing people down for answers.) The short of it as follows, though: GitHub Services are going away. This is what .org relied on previously, and we are now mid process of getting everyone moved over to Webhooks instead. So, .org will rely on Webhooks instead. In the meanwhile, we are still working on getting everyone migrated over to .com as well (which uses GitHub Apps), but that's unfortunately been a bit of a trickier beast than expected. We're still very much working on it, though. Hope that clears it up a bit! EDIT: We are updating the docs to reflect this. :)
hendry 8y ago
Loved Travis support over the years. I wish them the best. Though lately ruby-travis cli has been broken for me on Arch, and with their YAML changes & associated complexity... I'm starting to look forward to Github actions.
resca79 8y ago
Congrats to the founders, that I met during a conference, super developers. Thanks for the contribute to the open source projects!
sitkack 8y ago
When will name change to "Travisa Continuo" be announced?
mhd 8y ago
Given the dreadful Sencha acquisition, this doesn't sound too good for the employees. Hope you'll find good replacement positions.
kkapelon 8y ago
The main problem with Travis was that is stayed with the CI part (as the name suggests) while people wanted a CI/CD solution that helps with deployments and monitoring as well. F.D. I work for Codefresh a full CI/CD solution (competitor to TravisCI)
samblr 8y ago
Can anybody help point/predict numbers involved in acquisition ?
m00dy 8y ago
Glad to hear that. Travis is also being used in my company and every build spawns a new virtual machine which takes almost a year to boot up. I heard good things about CircleCI. will give it a try asap.
krn1p4n1c 8y ago
The first startup I was at was acquired by Idera. They started by trying to replace everyone in the dev team with remote contractors. I cashed out and left as soon as possible.
lumengxi 8y ago
Could be better, could have been worse.
yhoiseth 8y ago
For people coming to this thread looking for alternatives: I'm quite happy with Scrutinizer [1], especially for the easy setup and automatic code quality analysis. 1. https://scrutinizer-ci.com/ https://scrutinizer-ci.com/
xPaw 8y ago
Looks like a lot of people are having troubles with Travis CI in this thread, we do too. With so many competing CI services out there now, it's kind of hard to keep using Travis. They've added Windows support, which is great, but it's ridiculously slow. (a minute to run on Linux, 14 minutes on Windows). And with these slow downs, you quickly run into parallel build (I believe the limit is 3 builds per user).
awill 8y ago
To all of these types of acquisitions, my initial thoughts are always "At least it wasn't oracle"
i386 8y ago
There’s no market for standalone CI/CD. Everything is converging around automation, cloud platforms and version control hosting.
dewski 8y ago
I would have loved to paid Travis CI for my personal private repositories I wanted to kept private, that I push to maybe 1-2 times a night on a good week. Setup is a breeze, interface is simple and straight to the point, integration works. But they priced their "Ideal for hobbyist projects" plan way out of budget for any hobbyist who just wants somewhere to run some code. $70 a month!? Make it $15, maybe $20 and you got yourself an annual subscriber.
mbrumlow 8y ago
And with that I declare this product dead... Idera is the last stop to squeeze cash out of a company. Expect layoffs and all future work to be outsourced via fixed cost development to lowest bidders (mostly in India). Also expect a big sales push for multi year contracts. Nothing wrong with India, just that companies like Idea don't like to have developers on payroll, and the ones that do write specs all day long.
Rapzid 8y ago
Lots of issues with Travis CI feature velocity as well. Most of the other pain points others have mentioned I have felt. Random build failures, network issues, and etc. A particular issue is the PR merge-commit builds. Between stages a merge/push into master can change the merge-commit! This means code between stages can diverge. You may build an artifact in one stage, then run an out-of-date test suite against it in another. Known issue for years, had an employee acknowledge months ago on the community forum then.. Nothing. Another pain point that is not unique to Travis, is the lack of true "pipelines". Inter-project builds are a complete DIY crap fest. Coupled with roll-your-own artifact storage and retrieval.. Self-hosted solutions like Bamboo and TeamCity(Bamboos superior IMHO) are light years ahead of the SaaS solutions I've viewed. Test report analysis is another big feature missing from most. Would be good to be able to visualize and report on tests. I was almost considering this being a valid stand-alone SaaS idea because nobody has it! I believe the future of our integration/system tests will be build on codepipelines or the like for scale. Travis or CircleCI will be the public facing component.
jarvuschris 8y ago
As a Sencha user that has gone through Idera acquiring a product I use, don't count on any product development or meaningful support coming out of them Their model seems to be farming out choosing canned replies to the cheapest labor they can find. Things that break will stay broken, no one they keep employed will actually know how anything works, let alone how to maintain it.
talawahtech 8y ago
Lots of mention of CircleCI and Gitlab as the reason for Travis' downfall, which is very true. I also think GitHub announcing GitHub Actions[1] may have been the final nail in the coffin. I think GitHub Actions will become a major force in the CI market in short order, it has so many things going for it a) Everyone already has an account and lots of code already lives there. One less extra thing to worry about. b) I trust MS/GitHub with my Cloud secrets more than I trust the various other CI providers. c) The financial backing of MS to provide a significant free tier d) The fact that actions can so easily be shared on GitHub is a killer feature. More are more projects/companies will build actions for their end users. 1. https://github.com/features/actions https://github.com/features/actions

452 points by involans 8y ago

Interesting. All I can tell from Idea's homepage is that it likes to acquire companies: https://www.ideracorp.com https://www.ideracorp.com. It looks like it's just a private equity firm (or the acquiring arm of one, since it's owned by TA Associates). I've never heard of any of the software in Idera's brand portfolio. I wonder what the cultural change is like internally at a company joining the umbrella of a private equity firm.

mawburn 8y ago
Seems about right. They have acquired a lot in the last 2 years. https://www.ideracorp.com/brands https://www.ideracorp.com/brands and https://www.ideracorp.com/news https://www.ideracorp.com/news
luckydata 8y ago
All my ex coworkers at Sencha have been "promoted" then immediately laid off after the acquisition (2-3 months). Their business model is to milk long term support contracts, I wouldn't expect Travis to be relevant anymore (if it was before).
superqd 8y ago
Yeah, one of their "brands" is also called Idera, and I worked there for many years prior to the acquisition. But, yeah, just shortly prior to the acquisition, most of the dev group were let go to improve the bottom line, and a small group of 4 or 5 devs were kept and promoted to manage an outsourced team in some other country to continue developing the products. The atmosphere post acquisition was different, though, being at the company while it was growing, the culture also shifted as we grew from scrappy startup to "we are now in a high rise office tower" corporation.
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  And then from a high rise to a shitty office space where you could regularly see hookers on the elevators and at least while I was there the bank at the bottom was robbed at gun point twice.
  - superqd 8y ago
    Sounds so exciting! :^)
amcintosh16 8y ago
My last job was for a small company making a APM tool. We were bought by Idera and they fairly quickly laid off nearly everyone. We were cautiously optimistic when the purchase happened. Idera had just purchased a pair of similar applications with different target audiences, so we thought the products would stick around and there would be a lot of work to do integrating everything. We were right about that (they're all still separately available) but Idera didn't have us in mind to work on it. Our PM went to Idera's offices and found that it was basically a sales centre and that all the development was outsourced. A week or so later they came and laid off a third of the company. Within 3 months of the purchase, the only employees left were our PM, 2 sales reps, and 2 support. I can't speak to the software, but I don't like the chances of anyone employed by Travis.

andrewl-hn 8y ago

Looking at Idera portfolio, I see Embracadero (Delphi developers for many years), Sencha (Ext.js), Assembla (was GutHub of Subversion era). So it seems like they buy companies and products that were big and very important among developersin the past, but not necessary leading the pack today. I didn't think of Travis in that regard, though in a past few month I started to see Circle CI badges popping here and there for opensource repositories and anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their built-in CI offering. Probably a good time to sell the company, though I'd prefer if they would find a better buyer.

cheez 8y ago
That's exactly what they do, and the reason is that there is a long tail of subscription revenue that will continue to trickle in. They monetize that very well (for the owners)
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  This suggests that, at least from track record so far, for products in their portfolio one should not expect much more extensive development or innovation, they're just counting on the long-tail of revenue trickling in?
  - zitterbewegung 8y ago
    Some products are feature complete and since they are looking at long term earnings they won’t sunset the project which are two big pluses .
  - swasheck 8y ago
    as a former customer of idera (and a customer of their competitors), even their core products don't really get much ongoing development attention. they _were_ quite good for what they were, when they were current. after a while, though, they do just become subscription streams.
  - cheez 8y ago
    This is not true. They make strategic investments to keep their products relevant. They are not making the next Google/Amazon/Apple, just running a business effectively.

tnolet 8y ago

Curious to what this means for the Berlin tech scene in general. Travis was certainly one of the trailblazers and a high visibility local startup (next to probably Soundcloud).

l5870uoo9y 8y ago
European tech scene is completely dominated by US companies, this one company (unknown to people outside the tech scene) won't change that at all.
- i_cant_speel 8y ago
  Why does it matter whether or not a tech company is known by people outside the tech scene?
africajam 8y ago
Yes, I have fond memories of hanging out in their offices above beta house. Amazingly welcoming bunch of people and one of the best things about the Berlin tech scene for me. Hope it works out well for them. I know they were never in it for the money but they deserve a decent payout for their years of commitment.

yingw787 8y ago

Congratulations on the acquisition!

andrew_ 8y ago

Circle CI has been steadily taking marketshare away from Travis for many, many years. And in my personal experience, mostly because of Travis' slow pace of improvement. Using containers for testing blows away performance on Travis for comparable tasks. Travis had made some improvements this last year to their workflows, configuration, and platform, but too little too late. My experience in dealing with their customer service (we did have a paid plan for some time) and customer feedback (feature requests, pleas for fixes, etc) was also quite poor. I'd moved to Circle CI two years ago, and the only tasks/projects of mine still running on Travis are those which are deprecated, in suspended animation, or abandoned. For myself and my immediate peers, Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves. With Azure pipelines now a thing (and also far superior to Travis) I see another slow, slow death of a pioneering service.

bithavoc 8y ago
Does Circle-CI offers Mac runner for public/open-source projects? This is the reason I haven't been able to migrate from Travis to Circle-CI for all my projects, I have an open-source Electron module that I need to test cross platform so Travis covers Linux and Mac and AppVeyor for Windows.
- andrew_ 8y ago
  I was able to acquire that ability by emailing them and explaining the open source need. They were quite reasonable.
- dschep 8y ago
  It's worth noting that Travis also supports windows builds now. Which to me is a HUGE value proposition over CircleCI.
  - andrew_ 8y ago
    It's a decent point, but if I need Windows based testing, I'll get myself a free Azure Pipeline account and get Windows in CI from the same folks.
- 8y ago

jrochkind1 8y ago

I've been worried about travis' lack of urgency in dealing with the fact that the existing travis-ci.org github hooks used for open source products are going to stop working in a week or two... https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/9745 https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/9745 Now bought by a private equity firm, which usually doesn't indicate lots of innovation or an increase in quality on the way. I wonder if I should be worried and start migrating my projects. I really liked travis for so long.

DrTorte 8y ago
Hey there, (Disclosure: Travis CI Employee) The migration from GitHub hooks is actually just about complete. You can see the changelog entry here: https://changelog.travis-ci.com/migrating-from-github-services-to-webhooks-86328 https://changelog.travis-ci.com/migrating-from-github-servic... Apologies for the lack of public updates on this!
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  Thanks! Good to know. Really kind of down to the wire though, eh? It would be really disastrous if the deadline were to be missed, but even if it goes smoothly in the end, how it's been handled does not inspire confidence. One documentation page still says "The migration was planned to start at the end of Q2 2018, but has been pushed back. We will announce a new date as soon as we are able." --https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/open-source-on-travis-ci-com/ https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/open-source-on-travis-ci-com...
  - DrTorte 8y ago
    It's definitely not ideal, but it is less dangerous and close-to-the-wire than it sounds. It's actually separate from the migration to .com - which is something we haven't been great at communicating, and after talking it over yesterday, we're going to post something to clarify it a bit further. (Even working here, I was personally rather confused about it, and was running around yesterday chasing people down for answers.) The short of it as follows, though: GitHub Services are going away. This is what .org relied on previously, and we are now mid process of getting everyone moved over to Webhooks instead. So, .org will rely on Webhooks instead. In the meanwhile, we are still working on getting everyone migrated over to .com as well (which uses GitHub Apps), but that's unfortunately been a bit of a trickier beast than expected. We're still very much working on it, though. Hope that clears it up a bit! EDIT: We are updating the docs to reflect this. :)

hendry 8y ago

Loved Travis support over the years. I wish them the best. Though lately ruby-travis cli has been broken for me on Arch, and with their YAML changes & associated complexity... I'm starting to look forward to Github actions.

resca79 8y ago

Congrats to the founders, that I met during a conference, super developers. Thanks for the contribute to the open source projects!

sitkack 8y ago

When will name change to "Travisa Continuo" be announced?

mhd 8y ago

Given the dreadful Sencha acquisition, this doesn't sound too good for the employees. Hope you'll find good replacement positions.

kkapelon 8y ago

The main problem with Travis was that is stayed with the CI part (as the name suggests) while people wanted a CI/CD solution that helps with deployments and monitoring as well. F.D. I work for Codefresh a full CI/CD solution (competitor to TravisCI)

samblr 8y ago

Can anybody help point/predict numbers involved in acquisition ?

m00dy 8y ago

Glad to hear that. Travis is also being used in my company and every build spawns a new virtual machine which takes almost a year to boot up. I heard good things about CircleCI. will give it a try asap.

krn1p4n1c 8y ago

The first startup I was at was acquired by Idera. They started by trying to replace everyone in the dev team with remote contractors. I cashed out and left as soon as possible.

lumengxi 8y ago

Could be better, could have been worse.

yhoiseth 8y ago

For people coming to this thread looking for alternatives: I'm quite happy with Scrutinizer [1], especially for the easy setup and automatic code quality analysis. 1. https://scrutinizer-ci.com/ https://scrutinizer-ci.com/

xPaw 8y ago

Looks like a lot of people are having troubles with Travis CI in this thread, we do too. With so many competing CI services out there now, it's kind of hard to keep using Travis. They've added Windows support, which is great, but it's ridiculously slow. (a minute to run on Linux, 14 minutes on Windows). And with these slow downs, you quickly run into parallel build (I believe the limit is 3 builds per user).

awill 8y ago

To all of these types of acquisitions, my initial thoughts are always "At least it wasn't oracle"

i386 8y ago

There’s no market for standalone CI/CD. Everything is converging around automation, cloud platforms and version control hosting.

dewski 8y ago

I would have loved to paid Travis CI for my personal private repositories I wanted to kept private, that I push to maybe 1-2 times a night on a good week. Setup is a breeze, interface is simple and straight to the point, integration works. But they priced their "Ideal for hobbyist projects" plan way out of budget for any hobbyist who just wants somewhere to run some code. $70 a month!? Make it $15, maybe $20 and you got yourself an annual subscriber.

mbrumlow 8y ago

And with that I declare this product dead... Idera is the last stop to squeeze cash out of a company. Expect layoffs and all future work to be outsourced via fixed cost development to lowest bidders (mostly in India). Also expect a big sales push for multi year contracts. Nothing wrong with India, just that companies like Idea don't like to have developers on payroll, and the ones that do write specs all day long.

Rapzid 8y ago

Lots of issues with Travis CI feature velocity as well. Most of the other pain points others have mentioned I have felt. Random build failures, network issues, and etc. A particular issue is the PR merge-commit builds. Between stages a merge/push into master can change the merge-commit! This means code between stages can diverge. You may build an artifact in one stage, then run an out-of-date test suite against it in another. Known issue for years, had an employee acknowledge months ago on the community forum then.. Nothing. Another pain point that is not unique to Travis, is the lack of true "pipelines". Inter-project builds are a complete DIY crap fest. Coupled with roll-your-own artifact storage and retrieval.. Self-hosted solutions like Bamboo and TeamCity(Bamboos superior IMHO) are light years ahead of the SaaS solutions I've viewed. Test report analysis is another big feature missing from most. Would be good to be able to visualize and report on tests. I was almost considering this being a valid stand-alone SaaS idea because nobody has it! I believe the future of our integration/system tests will be build on codepipelines or the like for scale. Travis or CircleCI will be the public facing component.

jarvuschris 8y ago

As a Sencha user that has gone through Idera acquiring a product I use, don't count on any product development or meaningful support coming out of them Their model seems to be farming out choosing canned replies to the cheapest labor they can find. Things that break will stay broken, no one they keep employed will actually know how anything works, let alone how to maintain it.

talawahtech 8y ago

Lots of mention of CircleCI and Gitlab as the reason for Travis' downfall, which is very true. I also think GitHub announcing GitHub Actions[1] may have been the final nail in the coffin. I think GitHub Actions will become a major force in the CI market in short order, it has so many things going for it a) Everyone already has an account and lots of code already lives there. One less extra thing to worry about. b) I trust MS/GitHub with my Cloud secrets more than I trust the various other CI providers. c) The financial backing of MS to provide a significant free tier d) The fact that actions can so easily be shared on GitHub is a killer feature. More are more projects/companies will build actions for their end users. 1. https://github.com/features/actions https://github.com/features/actions