CircleCI Delivers Windows Support For Its Popular Cloud-Based DevOps Tools

The CI/CD vendor previously only supported Linux and Mac environments. By entering the Microsoft ecosystem, it opens its SaaS products up to almost half the enterprise development market.

CircleCI saw rapid adoption of its cloud-based DevOps tooling even before it could address almost half the enterprise development market.

On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based startup opened itself up for the first time to the more than 40 percent of developers building in Microsoft environments by introducing Windows support for its continuous integration/continuous delivery service.

The support for Windows execution environments, development frameworks and tooling comes just weeks after CircleCI closed a $56 million funding round that will fuel its next phase of product development and expansion into new regions.

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"We're seeing a lot of growth in the market around both Windows in general, and among people doing a lot more cross-platform development, using Windows and macOS or Windows and Linux environments," CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber told CRN.

"Clearly, opening up a large additional market is a great strategy for us in terms of fueling growth," Zuber said.

Many of CircleCI's current customers are building web and mobile apps across multiple environments and asking for consistent tooling to support those projects, Zuber said.

"As we look around in the market, we don’t see a super-compelling multi-platform approach that covers Linux, Windows and Mac," he told CRN.

The startup has also engaged in many conversations with potential customers that ended upon learning they ran entirely on Windows, he said.

"We already capture a decent amount of early stage conversation, but just haven't been able to serve" those companies," Zuber said.

CircleCI will dedicate some of its latest funding to reaching out to the Windows market it hasn't participated in before. Windows developers use different tools, read different news sources, attend different conferences, Zuber said.

But first, it will look to make good on the accounts it has already had to take a pass on.

"Teaching that market is a big part of the plan, but we're seeing a lot of demand already, so we'll meet that initially," Zuber said.

CircleCI delivers CI/CD capabilities mostly through a Software-as-a-Service model, allowing developers to focus on building their core products instead of managing their DevOps tooling.

The company was founded in 2011, and by the end of 2014 acquired Distiller, a startup building CI/CD products for mobile applications.

First serving startups in the Ruby on Rails community, the company now sells to a third of the Forbes Cloud 100, has grown to 250 employees, and recently opened offices in Japan, where the product caught traction even before the company had a presence.