This week, Zenhub launched Zenhub Enterprise 4.0 for On-Prem Teams. To find out more, VMblog reached out to Aaron Upright, co-founder of ZenHub.
VMblog: Before we get
started, can you give VMblog viewers a quick background on Zenhub and its role
in software development?
Aaron Upright: In brief, Zenhub enables software teams to build better code
more quickly by providing a developer-friendly productivity and project
management platform. Zenhub dramatically boosts collaboration and coordination
for teams working in GitHub with automated agile features, real-time roadmap
visibility, and team productivity insights. More than 8,000 teams worldwide,
including NASA and Red Hat, rely on ZenHub to ship great code faster.
VMblog: What is Zenhub
Announcing?
Upright: This week, we're announcing our most significant on-premise
release to date, Zenhub Enterprise 4.0. This latest version is designed for
organizations that prefer to self-manage and host tools on-premise rather than
in the cloud. Zenhub Enterprise 4.0 introduces a host of new functionality for
teams, most notably, our new Zenhub Platform and Zenhub Issues. For the first
time, our on-premise customers now have the ability to use Zenhub without
needing a GitHub account or paid GitHub seat.
Zenhub Platform has been live for our cloud teams since April
this year, and it's been exciting to watch how customers have adopted our new
Zenhub Issues. In particular, we've seen a lot of teams adjacent to software
development (such as design and marketing) adopt Zenhub as a way to collaborate
more effectively with their development teams. Rather than having to maintain
separate and silo'd project management tools, these teams can now manage work
using a single, shared interface.
VMblog: It's interesting
that in the era of the cloud, Zenhub is continuing to invest in the development
of an on-premise product. Why is that?
Upright: It's simply what our customers demand, and we're first and
foremost focused on their needs. This trend towards the cloud is not without
good reasons; the cloud provides myriad advantages in terms of accessibility
and lower cost of ownership. We ourselves have a cloud-based product as well,
but not everyone is exclusively going to the cloud. We're seeing a lot of large
companies opting for a hybrid approach, leveraging both cloud solutions and
maintaining self-managed, on-premise tools.
While at the same time that this hybrid approach is gaining
traction, we're also seeing competitors pulling back support for on-premise
offerings. For example, Atlassian announced that they plan to end their support
for on-prem customers using their Jira Server product in early 2024. We think
this creates a gap in the market, particularly for mid-sized and larger
organizations that have strict security and compliance needs that require them
to use on-premise products.
Our customers have been loud and clear about their needs on this
front, so we're committed to supporting not just them but anyone with
on-premise needs abandoned by the market.
VMblog: What are the
pressures that Zenhub's customers face that make them so interested in hybrid
architectures?
Upright: Quite simply, exclusively relying on cloud-based architectures
raises new questions about data privacy, security, cost, intellectual property,
and ownership-particularly in the quickly evolving world of AI. For example,
despite its potential, many firms are recognizing that AI currently represents
potential risks in terms of their sensitive and proprietary data inadvertently
being ingested into LLMs. I think many of our customers simply want to mitigate
risk, and a hybrid approach enables them to do that.
It's likely that we'll see this tone start to shift as companies
get more and more comfortable with AI and begin to outline formal usage
policies. For now however, we're seeing a notable rise in demand for
self-managed, on-premise versions. In our next enterprise release, we're aiming
to give customers the best of both worlds by bringing our new AI capabilities
into our on-premise offering to allow our customers to leverage these powerful
new AI features without worry that their data could end up in a public LLM.
VMblog: Zenhub recently
debuted a more open and transparent approach to building its AI capabilities.
Will that same strategy be applied to Zenhub Enterprise?
Upright: Most definitely. Here at Zenhub, one of the tenants defining our
approach to product development has been building in "public" with our
customers. Given that the application of AI and other trends to project
management is new to everyone, we want to make sure that what we're building -
be it for the cloud or in-premise - solves real-world challenges that teams
have and delivers on our brand promise of "project management that gets
out of the way."
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About Aaron Upright
Aaron Upright co-founded ZenHub in 2015 as a company to empower
software development with flexible workflow and organization within GitHub
using a fully featured integrated project management platform for Agile
development. ZenHub helps development teams build better software faster. Aaron
currently serves as the Head of Strategic Accounts, managing both strategic
partnerships and customer relationships, while helping current and prospective
users get the most out of their experience with ZenHub. Previous to founding
ZenHub, Aaron served on the team at technology incubator, AxiomZen, where he
focused on developing go-to-market strategies for early-stage companies. It was
here that Aaron formed ZenHub.