Continuous delivery provider CloudBees has shifted its company focus, dropping the runtime platform as a service (PaaS) of its offering to focus exclusively on open source software Jenkins.

CEO Sacha Labourey told CloudTech it was a ‘hard’ and ‘emotional’ decision to move for CloudBees, which was founded in 2010.

“We realised at the beginning of this year that Jenkins Enterprise was growing very fast, beyond our expectations, and we knew that something was going on, but it took us a bit of time to really make the conscious decision that what we had to do was strictly focus on Jenkins,” Labourey said.

“The company had a lot of strong PaaS DNA and so, to take the conscious decision to move away from that was obviously a hard decision, and even I could say an emotional decision to make.

“As soon as we decided to do that, we spent a couple of months looking at what we should do about those [PaaS] customers, what would be the best way to treat them, and as soon as we were ready we decided to move forward and do the roll-out,” he added.

With that in mind, CloudBees is retiring its PaaS Run@Cloud service – a “big shift that the company’s taking”, as Labourey put it.

 “In the last year or two we’ve seen tremendous growth towards continuous delivery,” Labourey added. “The big difference here is it’s not just about developers, but Jenkins is becoming this hub where everybody can meet – developers, DevOps, IT, they all meet around the table to set out a unified pipeline that goes from code to transaction.”

Earlier this year Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of the Jenkins server, became chief technical officer at CloudBees, indicating a sign of things to come.

CloudBees has also announced a partnership with Pivotal Network to collaborate in developing enterprise-grade continuous integration. Labourey, who said the two companies were in talks for “quite a long time”, notes the strategy shift to Jenkins was also key in securing this move.

“They really liked our Jenkins portfolio and offering, and what we could bring to the table, but it always kind of hard to have discussions when in your back pocket you have a PaaS and they have a PaaS – [it] led to complicated discussions,” Labourey said.

“As soon as we decided to move on, and to solely focus on Jenkins, discussions with Pivotal became extremely simple, and it was obvious for both parties that there was a clear interest in bringing each other’s value to the table,” he added.

Labourey also confirmed the current work delivering PaaS onto Verizon’s cloud, as CloudTech reported back in February, will be discontinued, although adding the two companies are still keen on working with each other.

Update 1145: A previous version of this article said that CloudBees had dropped its entire PaaS operation. This has since been corrected.