About
Tina Huang founded Transposit in 2016 with the initial vision of building a serverless platform to help developers compose API-driven applications. In the initial years the company built developer tooling and created the platform’s base integrations. In 2019-2020, the company pivoted to productize some of the specific vertical use cases that emerged from early customers and brought in current CEO Divanny Lamas.
Transposit shifted gears to cater towards SRE and DevOps teams who needed simpler tooling. Much of the original underlying platform supported this shift; the platform provided visibility into API endpoints, a curated set of pre-built integrations, and a serverless environment to run code via a developer console. These features, when tailored to the DevOps/SRE use case, empowered teams doing incident management.
The company now focuses on the incident management and process automation markets rather than targeting general purpose developer tooling. They have a “human-in-the-loop” automation perspective, with a goal of augmenting operations teams with more powerful and more accessible tooling.
Their self-provided elevator pitch is:
Transposit is a DevOps process automation platform with a unique, fully integrated, human-in-the-loop approach that empowers engineering teams to enhance service reliability, streamline operations, and resolve incidents faster. It’s the only platform that enables engineers to take action more quickly and securely across the DevOps toolchain while reducing errors and logging all activities.
Size
Transposit currently employs ~40 FTEs. Their operations and sales efforts are primarily centered in North America. The company is venture-backed and has raised $50.4M total, with the most recent Series B round raised in September 2020.
Products
Transposit’s core offering is a platform for building event-driven runbooks, which integrate with standard DevOps tools and frameworks. Their runbooks augment the concept of a traditional runbook with automation, delivered in a ChatOps interface. Transposit integrates tightly with Slack or Microsoft Teams. When there is an incident, Transposit creates a channel and then lets you select a runbook. The interface presents a ‘choose your own adventure’ format where you can click through the runbook and move to the appropriate steps. As you progress you can trigger pre-built actions and workflows, which can be automated to help simplify responses.
Some of the actions are pre-built from Transposit’s integrations (e.g., triggering CI/CD systems, viewing recent commits in a code repo, creating tickets, starting a Zoom meeting.) For in-house systems or things that require more customization, developers can use Transposit’s serverless platform to build custom actions into the runbook.
The platform also helps with incident review by building a timeline of all actions taken, supported with screenshots. Transposit captures every event and action that happens on the platform during an incident so that the team can focus on remediation rather than documentation.
Competitive Landscape and Go-To-Market
The incident management space is evolving and converging upon adjacent markets. Monitoring intersects with alerting, alerting moves into the remediation space, and remediation seeks automation. There are no clean categories anymore.
As such, Transposit competes with solutions that are outside the runbook automation space, or even the incident management space at large. Even though Transposit explicitly views monitoring and observability as an adjacent space, it’s part of the competitive landscape in which they operate.
A quick look at some of Tranposit’s competitors:
- FireHydrant provides automated runbooks and tools for automating retrospectives.
- PagerDuty is leaning heavily into automation, and recently acquired RunDeck to expand their platform with runbook automation.
- xMatters has tooling to build automated workflows and does incident management.
- Datadog has created incident management capabilities in their platform, including remediation driven through automation and auto-generated “Postmortem Notebooks.”
- Splunk purchased VictorOps to bring in incident response capabilities to their monitoring and observability tool suite.
- GitLab allows runbooks through JupyterHub (only for Kubernetes environments), and has incident management as part of their public roadmap.
- Atlassian acquired Opsgenie to help do incident management, and people use Jira Workflows as a way to build their own automations.
- DIY users could build their own triggers and workflows with GitHub Actions.
Transposit is attempting to differentiate from competitors by focusing on the breadth of their integrations and their ability to augment–but not replace–SRE and DevOps engineers with human-in-the-loop automation. Catering to these constituencies drives the company’s bottoms-up adoption approach to the market.
In addition to targeting incident management, Transposit is also identifying other operational areas to augment with its runbook-driven approach. GitOps is a good example of this approach–enterprises adopting GitOps don’t always have skills with every Infrastructure as Code platform (e.g., an engineer might be stronger with Terraform than Ansible.) Transposit can help the engineer or SRE, guiding them with runbooks for the platforms they are less familiar with. Areas Transposit is augmenting include incident management, response automation, GitOps, and service request automation. As the categories of software delivery converge into each other and the company works to expand its potential use cases, Transposit aims to become a broader DevOps process automation and orchestration platform.
Disclaimer: Transposit is a RedMonk client but this is an independent piece of research that has not been commissioned. GitHub, GitLab, PagerDuty, and Splunk are also RedMonk clients. Atlassian, Datadog, FireHydrant, and xMatters are not RedMonk clients.
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