CloudBees Inc. is adding release management, orchestration and automation capabilities to its suite of continuous integration and delivery or CI/CD tools for developers after acquiring rival Electric Cloud Inc.

CloudBees, which develops the popular Jenkins CI/CD platform that developers use to test code for problems while it’s being written and deployed, said the acquisition was completed earlier this month. It declined to reveal how much it paid to acquire Electric Cloud.

Instead, CloudBees officials were more interested in talking about what the deal means for its customers. The main benefit is that it brings Electric Cloud’s expertise in application release automation, which relates to the process of modeling and deploying software products, and configuring them for specific platforms, to its customers.

Electric Cloud’s ARA capabilities might not have made too many headlines so, but it does boast some prominent customers including the likes of Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and General Motors Co.

The company’s tools include ElectricFlow, which is used by customers to automate control application releases at scale, and ElectricAccelerator, which helps to accelerate software build and testing times to give developers more time to experiment. ElectricAccelerator works by combining software tasks across physical or cloud central processing units, speeding up development velocity by two to three times the normal rate.

CloudBees says the acquisition of Electric Cloud makes it a leader in what it defines as software delivery management, which is a new concept it introduced today at its annual CloudBees Days event in San Francisco.

“Having the Electric Cloud offerings under the CloudBees umbrella gives companies a greater ability to manage the delivery of value to customers,” Christina Noren, chief product officer at CloudBees, said in a statement. “It’s not just about speed – it’s about delivering business value securely and efficiently with confidence at high speeds.”

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