Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub subsidiary today announced a leadership change, revealing that Chief Product Officer Thomas Dohmke will become chief executive effective Nov. 15.

Dohmke (pictured) is taking over the reins from current CEO Nat Friedman, who has been at the helm for the past three years. Friedman was appointed to lead GitHub after the code hosting provider joined Microsoft in 2018 through a $7.5 billion acquisition. Prior to working at Microsoft, the executive was the co-founder and  CEO of Xamarin, a maker of development tools that the technology giant had bought in 2016 for a reported $400 million to $500 million. 

As chief product officer, Dohmke worked alongside Friedman to support GitHub’s growth over the last few years. Dohmke has been leading the Microsoft subsidiary’s product strategy and related activities such as product management. The executive is credited with overseeing, among many other initiatives, GitHub’s acquisitions of developer tooling startups Dependabot, npm and Semmle.

GitHub’s recent acquisitions are part of a broader effort to expand into new markets. The Microsoft unit, whose platform is best known for its code hosting features, has expanded to numerous adjacent parts of the development tooling market in recent years. The goal: becoming a bigger part of enterprise software teams’ workflow.

One of the most recent additions to GitHub’s product portfolio is Copilot, an autocomplete engine that can generate multiple lines of code at a time. Copilot is an example of how GitHub has been leveraging the resources of parent Microsoft to support its expansion roadmap. The service is based on a neural network developed by the OpenAI artificial intelligence research group, which works closely with Microsoft and received a $1 billion investment from the tech giant in 2019.

Cybersecurity is another segment that GitHub has been targeting as part of its growth strategy. The Microsoft unit this year introduced GitHub Advanced Security, a tool that can automatically detect vulnerable code in companies’ software. Code security is a lucrative and fast growing market, as indicated by the significant interest it’s drawing from investors. Snyk Ltd., one of the segment’s leading players, has raised more than $600 million in funding over the last few months.

For developers looking to write software in their browsers, GitHub has built a cloud-based code editor. Enterprise application teams can use the GitHub Actions service to automate the process of deploying code to production. 

GitHub’s investments in expanding  its product lineup have been paying dividends, Friedman disclosed today. “We are proud to say that more than 73 million developers are building the future of software on GitHub, we count 84% of the Fortune 100 as our customers, and every year since the acquisition our business has grown more than the last,” Friedman wrote in an internal memo posted on GitHub’s blog. 

In a separate post, Dohmke wrote that “we will continue to operate independently as a community, platform, and business. This means that GitHub will retain its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility. We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud.”

In conjunction with the CEO change at GitHub, Microsoft has appointed longtime executive Julia Liuson to lead its developer division. Dohmke will report to Liuson.

GitHub, being the industry’s most popular platform for hosting open-source projects, is a central component of Microsoft’s developer tooling portfolio. The portfolio also includes the widely used Visual Studio Code desktop-based code editor. For enterprises, Microsoft offers numerous services to simplify development projects via its Azure public cloud.

Among Microsoft’s various development offerings, GitHub presents the perhaps biggest revenue expansion opportunities. That’s because the Microsoft unit’s installed base of 73 million users includes most of the world’s developers. In some cases, a developer already using GitHub may be more likely to adopt a coding tool built directly into the GitHub interface than an offering from an external provider that requires more work to use, which gives Microsoft a potential sales advantage.

GitHub faces intense competition in many of the market segments where it has established a presence over recent years. One key competitor, GitLab Inc., went public last month and its market capitalization currently exceeds $16 billion, more than twice what Microsoft had paid to acquire GitHub. Both companies’ platforms are based in part on the open-source Git system for managing software projects. 

Photo: GitHub