It's impossible to get the full picture of what's happening with any business from a quarterly earnings report. GitLab (NASDAQ: GTLB) is a wonderful case in point. Following a not-so-great quarterly earnings update -- and a cratering in stock price -- GitLab rallied in grandiose fashion. Two days after the update, Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOGL)(NASDAQ: GOOG) Google reported it was a buyer of GitLab stock. What would Google want with shares of this leader in software development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) company? 

Quick recap of how we got here: Back in 2017, when GitLab was still a private concern, GV (formerly Google Ventures) led an investment round in GitLab totaling $20 million. Just months later, in early 2018, GitLab announced it was leaving Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) cloud computing platform Azure in favor of...drum roll...Google Cloud! The switch was trumpeted as providing better integration for software developers working on bringing old software into a cloud-hosted architecture, but clearly money moving hands certainly played a factor.

Just a few months later, in the summer of 2018, Microsoft said it was acquiring popular software code repository (and GitLab peer/competitor) GitHub for $7.5 billion. With the loss of GitLab as an Azure partner, Microsoft needed a way to keep filling its cloud computing funnel with new software DevSecOps projects. GitHub was a natural replacement.  

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Source Fool.com