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Category: Features

  • Report: Software Delivery Slowed During Pandemic

    Report: Software Delivery Slowed During Pandemic

    A survey of more than 500 IT and development professionals conducted by Atlassian finds two-thirds of respondents have slowed down the frequency of software delivery since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Patrick Hill, head of reliability process at Atlassian, said while developers may be creating more code than ever while they work from home, IT operations teams working from home are struggling to keep pace.

    In fact, the survey finds more than half of respondents (51%) reported incident response times have been slower since they began working remotely. At the same time, there’s been a 73% increase in demand for the digital services being provided, the survey finds.

    It’s too early to say to what degree slowing down the application delivery process might be a byproduct of the “new normal.” It’s more likely that IT operations teams need more time to re-engineer processes to return to the software release levels typically achieved prior to the pandemic, said Hill.

    In many cases, IT teams may also need more time to shift toward cloud-based frameworks for managing application release cycles that can be accessed from anywhere. Hill said Atlassian has seen a significant increase in the use of its IT management platforms since March. New signups have increased by approximately 125%, he noted.

    It’s also unclear to what degree an application release backlog may be building inside organizations. While developers may be launching more projects, Hill said many of those projects may be only to address bug fixes. As such, it may not take that long for IT operations teams to recover from the disruption caused by the pandemic.

    Nevertheless, Hill said most organizations are still coming to terms with the human impact of the pandemic. Many organizations, for example, might not decide to bring IT teams back into the office at all. In fact, there may not be any office to return to—many organizations might conclude there is no need, especially if productivity levels have not declined substantially. No doubt many organizations consequently will be closely monitoring application release cycles in the weeks and months ahead to determine to what impact working from home is having on IT productivity.

    Of course, not every member of the IT team is cut out to work from home. While many IT professionals may be introverts by nature, there are also a great many distractions at home that adversely impact productivity. Conversely, some IT professionals might even discover they have begun to work longer hours.

    In the meantime, Hill said IT managers would be well-advised to focus more on outcomes than metrics. The amount of code being released in a given week is not likely to be as important as making sure the right code is being released at the right time. With more demand than ever for application services, the greater the need there is for DevOps teams to focus their efforts on the components of an application that make the most critical difference to the business.

  • Low-Code and RPA With Appian CTO Michael Beckley

    Low-Code and RPA With Appian CTO Michael Beckley

    On the eve of the first virtual Appian World, we caught up with Appian founder and CTO Michael Beckley. Michael spoke to us about low-code and RPA as well as AI and robotics, all being leveraged to help organizations during the COVID-19 crisis.

    Obviously, given the current situation, developing applications quickly with a minimum of coding while harnessing automation and AI would be a big premium. This is a situation that seems perfect for Appian.

    In fact, the whole low-code and RPA model seems tailor-made for a COVID-like situation. Michael shares with us several instances of healthcare and governmental agencies using Appian and RPA to deliver massively scalable applications to measure and gather data around COVID-19.

    Low-code and RPA are not just COVID-19 trends, either. Michael and I discussed why the new normal will reward organizations that use RPA and low-code, as well as harnessing AI and robotics to build apps that can scale massively quickly with minimal coding.

    If Michael is correct, Appian is in an enviable position to deliver a robust, proven platform that will allow organizations to harness the power of low-code and RPA.

    My discussion with Michael is below. While Appian World virtual kicks off today, Michael actually delivers the keynote for the second day of Appian World on Wednesday. If you get a moment, don’t miss Michael’s talk. He has some great insight into how low-code and RPA can be a benefit during the COVID-19 crisis.

    While you’re at it, I highly recommend attending as much of Appian World that you can. I had the pleasure of attending one in Miami two years ago and was very much looking forward to this year’s event in Ft. Lauderdale, before it was converted to a virtual event. Appian’s hackathon is usually a great event to check out at Appian World as well.

  • DevOps Chats: Shadow Code Security with PerimeterX

    DevOps Chats: Shadow Code Security with PerimeterX

    When the cloud first caught on, there was a problem with Shadow IT—developers spinning up instances in AWS without the IT team knowing they existed. Now with the ease of CI/DC automated deployments, the problem of Shadow Code—code being added to apps that did not go through the entire team process—has arisen.

    In this DevOps Chats we speak with Elad Koren, VP of product at PerimeterX, about the Shadow Code issue and how his company can help.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel, and you’re listening to DevOps Chats. Today’s DevOps Chats features Elad Koren, who is VP of product at PerimeterX, and Elad, welcome to DevOps Chats.

    Elad Koren: Thanks, Alan. It’s an honor being here. Happy to join you.

    Shimel: I appreciate you being here, and it’s our honor to have you. So, Elad, we’ve never—I don’t believe so—we’ve never interviewed or covered PerimeterX before on Security Boulevard or DevOps. And why don’t we start with, why don’t you give our audience a little background—what’s PerimeterX about?

    Koren: Cool. I believe you’re right. PerimeterX has been around for a bit more than five years, and its main goal is to secure businesses, digital businesses across the web. It can be e-commerce, SaaS, and other online businesses, essentially providing solutions to the online digital challenges they have.

    We started with our Bot Defender solution about four years ago, and this targets the bot problem around the web. I’m sure you’re well aware of it, being the security professional you are. About a year ago, we’ve also launched our Code Defender product, which looks at the client-side code and highlights vulnerabilities and issues around that. And we will, of course, develop some more in the future as part of our growth plans to continue in securing digital businesses around the world.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, we’re gonna dive into that in just a second, but Elad, I also always like to ask people about their own personal journey. How did you come to be VP of Products at PerimeterX?

    Koren: Wow. [Laughter] It was a long journey. I’m actually, I’ve actually been in security for more than 15 years. I started with the Israeli Intelligence and the IDF. Then moved to my startup where I took all the security and kind of compliance and fraud areas. From there, I moved on to RSA Security, so you’re probably familiar with RSA Security, now part of Dell. And after a short period in Payoneer as their Head of Compliance and Security, I found myself in PerimeterX, leading the product group and now the VP of Product. I’m very proud of what we do with really, a sense of accomplishment with what we’ve been doing so far.

    Shimel: Excellent. Well, RSA Security was spun out of Dell now, right? Didn’t they do a PE deal a couple months ago, I thought?

    Koren: Yeah, yeah, they had a discussion around that. It was actually interesting because RSA was one of the biggest assets EMC had before Dell acquired them. And once Dell stepped in, I think RSA wasn’t that interesting for them, so it was only a matter of time.

    Shimel: Yeah, no, Dell seems to have a love/hate relationship with the security companies they acquire, but that’s for another podcast. Let’s stick to PerimeterX. [Laughter]

    So, client-side code inspections and security—talk to us a little bit about what you’re doing there and then I wanna jump into this concept of shadow code that we spoke about off-mic.

    Koren: Yeah. So, first of all, very important to understand, you know, the first question that comes to mind is, why are we talking about it on DevOps.com. So, one of PerimeterX’s top targets is to assist DevOps teams to do their job better. And the fact of the matter is that, after we’ve had our bot mitigation solution for quite a while and DevOps was one of our personas, we went out and asked our customers, what’s their next major problem.

    And one of the things that came up for many, many customers was the fact that they have a challenge around their client side, okay? Developers are adding libraries—well, you know, it’s a common practice. However, some of these libraries, JavaScript or others, they’re not that secure, and they’re not that trustworthy. What we did at that point is kind of think of that problem and what it reminded of. And it kind of reminded us of the problem of the shadow IT that we’ve seen about 10 years ago or so, where employees would just come with their devices or do whatever they want with their bring your own device kind of concept, and companies started fighting that. But at the end of the day, they understood that they have no weight.

    It’s kind of similar with code. Developers will find the best weight to add code, even if it’s a library that they can just take and adjust slightly, and even if it’s a GitHub repository that no one maintains, and these introduce significant risk.

    Shimel: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, it’s interesting, I think no one in DevOps questions anymore when we talk about adding security to the mix. I mean, thank God. You know, a little bit of my own personal journey, right? The reason I got into DevOps is because I thought it was the greatest thing for security. I thought this, the way it came down that this whole DevSecOps movement and shifting left and making developers more aware of security—I envisioned that when I first found out about DevOps. And I was hoping it would give us another chance to do it right, to correct some of the mistakes that were kind of inherent in our whole model.

    And I’m not saying it’s a panacea or it’s perfect now, but certainly, we can acknowledge that developers do care about—no one wants to develop insecure or crappy code. People have pride in what code they develop. Now, when they didn’t know—the more they know about security and the more tools we can give them that allow them to kind of do better, develop more secure code, the better off we are, I think.

    But this issue of, as you’re calling it, shadow code, right, kinda growing ________ with shadow IT when the cloud first came.

    Koren: Yeah.

    Shimel: It’s a problem. And the thing about it is, again, developers don’t raise their hand and say, “I wanna sneak around. I wanna sneak a little code in the back door.”

    Koren: Exactly.

    Shimel: Right? They do it because they have time constraints, they wanna get it done, they want it to work faster, right?

    Koren: They’re exactly the reasons that we’ve understood when we looked into it.

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Koren: And it makes sense. If you think about it, developers should be able to add whatever it is that they think can help them develop faster. I mean, it’s the business goal.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Koren: The main question that we asked is—well, how can you make it more streamlined, okay? How can you—and now, going one step backwards or sideways, there’s a disconnect, okay? The developers, as you said, they wanna make it a secure code, but the business owner or the person who manages the security posture of the application doesn’t necessarily know that somebody introduced a new vulnerability, because the developer thinks that this repository is safe. I mean, it should be, it’s in GitHub. [Laughter]

    Shimel: Oh, no—agreed.

    Koren: So, the thing is—and this is where we asked around, our customers, what are they doing to mitigate this type of risk and what are they finding out. And what we found out is, interestingly enough, you have a lot of performance monitoring tools, but you have zero security monitoring tools on client side in real time. You have static code analysis, you have a lot of other solutions trying to find the vulnerability before it goes out to production. But once it’s out there, nobody monitors.

    And you have to keep in mind—I know you are keeping in mind, but our listeners—the fact that, well, when in run time, you can inject dynamic code, that changes. And if somebody else gets control over it, this is a problem.

    Shimel: Yeah, yeah. Well, and there’s a couple, I think, other complicating factors, Elad, that I’d like you to address. And that is, you know, today, where does that client side code live? Is it in the container somewhere with the whole Kubernetes microservices mesh thing goin’ on?

    Koren: Mm-hmm.

    Shimel: Is it in the traditional hypervisor kind of environment, or maybe something like that or is it on bare metal and serverless or—you know, it’s a great time to be a developer, but it’s a very hard time to be a security person who’s trying to keep guardrails there for these people to do it as safely as possible, as securely as possible. How do you do that?

    Koren: This is correct. You’re spot on. You’d expect that when a new code is introduced, the company or the developers would adopt it and manage it or maintain on their servers or on their microservers or their mesh. However, because they want to keep it updated, because they want to keep it as capable as possible, they sometimes take the dynamic library from their repository and, whenever there’s a CI/CD process going on, it pulls the library from there.

    And that is where the shadow code becomes a problem. Because, unless you have the right processes around, how to make sure that this library is safe? How to make sure that this is, you’re not introducing anything malicious—and we have seen it happening in the past—this is where you have to address the problem. And you know, I can share some of the things that we’ve seen when we had the validation of the product before we launched it. We had a design partner, and they asked for something like this because their developers asked for the security team to allow them visibility into what’s happening on the client side. And we’ve actually—and it’s a big customer. I don’t want to name names, naturally, here, but—and you will share my surprise—when we found out, when we run on their client side that a very, very big vendor of there is using a jQuery from a non-trustworthy source.

    Now, you’d expect something like this would never happen for a well-established company, but it does. And it’s surprising, but it does. And they weren’t the only ones.

    Shimel: Hmm. Interesting. So, let’s now talk—so, I think we’ve defined the issue and the problem, right? How is PerimeterX helping this?

    Koren: So, our approach when looking at this issue or this problem, naturally, we are a Dev first company. So, we came and asked the developers that we were working with—the DevOps, DevSecOps, and some of the risk analysts, some of the personas—what would be most beneficial. And what they said, and this is how, you know, I’m the VP of Products. I’m a Product Manager at heart. And customer input is the number one thing that I’m looking into when I’m building the products.

    They said very clearly, if they can see, before moving from staging to dev to prod, what the code itself, when it’s pulled dynamically, is doing and have the visibility of what’s happening there in real-time on users—this is something that they don’t have today. Because that will introduce that level of visibility whenever something bad happens.

    I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the Magecart attacks that have happened from third-party libraries. Again, don’t wanna name names, but if somebody looks online, they can find out. When we come in and we analyze in real-time on the client side, on every user going into the website, what the scripts are doing there, whether they send information to a bad domain, whether they try to take the information and store it in a cookie and then use it later on—we can quickly highlight the main risks and main problems and vulnerabilities, like I mentioned earlier with jQuery, so that the DevOps or DevSecOps can quickly raise a flag and say to the developer, “Listen, this script you’ve added introduces new vulnerability.” You can’t see that in the static code analysis, but you will see that on run time on the client side. And that is something revolutionary. We don’t have that today in anyone else’s solution out there.

    Shimel: Hmm. Interesting. What—so, I always ask, and you’re the perfect person, VP of Product—now you’ve got a conundrum. You’ve got a really great security product here that’s gonna help developers with secure code. How do you—how do you sell it? How do you bring it into the organization? Do you talk to the security guy and say, “Hey, go talk to your developer team and tell them to use this?” Do you talk to your developers and say, “Tell your security team you wanna do this?” Do you gotta talk to the security team and the developer team? Whose budget does this come out of? Who ultimately is responsible for setting the policies and processes?

    Koren: And this is—

    Shimel: Is the solution hard to sell, maybe, though?

    Koren: You’re correct. So, theoretically, it’s hard to sell. However, the main key here or the key differentiator is the fact that when we went in to look how we wanna sell this solution, before we even built it, we established the fact that it should fit into their processes. If it’s not fitting into their processes, if they have to start defining things like content security policy, if they have to start maintaining this on a day to day basis, it’s not going to work.

    Solutions for DevOps or DevSecOps today are one, two, three. You have to have it in and you have to do it quickly and you have to have minimum manual effort, unless you definitely prove why it’s needed. And so, this is why we’ve added the fact that nobody needs to do the baselining on their own, we are doing that automatically with machine learning capabilities, what every script does, whether it’s ________ or not, and the fact that they can just have a small snippet on their client side and we’ll analyze whatever and flag in our portal or alerting system that they have, it actually fits into their CI/CD process, it fits into their day-to-day process. They can even have it as part of their regular security processes and have it fit into their SIM.

    And this is where it really makes the difference, because you don’t have to do anything manually and you solve a problem and you fit into their processes, and security people are very happy about it. I can tell you that one of the customers that actually already bought this product was very happy with the fact that they have visibility to this area and they don’t have to maintain it on their own, because we are doing that, the product does that out of the box. So, this was a key component in our product.

    Shimel: Huh. Excellent. Excellent, excellent. So—I told you, the time goes very fast. [Laughter]

    Koren: [Laughter]

    Shimel: We’re coming up on time, here. For people who are interested—let’s use our time wisely—how could they find out more information? What path do you suggest for them?

    Koren: So, first of all, they can go out to our website and check out our solutions, both for bot mitigation as well as the Code Defender and other solutions that we have. I think reaching out to our team if you have any questions, if you have any concerns around the client side, I can tell you that even companies that thought everything’s fine were completely oblivious to threats and concerns around the client side that are out there and many people are not aware of. You can also reach out to me directly via LinkedIn or what have you and we can discuss.

    I think in general, for DevOps and DevSecOps to be more aware of the dynamic nature of the code that is added to the client side and what to do. We actually have a blog post listing the things that are best to do if you want to make sure that it’s secure and you’re on top of things. So, it’s a good read as well. And that’s about it. So, we are here. We’re ready to help.

    Shimel: Cool. Last question, just because you have to ask it because it’s out there—with everything going on in the world with the COVID and everything else, how is it affecting you guys and what are you seeing?

    Koren: It’s actually amazing. We’ve seen some trends around the e-commerce landscape that we’ve actually had some blog posts on. And I think, you know, one of the things that kind of symbolizes these times, a few of the e-commerce sites that we are working with said that the traffic they experienced outgrows the Black Friday/Cyber Monday level of traffic.

    I think it symbolizes kind of the boom of online life that we have. I’m sure you’re experiencing it as well. And I think the shift there is not going to go back to the previous levels. It’s definitely going to go down, but we are seeing so many trends, very interesting trends, and we are naturally adjusting what we are doing, but luckily and happily, we’re doing great these times and it’s—we’re very happy with what we have now.

    Shimel: Well, I will tell you, for whatever reason, you know, and it may not all be good, because there is this whole, with the virus pandemic there’s a cyber pandemic of people trying to exploit. I mean, so, for instance, even here MediaOps where DevOps and Security Boulevard, our security site, used to be pretty even in terms of how many visitors—they both get 350 to 400,000 visitors, unique visitors.

    Koren: Mm-hmm.

    Shimel: All of a sudden, you know, Security Boulevard now this month is gonna be at 600,000.

    Koren: Wow.

    Shimel: Last month was 530,000. So, in the last two months since this COVID thing, you know, we’ve seen traffic on the Boulevard site—DevOps has stayed relatively steady. It hasn’t gone up, necessarily, it hasn’t gone down.

    Koren: You know, one thing we’ve noticed, and I think it can also explain, I think it’s wider than that—attacks and in general fraud and security challenges became much more complicated, because the adversaries are out there and they are targeting a whole lot of other new sites that previously didn’t experience. We are seeing much higher levels of complexity in the attacks that we’ve previously seen on giants, now on even medium small—small- to medium-sized sites.

    Shimel: Agreed. Crazy. Just crazy, right?

    Koren: Yeah, indeed.

    Shimel: You know, because that’s what you need when you have a virus pandemic, we need to have more cybercrime and that stuff to worry about.

    Koren: Yeah. [Laughter]

    Shimel: So, Elad, I want to thank you for joining us today on DevOps Chats. It’s been a pleasure.

    Koren: Thanks, Alan.

    Shimel: Be back on soon. Elad Koren from PerimeterX here on DevOps Chats, this is Alan Shimel and you’ve just listened to another DevOps Chats.

  • DevOps Deeper Dive: Teams Adjust to New WFH Normal

    DevOps Deeper Dive: Teams Adjust to New WFH Normal

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic the level of software development activity has remained relatively constant, but developers—who, like everyone else—are now largely working from home, are putting in more hours. Organizations are now grappling with whether working remotely on software development projects now represents the “new normal.”

    A report published this week by GitHub shows that while there was a slight dip in activity in various regions of the world as the pandemic spread, activity on the public GitHub repository quickly recovered. Whether developers are spending more time working on projects is difficult to conclude given all the potential distractions at home, but according to the GitHub report, the amount of time spent on the platform per developer has increased. This could be due to various factors including the fact that developers are not commuting to work or are managing multiple tasks—some of which are directly related to work—across an extended working day. Others simply may be taking more breaks between activities.

    Despite working in isolation, it would appear developers are remaining productive, said Kelly Stirman, vice president of product strategy and marketing for GitHub. “More time to code increases productivity.”

    Providers of other DevOps platforms have observed similar increases in activity during the pandemic. Moritz Plassnig, senior vice president and general manager for software delivery management and software delivery automation cloud at CloudBees, said many organizations have been launching custom application development projects to drive digital business transformation initiatives. Now those projects are becoming core to the organization’s business continuity strategy.

    “The current situation has only accelerated that trend,” said Plassnig.

    The biggest challenge in managing a highly distributed workforce is ensuring the right code is being worked on at the right time, said Fred Simon, chief data scientist of JFrog. “Everyone needs feedback.”

    To provide that feedback, managers have employed collaboration tools such as Zoom and, when necessary, shifted work to DevOps platforms made available as a cloud service, added Simon.

    At the same time, the level of communications tooling baked into a DevOps platform matters more than ever, said Emrah Samdan, vice president of product at Thundra, a provider of a platform for securing and observing cloud-native microservices. Developers can collaborate with each other much more effectively using asynchronous communications tools to, for example, share code.

    “A lot of productivity is being lost setting up Zoom calls,” said Samdan.

    The issue now is whether working on software development projects remotely represents the new normal. A recent survey of chief financial officers published by PwC finds that nearly half of the respondents (49%) plan to make remote work a permanent option for roles within their organizations that allow for it.

    How employees will respond to that change will vary. According to results from a recent survey of workers conducted by GitLab, 52% of employees say they are more productive working remotely, while 48% are more efficient. Of course, those results also suggest half of employees don’t share that same level of appreciation for working from home.

    It’s worth noting that many software development teams were already heading in the direction of working remotely more often prior to the pandemic, said Brendan O’Leary, senior developer evangelist at GitLab. In fact, he noted, resources such as the GitLab Remote Playbook have been downloaded more frequently over the last few months.

    “I think it is a time that will see a real separation of bosses and leaders,” O’Leary said, noting leaders will go beyond simply tracking metrics to enable organizations to continue to launch innovative software development projects.

    Obviously, DevOps teams that were working in a distributed fashion prior to the pandemic have a distinct advantage over those that have worked primarily in the same central location. However, given all the current uncertainties organizations now face, it’s probable every member of a DevOps team going forward is going to be working from home a lot more often.

  • TechStrong Con: 12 Hours Strong, June 4

    TechStrong Con: 12 Hours Strong, June 4

    In my previous article, I noted that as part of our COVID-19 response MediaOps has spun up TechStrong TV, a daily video stream. Additionally, we are hosting our biggest virtual event to date, TechStrong Con, for 12 hours strong on June 4. We want to make TechStrong Con our biggest, best virtual event to date. We want to show that while we may be working from home battling this terrible virus and dealing with economic upheaval, the tech industry is unbowed. We collaborate, we communicate. We develop, we deploy. We are strong, #techstrong.

    I know what you are thinking: Hmm, another virtual event, joy. Just what we need. Yeah, I am with you—it does seem like everyone and their mother are putting on virtual events, or at least calling what they are doing virtual events. But really, this one is different. Here is why:

    1. The speaker lineup is extraordinary. John Willis has handpicked the speakers in the main room auditorium. The lineup is not final yet but already includes an amazing mix:Seriously, this is a blockbuster lineup of speakers. In addition, there will be multiple auditoriums as well as the main stage, all with great speakers. One of the advantages of a virtual event is you don’t have to miss one speaker if two great talks are going on at the same time. The sessions will stream live at their given time and be available on-demand.
    2. There will be chat rooms built into the event itself. Many of the speakers will be available live in the chat rooms after their sessions to answer questions or chat with attendees.
    3. The event will be 12 hours chock full of all kinds of tech learning, networking opportunities and a chance to escape the bad news.
    4. A job board will be available for companies looking to hire and those looking for work.
    5. A portion of sponsor proceeds (it’s free to attend) will be donated to COVID-19-related charities.

    The whole event will take place in our state-of-the-art virtual environment, which we have been steadily improving for the past 24 months. This really is one event you don’t want to miss. Also, if you are interested in sponsoring or speaking, write to me at editor@devops.com.

    Stay healthy. Stay strong.

  • DevOps Chats: Software Delivery Leadership Forum and DevOps World 2020, CloudBees

    DevOps Chats: Software Delivery Leadership Forum and DevOps World 2020, CloudBees

    DevOps World | Jenkins World has long established itself as a leading venue for DevOps practitioners to learn, share their knowledge and build a top-notch community. But, what about leaders, the people in leadership roles at companies who utilize DevOps as a vital part of their business and technology strategies?

    Sam Fell, CloudBees area VP enterprise markets, joins DevOps Chats to discuss the newly announced Software Delivery Leadership Forum. DevOps World 2020 is expanding its focus and content by bringing leaders together with content specifically tailored for business and technology leaders. Accelerated Strategies Group, where Mitch Ashley is CEO, is leading the programming of the DevOps World 2020 Software Delivery Leadership Forum.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of the conversation.

    Transcript

    Mitch Ashley: Hi, everyone, this is Mitch Ashley with DevOps.com, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat podcast. Today, I’m joined by Sam Fell, area vice president, enterprise marketing at CloudBees. And we’re talking about, actually, a subject of interest to both of us. It’s the new Software Delivery Leadership Forum, and we’ll get into that.

    Welcome to DevOps Chat, Sam.

    Sam Fell: Thank you, Mitch. Pleasure to be here, as always—great speaking with you.

    Ashley: Absolutely. I always enjoy talking with you. For folks who don’t know you, I know you’ve been in the industry around DevOps for a while. [Laughter] So, a lot of folks know you, but—

    Fell: Are you calling me old? Is that it?

    Ashley: Actually, I didn’t say that. I’ve got the gray hair; you’re still young, so.

    Fell: [Laughter]

    Ashley: Just to introduce yourself, for folks that may not know you.

    Fell: Alright, wonderful. So, I am Sam Fell. I am area vice president at CloudBees, where I’ve been for the past year. We were acquired in, as part of the Electric Cloud acquisition where I ran marketing at Electric Cloud.

    Ashley: Yeah, a lot of folks know Electric Cloud, so probably know you from that as well as CloudBees, of course.

    Fell: Yeah. That’s right.

    Ashley: How long ago did that acquisition happen?

    Fell: That was literally a year ago in May.

    Ashley: Okay.

    Fell: So, we are just a year, really just coming up on a year. So, all the exciting stuff was happening, all the stuff that made me lose my hair and all that was happening right now. And we were just so thrilled with the outcome to be, you know, the company that Electric Cloud was. We had a pretty nice name in the space. But when you look at CloudBees and you look at the community that they’ve created and you look at the access to the brains that they have, it’s a tremendous opportunity. You know, obviously, I’m really excited to be able to be here. And I’m excited about sharing this journey with the Accelerated Strategies Group, right?

    Ashley: Well, thank you. I’m excited about that, too. Yeah, CloudBees is a great organization, as was Electric Cloud.

    So, let’s get into the—we made an announcement, or actually, you did a press release about the Software Delivery Leadership Forum, and there’s a connection to DevOps World and some other things. Maybe we start with that and then we can talk about Accelerated Strategies’ involvement in it.

    Fell: Lovely. Awesome. Okay, so, you know, we’ve been running probably, people would say, the most successful DevOps conference for years now, DevOps World/Jenkins World. Almost 2,000 people show up to learn more about what’s happening in the space, there’s hands on practitioner based workshops and training for people to really get their hands on and get them dirty about how to implement these changes that have to happen as you’re digitally transforming your organization.

    One of the things that we took a step back and we were thinking about is, what we don’t really have is a place for the leadership to be able to participate. And, you know, we’ve done leadership seminars and workshops before, but we’ve never said that DevOps World needs to be a place where not only the practitioners are coming, but where the leaders are coming to learn not the practitioner level information, but how to lead the practitioners. What are the processes, what are the methods that people are learning and using and trying and failing with and learning from?

    And so, we thought we would add that to the program. And as we were thinking about adding it to the program, we also thought, because of the way that the DevOps World/Jenkins World show has evolved, I as a vendor looked back at DevOps World/Jenkins World and I was always very willing to sponsor that event when I was at Electric Cloud, because it was an open event. There was not a ton of bias towards CloudBees products, necessarily. It was really about the community, and it was about educating people.

    And so, in that same spirit, when we were thinking about how do we make sure that there’s some objective independence in the way that we’re putting out the ideas around, “How do you lead? How do you lead this transformation? How do you make sure that your teams are all on the same page?” We felt that it was really helpful to have a third party help us with that programming. And so, that’s, of course, this is the cue to Accelerated Strategies, this is why we sort of reached out to you. There’s obviously great synergy between the work that we’re doing, and we thought, who better to help us craft this program, the programming for this conference than the fine people over at Accelerated Strategies?

    Ashley: Good.

    Fell: So, that’s pretty much where we’re going, and then you and I have had lots of conversations about what that Software Delivery Leadership Forum should look like at the event, and so maybe I would pitch it back to you and you could talk a little bit about what we’re thinking about for DevOps World Software Delivery Leadership Forum.

    Ashley: Absolutely. And thanks so much, we appreciate you approaching us, and it was exciting to work with you on this. And I agree—you know, DevOps World, yes, it’s CloudBees behind it, Jenkins World, but the community that you talk about really elevates it above any one vendor, to use that word.

    Fell: Yeah.

    Ashley: And just the fact that Electric Cloud, you know, would—and many others would sponsor a conference that’s put on by another vendor.

    Fell: Yep, yep, coopetition. The competitors were there and happy about it because the audience is the right audience. These are the people that are in the weeds making it happen with their fingers, and now what we’re saying is, “Hey, these people over in the weeds that are using their fingers, they need other people to help on the top that can help support and pave the road for them.”

    Ashley: They do.

    Fell: And so, we’ve been trying to do that.

    Ashley: Well, and I would imagine, too, that, you know, one of the drivers behind leadership as a topic is organization scale. You know, trying to do DevOps on more than two or three or four independent projects, that’s when you get into the heavy lifting. That’s when you’ve got to have management support. And now I see—I know you do, too—leaders reaching out and trying to find resources for themselves, educate themselves, lessons learned, pitfalls, community that they can be part of as well as the technical folks be part of their community and that’s in large part from what we’ve talked to why to go after this Software Delivery Leadership Forum.

    Fell: That’s right, exactly. Do you wanna talk a little bit about what the proposed format would be at the—

    Ashley: Yeah.

    Fell: —Software Delivery Leadership Forum? Wonderful, okay.

    Ashley: Yeah, I’m happy to. We have some research that we’re gonna be launching, and talking about around software delivery that we’ll be discussing and presenting some of the findings from.

    But the main point of how we’ve crafted this to be, it’s a parallel track. It’s not a separate venue, separate place, it’s just a set of content that’s specifically directed at leaders, people in SE or VP director software leader kind of role, but it’s also product leaders as well as transformational leaders. And those are the folks that we really would like to attract to attend to this, because that combination is always what needs to come together to achieve some business strategy, disruptive strategy product delivery, some kind of financial effect that we’re trying to have on the organization.

    So, it’s a track of about 22 different sessions, but we’re gonna have a number of things that will be highly interactive. So, we’re gonna have some panels, we’ll have some audience participation, kinda open forum for questions and answers with different experts, and we’ll have people that—yes, there’ll be some folks who are product company, there’ll be folks who are analysts like from Accelerated, but not only Accelerated; we’ll have other analysts there. And then, we’d like to have as many practitioners in a business role technical leadership role as well to get that perspective.

    Fell: Right.

    Ashley: And we’ve planned some workshops and some things like that. So, my goal is that everybody take three things away from this conference. Whatever those three things are, come back to your company, to your team, to your organization and say, “You know? I picked up some really good stuff. This one, I had no idea somebody was facing the same issue and they actually solved it—”

    Fell: And they fixed it, right.

    Ashley: “—a way I was thinking about, so it validated our thinking.” Or,  you know, “Threw it out the window and we’ve got a whole other approach, but I’m sure glad I didn’t march down that Bataan death march.” [Laughter]

    Fell: Waste my time—failing fast is winning, exactly.

    Ashley: Exactly, exactly. So, the call for presentations is open right now.

    Fell: Yep.

    Ashley: You can go to DevOpsWorld.com, and there’s a button there that is a call for presentations, fill out information, we’d love to have folks, and we are reviewing submissions actively right now, so it’s a good time to get this out.

    Fell: Yeah. We’re getting—actually, from that release, we’re getting quite a few submissions, which is really nice. There’s some suggestions around some of the topics that we’re looking to have people talk about—governance, security, those are big topics. So, yeah, definitely interesting to get people’s perspectives and to see what they have to say. We’re excited about that.

    Ashley: It is. So, full disclosure, we both have an interest in this and participating, but it’s good to be on with you to talk about it.

    Fell: Yeah, for sure.

    Ashley: You know, I’m curious, too, because you’re doing this—well, let me ask you, why did you decide to name it the Software Delivery Leadership Forum? Because I know we went around a couple names, a couple of ideas.

    Fell: Yeah. So, well, when you think about the work that the fine people are doing, whether they’re doing it from a DevOps perspective or they’re just in dev or they’re just in ops or they’re part of the executive team who’s not part of development or operations, but they have a vested interest in development and operations getting their stuff done, right?

    Every—this is such a hackneyed expression, it’s very overused, but every business is a software business. And now, in this age we find ourselves in, the digital connection with your customers is more important than ever.

    Ashley: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

    Fell: And so, there are other people beyond just dev and ops. And so, originally, it was going to be the DevOps Leadership Forum, but it’s really, we think it’s more about that, delivering that software or delivering those services that are foundationally built on top of software, and you can call it whatever you want, but down at the base layer, somebody’s written code, somebody’s built that code, somebody had to deploy it to a server so that people could get any value from it.

    And so, the software delivery life cycle, the SDLC, is something that we think a lot about in the SDLF, like, the Software Delivery Leadership Forum. Because the SDLC is still alive, it’s still kicking, and application life cycle management matters, even in the age of DevOps. And so, we thought that this would be an appropriate name for what we’re trying to put together with you is a place for people, a community to come together that’s built on the community that we already have of all these practitioners who already understand how a lot of this stuff works, but now, they’re just looking for some guidance and some, “Hey, I don’t wanna go down that road again, because that guy already failed,” right? Failing fast and learning from it is not a failure.

    Ashley: Exactly. There’s so much sharing that happens in the technical community, I’m confident we can build that with the business product and technology leadership.

    Fell: Yep.

    Ashley: It’s interesting. We’re in the midst of, maybe we’re still in the early part of this, I don’t know the whole COVID-19 and being in lockdown and, of course, there’s the health and, in some cases, even losing people that we know in our family, or friends. So, in all due respect to that, you know, I’ve talked—some of the things I’ve talked about on another venue, which is TechStrong TV, is, it’s interesting to see this—

    Fell: Congratulations on that launch, by the way.

    Ashley: Thank you. It’s a lot of fun to do.

    Fell: Yeah, I love it. Yeah, that’s great.

    Ashley: It’s a lot of fun to do. Some great content on there. If you haven’t checked it out, go to TechStrong.tv.

    Fell: Yes.

    Ashley: Two to four hours a day, Monday through Friday, so—keep you company. I call it “the view” for technology people. [Laughter]

    Fell: Nice. Very nice.

    Ashley: So, even in this situation, you know, we’re locked down, right? Everybody’s working from home. Most people are. I’ve noted, you know, restaurants have all gone to delivery. They’ve gone to curbside delivery. Even restaurants around here have now started to come up with new offerings to essentially take home packaged meals, kinda like you would from one of those box delivery services.

    And even places like Best Buy has curbside delivery. I had to build a computer, and the delays of shipping something from a manufacturer were so long, you know, and they had to change their apps. They rebuilt their app or added to their app and their web notifications to have, you know, a button to push to say, “I’m in the parking lot and I’m in a white this car and here I am, and by the way, here’s my QR code or scan code,” or not even have to do that.

    Fell: To validate—yeah, exactly.

    Ashley: And that happened in weeks. That wasn’t—you know, that’s a few weeks that those two examples happened. Now think about—

    Fell: Life finds a way. Commerce finds a way, maybe that’s [Cross talk].

    Ashley: It does, it does. And kudos to those folks and many others who were looking for—maybe we didn’t disrupt it, but disruptive business strategies. [Laughter]

    Fell: Yeah. I mean, they have to respond.

    Ashley: Delivery through software.

    Fell: Yeah. They need to respond. Life finds a way, I love it—DevOps finds a way.

    Ashley: It’ll be interesting, I think, you know, given the time frame, the dates are September 21st through the 24th in Las Vegas. And, you know, we’ll have several months behind us, hopefully not too bad, but several months of experience. I bet there is gonna be a lot of stories, many stories of folks who have reacted and responded and some successes, and—

    Fell: Led through that change, right, exactly. Led through that change.

    Ashley: So, talk about a good test—well, not good, but talk about a test situation for the flexibility and agility of our businesses.

    Fell: Yeah. This is the crucible. That’s really the crucible, right here.

    Ashley: Yeah. It truly is.

    Fell: And so, one of the other things, you know, that we’re doing—and Mitch, you’re part of this as well—is that we’re so excited about the Software Delivery Leadership Forum that we actually don’t wanna wait for the September event to get started.

    And so, what we’re actually doing is, we’re creating an online virtual series of Software Delivery Leadership Forums, with our first one coming up at the end of this month in April. Episode one of this series is gonna be on upskilling. It’s on adapting humans at the speed of DevOps and we’re gonna be joined by our friend, Jayne Groll—our mutual friend Jayne Groll—and Eveline Oehrlich, who is her head of research.

    Ashley: Both are mutual friends, yeah.

    Fell: Right, and Eveline—

    Ashley: Both are analysts with Accelerated, too.

    Fell: She’s with you over at Accelerated Strategies, right. And we’ll be joined even further after they’ve given their little talk about the survey results, and we’re actually gonna get an interesting cut of data for the European, because we’re doing two versions of that, event—one for the U.S. time zone friendly and one for EMEA time zone friendly.

    Ashley: Mm-hmm.

    Fell: And so, for the EMEA one, there’s gonna be a different cut of the data that’s gonna be much more focused on that geography, which we’re really excited about. But we’re having a whole bunch of other folks join us as well to be able to have that conversation, because we’re really wanting to try and create, again, a community where there’s interaction between the attendees and the folks who are on the webinar or on this virtual event. Because so many events, people parade out folks that are saying, “Yeah, here’s how we’re successful” and then maybe you get five or 10 minutes at the end for questions and answers.

    And so, we’re kinda gonna flip that on its head and we’re gonna have 30 minutes up front for the Software Delivery Leadership Forum—30 minutes up front for Jayne and Eveline to go through their findings to talk as subject matter experts about this topic that they certainly know a lot about. And at that point, we’re going to introduce a couple of other panelists to join us on camera and start fielding questions directly from the audience.

    And so, the folks who are going to be joining us this time around, we’ve got Ellen Thorne, who is the head of HR here at CloudBees, so who better than a person who’s in HR to talk about what’s—that’s an interesting perspective. What’s unique about that from a—

    Ashley: Skills and training of their people, yeah.

    Fell: Yeah, training. Robert Reeves, who’s the CTO at Datical, right? So, how is the technical person who used to hire technical people, what is that like? What kind of people are you looking for? What skills do you find deficient? What skills do you find lacking that you’d like to see? Of course, you’re joining us.

    And so, really, really excited about that. And then over in Europe, we’ve got a couple of other people joining as well—Eveline Oehrlich will be on that one as well as Cheryl Razzell, who is over at, I think, PolyCom right now, and she used to be at HSBC. She’s not a customer, I think, any more, but she was a customer ad she definitely has an opinion about this.

    So, we’re really looking for people with different perspectives to have a conversation. I’m gonna be on there, you’re gonna be on there. I’ll be moderating, I’m gonna be looking at the chat window the entire time. All the panelists will be able to respond to the questions that are posed in the chat. There’s gonna be a mechanism for people to vote the different answers up or down, which is pretty cool.

    Ashley: Mm-hmm.

    Fell: And my role is really gonna just be to interject and speak on behalf of the people on the chat and say, “Hey, Bill brings up a good point,” “Hey, Debbie just brought up a really good point, she disagrees with you,” “He thinks that that is wrong,” whatever. I’m gonna try and be a conduit to make sure that the audience feels like they’re part of that conversation.

    So, we’re gonna have 30 minutes of up front, set the table subject matter expert speaking stuff, and then we’re gonna have an hour of live Q&A or as long as that audience has questions, we’re gonna work on trying to get to them.

    Ashley: Wow, an hour. That’s great, that’s fantastic. I mean, you know, community in some ways starts with conversation. That’s what draws people in and say, “What’s happening? What are those folks talking about? What is that? Oh, I have a question, I have a thought.” And I’m sure we’ll get some opinions coming in on those questions. [Laughter]

    Fell: That’s right.

    Ashley: Sometimes, they’re sort of written that way, that, “Hey, don’t you think this is true, instead of the way you said it?”

    Fell: Yeah, exactly.

    Ashley: Which is actually, it’s some of the challenge as well as seeking information that helps advance it for all of us, and—you know, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, if you will.

    Fell: I was on a crowd chat with DevOps Institute, I think it was about a week ago, and we had folks from all over the world chiming in and giving their, some prompts that we were asked. It’s fantastic to see people, like you said, to challenge the status quo, to give their opinion of what’s worked for them to understand. Because that—you know, you get an understanding of how some people’s situations are just different. And you can’t—there is no best practice. I think Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton, they talk about this all the time. There’s no best practice, there’s just lots of good practices—

    Ashley: Good practices.

    Fell: —that you can apply to various different, apply to different areas, but you can’t just say that there is one best practice.

    Ashley: So, kind of a variation on the best practice theme, I’ll just ask you your—neither one of us can predict the future that accurately. [Laughter] But what are your thoughts about this virtual event, virtual conferences? Is that something you think will stay with us in a meaningful form post COVID and whatever, how we’re working, all that environment?

    Fell: I do. You know, you saw O’Reilly has canceled all of their physical conferences.

    Ashley: Yeah, yeah.

    Fell: And so, regardless of what ends up happening, I think the same way that the businesses like Best Buy and the other folks that you talked about are transitioning and they’re shifting.

    Ashley: Mm-hmm.

    Fell: I mean, I’m seeing—this week, I’m starting to see all the activities that my children were involved in are now, they’re finally acquiescing and saying, “Okay, we’re transitioning, and now, here’s the Zoom link for you to join for the kung fu class and you’re just gonna do it in your living room, but you have to still wear all of your things and you still have to show up and be polite.”

    So, they’re also transitioning, and businesses are transitioning. They’re learning how to work more remote. I’m very lucky to be working at a company that’s, you know, we’re 99, 90% remote already, so it’s not a huge change for us, but it is a huge change for the folks that are working remotely in my company who have, now, children at home.

    Ashley: Mm-hmm.

    Fell: And so, education is gonna be impacted and I’m talking with Charlie Betz, who’s an analyst over at Forrester, he’s a teacher over at the University of St. Paul—or St. Thomas, excuse me. And he’s talking, he and I talk all the time about how is education gonna be impacted by this? What are—as a parent, I’m sitting at home and I’m working, but my children are here, and they should be doing some school things, but it’s very hard for me to keep up with that and keep track of it. And I think it’s hard for a lot of the educators, because they haven’t had the experience in the virtual meeting space that we’ve all been sort of used to for a while.

    And so, I think there’s a lot of learning that needs to come out of this, but I see—and one of the things that Charlie says is, when people have no jobs, they can do a couple different things, but one of the things a lot of different people do is they go back to school, which is a fantastic thing to do.

    Ashley: Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

    Fell: And if you give people viable options to educate themselves and make themselves—again, all about the upskilling conversation that we were just having. How do we enable these people to be able to make sure that they’re gonna stay relevant, and how do we help them get jobs for the folks that are right now, that they don’t have a job because they’re forced to be in an office that’s closed?

    Ashley: Right.

    Fell: So, I think that there will be quite a bit of focus on how do we educate at a distance, how do we make the collaboration work better. And I think it’s happening already naturally. People are getting more accustomed to being on video calls, right? People who used to never want to be on a video call, now they’re flipping on their video, because it’s like—you know what? We’re all in this together, and one of the things that I really appreciate, before we started scheduling this, I ran around to everyone in my house and I said, “Hey, guys, please don’t scream for the next 30 minutes, because I’m gonna be recording something.”

    Ashley: [Laughter]

    Fell: But the fact is, is that I’m on meetings with people and, you know, my kid or my wife will walk by and we’ll speak. And now, it’s—it used to be where I was embarrassed by that, because it was an intrusion into my workday. And sort of the mind shift that I think is happening is that now, what’s happened is that I’m allowing work into my home.

    Ashley: Yep. And you’re entering into other people’s homes at the same time.

    Fell: And I’m also entering—yeah, absolutely, I’m entering into other people’s homes. But I think there’s a much more understanding and a much more—I’m more comfortable, anyways, with there being life happening outside of me. It’s like the classic BBC video of the girl, the 2-year-old girl who runs in the room. He was—he was, like, appalled that that would happen. And now, if that happened, hopefully, he wouldn’t be, right?

    Ashley: It’s called life.

    Fell: So, I think, as an organization—it’s life, right? And hopefully, as a humanity, we’re getting better about that, and I think we will.

    Ashley: You know, to give you some, a little bit of data to back up part of what you were saying is, we’ve launched—we started an IT, health emergency IT preparedness survey back in February, and things happened so fast that just a traditional survey couldn’t keep up with the changes that are happening with work at home and how this has evolved.

    So, we’ve also launched a flash poll survey, and I’ll be talking about it on TechStrong TV this week. But one of the initial ones before we announced this flash poll, one of the initial ones was, “What is the most critical—you’ve only got one choice—between kinds of services that you use to support your work at home staff? There’s e-mail, collaboration services, meeting, file sharing, phone—all kinds of things.

    Fell: And which ones had degradations, yeah.

    Ashley: Well, yeah. And it’s, surprisingly, collaboration and online meeting services were equal. Those are the top two, within 1% of each other.

    Fell: The top two worst performing?

    Ashley: No, this is of our most critical to my business.

    Fell: Most critical—okay, got it.

    Ashley: Supporting it. We’re gonna do another survey on what have you had issues with that’s actually launched this week.

    Fell: Yeah, I just—that’s why I saw it, because I just saw that one. I was like, “What?”

    Ashley: You just saw it. [Laughter] So, 37 and 36%, I think, online meetings was 37. And so—and email was, like, 20. So, that tells me people have already made this shift into Slack and Microsoft Teams and Hangout and Google and whatever other forms they have for kinda their corporate chat.

    So, I think that skill of collaborating that way is something that will be a natural outcome of the situation we’re in.

    Fell: Yeah, I think so. I mean—yeah, hard times force people to think differently.

    Ashley: Mm-hmm.

    Fell: And we’re a very resilient species. We’ve been around for a while, and we’ll figure this out, but it’s terrible to have to go through it.

    Ashley: It is, it is. We just hope everybody gets through okay.

    Fell: Yeah, exactly.

    Ashley: That’s what we’re hoping for. Well, Sam, it’s a great pleasure, a lot of fun, always, to talk with you. Thanks for being on the podcast and for joining us today, sharing and also sharing with Accelerated Strategies the Software Delivery Leadership Forum. Excited to do all of those events with you and take that dialogue to the next level and really build the community amongst the leadership side.

    Fell: Me, too—wonderful. Thank you, Mitch. I appreciate your invitation and stay safe.

    Ashley: You bet. So, you’ve listened to another DevOps Chat podcast. This is Mitch Ashley thanking everyone for joining us today. Be safe, be careful out there.

  • Coronavirus Impact: Enterprises Must Focus on What Works

    Coronavirus Impact: Enterprises Must Focus on What Works

    As the economic slowdown continues, CIOs, CFOs and enterprise technology teams continue to grapple with frozen budgets and how their enterprise will keep their operations functioning as they attempt to move forward with crucial digital transformation efforts, and possibly shelve those initiatives deemed less critical.

    How are CIOs deciding what projects get postponed? Many projects underway now are focused on business continuity and supporting remote work, but that can’t be the only focus for CIOs and enterprise technology leaders.

    Miles Ward, CTO at business-technology consultancy SADA Systems, said there is a substantial shift to enable staff to productively work from home, increase flexibility in spending and to automate operations, and rely increasingly on managed services so that demands on operations personnel are reduced.

    “Projects outside of those focus areas are going to get deprioritized unless they’re in the very final stages of delivery, where stopping creates more waste than it could prevent,” said Ward.

    According to a recent survey from Dresner Advisory Services, 61% of respondents said projects and budgets will be impacted by the pandemic, with sizable majorities reporting the same in Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, Africa and North America. The biggest impacts are expected to be in operations (manufacturing, supply chain, services) at 89%, executive management at 83%, marketing at 75%, finance at 65%, IT at 60%, research and development at 60% and business intelligence at 56%.

    Dresner Advisory Services found that those organizations with more than 5,000 employees expect the lowest level of impact, while organizations with 1,001 to 5,000 reported the highest level of impact.

    Jarod Greene, general manager at the Technology Business Management Council, said a great amount of uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 remains, including the rippling health, economic and business impact. It all presents an incredible challenge for all business leaders.

    “CIOs and other IT leaders, specifically, are in the thick of this challenge, [and they are] not only responsible for maintaining the continuity of operations and seamless work experiences but also factoring in the short-, mid- and long-term financial impact of their decisions,” said Greene.

    Greene contended that CIOs play a vital role in times like these, and that they can help organizations to clearly understand the costs and corresponding value of their technology investments, and therefore can advise business leaders of informed tradeoffs, rather than merely widespread cuts.

    “Conversations I’ve had with Technology Business Management Council members over the past days and weeks have focused on re-planning and forecasting and the execution cost optimization exercises—with the ability to measure the impact of those decisions,” said Greene.

    Time to Invest in Measurable Impact

    For many organizations, the focus has shifted to delivering improved technology experiences to customers.

    “The dot-com bubble burst and 9/11 may seem like ancient history to some. These were events that forced businesses to focus on what’s really important: providing value to customers and investing in projects with measurable impact on revenue and cash flow,” said Vaclav Vincalek, partner at business-technology consultancy Future Infinitive.

    “The cash shortage refocused management teams on what was vital for their businesses. The current situation will be no different. Business will have to adapt to a new environment and adapt quickly. Companies with well-planned strategies will adjust some tactics. If they’ve already planned for change and aligned with their vision, they’ll continue to succeed with focused execution,” said Vincalek.

    Alex Miłowski, platforms researcher and evangelist at Redis Labs, agreed.

    “Essential services, especially customer-facing communications systems, are likely to face surges in demand. As such, it is important to meet those demands rather than pull back and postpone,” said Miłowski.

    “It very much depends upon what type of business you are in. It’s not all doom and gloom. It hasn’t been for us, or for many of our customers,” added Kevin Grice, director of digital transformation at Trace Solutions. “That said, I think it’s a fair assumption that there will be widening ripple effects through all parts of the economy—so there are likely to be challenges ahead. How big the ripples are, and how long they last, is yet to be seen.”

    “Many companies have gone into a temporary lockdown, with a freeze on all development to reduce risk and the possibility of additional costs in a time of reduced cashflow. However, if this emergency goes on for any significant length of time, that approach will soon become unviable. So businesses will have to adapt,” said Grice.

    Not all companies have retrenched and have decided to keep moving forward with investments.

    “At Laserfiche, we currently do not have any projects on hold, rather, we are working to accelerate any [projects] that are related to business process automation as it helps the workforce. Content management and automation will continue to lead upcoming projects. As IT leaders, we have a responsibility to get things scaled quickly. The challenge we have is being agile and adapting to our ‘new normal,’ but we’re continuing to move forward,” said Thomas Phelps, Laserfiche’s CIO.

    Laserfiche isn’t the only company that has decided to keep moving forward. A survey of 317 CFOs, from research firm Gartner, found that 38% of those surveyed don’t have any plans to cut costs, and only 16% of CFOs said they plan to cut IT by more than 10%.

    What does Gartner advise enterprises do? Essentially, to do what they are doing: focusing more on what works and cutting the deadweight.

    “Where there is excess scope in their organization’s product or service portfolios, the hidden costs of complexity drag down profitability,” Dennis Gannon vice president, advisory at the Gartner’s finance practice said in this statement. “The best CFOs will use COVID-19 as the catalyst to derive significant operating leverage from their most profitable lines of business without destroying value.”

  • Training and Certifications: Get It, Don’t Sweat It

    Training and Certifications: Get It, Don’t Sweat It

    At my company, we’re pretty big on continuous learning. It’s not so much which corner of tech you are learning about, as that you are expanding your professional horizons. Knowing that many of you are the same way, I thought I’d offer some insight into the state of online education and online certification in the wake of COVID-19.

    As luck would have it, just as COVID-19 was gearing up, my company purchased a CBTNuggets subscription for me. This is a sweet benefit if you like to learn about areas of IT that you don’t normally work in, or brush up on bits you do work in but want to get more out of. The only reason I prefixed this with “as luck would have it” is because COVID-19 has brought a lot of change to the training and certification market—most of it for the good of users.

    Pearson Vue is now offering online proctored exams. For those who sponsor the certifications, they have a choice about whether to participate with online examinations or not. Some do, some don’t, both for good reasons. Check if the exam you’ve been waiting for is available online now. Considering CompTIA testing is included in Pearson’s options, this is worth checking out. Note that Microsoft is also a VUE client, so an increasing number of MS exams are available online. This was in-process before, but is accelerated due to the current situation.

    DevOps Institute has long done online exams, and offers a worthy collection of certifications to look into. In fact, there is a lot of free (or registration-only) training on the DevOps Institute’s sight, not just certifications. It is definitely worth checking out.

    Cisco has expanded online testing for many of its exams. Now might be a good time to take that exam you just couldn’t get to a testing center for.

    We paid a fair amount for CBTNuggets, but if learning (as opposed to certification) is your goal, it’s worth the money if you/your employer are willing to shell it out. To the point, the fee is one-off. Use all the training you want for the annual fee, so the value is limited only by your available time and motivation.

    Some of us in IT really don’t have that much free time right now, as supporting a suddenly huge remote workforce is a surprise burden, but if you are one of the lucky ones that isn’t struggling with an unexpected expansion, now is definitely a good time to enhance your skills and learn some new things. The CompTIA Linux courses are a good place for Windows fans to start, and the introductory Windows Admin courses are a good place for Penguins to start. But you all know that.

    Note that there are a few organizations out there that do not want to participate in online proctoring or testing because they worry about cheapening the exam because leaks of exact questions are far easier in an online setting. Don’t be too hard on them, they want to preserve the value of their certifications for those who have earned them–a worthy goal, whether you think it wise in the current environment or not. I know of two organizations that fit this category, so I thought I’d mention it.

    Stay safe, keep rocking it and hopefully you have some time to pick up some training or certifications.

    Note: This list is just things I am aware of. Please leave any other training options as a comment and help your fellows out.

  • Despite Downturn, Enterprise IT Budgets Remain Intact

    Despite Downturn, Enterprise IT Budgets Remain Intact

    A survey of 137 IT operations leaders at companies in the U.S with at least 500 employees and an annual IT budget in excess of $5 million finds a surprising amount of resiliency at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Conducted April 1 by OpsRamp, a provider of IT operations tools, the survey finds more than half of the survey respondents (58%) said they expect to either significantly or moderately increase their annual technology budgets, while 38% plan to either significantly or moderately reduce their technology spending.

    The survey also finds 73% of respondents expect to either accelerate or maintain digital transformation initiatives and projects.

    Bhanu Singh, senior vice president of engineering and DevOps for OpsRamp, said that at least for now among larger enterprises, digital business initiatives are being accelerated as organizations recraft their business continuity plans. With most customers and employees working from home, the need for applications that digitize business processes has become more critical, especially since no one knows for sure when the COVID-19 pandemic might subside or whether there will be another one, he said.

    Many of those projects will rely on cloud-native technologies that make it easier for organizations to scale IT resources up and down, added Singh, noting organizations are quickly discovering that monolithic applications even when they are deployed on a public cloud are not as flexible as they now require.

    Specifically, the survey finds IT leaders are investing heavily in AIOps (69%), information security and compliance (62%), self-service platforms (60%), cloud-native observability (51%), network performance monitoring and diagnostics (51%), big data analytics (46%) and cloud infrastructure (45%).

    IT leaders are also planning to drive technology vendor consolidation (59%) to reduce costs and rely more on third-party managed service providers (58%).

    In terms of hiring, IT financial analysts (68%), cloud architects (53%), DevOps engineers (50%) and data scientists (47%) top the list of priorities.

    Of course, as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy becomes more apparent it is too early to say what the impact on IT budgets will be. Industry analysts Gartner and International Data Corp. (IDC) are forecasting a relatively small decline in IT spending of about 5% for the year once the economy begins to recover in the second half. However, it’s clear that certain vertical industry segments, such as travel and hospitality, might have a much longer way to go than, say, healthcare companies.

    In addition, it’s likely that much smaller companies than those surveyed by OpsRamp may find it more challenging to restart operations after being forced to lay most of their employees in some cases.

    Whatever the timing, the one probable thing is many of the IT trends that were just beginning to gain traction are likely to see accelerated adoption once the economy recovers. There will be a natural tendency to limit the adoption of new platforms and processes in the short term. However, now that it’s clear existing platforms and processes are not especially flexible it’s only a matter of time now before most of them one way or will be replaced or at the very least completely modernized.

  • How 200 CIOs Responded to a Fully Remote Economy

    How 200 CIOs Responded to a Fully Remote Economy

    The COVID-19 global pandemic has ushered a significant priority shift for the digital workplace. As development teams become completely remote, executive priorities are rapidly adapting to meet the gravity of these unanticipated times.

    But, were IT leaders prepared for such a dramatic shift? What are they doing to evolve? To answer these tough questions, let’s turn to the data. A March 2020 study, conducted by Adobe and Fortune, surveyed 200 chief information officers (CIOs) on how their priorities are changing to meet the needs of a global crisis. Here’s what they found.

    Remote Work

    As it turns out, the majority of enterprises (84%) report they were prepared for remote work, with a slight increase for SMBs, at 94%.

    “Like most business leaders, CIOs now have to rethink priorities, or at least reorder them, and we must reinvent ourselves now as virtual leaders,” said Adobe CIO Cynthia Stoddard.

    We are living in a golden age of virtual collaboration tools—teams have Slack, GitHub, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and many other options. Yet, 53% of CIOs still cite communication as the biggest hurdle to remote work. Nevertheless, half of the CIOs surveyed reported their organizations are still actively hiring, indicating steady growth for IT.

    New Technologies

    Regarding technological adoption, some organizations are struggling to keep pace. Twenty percent of CIOs report serious shortfalls in technology tools. Interestingly, less than 25% of CIOs estimated increased financial spending for areas such as public cloud, infrastructure and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML).

    “Indeed, nearly all CIOs (90%) surveyed said they use a public cloud service for at least some of their data, but most is housed on-premises,” said Giselle Abramovich. “Only one in three organizations store half or more of their data in a public cloud.”

    One thing most enterprises agree on is the need for better security—seven in 10 anticipated increased financial investments into cybersecurity.

    Artificial Intelligence

    Only 50% of enterprise CIOs said they use AI in one or more projects (25% for SMB CIOs). However, it seems to be a growing discipline, as 90% of the organizations that have implemented AI have done so in the past year.

    Though AI has garnered significant interest, there are hurdles to actual implementation. According to the report, “the biggest issues related to AI include getting data in order, funding and finding the right talent.” With more people online and the importance of distanced communication, it is likely that investments into AI will increase, especially for use in IT support and customer interactions.

    “We’re making AI a strategic priority at Adobe. AI implementation is difficult for many organizations because it’s still new to most businesses, and there is a shortage in talent that has a deep understanding of it,” said Stoddard.

    Analysis: Impact on DevOps

    CIOs are in a unique position. Leaders are reevaluating business practices and also reassessing their technological investments. As the Adobe/Fortune study shows, many companies were prepared for 100% remote work, albeit some more than others.

    To endure a COVID-19 economical drought, CIOs are taking action. The report indicates increased investment into remote tools, AI and cybersecurity, while aligning hiring and new infrastructure to reach these goals.

    Institutions with a previous investment into cloud infrastructure as well as scalability practices, such as serverless, are likely well-equipped for increased online interaction and unanticipated usages. In this virtual realm, automation is also key to streamline deployments and monitor applications in remote fashions.

    Though the report doesn’t differentiate between company types, it’s likely that digitally native enterprises are well-equipped as well. In addition, the trend from physical storefront to “brick and click,” has only been magnified by the current climate, forcing retail and banks to invest heavily in digital technologies and DevOps.

    From a DevSecOps standpoint, increased end-user online action means an increased number of threats. Thus, security strategies for containers and service meshes should be reevaluated.

    By repositioning priorities, IT can adapt to the new state of interaction. With deliberate execution, CIOs and all executives alike could find themselves on the right side of the river once the economy resumes.