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Tag: CA World

CA World 2017: DevOps As Far As the Eye Can See
The show floor for CA World 2017 had one inescapable, very obvious feature: There was DevOps as far as the eye can see. No kidding. It was a stunning reminder that this multibillion-dollar-revenue company has gone all-in on DevOps and related technologies. While we know CA has spent almost a billion and a half dollars acquiring DevOps-related companies in the last year, the effect on this year’s CA world was dramatic.

What Was All That DevOps?

CA World is organized so that most of the sessions except the keynotes are all conducted right on the expo floor. The floor is broken into distinct areas. Each area has its own theater, where sessions on the subject of that area are conducted. It is actually a great way to organize a conference like this and saves you from going to room to room, floor to floor.

CA World 2017’s main floor segments were:
- Automation – Basically CA Automic and all of its related partners, integrations and offerings. Primarily a DevOps area.
- DevOps: APIs and microservices – This has been a staple of CA World now for several years. APIs again are related to DevOps, automation and microservices.
- Mainframe -This area focused on enabling customers to extend DevOps practices to legacy applications, which most critically included a modern mainframe experience for enterprise developers
- DevSecOps – There was a whole area dedicated to DevSecOps. Primarily the Veracode team—they had their own theater and lots of space and attention in the middle of the floor. The DevSecOps section did bleed into a smaller security section with the legacy CA security tools.
- Agile Management – All things agile, based primarily on the Rally business CA bought a few years ago.
- DevOps Agile Operations – APM and things of that nature.
- DevOps CD – This area also included continuous testing and the new CD Director.
- Advanced analytics
- MSP Zone
- CA Agility Zone
- CA Acceleration Zone
As you can see, a lot of DevOps right there.

All Your DevOps Are Belong To Us

But more than the real estate of the show floor, even the messaging coming from CA was “all DevOps, all the time.” The keynotes from the executive team were heavy on DevOps and related topics. The sessions at each theater featured household-name customers mixed with partners and CA people discussing DevOps-related topics.

One presentation I found interesting was from the GM of the DevOps continuous delivery business, Jeff Schaeffer. It was a demo of a new product CA rolled called DevOps Continuous Delivery Director, a SaaS product that is a UI wrapped around a lot of the CD-related solutions from CA and leading partners. All kinds of testing, including testing from Sauce Labs and security testing from Veracode was possible from within the interface.

I moderated a good panel on Continuous Testing: Shifting Left, which was well-attended. I was joined by customer reps from Cigna, a large financial institution, Groupon and others. This was also in the DevOps CD area.

The mainframe theater stage featured a DevOps panel session to showcase a cross-BU perspective. Panelists included Aline Gerew from Automation, Steve Feloney from Continuous Delivery, Scott Morrison from APIs and Microservices, and Jean Louis Vignaud from Mainframe. The video recording is not yet available, but I was able to catch one snippet in a promotional tweet – APIs enabling IAM on Mainframe

What’s Still Needed?

As impressive as the DevOps show by CA was, what is missing is a tighter integration between the DevOps solutions. While some rudimentary integration is in the works, really making a 1 + 1 = 3 equation will provide the enhanced value to customers that such a broad set of DevOps solutions promises. I spoke to executives from just about every DevOps-related business unit and to a person they mentioned that this was in the works. But what was pleasantly surprising was the mandate not to force tighter integration that would stunt the innovation that each of the DevOps companies brought with them when they were acquired by CA.

Of course, we will see if this remains the case. However, I did speak with employees at each of the units and they were all happy with how CA has handled the acquisitions to this point.

Conclusion

It is hard to argue when a software company the size of CA Technologies makes such a bold statement regarding DevOps. The company is clearly betting its future on DevOps being the backbone of the modern software factory.

— Alan Shimel
November 20, 2017
CA Technologies Extends DevOps Push

At its CA World 2017 conference this week, CA Technologies moved to tighten the integration between the various elements of its DevOps portfolio acquired over the last year and unveiled CA Digital Experience Insights, an analytics-infused monitoring tool delivered via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

The company also announced an instance of the CA Microservices Gateway that allows the API management platform to be deployed as a Docker container. Earlier this week, CA Technologies launched a beta release of Fastrack.io, a service for monitoring Kubernetes clusters based on machine learning algorithms and embedded in an instance of the open-source Prometheus container monitoring service.

The company is also adding CA Virtual Test Data Manager, a tool that makes it simpler to create copies of large data sets for testing purposes, and CA Service Virtualization Community Edition and CodeSV, a plug-in that enables DevOps teams to invoke service virtualization from within their integrated development environment to mimic external services without having to connect to an actual instance of those services running in a production environment.

Additionally, CA Technologies announced it has integrated CA Veracode security testing software with CA Automic IT automation platform, and announced general availability of BlazeMeter API Test, a SaaS-based API testing tool, and CA Continuous Delivery Director SaaS, a service that integrates the DevOps toolchain.

Aruna Ravichandran, vice president of DevOps product and solutions marketing for CA Technologies, says each of these offerings are part of a larger company effort designed to enable organizations to set up their own software factories. Now that more organizations have come to realize their ability to differentiate themselves depends on custom software, many of them want to be able to acquire all the integrated DevOps tools required to achieve that goal from a single vendor, Ravichandran says.

CA Technologies is making a concerted effort to link the need to create a software factory as a prerequisite for driving digital business transformation at scale. To achieve that goal, she says, control over IT operations is continuing to shift to the left as developers become more accountable for the entire application experience. Offerings such as CA Digital Experience Insights make it simpler for developers to holistically manage those end user experiences by infusing predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms coupled with improved data acquisition techniques in a single service, Ravichandran says.

CA Technologies clearly wants to become a DevOps force to be reckoned with. In the last two years it has acquired Blazemeter, Automic, Veracode and Runscope. Prior to that, the company acquired Rally Software, Nolio, Grid Tools and Layer 7 Technologies. From here it’s likely CA Technologies will continue to expand its portfolio by acquiring companies while tightening the integration between the various code bases that make up its DevOps portfolio.

The company’s stated goal is to provide a suite of DevOps tools and services that are too compelling to ignore without forcing IT organizations to consume a product or service they don’t want by maintaining open interfaces across the portfolio. The degree to which CA Technologies can succeed in that effort remains to be seen. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the company has now assembled a formidable DevOps arsenal of products and services.

— Mike Vizard

November 17, 2017
DevOps Transformations Everywhere; Join Us To Watch, Hear & Learn

For me and many others the best way we learn about DevOps is to hear others who have set about on this journey. For three years Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit has been powered by hearing one DevOps Transformation experience after the next. The new DevOps Handbook has over 40 case studies of DevOps transformations. We here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud will be offering some great DevOps transformation stories this month that I wanted to share with you.

First of all Monday afternoon (2pm eastern time) we will be having a webinar, “Leading Change at DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco“. You can register by clicking the title or clicking here. The webinar will discuss leading DevOps transformation and features a pretty impressive cast:

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

CEO and Chief Scientist, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is an IT impacts expert who shows leaders and tech professionals how to unlock the potential of technology change in their organizations.

Sam Guckenheimer

Product Planner, Microsoft

Sam Guckenheimer is the Product Owner for the Microsoft Visual Studio Cloud Services, including VS Team Services and Team Foundation Server.

Scott Prugh

Chief Architect & VP Software Development, CSG International

Scott Prugh is chief architect and vice president of software at CSG International and has been with the company for 10 years.

J. Paul Reed

Managing Partner, Release Engineering Approaches

J. Paul Reed has over fifteen years’ experience in the trenches as a build/release engineer, working with such storied companies as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, Symantec, and Salesforce.

Next week devopsy.kinsta.cloud will be out at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, where we will once again have a video booth and will be interviewing most of the speakers at DOES, as well as many guests and friends from the DevOps scene. If you are attending and would like to sit for a video interview stop by during Monday or Wednesday of the show.

Our videos should be up in a few days afterwards, so if you can’t make it to San Francisco be sure to catch our interviews of the speakers and others.

Later this month we have another webinar that I am really excited about. It is again about DevOps transformation experiences. It features:

John LaFreniere is the Vice President of Global IT Architecture for the Hertz Corporation.

Raghunath Raman, Director, Digital Shared Services, API Delivery & Integrations, Corporate Services & Digital Technologies (CSDT), Kaiser Permanente

Sanjeev Sharma, is an internationally known DevOps, and Cloud Transformation thought leader, technology executive, and published author. Sanjeev’s industry experience includes tenures as CTO and Worldwide Technical Sales Leader, Acquisition Integration Technical Leader, and IT Architect. As an IBM Distinguished Engineer, Sanjeev is recognized at the highest levels of IBM’s exclusive core of technical leaders.

You can register for this webinar here.

Beyond these there is IBM InterConnect on the horizon, CA World, where I will be speaking as well, also in November and our own DevOps Connect: CD Summits this month and next in Austin, LA and Seattle.

So yes indeed DevOps Transformations are everywhere. There is much to be learned from hearing these stories. Sometimes more from the mistakes they made then from the success. Check these out if like me you are interested in these tales from the front lines.

— Alan Shimel

October 30, 2016