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Tag: digital transformation

How Not to Sabotage Your Multi-Cloud Strategy

The immense pressure for enterprises to deliver new applications and insights that exploit new business opportunities has been a driving force for digital transformation. This, in turn, has led IT leaders to embrace a multi-cloud strategy—whether that’s deploying a combination of cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and Google, or extending private data centers to the public cloud—to achieve greater agility, optimized performance and cost savings resulting from deploying workloads across multiple cloud platforms.

However, maintaining multiple cloud platforms and services adds complexity and even confusion to enterprise IT environments already crowded with a range of technologies, applications and processes. While a recent Forrester study shows that enterprises are increasing investments in using multi-cloud strategies for business-critical applications and workloads, the majority of these enterprises also report that they experienced issues with deploying and using multi-cloud environments.

The difficulty in managing IT environments made more complex by multiple cloud services involves three major issues: ignoring the importance of cultural transformation, not addressing the widening skill set gap and implementing a DIY approach to cloud management.

Here are three ways to deal with these challenges, so you don’t end up sabotaging your multi-cloud strategy.

Make Culture Change a Priority

The cultural transformation required to support digital transformation and to fully take advantage of multi-cloud’s power is more than shifting the organizational mindset from capex to opex. It’s also more than picking one or a combination of the big three cloud providers and simply saying, “Let’s do this.” It requires building trust and breaking down the silos of technology knowledge—whether vendor, legacy or emerging technologies—across disparate IT teams to achieve the business goal of speedier application development and faster time to market.

Specifically, this culture change requires better collaboration between teams and arming central IT with up-to-date processes and management platforms that are focused less on managing infrastructures and more on achieving a balance between visibility and resource control, the linchpin for IT, and creativity, the true north for developers. It will have parameters in place for provisioning resources while helping developers get the resources they need—compute, storage, network services and more—as quickly as possible.

Culture change also enables the maturing of DevOps processes toward streamlining and bringing order to the clutter and smooth partnerships with other IT teams, especially security and operations. These include processes to eliminate bottlenecks in workflow, to advance automation and self-service, to consolidate resources and to make security integral to—rather than an afterthought in—the development process.

Invest in Building Expertise in Multi-Cloud and Emerging Technologies

The more cloud environments an organization has, the more skills and tools are needed to be able to deploy and optimize these environments efficiently. Despite increasing commoditization in the industry, there are still differentiators between cloud vendors and their services, and ways to leverage these to align with an organization’s specific needs. To do this, it is crucial to train the internal DevOps team or hire experts in multi-cloud environments and in key technologies for advancing multi-cloud such as containerization, microservices and serverless computing.

Additionally, a cloud management platform that provides self-service IT and enables any user to provision, manage and orchestrate IT resources, will allow both end users and admins more time to focus on getting high-quality work done.

Select a Cloud Management Platform that’s Right for You

Cloud management platforms address the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments by providing a central platform that allows a selection of the clouds and services that best fit an organization’s needs. They also enable IT to connect to any third-party resource, whether that’s VMware on-prem, AWS in the public cloud or container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, to gather the inventory of cloud computing resources and to provision new resources to be used by anyone in the organization from one place. Self-service IT can also be enabled when appropriate.

In addition, by ensuring cloud management platforms are built on a single pane of glass, IT can gain a holistic view of hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It also allows effective monitoring of resource utilization across those environments, thus ensuring that cloud spend is not only reined in but also optimized.

Finally, a cloud management platform should connect both legacy and new technologies within cloud environments. Although the complexity will not go away, it gets easier to manage. Instead of having multiple teams from different departments managing and accessing resources in separate environments, a central team handles complexity with enterprisewide visibility and control.

The way to succeed is to embrace the complexity by configuring it and managing it behind the scenes, so developers and end users consume IT resources from one consistent way, regardless of where it comes from. Leave the complexity to the cloud and IT architects and let your end users and developers get to work.

— Brian J. Kelly

June 14, 2019
The Human Value in Automation-Driven DevOps Testing
Enterprises are embracing DevOps underpinned by automation to ensure the quality of software across all digital touchpoints. In fact, automation has become the crux of continuous integration and delivery, the vital DevOps testing goals. Without automation, DevOps would become a distant dream, and businesses would struggle to keep pace with seamless delivery and integration. However, DevOps entails more than the implementation of the latest automation tool and demands a more holistic approach. It does so by bringing together processes, people and technologies under a shared vision. As defined by Microsoft, DevOps is the coalition of products, people and processes to facilitate the seamless delivery of value to the end customers.

DevOps is considered to be the latest advancement of the agile movement. It includes a greater number of stakeholders in the process of delivering value by linking the silo-based teams. It may not be the best practice, but it’s a discipline of people-centric management. Continuous delivery is the technical foundation of DevOps automation, which extends to the agile foundation as well. The close collaboration between the operations and development teams is known as DevOps, which is used to automate the delivery pipeline.

Role of Automation in DevOps to Increase Productivity

Since digital transformation has taken over the current business model, more and more companies are embracing the DevOps practice to drive the automated deployment of software. We are shifting toward an organizational culture in which development and testing take place simultaneously, quickly and more often. This helps maintain consistently high ratings on the quality of software with faster turnaround time. The main agenda of DevOps testing is to derive quality outcomes all along the software development life cycle (SDLC) and beyond. So, with the help of DevOps culture, a new code of development, testing and delivery is introduced in the overall SDLC.

The automation in DevOps empowers companies to:
- Enhance the reliability, re-usability and quality of all components.
- Save costs of upgrades and maintenance.
- Improve the rate of success for standardized processes to ensure the rapid delivery of applications.
Automate Everything — Is It Even Possible?

With the help of the DevOps approach, developers automate and accommodate operational activities, from the source code commit to operational productivity. The primary goal of DevOps automation is to remove bottlenecks in the pipeline by implementing automation in a single level of development. However, DevOps is not a fully automated process and is not operational without human intervention. It is the DevOps testing specialists who are responsible for the process to run flawlessly. Governance at every stage of DevOps testing is still indispensable in various processes undergoing automation. Importantly, human administration is still crucial in handling exceptions to complete the tasks of automation.

The Strategic Role of Humans in DevOps to Ensure a Continuous Pipeline

Remove the Boundaries of Roles

The primary feature of DevOps automation culture is about an enhanced collaboration between the operations and development teams. It has led to a cultural transformation at the organization’s level and inside the teams as well, to encourage continuous delivery. Since shared collaboration is an important aspect of the DevOps culture, it strengthens the collaboration within teams. Before the DevOps approach, the perceived lack of interest by the development team regarding maintenance and operations used to affect DevOps testing and business goals. However, this scenario has since changed due to an organizational shift toward automation and DevOps testing.

The gap between the silos of operations and development no longer exists with the arrival of DevOps. It has removed the boundaries of several organizational roles. Teams are required to focus on the shared goals of DevOps to enhance the end user experience, so the team members need to rethink every investment and decision around this shared goal, which requires human intervention. Automation cannot substitute the decision-making process of humans, for the latter has become vital across the organizational ecosystem as, and when, needed.

Omit One-Size-Fits-All Approach in DevOps Testing

Automation cannot be viewed as the eliminator of roles. The organization still requires expert knowledge and skill set inside your team. The focus should be on developing agile and cross-functional teams that are recognized for removing long-established stumbling blocks between the operations and development teams, and for facilitating collaboration. Developing efficient and functional teams would ensure the delivery of superior quality products.

Continuous Monitoring, Testing and Improvement

One of the key agendas of DevOps testing is to carry out a deeper level of monitoring. Since rigorous monitoring is needed at every layer of the testing process, from integration to infrastructure and transactions to components, it has become a crucial part of the road map of the DevOps approach. In this digitally connected world, monitoring and testing are no longer distinguishable. Continuous monitoring by testers offers a positive response to the user experience while eradicating pre- and post-production obstacles.

Conclusion

With the impetus in the growth of DevOps and agile practices in the past few years, testing has taken a new structure and form. It has evolved into a crucial discipline, and it’s not restricted to a phase of the development cycle anymore. It has become an essential part of the operational activities of production. So, is the role of a tester transformed radically from only a checkpoint to a crucial active participant in the DevOps testing? Teams need to cooperate based on the shared vision of enhancing augmented user experience. We need to understand the fact that automation is not an elixir to deliver on DevOps goals, but merely a part of the DevOps strategy.

— Komal Lopez
June 12, 2019
Successful Digital Transformation Starts With Developers

Digital transformation (DX) continues to be a primary focus as companies both large and small look to become more agile, improve and accelerate the delivery of product and service offerings and enhance data-driven business decisions. The C-suite typically leans on IT departments and developers to champion such transformations, designing the software and tools that will lead the experience both internally with staff and externally with customers. The challenge often lies in the fact that most organizations lack the software resources to drive a successful transformation. In addition, research has found that 45% of executives don’t know where to start with DX projects, resulting in added pressure on the developers who hold the technical knowledge but may lack the managerial expertise for a successful rollout.

So, with IT having the opportunity to be the hero or the scapegoat of a DX initiative, where should development teams start? Typically, digital transformation requires development transformation, so you can start at home, by modernizing the way you develop and deliver software. Doing this also significantly improves the odds of a successful digital transformation and puts development in the driver’s seat.

Here are four factors to prioritize before kicking off a DX project:

Buy vs. Build

A DX initiative requires a number of digital tools and software applications, some of which can be purchased through third parties while others may need to be built in-house, depending on the desired goals of the program. Organizations must determine whether they want to build or buy new software solutions, and the answer is almost always mixed. Most developers believe that each application can be built in-house, while the C-suite often encourages purchases from a third party to accelerate adoption. Before starting to code, ask yourself if the solution you need should be bought or built. Oftentimes, the same goal can be achieved through a purchased solution, empowering you and your team to spend more time customizing those solutions rather than starting from scratch while focusing on the projects that will have the biggest impact on the business—ultimately accelerating time to completion.

Accelerated Rate of Change

Once applications are built and available to the public, you can expect bugs to be identified and requests for improvements to be made at an accelerated rate. Developers are constantly making software updates, but when applications are being used to support DX, the rate of change for business requirements is going to speed up, especially when those applications are customer-facing. Developers will need to learn fast and iterate quickly, so it’s important to establish an agile culture within your team.

Adopting a DevOps philosophy often will be the most successful approach, as it enables your team to test and troubleshoot quickly and enact change across the platform. This approach also assists the rest of the organization in adopting DX practices, delivering a more seamless experience and universal data-sharing. Developer teams must be wary of traditional quarterly or annual planning cycles that create silos, slow agile processes and hinder successful implementations. By breaking down these silos, your team will gain better insight into what is and isn’t working and enable swifter improvements, creating a culture that embraces the changes that come with DX.

Modular Software Architecture

Software architecture is incredibly important, as it directly impacts the team’s ability to react to rapid change. A more loosely coupled, modular architecture puts the developer team in the best position to evolve quickly with fewer dependencies, enabling them to make updates and replace components over time to meet business objectives and customer demands. The ability to reconfigure or replace components without having to recode the entire system also assists in build-versus-buy decisions, with developer teams purchasing add-ons to incorporate into a system and solve problems quickly.

DX Outside of Organizational Barriers

We work and collaborate in a digital ecosystem. External APIs, third-party data-sharing and interoperability are all requirements as organizations roll out new tools as part of a DX initiative. DX comes down to building a digital ecosystem that flows outside of the organization, whether it is employees working remotely or customers integrating your tools into their existing solutions. Your company’s software needs to accommodate these capabilities to enable a more seamless and well-rounded DX approach.

DX is a Journey, Not a Destination

A successful DX initiative should be seen as a culture shift, not an end result. The digital world is not static, and DX is a practice that enables an organization to learn fast and be lean and nimble. As soon as you’ve reached one milestone, there’s a whole new set of rules to play by to get to the next, requiring the developer team to recalibrate. By taking a realistic, process-oriented approach, the developer team will have the mindset and tools necessary to make DX successful.

— Jeff Fried

June 10, 2019
Getting the Enterprise Digital Core in Shape

While enterprises rush to transform their business digitally, most are taking tactical steps rather than building a comprehensive digital core that can be improved over time. Very few are taking a thorough view of their entire technology portfolio and looking for ways to create a cohesive core—their digital core—to provide them the strength and stability to move forward swiftly in their digitization efforts. The enterprise digital core essentially is the vital set of technologies and employee skill sets that enable the organization to deliver its digital services. These services are both consumed by customers and internally by staff and others.

How do enterprises get their digital core into shape?

Emphasize Talent Over Technology

While a strong digital core includes the technological platform, it is also a people-platform. “The heart of digital transformation isn’t technology but the mindset and skill sets of your staff,” said Andy Lin, senior vice-president of strategy and consulting at Nexient. Digitization, he said, means enabling customers to transact and interact with you anytime they want, from anywhere, using any device. The only way to get there is if leadership makes it clear to staff why digitization is crucial; otherwise, they will struggle to adapt, he said.

If the staff does understand the reasons behind the transformation, they will—instead of just following rules for the sake of rule-following—be much more likely to adopt a digital mindset. They’ll also be more likely to embrace the training and skill set development they’ll need to make the transformation a success, Lin added.

Scrum.org CEO and product owner Dave West agreed that the digital core starts with the customer. “There needs to be a clear line from the mission and strategy of the business with the outcomes the customer wants,” he said. Teams need to understand clearly how their work helps deliver the organizational mission digitally to the customer, no matter what that mission may be. That means everyone needs to be clear on the nature of the business, or organizational business, as well as what success looks like

West also advised organizations that seek to improve their digital core to look both inward and outward for support. From within the organization, of course, support should come from leadership, who must set the course and ensure efforts are going in the right direction. “Externally you need to build a network of support from people and organizations that have done it before,” he said.

Put Cloud at the Core

Of course, a strong digital core must have a strong technological foundation. In today’s typical enterprise, that may very likely mean more about subtraction than addition. While emerging technologies, such as internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) and others are recommended to be integrated within enterprise software, “Many of them are not generally suited to run on legacy IT infrastructure,” said Maxim Ivanov, CEO at enterprise software development firm Aimprosoft. “The digital core relies on intelligent automation scalable platforms that are integrated in the cloud and prepares data for next-generation technologies.”

Gabriel Salazar, digital solutions manager at systems integrator Enstoa, agreed that building a cloud-based infrastructure goes a long way to improving the digital core. “It’s important, however, not to simply carbon-copy the business processes used prior,” said Salazar. “Look to take advantage of all automation, machine learning and analytics offered by converting and folding them into your updated business process.”

Finally, if organizations want to have a strong digital core, they are going to have to work to maintain it. “Due to the speed of technology change, getting your digital core in shape is a continuous process. Start by understanding what is preventing you from supporting business goals, what is causing ongoing stability or performance issues and what reduces your time to market,” said Nick Polachek, senior principal of strategy and transformation at Maven Wave Partners.

To do so, Polanchek recommended building the digital core iteratively while maintaining the focus on delivering business value or resolving current issues. It’s also important, he said, to have a thoughtful future vision for your digital core and ensure that each delivery is at least aligned, if not an improvement, over core technology already in place.

After all, keeping that digital core in shape is an ongoing process that will require ongoing work and practice.

— George V. Hulme

June 6, 2019
How AI is Transforming Testing Today

Currently, there is much debate about how artificial intelligence (AI) will transform our lives. One of the technology’s key benefits lies in its power to transform traditional approaches to app development and software testing. Gartner identified AI-driven development as one of its top three strategic technology trends for 2019.

Digital transformation is dependent on better-quality software, and software testing matters more than ever. However, the growing complexity of our software-driven world means that new, smarter and quicker forms of testing are critical in the race to build better software faster. But in a hyper-connected and complex environment, this is no simple task, and this is where AI-driven testing can help.

AI Transforming Testing

Like any new technology, there are exaggerated claims. However, when it comes to testing, AI is already delivering real improvements and making intelligent automation a reality. AI has moved far beyond an academic concept and is driving business benefits as opposed to hints to those organizations that have adopted it. Below are four of the key ways that it’s already transforming testing.

Auto-Generation of Test Scripts

There are undoubtedly complex test cases for which AI can’t auto-generate all the code. However, AI can easily auto-generate the code that clicks the buttons on the screen, fills out a form, logs into the app and other similar functions. Organizations that have deployed AI-driven testing are able to auto-generate 80% of code reliably, delivering substantial efficiency improvements. Along with auto-generation, AI achieves auto-maintenance: Tests are rebuilt when something in the digital product changes, ensuring continuous quality is maintained and further reducing the resource burden on human testers.

Test Optimization

If you’ve ever used Amazon, then you know that recommendation engine technologies are not that futuristic. AI can be applied to testing in the same way to help companies determine which test is most likely to find a defect based on the risk information gathered. Rather than taking a haphazard approach to testing, AI enables you to home in on the areas at risk—not only delivering efficiency gains but also ensuring a quality experience that delights.

Release Impact

Neural networks, combined with test history and data from current test runs, can predict how an upcoming release will impact users. For example, will customer satisfaction go up or down? Armed with this information, companies can make any adjustments necessary to ensure their users continue to be delighted by their digital experience.

Customer Impact

This is a key benefit of deploying AI-driven testing as you can determine the impact on the business from release updates. Neural networks, machine learning and other AI techniques can be used to understand how technical factors impact business performance. For example, are load times negatively impacting conversion rates? By understanding how releases will affect the business, you can make changes that will quickly have a positive impact.

What Does the Future Hold for AI-Powered Testing?

In addition to the core benefits that AI-driven testing is already delivering, organizations can expect to see additional benefits within the next 12 months that will further accelerate their ability to fully automate the entire testing life cycle.

Failure Determination

Current testing compares the result of a test with a pre-defined known good result. That methodology simply will not work with dynamic systems, such as an internet of things (IoT) device that interacts with multiple other devices which are constantly changing. AI is a key part of the solution: A well-trained AI system can determine whether a real user would consider the actual result correct or not.

Persona Testing

One size doesn’t fit all, and the ability to understand how your app reacts under different personas will allow organizations to understand what parts of the app are particularly good or bad for different personas. Armed with this information, you can optimize your app for your target audiences, ensuring an experience that delights.

As every organization races toward digital transformation, delivering a high-quality digital experience is essential for survival. To create compelling digital experiences, companies need tools that can navigate applications intelligently, learn where quality issues are most likely to occur and identify the critical data correlations that will help developers resolve issues quickly. This is where AI is already delivering significant advantages to organizations that have adopted it.

It’s clear that AI-driven testing is not a passing fad. Rather than taking a wait-and-see approach, it’s time to jump in and experience how AI can help transform app development and software. With AI-driven testing making a real and measurable impact on the business, you can’t afford to be late to this revolution.

— Antony Edwards

May 30, 2019
Digital Transformation Vital for Business Survival

Businesses are in a fight for their survival, and they know it. Their direct competitors, large and small, are digitizing their businesses. And those businesses that effectively digitize first have much to gain competitively. However, as we’ve reported in “Digital Transformation: Coming from Behind” and other stories, many organizations are experiencing significant challenges when it comes to executing on their digital transformation strategies.

To get a sense of where companies are in their efforts, managed SD-WAN and cloud services provider Masergy contracted research firm Webtorials to conduct its 2019 Digital Transformation Market Trends Report. The report is based on a survey of large and small companies in 35 countries, and it found that the early digital transformation wins tend to be among customer-facing investments, such as customer service and customer experience.

Not surprisingly, the report found 78% of respondents believe that their company’s primary industry is rapidly evolving and that digital transformation is necessary to survive the change underway. The benefits respondents cited (ranked in order) were enhanced customer experience and customer relationship management, the ability to maintain competitiveness, enable new ways of doing business, increased productivity, cost savings, increased revenue generation and enhanced product development.

With the majority of digital transformation efforts failing to meet their established objectives, businesses are clearly facing no shortage of obstacles. According to the Masergy survey, the challenges respondents cited as barriers to a successful digital transformation effort, in order of difficulty, are budget commitment, executive support, in-house skill sets, organizational buy-in and lack of adequate IT infrastructure.

These findings paralleled findings from other related and recent surveys, including the “State of Digital Transformation” report from research and advisory firm Altimeter. The report found that CIOs (28%) or even CEOs (23%) typically own digital transformation at an organization. That report also found that enterprisewide support is a leading barrier, with many organizations citing the belief that digital transformation is a cost center (28%), elusive ROI (29%) and resistance to change (26%) also are barriers.

The survey also found that only one-third of respondents believe they can meet their digital transformation goals without help from a solutions provider. This finding parallels other reports. Earlier this year, IDC found that business services related to digital transformation will grow at a healthy 29% annual rate over the next five years.

Interestingly, the “2019 Digital Transformation Market Trends Report” from IDC found those looking for outside help prefer smaller service providers (58%) rather than larger providers (43%).

What technologies most support digital transformation? According to this survey, those that help in migrating to cloud or in improving security, as well as data analytics and AI, mobility, collaboration and emerging technology such as virtual reality and IoT.

These reports show that while businesses are aware of what is at stake for their enterprises, the bad news is they are having a hard time making headway. The good news is that it doesn’t appear too late, just yet, for businesses to get their digital houses in order.

— George V. Hulme

May 20, 2019
The State of Low-Code Development

As enterprises continue to play catch-up when it comes to meeting their internal demand for new software services and applications, more enterprises—but still, only a minority—are turning to low-code development platforms to try to fill the gap.

Low-code development platform provider OutSystems released its sixth annual “State of Application Development Report.” The report is based on surveys conducted in March of 3,300 IT professionals.

The report found that a sizable minority (41%) of respondents are already using low-code platforms, while another 10% stated they were about to start using a low-code development platform. For comparison, in the 2018 report, 34% of respondents said they were using low-code development platforms and 9% said they were about to start using these platforms. Clearly, interest in these platforms is rising, if not modestly.

Low-code development platforms strive to make software development more accessible. They do so by removing traditional coding interfaces with graphical user interfaces. And they typically target development toward a specific functionality, whether that be web applications, business process automation, IoT and, quite often, databases. The low-code development platform market is expected to grow to $27.2 billion by 2022 from $4.3 billion in 2017, an annual growth rate of 44%.

The demand for software has never been higher. According to the OutSystems report, 64% of IT professionals said they have an application development backlog. For 19% of respondents, that backlog is deeper than 10 apps. While 50% said their backlogs have remained the same, 39% report that their app backlogs have improved over the past year.

The time to deliver web apps and mobile apps is mixed. The 2018 OutSystems report found that 54% of respondents took four months or less to deliver a web application. This year, 61% said it takes them four months or less to deliver a web application. Mobile app development has changed a little: 55% on average said they deliver apps in four months or less.

According to OutSystems, enterprises using low-code development platforms are 12% more likely to report that their backlogs have improved year over year.

Those findings echo similar surveys. For instance, a survey released earlier this month from low-code provider Appian found that nearly 80% of its respondents believe that using low-code can free developer time to work on higher-level projects. That survey also found 86% of IT developers agree that emerging technology is increasing the pressure on the IT organization.

One thing is certain, the demand for software isn’t going to let up anytime soon. According to the OutSystems report, the number of applications respondents plan to deliver this year is 60% higher than last year. For those with more than 500 employees, 65% said they had plans to deliver 10 or more apps, 38% plan to build 25 or more apps and 15% said they plan to develop 100 or more apps this year.

Despite the high demand for enterprise software, only 36% of organizations have larger development teams than they did a year ago. However, that’s likely not due for lack of trying to hire and retain development talent. The OutSystems survey found only 15% of respondents described developer recruitment as easy. “For many organizations, retention of developer talent appears to be an equally grave challenge,” according to the report.

With conditions like that, it’s only reasonable to expect low-code development platform popularity to continue to rise.

— George V. Hulme

May 16, 2019
7 Big Digital Transformation Trends

As enterprises continue their rush to digitally transform their organizations, they’re investing big in retooling their software development pipelines, new artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) technologies and low-code development platforms, as well as putting considerable money into customer engagement software. Yet, the extent of success following these investments remains unclear and varies significantly from industry to industry.

To shine a light on the digital transformation efforts currently underway, as well as the degree of their success, we’ve collected a number of fascinating trends in the most essential areas of digital transformation.

Investment in AI, Machine Learning and RPA Technologies Hitting an Inflection Point

According to the consultancy KMPG, enterprise investments in AI, machine learning, and RPA will rise to $232 billion by 2025 from $12.4 billion in 2018. “Nearly two-thirds of respondents indicate plans to fully implement RPA within three years. Another 18% plan selective use. As for cognitive automation, nearly half noted intentions to use these approaches at scale within 3 years, while 29% indicated selective reliance on cognitive automation capabilities. Some 10% said they would launch pilots and proof of concept projects,” according to the report.

DevOps is Just Getting Started

While we’ve been writing about the enterprise move to DevOps for years now, the investment in DevOps is just setting itself up to truly soar. According to the market research firm Market and Markets, the DevOps market will grow 24.7% annually, to $10.3 billion by 2023 from $2.9 billion in 2017. “The demand for DevOps solutions and services among enterprises is expected to gain huge traction, due to the increasing need for fast application delivery with high quality,” the firm said.

Digital Transformation Spending to Top $1 Trillion This Year

In research firm IDC’s “Worldwide Semiannual Digital Transformation Spending Guide,” global digital transformation spending will reach $1.18 trillion this year, rising nearing 18% from 2018. “Worldwide DX technology investments are expected to total more than $6 trillion over the next four years,” said Eileen Smith, program vice president with IDC’s Customer Insights and Analysis group.

For 2019, the two industries expected to invest the most into digital transformation are discrete manufacturing and process manufacturing, which will invest roughly $222 billion and $124 billion, respectively. According to IDC, the top digital transformation spending will be in smart manufacturing, which will be supported by autonomic operations, manufacturing operations and quality. The retail, transportation and professional services industries will follow closely behind.

IT and Business Leadership Chasm Widen

According to research firm consultancy Capgemini, there appears to be a growing disconnect between the CIO and senior business executives. Capgemini’s research found that while in 2012, 65% of organizations believed that the CIO and senior business executives possessed a shared understanding of the role of IT in their organization. In their most recent survey, that figure dropped to 37%. Additionally, Capgemini found, 59% of enterprise respondents in 2012 believed that the CIO and senior business executives had a shared understanding of how IT could be used to increase organizational productivity. That figure also declined precipitously, hitting 35% in 2018.

Low-Code Development Continues to Gain Higher Ground

The demand for enterprise software seems to have no bottom. And no matter how hard they try, developers can’t code software quickly enough. This is why more enterprise software needs are being met by low-code development platforms.

According to research from ResearchandMarkets.com, the global low-code development platform market will grow to about $27 billion by 2022, up from $4 billion in 2017 and at an annual compound growth rate of 44%.

Digital Transformation, Customer Engagement Software Grow

Digital transformations don’t mean much if they don’t reap increased revenue, land new customers and improve relationships with existing customers. And how enterprises engage with their customers is one of the most rapidly evolving aspects of enterprise technology today, from AI and machine learning to IoT devices and ubiquitous adoption of mobile devices. Customer engagement software ranges from staid CRM systems to customer self-service software. This class of software was a nearly $13 billion market in 2017, but will likely reach $22 billion by 2023, an annual growth rate just shy of 10%, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence.

Digital Transformation Success Grows Harder to Come By

The success rate for digital transformation efforts is persistently, and dismally, low. According to research from McKinsey and Company, over time fewer than 30% of digital transformations succeed.

And that failure rate appears to be growing worse, not better. McKinsey’s 2018 survey results show only 16% of enterprises believe their digital transformations will improve organizational performance over the long term. “Even digitally savvy industries, such as high tech, media and telecom, are struggling. Among these industries, the success rate does not exceed 26%. But in more traditional industries, such as oil and gas, automotive, infrastructure and pharmaceuticals, digital transformations are even more challenging: success rates fall between 4% and 11%,” McKinsey found.

While enterprises are clearly investing into their digital transformation efforts and the desire to succeed is high, the high digital transformation failure rate says enterprises either aren’t taking the right approach to these efforts or they are not executing properly.

Whatever the reasons for the high rate of failure, with the vast amount of business capital on the line and the increasing risks upstart businesses pose to those established in their markets, more enterprises better figure out soon how to get their transformation efforts right.

— George V. Hulme

May 9, 2019
Digital Transformation: Digitally Resilient Organizations

While some are growing weary of the term “digital transformation,” the reality is, it’s here to stay. Digital transformation isn’t just a buzzword or a transient phenomenon. Enterprises are digitizing themselves as rapidly as they can and automating what can be automated, improving customer experiences, leveraging data for machine learning and improving customer experiences.

These levels of transformation are underway across vertical industries—manufacturing, retail, transportation, health care, telecommunications and government. Research firm IDC, expects worldwide spending on digital transformation products and services to reach $1.8 trillion in 2019, a rise of 18% from 2018. IDC expects that figure to rise to more than $6 trillion over the next four years.

“Strong DX technology investment growth is forecast across all sectors, ranging between 15% and 20%, with the financial sector forecast to be the fastest with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% between 2017 and 2022,” said Eileen Smith, program vice president with IDC’s Customer Insights and Analysis group.

The two industries that will invest the most, according to IDC, are expected to be discrete manufacturing, at $222 billion, and process manufacturing, at $125 billion. IDC said the top priority is smart manufacturing, supported by significant investments in autonomic operations, manufacturing operations and quality. Retail will follow closely behind, which in turn will be followed closely by transportation and professional services.

As hard as it may be to believe, the four pillars of transformation—DevOps, cloud, AI and IoT—are still in the nascent stage of deployment. The most popular digital transformation use cases this year, according to IDC, will be freight management ($60 billion), autonomic operations ($54 billion), robotic manufacturing ($46 billion) and intelligent and predictive grid management for electricity, gas and water ($45 billion). Additional use cases that will see investments higher than $20 billion in 2019 include root cause, self-healing assets and automated maintenance, and quality and compliance.

Those organizations that excel in their digital transformation efforts will find that they’ll reap tremendous benefits. However, excellence here isn’t about short-term wins or one-off projects. Excellence in digital transformations is about properly tooling the enterprise for digitization so that the organization is as productive as it can be, cost-efficient and technically agile enough to seize new business opportunities as they arise and successfully endure or even thrive through market, geopolitical or other adversity. It’s about building an iterative, generative, agile digital platform that positions the business for long-term success. This is digital resiliency.

Most enterprises aren’t close; according to the 2018 Global CIO Survey from Deloitte, about 70% of the 1,400 executives they surveyed don’t even have a digital enterprise strategy.

The digitally resilient enterprise has built a business-technology platform that is elastic and agile and can position itself correctly depending on current business demands; it’s reasonably secure from cyberattacks that threaten data. The digitally resilient organization is also continually learning from its data and making adjustments as markets, its workforce and its customers demand. The digitally resilient organization has eliminated the bulk of its technical debt, and it innovates, so competitors don’t disrupt it with a better idea, execution and understanding for what customers want.

In the weeks and months ahead, I’ll be sharing more stories, case studies and insights on how organizations can build the digitally resilient organization that positions them for success over the long term.

— George V. Hulme

May 3, 2019
DevOps Chat: Digital Transformation with Exadel’s Jonathan Fries

In this DevOps Chat, Jonathan Fries, VP of Engineering and Digital Transformation at Exadel, tells us about the new Innovation Lab by Exadel—a place for organizations to accelerate their transformation. We also talk about the state of IT in general from his perch at Exadel, a company with 20 years of empowering IT.

You can find out more about the Innovation Lab at exadel.com/innovation-lab/.

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

Transcript

Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. This episode of DevOps Chat features Jonathan Fries of Exadel. Jonathan, welcome!

Jonathan Fries: Hi, Alan. It’s great to be here.

Shimel: Hey, it’s great to have you here, Jonathan, and I wanna thank you. It’s always nice to have a new company coming up on our chats here, so it’s—you know, some fresh blood for the audience. I assume most of our audience is not familiar with Exadel, so why don’t we start with that, Jonathan? Tell us a little bit about Exadel.

Fries: Sure. So, Exadel is a global software engineering services firm. So, we help our clients write software. We have—we’re a global company, so we have offices in Eastern Europe, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland being kinda the big ones where we have our offices in Europe. And, you know, we help clients in a variety of areas. Probably our big verticals are health care, finance, transportation, media and entertainment, and high tech. And, you know, we have some really good clients in those areas. Health care, McKesson is one that people have heard of. Finance, we work with Deloitte. In the high tech world, we have HP and Google as our clients.

So, we’re doing offshore development for a lot of it. We have teams that are either all in Europe or usually a hybrid of some people here in the U.S. and some people in Europe. We’ve got about a thousand developers in Europe, so that’s where a lot of our work gets done. We’ve been around for 20 years, and so yeah, that’s a bit about Exadel.

Shimel: Another overnight sensation, huh?

Fries: Pardon?

Shimel: I said another overnight sensation.

Fries: [Laughter] Yeah, it’s been a gradual sort of buildup of working with clients and, you know, getting to work with a lot of interesting companies and them recommending us to others.

The name of the company actually comes from a combination of excellent and delivery. I always think that that’s an interesting fact to bring up, and I think it’s an important part about kind of who we are and where we come from and how we got that list of clients. You know, we’re all about building really great products, software products for our customers, and that’s how we’ve grown the business.

Shimel: Sure. So, and Jonathan, you know, kidding aside about overnight sensation, that’s the right way to build the business, right? You don’t just—I mean, yeah, everybody wants to be a unicorn, but unicorns are mythical, right? [Laughter]

Fries: [Laughter]

Shimel: [Cross talk] the world and all of that, so good for you guys. But you know what I didn’t mention is, what exactly—and just sharing with the audience, what’s your position with Exadel?

Fries: My title is Vice President of Engineering and Digital Transformation. So, my background is in the software development world doing software development, leading teams, eventually sort of managing engagements and things like that, and also today heading up the digital transformation practice inside of Exadel.

So, my background comes from the technology world and software development, and that’s why I’m proud of—I’m proud of our engineering capabilities and what we’re able to do for customers.

Shimel: Good for you, good for you. So, Jonathan, you know, digital transformation is such a buzzword today, right?

Fries: Yep.

Shimel: We’ve all heard it, you know, and the one thing I’ve learned is that, for many organizations, you know, digital transformation is hard, right? I’ve heard so many people say, “Well, this wasn’t as easy as it was made out to be.” And I think one of the issues is, is that, if you can’t define something, how can you achieve something? Right?

Fries: Yeah.

Shimel: And so, it starts with, “Well, what exactly does digital transformation mean?” And so, I’ll throw it back at you—what does digital transformation mean to you?

Fries: So, digital transformation for us is about helping our clients with the—you know, the doing and the engineering work of doing digital transformation. So, it’s about software development—you know, in particular it’s cloud development today—QA automation, and DevOps. I mean, those are really the big three areas of expertise within the company that we’ve really brought together under the digital transformation sort of heading as well as our agile methodology expertise, and so, bringing kind of those four things together. And they completely make sense together, because, you know, DevOps is really kind of the technology reflection of agile methodology and agile methodology is kind of the methodology reflection of the DevOps technology mindset. And QA automation is so tightly wound into DevOps and really the way that we’re delivering software and the way that our DevOps solutions work are very much married a lot today to cloud development.

And so, we’re bringing all of those things together, which are all things that Exadel had lots of expertise in, but figuring out how to make sure that we were weaving those strands together, if you will, in a really sort of explicit way and building up some solutions for clients. Not just, “Hey, we’re really good at those things, and we have people who can be really good at those things for you,” but we can bring all of our best practices together and some technology solutions together.

So, that’s what it is for us. It’s very much, you know, we’re a software development, software engineering firm, so we really—you know, we’re not sort of going after the cultural transformation part of that, or the, you know, the change management. I mean, we certainly have experience with those things, but for us, it’s really about the development side of it and our expertise in helping clients take on hard projects and succeed.

Shimel: Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about something new that Exadel recently delivered, and that’s the Innovation Lab. Talk to us—what exactly is the Innovation Lab?

Fries: Yeah, the Innovation Lab is, it’s a new offering that we’re bringing to the market that combines some things that we already have into one thing. So, you know, we’ve all heard about the importance of innovation and even innovation labs. You know, some companies have them or are creating them. Exadel’s Innovation Lab is sort of more of a virtual innovation lab as opposed to, say, a physical place that we help someone create.

So, we already have something called Appery, which is a cross-platform, low code development environment for creating cross-platform mobile apps as well as, like, a low code backend that runs behind that. So, that’s a way to build software very quickly to create real, working software.

We already have a lot of expertise in agile development, as I mentioned before. And so, that’s also part of what we do. We have really great resources, all of those developers that we have, you know, in Europe and some here. And we have some packaged solutions that are a part of those practices.

So, we’re bringing those all together to help our clients innovate. So, you know, what we wanna do is help our clients who are looking for a way to move faster, experiment, try something, get some features in front of customers or business stakeholders more quickly, and the Innovation Lab is our sort of packaged solution for doing that.

So we can, we bring all of those things together—low code development, agile, on-demand resources when there might be something. Since a lot of what people what to experiment today are things like artificial intelligence and blockchain and how can we make those things work for us, so that’s—you know, often, we might have to bring in, you know, we might have to bring in an expert to help out with that as well.

So, it’s really, it’s all of those things to help our customers and new customers innovate more quickly.

Shimel: Got it. So, you know, and to me, when I look at it, Jonathan, you know, we talk about digital transformation, and what I said before about how, if you can’t define it, how can you be successful, and even once you define it, it’s an experiment in a lot of ways, right? It’s kinda that classic DevOps where you deliver, you learn, you get feedback loops, you iterate, you reiterate, and you keep reiterating.

And an innovation lab is kinda the perfect place to kinda have that sort of learning that propels, that helps you define and then succeed in your digital transformation, right?

Fries: Yep.

Shimel: You know, you don’t wanna practice, I guess, on live TV or stuff like that. But you need—you need these labs to push the envelope and find out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you.

Fries: Yeah. I very much view it, you know, as an extension of the product owner, you know, life cycle from scrum. You know, there’s the regular sort of software development life cycle within scrum where you’re doing your sprints and you’re delivering software.

Shimel: Mm-hmm.

Fries: But a big part of what the product owner should be doing is developing the product backlog which includes, you know, testable hypotheses. That’s kinda the way that the scrum community talks about it.

And so, the Innovation Lab is a way for product owners to test some hypotheses that they might not be able to test, you know, if they already have a product. Like, you may not wanna do all the work to develop it and test the hypotheses over here, or that hypothesis over here. You may wanna use something like the Innovation Lab where we can use some of the tools at our disposal to create something that you can deliver and test out one of those—you know, test a hypothesis kind of on its own, if you will—but with working software. Which, you know, as we know is also a big part of agile and DevOps. You know, wireframes and requirements are great and they have a place, but they’re not the best way to show people what you’re doing or get feedback, and this really allows us to help clients do that and do it more quickly.

Shimel: Got it. I agree 100 percent. Interesting—great idea. Moving off Innovation Lab, there’s other stuff going on at Exadel. You wanna share with our audience a little bit?

Fries: Sure, yeah. We just launched the practice areas. As I mentioned, I’m the head of the Digital Transformation practice, and we also have a Digital Marketing Technology practice and a Products and Platforms practice that, much like digital transformation, the other two are also things that, you know, in places where we already have a fair amount of expertise and were kind of collecting all of that together in one place.

So, for Digital Marketing Technology, we have some pretty significant clients for whom we’ve done work with Adobe Experience Manager to build global, localized, large scale websites. And since we had really done that several times, the Digital Marketing Technology practice is all about packaging that solution and delivering that to other clients for kind of building those large scale worldwide type of websites with Adobe.

Products and Platforms is—you know, given that we’ve developed Appery, which really is, you know, it’s not just an application, it’s a whole platform for building other applications, and we’ve done that both for ourselves with Appery as well with several of our other clients like GHX where we’re creating a lot more than just an application, it’s this whole ecosystem. And so, that Products and Platforms practice sort of brings together the best of our knowledge base about developing those really sophisticated, large scale platforms.

And Digital Transformation, of course, which is mine, is all about DevOps, cloud tech, QA automation, and agile. We have a solution that we’re putting together within the Digital Transformation practice that is a cross-cloud Kubernetes implementation that’s all done with Terraform and we’re actually getting ready to use that with the first customer now. We’ve kinda been just doing our internal dev on it, but we’ve shown it to some people and they’re pretty interested in that. The first customer will probably just use it on Azure, but it’s got some really sophisticated—you know, deploying Kubernetes with Terraform, autoscaling, a lot of really cool tech for containerized application development. So, I’m pretty excited about that.

Shimel: So am I. I mean, it’s an exciting time to be alive in IT. I mean, from a developer point of view, from an ops point of view, there are so many options and so—you know, such power at your fingertips.

Fries: Yeah.

Shimel: It really is, you know, it’s a golden age to be into this kinda stuff.

Fries: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I just—I think it’s an amazing time and, you know, I think there’s so much opportunity. There’s so much opportunity out there in what you can do and so forth and then how easy it is now to, you know, to bring computing solutions online for stuff, you know, and it’s what can be done.

It’s awesome, and I know that, you know, it’s a lot of change and it can be hard on people sometimes, but I’m definitely an optimist and an “all ships will rise” type of guy, so, you know, I see all those opportunities out there and it’s like—you know, yeah, there’s an awful lot exciting going on.

Shimel: Well, you know, Jonathan, I think in our business, either we can be optimists, or we can be cynics.

Fries: Yeah.

Shimel: I got into it yesterday, some guy, I don’t even remember his name, but he tweeted, “Oh, those DevOps people selling snake oil! There’s no such thing!” I think they reach a certain age where they just feel like there’s nothing new under the sun, and therefore, they’re just gonna bad mouth, right, whatever new comes along, and—hey man, you know, there’s a place for them on Earth, too, I guess.

Fries: Yeah, and I mean, I think there’s always, I think, a real reason to be concerned about automation and the changes that that brings to not just our industry, but all of society. I mean, you can look around and see how much automation is impacting everything and, you know, as somebody with—you know, I have kids who are grade school aged kids, and it’s like, the world’s gonna look a lot different 20 years from now, so here’s what you need to spend your time thinking about and learning. Because, you know, if you really wanna do this kinda job, it’s not gonna be there 20 years from now.

Shimel: And I have kids in high school and college and I’m telling them the same thing, man. It’s a crazy world. But you know something? To me, you know, we talk about being optimist, pessimist—Jonathan, the flip side of digital transformation is disruption.

Fries: Yeah.

Shimel: Right? And so, you get to the haves and the have nots. You have the empowered people who embrace transformation and are accelerating their business, and you have the laggards who don’t, and they may very well have to die off, right?

Fries: Yeah.

Shimel: I think that’s the choice that we—you know, that it’s nice to talk about this golden age, but that’s also the choice out there is, you can get with it or fall by the wayside. It’s compete or die. And, you know, that may be harsh to some, but that, I think, is the way it is.

Fries: Yeah. It’s kind of been true for, you know, for a while, honestly. Industrialization automated some things, and like I said, I think, at the end of the day, the new businesses that will be created by digital transformation, the businesses that will be completely transformed by digital transformation will create, you know, even more opportunity, and as long as you are looking at it through the lens of those things, even though automation can be—you know, it can be scary.

I mean, like I said, I came from—I was a developer and worked in IT and things like that, and you know, there was lots of things even 20 years ago, where it’s like, “Oh, these things are gonna change everything and jobs will go away” and it’s like—you know, that’s—

Shimel: [Cross talk] Doesn’t happen, doesn’t happen. Anyway, Jonathan—

Fries: No, it happens.

Shimel: – when we started, I told you, the 15 minutes goes really quick, man. [Laughter]

Fries: Yeah.

Shimel: And we’re way over already. I apologize, but I didn’t wanna stop you, you were on a roll, and I thought it was a good conversation. So, but we’re gonna need to pull the plug on this episode of DevOps Chat. Jonathan Fries from Exadel, thanks for being our guest today.

Fries: Absolutely, Alan. It was great. Thanks for having me.

Shimel: Alright! This is Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you just listened to another DevOps Chat.

— Alan Shimel

April 26, 2019