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  • Twistlock Announces Accelerated Business Momentum, Expands Executive Team Amidst Multiple Industry Accolades

    Company Appoints Dr. Gene Kim to Advisory Board and Taps Jacinta Tobin for Chief Revenue Officer Role

    SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – Mar 28, 2016) – Twistlock, the leading provider of virtual container security solutions, today announced that its business momentum heading into 2016 has surpassed the company’s revenue goal for the first half of the year, delivering sales far above planned expectations. The company also announced the appointment of Gene Kim as a strategic advisor and Jacinta Tobin as Chief Revenue Officer.

    Twistlock’s Container Security Suite has experienced strong adoption since the company announced its general availability in November 2015. The product is now deployed at leading financial services, insurance, healthcare centers, as well as in highly secured military and defense environments.

    This momentum has resulted in numerous prestigious industry acknowledgements; Twistlock has been named a “CyberSecurity company to watch in 2016” by both Dark Reading and Momentum Partners. SC Magazine selected Twistlock as a finalist for the prestigious “Best Emergent Technology” Award. The company received Virtualization Review’s Editor’s Choice Award, and was named as one of CRN’s Top 10 Coolest Security Startups of 2015.

    Today, the company announced the appointment of Gene Kim, an award-winning CTO, researcher, and author, and a prominent authority in DevOps and security, as a strategic advisor. Kim was the co-founder and CTO of Tripwire, and co-authored “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win” and the upcoming “DevOps Handbook.” Kim will advise the company on its product direction, as well as serve as a sounding board for the company’s overall strategies.

    “Driven by the need for increased agility, containers and DevOps are increasingly being used by large, complex organizations, across all industry verticals. There is the potential to not only increase productivity, but to also increase security and reliability,” said Kim. “Container security is a powerful enabler to build quality and security into how we develop and deploy software.”

    In addition, Twistlock announced the appointment of Jacinta Tobin as Chief Revenue Officer. Tobin comes to Twistlock with many years of experiences driving hyper-growth businesses. She is known for her customer-focused execution strategies, which have consistently delivered results to help Fortune 500 customers and large operators achieve technology visions and goals. Tobin will oversee sales, market expansion, and channel practices for the company.

    “Gene brings a unique blend of experiences in entrepreneurship, security innovations and DevOps thought leadership,” said Ben Bernstein, CEO of Twistlock, “Jacinta is one of the most successful high tech sales executives in the field. The addition of Gene and Jacinta comes at an important moment as we expand our market presence and the breadth of our offerings to customers. We look forward to working with them both and leverage their vast expertise to enable innovations and business success for our customers.”

    Bolstering the general availability of its Container Security Suite, Twistlock also announced strategic integrations with two of the largest cloud platforms — Google Cloud Platform’s Container Engine and the Amazon EC2 Container Registry Service. As part of these integrations, Twistlock’s technologies are now easily available to help identify vulnerabilities, detect anomalies and enforce run-time policies for containers in and across both AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

    Twistlock’s Container Security Suite is the only dev-to-production security product on the market today. It has been adopted by more than 30 organizations, spanning financial services, health care, media, hospitality, consumer technology services and government agencies. Many of these customers have deployed Twistlock in both development and mission-critical production environments, protecting live services and valuable customer data in containers.

    Accolades and Awards:

    Additional Resources:

    About Twistlock
    Twistlock is the industry’s first enterprise security suite for container security. Twistlock’s technologies addresses risks on the host and within containers, enabling enterprises to consistently enforce security policies, monitor and audit activity, and identify and isolate threats in the container environment. Twistlock’s mission is to provide an enterprise-grade security stack for containers, enabling organizations to maximize the benefits of adopting containers. For more information, please visit www.twistlock.com

    CONTACT INFORMATION

    • Media Contact:
      10Fold
      Travis Anderson
      Email Contact
      925.271.8227
  • Puppet Labs Launches Annual State of DevOps Survey

    Puppet Labs Launches Annual State of DevOps Survey

    Puppet Labs has announced its 5th annual State of DevOps Survey. In the past five years, we’ve surveyed more than 20,000 technical professionals around the world, spanning all industries and companies of all sizes. We’ve captured a tremendous amount of data about how IT performance, culture, technical practices and organizational performance intersect.

    What sets our survey apart from the many other surveys out there is that it’s science-based. Yes, there is a science to creating surveys and analyzing data, and there’s also an art to translating all of that amazing data into something that’s useful to the industry at large.

    This year, we’ve partnered with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), founded by our friends Gene Kim, Jez Humble and Nicole Forsgren. If you’ve been following the DevOps conversation for a while, their names should be familiar. Together, our goal is to help advance the DevOps community and help technology organizations improve their practices through rigorous scientific research.

    Through our analysis, we’ve been able to quantify IT performance. We know that high-performing IT teams deploy code 30 times more frequently, with 60 times fewer failures, and they recover 168 times faster. We also know the factors that predict IT performance—technical practices such as continuous delivery, cultural norms and lean management—which in turn predict organizational performance.

    This year’s survey seeks to dive deeper into each of these areas, while also shedding light on new areas of research, including:

    • ROI of IT performance. What can you expect from your investment in DevOps? Our goal is to understand how throughput, stability and quality affect the bottom line.

    • Security and compliance. What role do security and compliance play in a DevOps environment? Some people see security as a roadblock to DevOps, but we want to investigate if it has to be that way.

    • Quality. So you’re deploying code faster than ever. What’s the quality of that code?

    • Containers. How do containers affect IT performance? Are they making IT’s job easier?

    • Lean management. Last year we found that lean management practices such as limiting work in process and creating and maintaining visual displays showing key quality and productivity metrics predict IT performance. This year’s survey looks at additional lean management practices to help us better understand what it really means for a technology organization to go lean.

    The survey seeks answers to questions we get all the time and we believe they reflect the broader concerns of the DevOps community. Your experience matters and we hope you’ll share it by taking the 2016 DevOps Survey. It should only take about 20 minutes, and when you complete the survey, you’ll be entered to win some great prizes (see the official rules), including :

    Please take the survey and share it with your friends and peers. Together, we can make IT better for everyone.

    About the Author/Alanna Brown

    unnamedAlanna Brown heads up DevOps research and go-to-marketing strategies at Puppet Labs. She also works closely with Puppet Labs product owners and engineers to develop a roadmap and support for Puppet on Windows.

  • Kicking Off InterConnect 2016

    Kicking Off InterConnect 2016

    Our InterConnect 2016 coverage kicks off with online events

    Once again this year devopsy.kinsta.cloud will be providing extensive coverage of InterConnect. InterConnect 2016, features hundreds of sessions and tracks around DevOps. We think InterConnect offers more DevOps related tracks than any conference in the world.

    We are kicking off our InterConnect 2016 coverage with some great online events leading up to conference which takes place on February 21-25 at Mandalay Bay and MGM Grand in Las Vegas. You don’t have to go to Vegas though to participate and attend these events though.  Mark your calendar for these:

    • Twitter Crowd Chat, DevOps: Outthink Delivery January 22nd, 1 pm EST. Join me and some of the clients, partners and IBM experts for this free-form, lively twitter conversation on how to deliver innovation and start-up performance at enterprise scale.
    • Google Hangout #1: What Will DevOps Look Like in 3 to 5 Years, January 27th, 1 pm EST. This is a preview of a panel I am moderating at InterConnect featuring Gene Kim, Dan Berg and Raghunath Raman.
    • DevOps Chat: DevOps for multi-speed IT and DevOps & Open Technologies IT, January 21th and February 8th. My interview with IBM Distinguished Engineer, Rosalind Radcliffe and Dan Berg. This will be a recorded podcast that unfortunately will not offer audience participation live. However, if you have any questions that you would like me to ask Rosalind or Dan, please leave them in the comments on this article.
    • Google Hangout #2: DevOps for multi-speed IT, February 3rd, 4 pm EST. Join Sanjeev Sharma (IBM ), Carmen DeArdo (Nationwide), Brad Schick (Skytap) and myself as we discuss Bi-Modal IT and DevOps. Link will be available shortly.
    • Google Hangout #3: Innovate Like a Startup, Scale for the Enterprise, February 10th, 1 pm EST. Join Gene Kim, IBM VPs Angel Diaz and David Lindquist and another special guest (still confirming) with me moderating for our last pre-InterConnect event. Link to be provided.

    We will also feature more related content leading up to InterConnect in a dedicated section of the site, DevOps@InterConnect.

    At the conference itself we will be on scene with live coverage, video interviews, blogging and tweeting, so stay tuned.

    In the meantime please join us for these great upcoming events.

  • DevOps success is everyone’s responsibility

    DevOps success is everyone’s responsibility

    For organizations with existing hierarchies and processes the shift to a DevOps mindset can be a challenge. The traditional departmental roles and separation of duties is anathema to an efficient DevOps culture. When it comes to DevOps there’s no room for finger-pointing—every team and individual is equally responsible for making sure everything is firing on all cylinders.

    Gene Kim, coauthor of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win and the upcoming DevOps Cookbook, took part in a podcast earlier this year and shared that two-thirds of the DevOps success stories he has seen are actually from established businesses with existing infrastructures and processes as opposed to “greenfield” projects that embrace DevOps from the start. In those situations, the drive to embrace DevOps has to come from somewhere, but in order for DevOps to work the organization has to overcome the urge to place the entire burden for the success or failure of DevOps on that one team or individual.

    There is a reason that the word “culture” plays such a central role in any discussion of DevOps. Without a shift in the mindset of how teams and individuals communicate and collaborate a DevOps initiative isn’t much different than any other IT project in the organization. One team or person can use DevOps tools, but that’s not really a functional implementation of DevOps.

    That doesn’t mean that DevOps is an all-or-nothing game. It’s possible for different departments or elements within a company to embrace DevOps without the whole company jumping on board. There has to be a quorum of sorts, though—a broad enough consensus between teams and individuals to cooperate and collaborate in a different way than how it’s laid out on the company org chart. An important part of that shift is for everyone to accept responsibility for the outcome and work together toward a common goal.

    There’s a phrase that goes something like “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Developers understandably view the world through the filter of developing. IT operations people look at projects from the perspective of operations. QA looks at things from the point of view of testing and quality assurance. Accounting considers projects from the financial angle. Security personnel tend to focus on the security aspects. You get the idea.

    Kim shared an excerpt of the upcoming DevOps Cookbook with me. In the book Kim talks about the need to move from functional-oriented teams optimized for cost to market-oriented teams optimized for speed. He talks about the challenges and bottlenecks created when some teams or elements are moving at an accelerated pace while others struggle to keep up.

    Part of optimizing for speed is shifting the perception of responsibility. Smaller, market-oriented teams are more agile and can deliver value to customers—both internal and external—while reducing or even eliminating reliance on other teams. Kim explains, “Taken to its extreme, market-oriented teams are responsible for not just feature development, but also testing, securing and deploying their code into production themselves, as well as being responsible production operations and availability.”

    In order for DevOps to work effectively, everyone needs to forget that they’re a “hammer” and view the project as a more comprehensive toolbox instead. DevOps teams need to strive to break out of the traditional roles and silos and make a conscious effort to see things in terms of the common goals or greater good.

  • Live blogging DOES 2015

    Live blogging DOES 2015

    We will be live blogging from DOES 2015. Ericka Chickowski and Alan Shimel are live at the show in case you can’t be here yourself.

  • DOES15 – A Focus on DevOps Execution

    DOES15 – A Focus on DevOps Execution

    “I recently attended my second DevOpsDays, and even one year later I noticed that the audience had changed a lot” – says Travis Cunningham a Software Engineer at SmartFile during an interview about their development environment. What Travis is speaking to is the fact that DevOps has matured dramatically in a short amount of time. Around two years ago the community was a members only club. It consisted of the innovators, and smaller organizations who could adopt DevOps in one fell swoop. But now the benefits of DevOps are shared objectives for most organizations.

    (more…)

  • How do large enterprises do DevOps? Recap of my third video chat with the 2015 DevOps Enterprise Summit Speakers

    How do large enterprises do DevOps? Recap of my third video chat with the 2015 DevOps Enterprise Summit Speakers

    Earlier this morning I had the pleasure of hosting the third video chat with and some of the speakers of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015.

    This live event featured:

    Paul Reed | Director of Site Reliability Services/Principal Consultant, Salesforce
    Attend Paul’s talk at DOES15: The Blameless Cloud: Bringing Actionable Retrospectives to Salesforce

    Kris Buytaert | CTO @ Inuits.eu
    Attend Kris’ talk at DOES15: Turning Around the Containership

    Michael W. Smith | Technical Director, Hardware & Infrastructure, Raytheon Software
    Attend Michael’s talk at DOES15: Melting the Glacier: Introducing DevOps to a Federal Systems Integrator

    Tapabrata Pal | Product Manager, Capital One
    Attend Tapabrata’s talk at DOES15: Shortening the Feedback Loop: DevOps Dashboard

    Anders Wallgren | Chief Technology Officer, Electric Cloud
    Attend Anders’ talk at DOES15: Continuous Delivery of Microservices: Patterns and Processes, and a panel discussion with Gary Grver, Jez Humble and others on DevOps and Continuous Delivery for Embedded and IoT.

    We discussed how some of the largest enterprises in the world are addressing the biggest challenges facing the DevOps community: from fostering a DevOps culture and leading the transformation, automated testing of legacy applications, security and auditing requirements, managing burnout, fostering an internal consulting capability, and more. Take a look at some highlight tweets and then watch the full recording below.

    The importance of avoiding burnout during a DevOps transformation:

    On security:

    It was such a pleasure to discuss these topics with the best minds guiding DevOps transformations in large, complex organizations. Watch the full recording and hope you join me at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 to discuss more!

    The Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps Transformation Summit
    October 19–21, 2015
    Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, CA

    Use the code DOES10 to get 10% off your ticket.

  • How do large enterprises address the challenges of DevOps? Recap of my Video Chat with the DevOps Enterprise Summit Speakers

    How do large enterprises address the challenges of DevOps? Recap of my Video Chat with the DevOps Enterprise Summit Speakers

    Last Friday, I was delighted to spend an entire hour with seven leaders of DevOps transformations, discussing the practices and patterns they see for leading a DevOps transformation in large, complex organizations. It was an honor to have them share their lessons learned and tips for how large organizations address some of the challenges of DevOps: from automated testing for legacy environments, getting leadership buy-in and fostering a DevOps culture, DevOps roles and responsibilities, and security and compliance.

    Each of these experts also shared what they will be presenting on at this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit, taking place October 19–21 in San Francisco.

    Chivas Nambiar  |  Director – Systems Engineering, Verizon

    Heather Mickman  |  Director, Target

    Ralph Loura  |  CIO, HP Enterprise Group

    Neil Manvar  |  Solutions Architect, Sauce Labs, Inc

    Tom Limoncelli  |  SRE, StackOverFlow.com

    Anders Wallgren | Chief Technology Officer, Electric Cloud

    Cornelia Davis  |  Director of platform engineering, Cloud Foundry team at Pivotal

    After quick introductions, I summarized the top five problems facing the DevOps community today – which also form the key focus areas for this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit. At last year’s Summit, I asked that every speaker end their presentation with a slide addressing one of the two following titles: “Here’s what I don’t know how to do” or “Here’s what I’m looking for help with.” We wanted a glimpse into what the top challenges were that the entire community was facing, which we could then use as a research roadmap.

    Each speaker shared how their organizations are addressing these challenges, and gave a taste of what to expect from their talk at DevOps Enterprise Summit.

    1. How to address culture and leadership issues, particularly around transitioning and transformation

    Cornelia Davis suggested starting small, perhaps with sending some select members to work on pair programming, then have them return to bring the skills back in-house. “It’s one of the best ways of learning new programming. It’s more of a grassroots process,” elaborated Davis.

    Heather Mickman agreed, adding, “We started doing our own internal DevOps Days where we could start building momentum and showing results quickly. To accelerate adoption, we’ve created an internal DevOps dojo to help coach teams on tools and processes.”

    Chivas Nambiar suggested, “Find the leader who shares a common belief, who is close to the work and is aware of these types of technology trends. The second piece of it is you can’t do this [transformation] overnight. We’re entering our fourth year of transformation. Find your key partners, give them what they need to be successful, then share their successes.”

    When I asked, “How do I get my boss’s boss to care about DevOps?” Ralph Loura listed ways to counteract “corporate antibodies” who doubt and resist change: “The top things you need are trust, trust and trust,” he said. “To create this trust, we provide transparency through collaborative tools and pairing people together; we create and embed evangelists to help the next wave of teams succeed and spread knowledge, and help when something goes wrong; and we need data and evidence of success.

    The group discussed the balance of grassroots efforts with getting leadership buy-in, and everyone discussed the value of teams needing to create small successes in order win doubters over. Loura brought up the metaphor of the campfire: “If you start a campfire and you put too much fuel too soon, it can smother the fire. It’s important to keep it shielded at first, until the fire has enough heat to it.”

    1. How to deal with automated testing issues, specifically for legacy environments

    The conversation moved on to experiences we’ve all had with software products or services where we gave development, testing, operations, etc. to a different sourcing partner, thinking we would get better outcomes that way. Heather Mickman shared what the transition was like to go from that model to their current one, “The way we used to do software development in Target was handing off each function to different teams and centers of excellence. There were handoffs to 10–15 different teams. There was no end-to-end accountability for these once-per-quarter releases. So, as we started building out the team that creates APIs for Target, we decided we wanted end-to-end accountability, so we broke down those silos so everyone cares about the end product.” This was just one example of emergent patterns that are coming out of these complex organizations.

    1. How to address IT security and compliance issues – to get your Security team on board with your DevOps plans

    All these presenters are from large organizations who are publicly traded, and have numerous regulatory measures that they must comply with. I wanted to know more about how they work with security and compliance.

    Neil Manvar suggested that DevOps practitioners be completely transparent. He says, “Show the security teams the value, so they can get on board and that you’re not just trying to give them a hard time. Give them access to the change log and very nicely format it or link to the commit. Giving more information about what’s going on really helps with getting everyone on board. Any concerns that are raised, kind of create some automation around it and integrate that into the pipeline.”

    1. What metrics should organizations be using to track their DevOps implementation and performance.
    2. Organizational design, roles and responsibilities

    Holy cow, we didn’t even get around to discussing this last two problem areas. We will be revisiting this and the other problem areas with another group of DevOps experts in another live chat.

    When I asked for any concluding remarks with our last two minutes, Tom Limoncelli responded, “Everyone I know who’s been through this kind of transformation has said the same thing. That when you were done, when you looked back, they said ‘I never want to go back to the other way and in fact in future job hunting, the first questions will be do you have this environment?’ Having a DevOps environment can be one of your biggest recruiting tools.”

    Join the next live chat:

    How do Large Enterprises do DevOps?: Video chat with Gene Kim & the #DOES15 speakers

    Friday, September 11

    10:00 a.m. PDT

     

    Watch the replay of the video chat:

     

    To hear more from these great speakers and other DevOps luminaries, I invite you to join us at DevOps Enterprise Summit next month.

    Learn more and get your pass now at: http://devopsenterprise.io

  • What to expect at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015

    What to expect at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015

    I am unbelievably excited about DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015. As amazing as last year’s event was, it will be even better this year. I wanted to share with you what you can expect this year at the conference and give you a behind-the-scenes look inside the programming committee goals and how they informed the overall conference organization.

    The Programming Committee

    The programming committee comprises some of my favorite people in the world, and all have made incredible contributions to our field: Adrian Cockcroft (Battery Ventures), Dominica DeGrandis (LeanKit), Cornelia Davis (Pivotal), Damon Edwards (DTO Solutions), Anders Wallgren (Electric Cloud), John Willis (Docker), and advising member Jez Humble (Chef).

    As Damon Edwards once quipped, “Over our careers, we’ve all become professional conference attendees, so we have strong opinions on what makes for a great conference.”

    The Format of the Conference

    The quality of the speakers is a major contributing factor to the success of a conference — after all, why bother spending three days somewhere if there are no remarkable people there in the first place?

    The DevOps Enterprise Summit is a three-day conference, featuring 14 keynote sessions and about 36 other sessions in concurrent tracks.

    Last year, all talks were 30 minutes, which we thought worked very well. Even though this can be challenging for speakers to put everything into a half-hour, what TED Talks have shown us is that even the most complex ideas can be conveyed in a short amount of time.

    As an attendee, I personally love the shorter talks because it allows me to experience many ideas and concepts within a short amount of time.

    As a conference organizer, it’s also fantastic, because it allows us to put more speakers on the schedule. This is super important, because there are so many worthy talks that we want to showcase. This year, we had over 220 submissions. I can’t express the amazing quality of the submissions, and we would have accepted more if it were possible.

    More Experience Reports

    We want to hear the firsthand accounts of DevOps transformation in large, complex organizations, at all stages of the journey, so we structure the conference around experience reports delivered in a very specific form. We ask the experts to tell us about their

    • organization,
    • specific business process or application that they were focused on,
    • problems they experienced, ideally with metrics around deployment lead time,

    followed by

    • what they did about it,
    • and the business value that was created.

    In addition to a whole new batch of experience reports, we’ll be hearing from numerous DOES14 alumni, complete with updates on what has transpired on their journeys over the past year, including Heather Mickman and Ross Clanton from Target, Jason Cox from Disney, Carmen DeArdo from Nationwide, Courtney Kissler from Nordstrom, Tapabrata Pal from Capital One, Terri Potts and Michael W. Smith from Raytheon Software, and Scott Prugh from CSG.

    I’m also excited that Ralph Loura and Olivier Jacques from HP will be presenting. As the CIO of HP, Loura serves the needs of over 300,000 employees (and that’s even after the October scheduled split of the company), making them the largest organization to share their story at this conference.

    Based on my conversations with these folks, I’m super excited about what they’re going to be sharing, which includes how they’ve accelerated and expanded their DevOps initiatives, new engagement models with the rest of the organizations, the role of leadership, and more.

    This year, we will have 35 speakers presenting experience reports, down from last year’s 50. Why? To make room for expert talks.

    Amazing Expert Talks in the Top Five Problem Areas

    I asked that every speaker at DevOps Enterprise 2014 end with a slide addressing one of the two following titles: “Here’s what I don’t know how to do” or “Here’s what I’m looking for help with.” We wanted a glimpse into what the top problems were that the entire community was facing, which we could then use as a research roadmap.

    The top issues stated in 2014 were:

    • Better strategies and tactics for creating automated tests for legacy applications
    • Addressing culture and leadership aspects during transforming
    • Top approaches to organizational design, roles, and responsibilities
    • Information security and compliance practices
    • Identifying metrics to best improve performance with DevOps initiatives

    This year, we reserved 15 talks specifically to address those areas. On the programming committee, we put our heads together, reached out to many in the DevOps community, and invited the most renowned experts in each area.

    I’m extremely excited that some of these expert talks will include the following, where they will share their lessons learned:

    • Elisabeth Hendrickson helped pioneer quality engineering practices for the last twenty years, and is someone who Jez Humble and I have admired for years. She presented last year on “Care and Feeding of Feedback Loops,” has since been promoted to VP of Engineering for Pivotal’s Big Data Suite, and will discuss her journey around creating great engineering organizations with a culture of quality.
    • Josh Corman is a longtime researcher in information security and John Willis is equally renowned in the DevOps community. They will be presenting their work on software supply chains, immutable infrastructure, and how they both impact DevOps productivity and security.
    • Ed Bellis was former CISO of Orbitz, and will share his experiences on how information security should ideally integrate into the DevOps value stream and how it impacts compliance and reporting.
    • Rosalind Radcliffe has made significant contributions to our profession over her entire career as a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, and she’ll be sharing amazing strategies and tactics of how organizations can improve the state of automated testing on mainframes. John Willis says, “From green screens to GUI’s, Tivoli to SOA, then showing up on the DOES 2014 stage presenting on mainframes and Devops at IBM. Unlike most people she is one of those rare individuals that has transcended four decades and always seems to be on the bleeding edge.”
    • We will have two talks on how automated testing and other DevOps practices were put into practice at famous Yahoo! properties. Neil Manvar, solutions architect at Sauce Labs and former software engineer at Yahoo!, and Chris Riley, founder and DevOps analyst at Fixate.IO will talk about how Yahoo! implemented automated testing for Yahoo! Mail. Automated testing enabled the software quality team to spend more time on important user-facing product code and helped them introduce exciting new strategies for building higher quality apps faster. Jim Stoneham will present on his experiences as the general manager of Yahoo! Communities division in 2009, including his first-hand observations of the Flickr “10 deploys per day” culture, and how many of those practices were replicated in Yahoo! Answers to increase their deployment cadence from once every six weeks to daily deploys.

    Representation of Women

    One of the other important programming objectives of the conference was to have the composition of speakers match the technology community population as a whole, especially around representation of women and minorities.

    Last year, we were pleased that 41% of speakers were women. The complete roster of speakers is still being finalized, but we’re hoping to match or exceed that number this year.

    We received much positive feedback about the representation of women at last year’s conference.

     See the Speakers in Action

    In short, I have never learned as much as I did in any three days than at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2014. They were some of the most courageous and exciting transformation stories I had ever seen, and this year’s conference is going to be even better. I hope you’ll agree that we have an amazing conference in store for you at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015! I look forward to seeing you there!

    To see some of the speakers in action and learn about what you’ll experience at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015, go here:

    Get 20% off your ticket through August 28 with the code DOES20: [https://does15.eventbrite.com/?discount=DOES20]

  • DevOps and continuous innovation accelerate the evolution of technology

    DevOps and continuous innovation accelerate the evolution of technology

    DevOps tools and principles have dramatically increased the pace of innovation and enabled the organizations that have embraced them and used them most effectively to achieve a major strategic advantage over competitors. The more the world runs and relies on software, the more DevOps can be the engine to automate and facilitate change.

    There was a time it took almost half a day to build a single car. Henry Ford managed to bring that down to two hours and 30 minutes thanks to the assembly line, but for over a hundred years most of the changes year to year in automobiles have required retooling manufacturing plants so updates and modifications are developed at a relative snail’s pace. Then Tesla came along with a car that is more or less just a framework for the software that runs on it and that can have new features and capabilities the next day through over-the-air software updates.

    John Jeremiah, technology evangelist and team lead for HP Software, was quoted in a post earlier this year saying, “It was just a few years ago when nobody had heard of Uber. Now, every single taxi company or taxi service is under pressure to react to a company that owns no taxis. Why is that? It’s because they’ve used software.”

    Tesla has an advantage over other automobiles because it can change the way its vehicles work or improve them with new features at the push of a button. Uber has an advantage over the traditional taxi industry because it has streamlined its service through a mobile app available on hundreds of millions of mobile devices and it can modify and improve the way it works with a simple update. Software has increased the ability for organizations to adapt more quickly and DevOps accelerates that evolution even faster through continuous innovation and the automation of routine tasks.

    There will still be things that require physical change—an updated vehicle frame in the case of Tesla or a new feature that relies on cutting edge technology only available in the latest smartphone models in the case of Uber. Software alone can’t do it all.

    The areas where software makes a difference, though, DevOps has a major impact. A recent study conducted by Gene Kim and a team of researchers found that organizations that have embraced DevOps tools and principles effectively have 8,000 times faster lead times and 30 times more frequent deployments than their peers. They also have 12 times faster mean time to recovery when issues arise and are twice as likely to exceed profitability, market share and productivity goals. Those are all significant statistics that impact the bottom line and separate the companies that win from their struggling rivals.

    Companies that can harness the power of DevOps and continuous innovation to develop new apps and capabilities faster and that have the capacity to push those updates out to existing customers have a significant advantage over competitors still slogging through “innovating” the old-fashioned way. It’s hard to compete with companies that are deploying 30 times faster than you and have twice the profitability and market share.