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Tag: IT organizations

  • Progress Acquires Chef to Expand DevOps Portfolio

    Progress Acquires Chef to Expand DevOps Portfolio

    Progress today announced it has acquired Chef for $220 million in cash as part of an effort to advance adoption of best DevOps and DevSecOps practices in the midmarket.

    Once the deal is completed next month, Chef will operate as an independent business unit led by Sundar Subramanian, who currently is a senior vice president and general manager at Progress.

    Progress CEO Yogesh Gupta said IT automation technologies developed by Chef will be incorporated into monitoring and debugging platforms and tools that Progress currently provides. By moving into areas such as compliance and security, Chef has already embarked on an effort to make its offerings more accessible to IT personnel, who often lack programming skills, especially in midmarket IT organizations that make up the bulk of the Progress customer base.

    As a private company owned by venture capitalists who monetized open source software mainly via commercial support agreements and enterprise editions of its software, Chef has been able to generate roughly $70 million in revenue. As an arm of Progress, Chef joins a public company with more than $500 million in revenue that has a market capital in excess of $2 billion.

    Chef should be in a better financial position to compete against rivals such as Puppet and Red Hat. Following its acquisition by IBM, Red Hat has been plowing consider resources into a declarative Ansible automation framework that tends to appeal to traditional IT teams. In comparison, Chef has been a pioneer in automating IT using programming tools that especially appeal to DevOps teams managing infrastructure as code.

    In general, most midmarket IT organizations don’t have a lot of DevOps expertise. As an independent arm of Progress, Chef will continue to focus on IT operations, compliance and security, while Progress focuses more of its efforts on the application development and deployment requirements of midmarket organizations, said Gupta. As midmarket IT environments become more complex, the number of touchpoints between Progress and Chef involving cookbooks and recipes created by Chef will increase over time, he added.

    The acquisition of Chef is the latest in a wave of consolidation across the DevOps category. While adoption of DevOps tools and platform continues to grow, traditional enterprise IT organizations are now moving to acquire many of the larger vendors in the DevOps category. That trend is only likely to accelerate during an economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the number of startup companies being launched continues to expand the overall size of the DevOps/DevSecOps ecosystem.

    It’s too early to say at what rate best DevOps practices will gain further traction among traditional midmarket IT organizations. However, at a time when many of those organizations are being asked to do a lot more with even less, it’s only a matter of time before existing rigid IT processes begin to incorporate more agile approaches to managing IT as a matter of survival.

  • Pandemic Provides IT Teams a Chance to Shine

    Pandemic Provides IT Teams a Chance to Shine

    Few would argue that the novel coronavirus pandemic hasn’t dramatically changed enterprise IT. This is especially so when it comes to both the management of IT as well as the very relationship between IT staff and the rest of the business. But how many would have predicted that the relationship between IT and business leaders would have improved since the start of the pandemic?

    According to a recent survey, that’s been precisely the outcome for roughly 43% of organizations. The study is from IT services provider Ensono, which questioned 153 IT decision-makers within the United States and the UK. The research was conducted during the first week of July 2020.

    Further, 32% of IT decision-makers said that their IT budgets are increasing, and 33% have been given more scope to define IT spending since the beginning of the pandemic. Just 5% said that they’ve been given less scope to define their IT spending.

    The survey also confirmed that the pandemic has increased pressure for enterprises to transform themselves digitally. Fortunately, IT has proven its value, at least when it comes to reliability. Despite staff having to work remotely and maintain socially distant, thereby increasing demand for software access, 1 in 4 respondents said they didn’t face any downtime issues. At the same time, only 2% reported between 24 and 48 hours of downtime.

    Additionally, 38% of respondents said that the pandemic helped to improve their understanding of IT. In comparison, 30% of IT decision-makers said they now have more control over business decisions, while only 4% said they now have less control. For 10%, there has been no perceived change in their relationship with the rest of the business outside IT.

    These findings echo those of an earlier study this year from services provider BDO, whose 2020 Digital Transformation Survey, which measured the digital transformation efforts of middle-market organizations, found many of the digital transformation failures stemmed from leadership failures. These include lack of skills or training (41%), employee pushback (30%), poor communication or project management (28%) and lack of leadership or vision (28%) as top reasons for digital efforts failing. “Change readiness is a function of culture, commitment, and capacity to meet the objective and see it through. In a time of competing priorities, systemizing an approach to change management is more essential to organizational agility than ever,” BDO said in its statement.

    It’s certainly essential for those organizations that participated in the Ensono survey, with 56% reporting being under greater urgency to digitally transform their business and about 25% of organizations reporting that events have forced them to begin their digitalization efforts immediately.

  • LF Edge Moves Open Networking Push Forward

    LF Edge Moves Open Networking Push Forward

    A vendor-neutral initiative dubbed the State of the Edge was acquired this week by LF Edge, an arm of The Linux Foundation focused on defining an open source stack of software for edge computing applications.

    The State of the Edge project will be merged with the existing Open Glossary of Edge Computing initiative that LF Edge already had in place. That combined initiative will now be known as the State of the Edge project within the larger umbrella of LF Edge projects.

    State of the Edge was launched by Vapor IO, Arm, Rafay Systems, Packet by Equinix and Edge Gravity by Ericsson to provide free research reports. Arpit Joshipura, general manager for networking, edge and Internet of Things (IoT) for The Linux Foundation, said that mission will continue as part of a larger effort to advance open software-defined networking software.

    The goal is to define stacks of software and implementation blueprints that will make it simpler for both telecommunications carriers and enterprise IT organizations to implement open source networking software both at the edge and in the cloud, said Joshipura.

    That’s critical because as IoT continues to evolve it’s apparent that IT and operations technology (OT) teams will converge, he added, noting the challenge is enabling organizations to achieve that goal around using a suite of programmable open source platforms that are truly interoperable with one another.

    Existing LF Edge projects include Akraino Edge Stack, an edge computing platform; Baetyl, a cloud-based management platform; EdgeX Foundry; a framework for sharing data between devices; Fledge, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for common administrative tasks; Home Edge, a platform for deploying consumer applications; and Project EVE, a virtualization engine.

    Interest in building and deploying applications at the network edge is on the rise in anticipation of 5G wireless networking services becoming widely available. Most of the organizations building those applications will be relying on best DevOps practices to achieve that goal. Less clear for now is the degree to which traditional network operations will be rolled up into those DevOps practices. The more programmable the networking environment becomes the more control each developer theoretically can have over the network services being accessed by their applications. However, network bandwidth is often a finite resource; there most likely will need to be some governing mechanism that determines how much network bandwidth any one application would be allowed to access at any given time.

    Of course, the open source community is not the only entity eyeing the rise of edge computing. Providers of commercial networking platforms ranging from Cisco Systems to VMware are all focused on enabling edge computing applications. Historically, open source platforms such as OpenStack have been embraced by carriers. However, within enterprise IT environments open source networking platforms have not gained much traction. The open source community will need to galvanize around a set of platforms and blueprints for edge computing platforms quickly. Otherwise, many organizations will most likely turn once again to commercial networking platforms to provide services to edge computing applications.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Three Insights from the World’s Leading IT Organizations

    Three Insights from the World’s Leading IT Organizations

    IT is in a state of change on a consistent basis, but never more so than now. With the increasing importance of the digital customer experience across all industries, technology is at a new inflection point in how it can fundamentally impact executive priorities. And while nobody can speak for the direction of IT as a whole, there are a few resources so comprehensive that they’re worth reviewing when they’re released.

    Take, for example, the 2019 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey. It’s the largest global survey of CIOs with data from 3,645 respondents across 108 countries. IT leaders who participated in the survey controlled a whopping $250+ billion in annual IT budgets. The CIO survey examines how board priorities, technology adoption, skills gaps and IT leadership is changing in the age of digital business.

    Here are three insights that explain the tectonic shifts occurring in enterprise IT teams today.

    Digital Leadership: Three Steps to Becoming a Digital Native

    The 2019 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey shows only 30% of IT organizations are digital leaders. These organizations are unusually adept at “using digital technologies to advance their business strategy,” and can launch innovative solutions that generate new revenue streams, enable faster time to market and cut down operational costs. Here are three defining characteristics of what it takes to be a digital leader in 2019:

    • It’s All About Data. Data management and analytics is a core competency of leading IT organizations. Digital leaders are in a strong position to maximize the value of their organizational data by extracting, aggregating and curating the right information. This data is then used to train machine learning models, create high-value assets and deliver customer value on an ongoing basis.
    • Speed of Execution. Digital leaders are willing to either quickly double down on successful experiments or pull the plug on products that don’t deliver expected value. They are also more likely to leverage agile and DevOps practices to increase software release velocity and iterate rapidly on solutions using fast feedback loops.
    • Expansive Mindset. Digital leaders have transitioned from project thinking to product-centric innovation for creating enduring value from their software investments. They also build cross-functional teams across their business and IT silos for better collaboration and faster decision making for digital transformation initiatives.  

    What Does This Mean? CIOs will need to embrace big data analytics, agile delivery models and product-centric teams to create the right foundations for digital business. Without proper foundational investments, IT leaders will struggle to meet business demands, gain customer trust and withstand competitive pressures in the face of escalating customer expectations.

    Business-Managed IT: How Shadow IT Finally Became Respectable

    In the last decade, the adoption of cloud services led to the phenomenon of shadow IT where business units would directly buy cloud solutions without consulting IT teams. CIOs resented their growing irrelevance and tried their best to bring shadow IT under their control.

    The 2019 CIO survey confirms 64% of enterprises have made peace with business-managed IT investments. In fact, 10% of IT leaders actively endorse this approach. What factors have led IT teams to change their mind on shadow IT?

    The survey shows organizations with business-led IT scored better on key metrics than organizations without any mandate for business-managed technology spend. Business-led IT organizations delivered “better customer experiences and faster time to market for new products (52% more likely) as well as positive employee experiences (38% more likely).”

    For business-managed IT spending to be truly successful, CIOs will require the right guardrails in the form of central IT oversight. The 2019 CIO survey makes the case that organizations without IT team involvement are twice as likely to have multiple security issues and are also less likely to build customer trust with their technology investments.

    What Does This Mean? Instead of actively opposing shadow IT investments, CIOs should partner with their business counterparts to create effective governance and operating models for business-managed IT spending. Central IT oversight will ensure the right support for digital business initiatives, reduce the risk of unauthorized breaches and minimize wasted spend.

    Influencing Without Authority: What It Takes to Be an Effective Technology Leader

    Board membership for CIOs dropped this year, with only 58% of IT leaders being part of the executive team in 2019 as compared to 71% in 2017. Does this mean CIOs no longer have executive backing for orchestrating and executing digital business strategies in their enterprise?

    The 2019 CIO Survey indicates board membership, headcount or annual budgets are not the right indicators of the power and influence of technology leaders. Instead, CIOs should focus on building trust across organizational boundaries, creating partnerships with the right executive stakeholders and ensuring the success of critical initiatives. CIOs working for digital leaders are comfortable exerting influence without authority and are driving organizational growth, by being “three times more likely to collaborate strongly with business leaders.”

    What Does This Mean? Formal board membership or the size of the IT team is not the best way to assess CIO influence. The best technology leaders ensure successful enterprise transformation by garnering strong commitment from the board, building digital capabilities with cross-functional teams and creating a sense of urgency for rapid innovation.

    — Deepak Jannu