The Phoenix Project bills itself as a novel about IT, DevOps and helping businesses win. Essentially it tells the story of “Parts Unlimited” and automotive parts company in the midst of disruption and IT-enabled reinvention. The hero of the story is Bill Palmer, a Director of Midrange Technologies, who is suddenly promoted to VP of IT Operations. The company is in the midst of a large IT project that potentially holds the financial future of the company – as such it has pressure from specific business units to deliver, barriers from security and audtiing and individual executives throughout the organization who expect their pet project to be a key priority.

In the midst of this mayhem, Palmer meets Erik Reid, a mysterious kind of an IT operations Jedi Knight who shows him the path to enlightenment through the application of the “Three Ways:

The First Way helps us understand how to create fast flow of work as it moves from Development into IT Operations, because that’s what’s between the business and the customer. The Second Way shows us how to shorten and amplify feedback loops, so we can fix quality at the source and avoid rework. And the Third Way shows us how to create a culture that simultaneously fosters experimentation, learning from failure, and understanding that repetition and practice are the prerequisites to mastery

Reid takes Palmer on a journey of agile enlightenment – showing him how positive team dynamics, a culture of enablement, realistic approaches towards compliance and audit and dev and ops teams who are motivated by each others drivers, can lead to an IT department that delivers on that fabled objective of being a strategic enabler for the business.

This form of educational book – delivered as an entertaining novel, is a tried and true method. By writing in this style the authors, DevOps thinkers and practitioners themselves, ensure that the audience will be gripped by what is potentially a dry topic, and taken on a journey that will hopefully lead to their own realization of what it takes to make IT effective again.

I came away from reading the book with some mixed emotions. Initially I was a little frustrated, with something of a “of course this is the way to solve these problems, everyone knows that” impression. After taking a moment to think about it however, I cast my mind to the IT organizations I’ve had dealing with that, almost invariably are dogged by the problems that Parts Unlimited faces. A culture of denial, extended timelines, and adversarial attitude between IT and the business and no real understanding of agile, not as a development methodology but as a business one.

I came to the realization that what is blindingly obvious for me, is comparatively new for most IT practitioners and that the book fills an extremely important niche in the development of something that I’m particularly passionate about, a business-centric focus within the IT department.

Of course the novel makes it look like IT reinvention is an easy thing to do – alas the reality is quite different and I can imagine a host of IT leaders who will read the novel and then be frustrated that they’re unable – because of organizational culture – to apply its learning’s to their own situation. But as a general motivational guide to trying things out and being prepared to fail quick and fail fast, the novel is extremely important.

In my view this isn’t so much an IT management book as it is a book about management generally. I spend time waxing poetic about the massive changes facing businesses and how fundamentally different the business of the future will look to what exists today. If this is indeed the case, then the business as a whole needs to take the lessons from The Phoenix Project and apply it to its own situation. It needs to learn to work collaboratively, to deliver solutions in an agile manner and to not use compliance and regulation as a crutch to justify an orthodoxy that is passé at best, and downright toxic at worst.

Solving the issues that face IT in particular, and organizations in general, is more about people than it is process. Underlying the central thesis of The Phoenix Project are some theories about the way humans act, react and interact – it’s the sort of book that would prove useful to anyone involved in managing projects and people – a must read for the bookshelf.

What many vendors are thinking about now is bringing flexible access end points, to these existing data store systems – in doing so they’re attempting to deliver the best of both worlds to customers. Case in point is ShareFile (now owned by Citrix) which is today announcing that it now supports SharePoint and Azure. In doing so they tie together the data within these discrete systems, along with data within ShareFile itself – but still deliver the IT control that it demands. Specific announcements today include:

• New StorageZones on Microsoft Windows Azure allows customers to store data in Microsoft hosted datacenters
• Integration between ShareFile and XenMobile, IT can secure and control enterprise data on mobile devices by choosing ShareFile as the common data platform across Worx-enabled mobile apps
• ShareFile includes a built-in mobile content editor, which supports standard SharePoint functions like check-out, edit and check-in from mobile devices

MyPOV – What Does it Mean?

It would be easy to say that ShareFile rolling out this functionality is an admission that they’re not really penetrating their market as they like to – after all if your solution is being successful in replacing legacy systems, why integrate with those systems? The reality is more nuanced than that however and ShareFile is offering customers a progression from the old world to the new. Customers who have huge amounts of data in legacy storage have a pressing concern, and it’s not moving off that storage. rather they’re looking to mobile-enable their workforce, a workforce which in many cases is already rushing headfirst into the BYOD world. This product offering does that – it’s not hugely elegant, but it works.

I’ve used ShareFile a bit and I have to say, having come from using more bottom up tools like Box, Google drive, Dropbox and others, it’s user experience leaves a little to be desired. But seen in the context of enterprise reality – it’s about incremental steps. And tying enterprise storage in with an access and editing front end, even if that front end isn’t as pretty as other solutions, is a compelling proposition.

At the OpenStack summit Cloudscaling announced the latest version of its product and also signaled a partnership with Juniper to integrate that company’s virtual network control (VNC) technology into OCS. It’s a logical step, Juniper gets to be an integral part of a logical and compelling cloud OS, while Cloudscaling gets a big dose of credibility with larger organizations. Cloudscaling also announced that it was joining Seagate’s Cloud Builder program, and was looking at developing an optimized storage solution for OpenStack powered clouds. The round included previous investor Trinity Ventures and, not surprisingly given the existing partnership arrangements, also included Juniper and Seagate.

Since time immemorial (or at least for a number of years) a bit of an inside joke amongst the cloud cognoscenti has been the fact that almost every vendor under the sun uses Korea Telecom (KT) as a case study for its technology. KT has seemingly done a PoC trial with every vendor out there and, frankly, the general consensus is that any vendor who is still using KT as a proof point is missing something. Cloudscaling has been guilty, in the past, of talking up KT as a customer but has now secured a bunch of extra successful customers including LivingSocial, EVault, Ubisoft and DataFort.

These customer wins, the new found industry focus on private and special use-case clouds and the not insignificant wins Cloudscaling has had in recent months bode well for the company’s future.

• vCloud Hybrid Service Dedicated Cloud: Provides physically isolated and reserved compute resources, as well as a private cloud instance. Sold on an annual term with pricing starting at $0.13/hour
• vCloud Hybrid Service Virtual Private Cloud: Multitenant compute resource model, but with dedicated allocations for customers. Sold on a monthly term with pricing starting at $0.045/hour

It would be very easy to get critical at this announcement, and gasp at the fact that a company that formerly hated on the public cloud is now turning around and offering a hybrid solution. But that attitude ignores the reality for VMware customers who are often conservative and have only just developed an appetite for taking tentative first steps into the public cloud.

For those customers – application portability, an architecture they’re familiar with and an invoice from a vendor they’re already deeply partnered with is important. That’s the bottom line and the reason that, despite what the purists will say, this initiative will gain some traction.

It’s no threat to the big cloud providers of course, but it does raise some questions for those companies who make their income by helping large organizations built private clouds – their world just got a little bit more complicated.

In terms of technology, vCloud Hybrid Service will offer a simplified approach to management, allowing VMware customers to use the same tools and processes they use today to manage both on-premise and off-premise environments.  They’ll do this via the free vCloud Connector plug-in. As an interesting aside, VMware selected cloud automation technologies from Puppet Labs for the orchestration part of the offering – not surprising when one considers that  the company recently announced that it was putting $30M into Puppet Labs.

VMware is holding out an olive branch to partners – vCloud Hybrid Service can be sold the same way as on-premise VMware licenses with a standard SKU, and partners can retain the billing relationship with customers.

Interesting times huh?

• Google Compute Engine is now in general availability
• GCE offers sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a ten-minute minimum
• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads
• Persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume
• Google App Engine adds PHP support
• GCE, GCS and GAE all achieve ISO 27001 certification
• Google launches Cloud Datastore, a schema-less solution for storing non-relational data

Right, on to the insight. We’ve been waiting a long time for a real competitor to AWS to appear. Even Adrian Cockcroft, Chief Cloud Architect for Netflix and perhaps the biggest platform evangelist for AWS (either inside or outside of AWS) has stated that he’d love to see some credible alternatives to the Seattle behemoth to appear. As OpenStack moves more and more into a private cloud play, and Microsoft continues to confuse the world about exactly what its cloud platform is, those options have been sparse (actually, non existent).

That could change very quickly now as Google sees to be diverting some considerable attention to it’s compute platform. As my buddy Alex Williams pointed out, Google Compute Engine was one of the top three areas for attention on the IO agenda – that is indicative of Google’s strategy and is, at least in part, an affirmation that the Goog has been looking closely at the massive adoption that AWS has. Not so much because of the revenue it can drive (although that too) but more because whoever deliver the platform chosen by developers is well positioned to capture the bulk of the highly valuable user data that Google has so effectively monetized.

It was interesting to contrast the attitudes towards GCE that were evident at Cloud 2020, the cloud summit myself and colleague Krishnan Subramanian put on in Vegas the week before IO. There were two distinct opinions raised at that event:

• Google has the scale and experience to be a real competitor to AWS in the public cloud space
• Google is a high margin business, which Amazon is in the low margin one. As such Google’s new found love affair with the public cloud will soon wane

I think it’s short sighted to write off Google merely from a first degree margin perspective Google of all organizations knows the value of secondary monetization of user data and has built a business out of giving away commodity services in order to mine and leverage the data it can extract from those services. GCE is hardly likely to be significantly different. if we accept that Google is committed to GCE, then it’s time to look at what sort of growth expectation that platform is likely to gain.

Massive – quite simply AWS should be very concerned about this news for two distinct reasons.

Firstly – Google has arguably the best experience of any organization on earth at building massive scale data centers, networking elements and distribution networks. They deliver incredible scale computation on a global basis with high degrees of reliability. With all of that plumbing in place, it’s not surprising that the past few months have seen Google very quickly expose functionality to customers. I’ll say it again, the functionality is all there, Google now just needs to expose the APIs to allow people to use it. The fact that Google has little to build beyond the endpoints means that the relative pace at which they can roll out functionality is higher than its competitors.

Secondly – Developers are increasingly wishing to make use of the APIs that surround the data and services that Google holds. Given the option of using a public cloud provider whose infrastructure sits right next to that data, it makes sense for developers to use Google as their infrastructure of choice – it’s a nice solution to at least part of the data gravity problem that developers face. Add to that the release of the higher-value products that Google offers (Android Studio for example) and there’s some extra value built in to the Google platform that AWS can’t replicate.

During IO I took the opportunity to talk with some developers and ISVs who have been using the Google Cloud Platform – they report a truly amazing level of performance. In fact one person I talked with suggested that the performance for his management solution was better than if he was using physical hardware with storage and compute in the same rack. This performance is a function of the amazingly performant network that Google has built over the years.

So. Is GCE a complete slam dunk? Not yet. Google has yet to prove that it really understands enterprise needs, and it needs to prove it’s in this business for the long haul. The fact that Google Apps, for example, was hardly even mentioned at IO is an indication that this is a company that has a fairly relaxed attitude towards what business really needs. Google needs, if they’re serious about being a credible IaaS provider for larger workloads, to build out the non technology aspects of a vendor – on that count we’re yet to see what will happen.

That said there was an interesting announcement at the tail end of IO on Friday. Details are scant but apparently Google showcased some new networking capabilities that enable hybrid clouds to run between GCE deployments and on-premise data centers. The functionality allows customers to establish virtual private Layer 3 networks and assign static IP addresses to instances. Apparently there is the ability to connect networks and run load balancing across them. Details are scant but it’s an unusual, and surprisingly business-focused offering.

Frankly having AWS as the kind of the IaaS castle has been boring. All things being equal, Google announced to the world last week that it’s committed to storming the castle. Time will tell if it succeeds, or drowns in the moat.

I attended NetSuite‘s global conference this year (disclosure – NetSuite contributed to my T&E to attend) and it has been interesting to reflect on a company that is unabashedly growing up. Having been at all of the previous global NetSuite events, it was impressive to see attendance grow to some 5000 people, to hear the conversations ramp up a notch and to see the increasing professionalism with which the event was run. Having had a few days to digest the announcements, here follows an assessment of what we saw through this pundits lens.

What About the Social Angle?

In an analyst session with Zach Nelson, I raised my perennial question around the lack of a compelling vision from the company that provides some answers to the customer engagement question. I put it to him that Salesforce is really taking all of the mindshare when it comes to assessing the sentiment of the marketplace – harnessing conversations and bringing those into the core operations of the business. Salesforce has spent significant money on acquiring companies in this space and really articulates this value proposition strongly.

Nelson’s reaction was that as far as he was concerned, Salesforce isn’t really a customer relationship management solution but rather a prospect relationship management one. I suspect that what he justifiably meant by this was that solutions that only harness the front end of the relationship, but don’t have a deep visibility into the transactional activities of the customer are less than optimal In his view NetSuite, with it’s visibility into the total transactional relationship with the customer has this benefit. As I said that’s a justified position, but one which is, in my view, a little shortsighted. Any customer-facing organization that rests on its laurels by being happy to simply own the transaction relationship is missing out on the opportunity for new sales by harnessing the potential customers before they’ve even made a decision to purchase – this is where social media marketing and sentiment analysis tools come in.

I’m expecting to see NetSuite bridge this gap going forwards. With Their retail solution more baked now, I’d expect a very strong message about harnessing the customer BEFORE they’re event a customer to emerge between now and the next SuiteWorld in 2014.

A Vibrant Ecosystem

One thing that was very positive to see at SuiteWorld was the increasing maturity and breadth of the partner ecosystem. This ecosystem is vibrant not just at the ISV end, but also from the all important system integrator end. At SuiteWorld a partnership with CapGemini was announced – ticking off the last of the massive global consulting firms to have signed on as NetSuite partners.

In the ISV area however there was some real movement and some strong stories. On day two of the event a significant part of Evan Goldberg‘s keynote was given over to a demo by eWinery. I was very bullish about this vertically-specific solution for the wine industry when I first saw it a few months ago. I’ve long said that I believe the opportunity for NetSuite is to roll out more certical-specific solutions. I dug into this issue with Nelson and he explained his approach towards this. NetSuite is keen to provide broad solutions for general verticals (retail, manufacturing, professional services) but to leave what they call the “last mile” to partners. They’ll do broad categories, but not distinct industries seemed to be the approach. The eWinery partnership is a good example of this – NetSuite provided the broad retail and back office functionality, while eWinery came to the party with industry specific knowledge and process – it’s a logical approach and should allow NetSuite to hit a wider addressable market than otherwise.

Critiquing the Competitors

As is often the case, NetSuite put in a few jabs (actually more than a few) at its competitors. In previous years both SAP and Microsoft have come in for a lashing but this year criticism for Microsoft was lacking. This is interesting and is likely tied to the fact that Microsoft is rapidly becoming irrelevant in this space. There was one uncomfortable moment when Norm Fjeldheim, the CIO of Qualcomm, was on stage with Nelson during the keynote. Qualcomm are using NetSuite for some of their small business units and Fjeldheim made the comment that if he were Oracle or SAP he’d be worried. There was a moment of silence before Nelson agreed with him, at least when it comes to SAP. This off-the-cuff exchange shows the illogical nature of nelson’s harsh criticisms for SAP while leaving Oracle untouched. We all know that Larry Ellison is the biggest shareholder in NetSuite (in face I was part of a very small group of customers and influencers who enjoyed a cocktail event at Ellison’s amazing Woodside home), but clearly NetSuite is edging into the markets of both of these players are it’s frankly illogical to not admit that.

Nelson didn’t make a valid point about SAP’s much lauded in-memory technology HANA. He commented that while SAP talks all about technology, NetSuite is focused on delivering solutions to their customers. His point being that NetSuite uses in-memory techniques, but would rather talk about the solutions they’re delivering to the customers rather than the technologies themselves. It’s a valid criticism and one which SAP needs to ruminate upon.

Overall Thoughts

NetSuite is a company that is rapidly maturing. Their product has a depth and a breadth that we haven’t seen before and the customer wins they showcased at SuiteWorld really indicate that is now able to deliver a far greater selection of what large customers need. This maturing greatly increases the likelihood of what I have been predicting for years, namely an acquisition by Oracle. Outside of this M&A crystal ball gazing however, NetSuite seems to be doing everything right. They’ve got a long way to go to catch up with the mindshare and aspirational appeal of Salesforce, but my sense is that internally there is a realization about this and that the next twelve months will see the company really step on the gas and increase the activity on a number of levels – I’d expect to see some smart acquisitions, a strong marketing message about the future of the different verticals they deliver to, and a narrative that helps their customers (who, frankly, are often the more conservative parts of a business) see how their future looks different, and the moves they need to make to secure that future.

Overall SuiteWorld was an impressive event, as NetSuite events always are – I’m already looking forward to the next event and seeing what the company can deliver in 2014.

I attended NetSuite’s global conference this year (disclosure – NetSuite contributed to my T&E to attend) and it has been interesting to reflect on a company that is unabashedly growing up. Having been at all of the previous global NetSuite events, it was impressive to see attendance grow to some 5000 people, to hear the conversations ramp up a notch and to see the increasing professionalism with which the event was run. Having had a few days to digest the announcements, here follows an assessment of what we saw through this pundits lens.

Launch of NetSuite for Manufacturing

Some three years ago NetSuite launched a manufacturing solution off the back of a partnership with Rootstock – for whatever reason, be it technical or business-related, that deal never really bore fruit. Instead NetSuite went back to the drawing board and decided to build its own solution. This is actually a better approach for a manufacturing solution since building off one common architecture and data type increases both the flexibility and the ease of use than by kludging together different solutions to create some kind of Frankensteinien combination. CEO Zach Nelson was very quick to point out that in the same time as SAP saw core licensing business reduce, the past four quarters saw NetSuite manufacturing sector bookings grow 60% – of course given the relative sizes of their business this is less impressive than it sounds, but for a company focusing heavily on growth, it’s something to crow about.

After announcing the solutions, Nelson told the audience about the partnership between NetSuite and Autodesk to integrate Autodesk’s 3d design and product lifecycle management (PLM) tools alongside the NetSuite ERP. The demo showcased a fictitious BBQ manufacturer and retailer, and showed how design, product feedback, customer input and financial aspects of a combined manufacturing/sales organization can be run on the products. While the demo was relatively slick, there didn’t seem to me to be a huge amount of true integration. NetSuite describes the partnership as:

a bi-directional integration of cloud-based ERP with cloud-based PLM, giving manufacturers a single, closed-loop solution to accelerate product design and development, reduce risk of errors and delays, streamline supply network collaboration, and gain critical real-time visibility into pricing, scheduling, capacity and profitability

There’s certainly some truth in that – but I suspect the number of customers who actually consider the design part of manufacturing as needing to be deeply integrated into their ERP solution is limited. There is also obviously some tension with regards existing product breadth from the two partners – as an example the functionality around requests for quotes, and important area for outsourced manufacturing businesses, exists in both Autodesk and NetSuite. Alongside the partnership with Autodesk, NetSuite rolled out some extended functionality that will appeal to manufacturing customers including availability to promise (ATP), standard cost, work-in-process (WIP), and routings.

Manufacturing is a massive area of opportunity and the complexities involved in a manufacturing business lend themselves well to the sort of broad, flexible and robust solution that NetSuite has created – the increasing velocity of the creation of new nimble manufacturing businesses (for example GoPro, the Pebble Watch and Jawbone) who aren’t constrained by existing thoughts around what a MRP system should look like plays very well into this new strategy for NetSuite

Omni-Channel Wins

One of the other areas Nelson focused on in his keynote was retail. Unsurprising since it was at this event last year that the company rolled out SuiteCommerce, a solution set designed to manage the complexities of omni-channel retail. NetSuite rolled out the CIO of Williams-Sonoma who has only just finished rolling out NetSuite to run four individual brands retail an e-commerce operations. The move to NetSuite was prompted by Williams-Sonoma’s first foray outside of the US, in this case building out an Australian business. The company wanted a solution that would scale geographically across markets and would let them roll out the stores as quickly as possible. The roll out took only three months, something Nelson is justifiably proud of given the massive timescale more generally seen with these sorts of projects.

The breadth of use of NetSuite by Williams-Sonoma was somewhat glossed over at the event – currently it’s in place for the Australian operations only. Having said that, in follow up sessions with the NetSuite executives in charge of retail, I did get the distinct impression that this is a relationship that is likely to grow stronger – Williams-Sonoma was very impressed by the speed at which the implementation of NetSuite occurred, perhaps especially so given their experience with existing large ERP solutions.

In a deep-dive analyst session around retail I stated my impression that, while the retail solution looks really powerful, it doesn’t really leverage the cutting edge approaches that we’re seeing in the marketplace – I mentioned such things as location based shopping and special offers as two areas where there is a massive amount of innovation. NetSuite doesn’t seem to be weaving this narrative into its approach towards retails. My impression is that there is a couple of reasons for this. Firstly the company has only just started down the retail route and is running fast to try and innovate quickly. Secondly however and more importantly, NetSuite is delivering a solution that its customers, generally larger retail operations, are asking for. These companies seem not to be aware of the impending tide of disruption that the social/local/mobile trend will have upon their business. NetSuite needs to start telling this more aspirational story or else it risks losing relevance in the future.

Look for part two of this review next week.

As part of their onboarding and proof of concept, EdgeSpring has developed CrunchEdge, a public playground where people can explore EdgeSpring applied to the Crunchbase data. I’ve had a bit of a play and it certainly does what it says it does – allows people to drill down into the part of the data set that is relevant to them – in the case of CrunchEdge that could be getting some data on deal size, on vertical industry, or on any other part of the data that is of relevance. The EdgeSpring platform allows users to:

• Acquire data from any source and bring it in to the platform – currently from SQL, Hive, salesforce.com, and some other sources.
• Manipulate data to meet specific requirements
• Query the platform – either manually or programmatically
• Derive visualizations off the back of the queries

In terms of its go to market products, EdgeSpring offers to distinct products, SalesEdge and MarketingEdge – as the names imply, these two products offer sales and marketing people the ability to gain insights into their area of specialty and to be in a position to assess where to best prioritize their time. SalesEdge offers pipeline management as well as salesperson-centric opportunity visualization and management-centric salesperson reporting. MarketinEdge on the other hand attempts to connect the marketing initiative data to customer acquisition/retention data to more accurately assess the efficacy of marketing initiatives. EdgeSpring already has some interesting customers including Equinix, Netflix and Intacct.

I really like the area that EdgeSpring is going in to. As with other BIO solutions the key barrier to uptake is the ease of adoption/deployment. If they’re able to make it far easier for organizations to get started leveraging business intelligence, they look set to achieve some real success.

…providing virtual environments in the cloud. CloudShare’s self-service SaaS platform and suite of solutions enable business users to build, freeze and share complex computing environments

The company boasts of over 175,000 users worldwide and more than half of the Fortune 100 as customers. Anyway – today CloudShare is extending their platform to deliver upon the needs of development and testing groups. CloudShare Labs is a self-service solution that delivers cloud infrastructure but in a way that is optimized for the particular use case of the department needing it. Particular capabilities of the platform include:

• Simplified Bug Fixing: The solution enables the capture of a multi-VM disk and memory state, literally freezing a bug in its environment so it can be shared with developers and corrected without having to reproduce the bug in a different environment
• Environment Cloning and Template Libraries: The ability to clone a master environment eliminates mistakes caused by misconfiguration and enables collaboration among cross-functional and dispersed teams through a web browser, console or SSH session. Groups can also create and store libraries of templates for later reuse
• Integration: The new solution integrates with the leading application lifecycle management (ALM) and software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes and tools, such as Team Foundation Server and Jenkins
• Remote Access: CloudShare Labs extends an organization’s existing on-premise development and testing environment to the cloud. Using an organization’s virtual private network (VPN), teams can connect to CloudShare to burst for more resources or collaborate with anyone, anywhere in the world.

It’s actually a compelling argument – individual development team are using so many specific functional tools that the idea of creating a one-size-fits-all development recipe that will cover all the different needs of a development organization is untenable. Rather what is needed is the ability to create libraries of stack templates, and to clone these environments as and when required. The environment cloning and template library aspects of CloudShare Labs make sense. The ability to “freeze” an environment mid-error and in doing so to more readily track and fix bugs is also a logical and compelling proposition.

The CloudShare approach is an interesting one and will suit large enterprises with a wide and diverse spread of development approaches and methodologies – it will be interesting to see the uptake that the product gains in the marketplace.

And at the end of it I was left with a slightly nervous feeling that in advocating the rise of DevOps, we run the risk of removing one archaic and broken system, only to replace it with more of the same.

The worrying thing was the hallway comments from people who were attending the event in order to formulate a plan to “implement a DevOps team” within their organization. That entire aim missed the point of DevOps as an organizational trend. I spent 45 minutes or so talking about how broken current approaches are – siloed teams, each with differing motivations and areas of focus doesn’t deliver consistency. Neither does the fact that these teams are generally talking in different languages, at cross purposes and with wildly different priorities.

To simply rip this out and replace it with a siloed DevOps team doesn’t help that at all. DevOps isn’t about particular toolsets and neither is it about implementing a black ops team to go around operational turf protection. Rather DevOps is a humanistic movement, one which should be almost completely focused on communication, on bridge building and on the identification of common interest. My frustration was lessened somewhat after reading a post by Jez Humble on the subject. Somewhat confrontationally entitled “There’s No Such Thing as a “DevOps Team”, the core thesis of the post was that

the Devops movement addresses the dysfunction that results from organizations composed of functional silos. Thus, creating another functional silo that sits between dev and ops is clearly a poor (and ironic) way to try and solve these problems. Devops proposes instead strategies to create better collaboration between functional silos, or doing away with the functional silos altogether and creating cross-functional teams (or some combination of these approaches).

In this modern world, where the delivery of agile solutions on an ongoing basis is a non-negotiable requirement for success, organizations need to set themselves an objective to cross functionalize as much within their organizations as possible. This is part of the reason that every step up the stack delivers incremental benefits. Automating infrastructure deployment does much to build bridges between application operations and systems operations teams, and creates common goals where formerly they were hard to identify. Similarly the move from infrastructure up the stack to PaaS all of a sudden means that development and operational tasks are developed and achieved with commonality.

Individual functional silos increase the occurrence of problems. Why? To revert to the previously mentioned post:

…functional silos often get created in reaction to a problem (which they inevitably exacerbate). At the beginning of an interview with Elisabeth Hendrickson I posted recently, she discusses working at a product company which was suffering a series of quality problems. As a result, they hired a VP of QA who set up a QA division. The net result of this, counterintuitively, was to increase the number of bugs. One of the major causes of this was that developers felt that they were no longer responsible for quality, and instead focussed on getting their features into “test” as quickly as they could. Thus they paid less attention to making sure the system was of high quality in the first place, which in turn put more stress on the testers. This created a death spiral of increasingly poor quality, which led to increasing stress on the testers, and so on

Functional silos (and a standalone DevOps team is a great example of one) decouple actions from responsibility. Functional silos allow people to ignore, or at least feel disconnected from, the consequences of their actions. DevOps is a cultural change that encourages, rewards and exposes people taking responsibility for what they do, and what is expected from them. As Werner Vogels from Amazon Web Services says, “you build it, you run it”.

So a “DevOps team” is a risky and ultimately doomed strategy. Sure there are some technical roles, specifically related to the enablement of DevOps as an approach and these roles and tools need to be filled and built. Self service platforms, collaboration and communication systems, tool chains for testing, deployment and operations are all necessary. Sure someone needs to deliver on that stuff. But those are specific technical deliverables and not DevOps. DevOps is about people, communication and collaboration. Organizations ignore that at their peril.