DevOps by Design -- Practical Guide to Effectively Ushering DevOps into Any Organization

DevOps by Design -- Practical Guide to Effectively Ushering
DevOps into Any Organization
Transcript of a Brieﬁngs Direct discussion on some powerful best practices on making DevOps
an accelerant to broader business goals, but at the level of a multigenerational IT activity.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HPE Discover Podcast Series.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.
Our next DevOps innovation case study highlights how Cognizant Infrastructure
Services has worked with a large telecommunications and Internet services
company to make DevOps beneﬁts a practical reality.
We'll learn some important ways to successfully usher DevOps into a large
complex enterprise IT environment and we will hear best practices on making
DevOps an accelerant to broader business goals, such as adapting to the Internet of
Things (IoT) requirements, advancing mobile development, and allowing for
successful cloud computing adoption.
To provide a practical guide to effectively ushering DevOps into any organization, we're joined
by Sachin Ohal, Manager Consulting at Cognizant Infrastructure Services in Philadelphia.
Welcome, Sachin.
Sachin Ohal: Hi. I'm glad to be on the show. How are you?
Gardner: I'm great. Thanks for being here. We're also here with Todd DeCapua, Senior Manager
for Product Marketing and Technology Evangelist at HPE Software in Palo Alto, California.
Welcome, Todd.
DevOps Solutions Unify Development,
Accelerate Innovation and Meet Market Demands
Find out More from Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Todd DeCapua: Dana, great to be here.
Gardner: Let's start at a high level and then drill down. When we're talking about DevOps in a
large environment, what are the barriers that we're facing these days? What is some of the
resistance when we think about ushering it in? I know it's a complex undertaking, but what are
Gardner

the things we need to be thinking about in terms of overcoming that and making DevOps a
reality? Todd.
DeCapua: Some of the things that I've seen in the last 10 or so years, thinking about things like
agile transformations, then DevOps, people often say, "What are the tools that I need to buy?"
And it's not about the tools. It's starting with the culture of the organization and helping people
understand the reasons why a change is needed, and as they would understand why, then how is
it that we can start to adopt some of these fundamentals?
Gardner: Sachin, what are some of the problems that we need to overcome?
Different models
Ohal: Fundamentally, industries come in with many different models, which was a sending
and receiving mode rather than a communicating mode.
So either one team is sending to the other team or one organization is sending to
the other team. When we come up with a model like DevOps, the IT team starts
DevOps without selecting an area where DevOps needs to start or where a team
needs to take a lead to start DevOps in the organization
Companies are trying to enhance their IT infrastructure. They want to enforce
DevOps. On the other hand, when all start communicating, they're getting lost.
This has become a fundamental problem in implementing DevOps.
Gardner: You've been working with a number of companies in bringing DevOps best practices
into play. What are some of the bedrock foundation steps companies should take? Is there a
common theme or does it vary from company to company?
Ohal: DevOps is a kind of domain that varies inside a company. We can't compare company to
company. It varies company to company, domain to domain, organization to organization,
because here we're talking about developing a culture. When we talk about developing
a culture, a thought process, understanding those thought processes play a key role.
And if we fundamentally talk about an application development
organization, testing organization, or the IT ops organization, they
have their own key performance indicators (KPIs), their own thought process,
and their own goals defined.
Many times, we observe that within the IT organization, development, testing, and operations
have different goals, objectives, and KPI’s. They never cross functionally define business needs.
They mostly define technology as organization specific. As an example a functional tester
doesn’t know how developer are communicating with each other or the security team for
Ohal

security-related issues. An operations engineer has KPI up time, but he really don’t know the
various application modules he is supporting.
Suddenly, by enforcing DevOps, we're telling all the organization to start communicating, start
intersecting, start having cross communication. So this has become a key problem in the 21st
century infrastructure, application, testing, or overall DevOps framework implementation.
Communication and understanding have become key challenges for organizations.
Gardner: Before we get into the specific use case scenario and case study that we're going to
talk about, what is the relationship between Cognizant and HPE. You're a services provider;
they're a technology provider. How does it work?
Strong partner
Ohal: We're a strong partner with HPE. Cognizant is a consulting company, a talent company.
On the other hand, HPE is an enterprise-scale product delivery company. There is a very nice
synergy between Cognizant and HPE.
When we go to market, we assess the situation, we request HPE to come on premises, work with
us, have a handshake, form a high-performance team, and deliver into an enterprise solution to
Cognizant and HPE customers.
Gardner: Todd, given the challenges of bringing DevOps to bear in many organizations, the fact
that it varies from company to company really sounds like a team sport, not something one can
do completely alone, but it's about an ecosystem play. Is that right?
DeCapua: It absolutely is. When I think about this ecosystem, there are three players. You have
your customer first, but then you have an organization like HPE that provides enterprise products
and capabilities, and then other partners like Cognizant that can bring in the talent
to be able to put it all together.
As we think about kind of this transition and think about what these challenges
are that our number one player, our customers, have, there are these foundational
pieces that you think about -- things like time-to-market as being a challenge,
brand value being a challenge, and, of course, revenue is another challenge.
As we were talking early on, what are those fundamental challenges that our
customer, again as a team sport, are being challenged with? We see that this is different for every
one of our customers, and starting with some of these fundamentals, what are those challenges?
Understanding that helps with, "We need to make a change. We need to influence the culture. We
need to do all these pieces." Before we jump right into that technical solution, let’s sit down as
the teams together, with a customer, with someone like HPE, with someone like Cognizant, and
really understand what our challenges are.
DeCapua

Gardner: All right. Let's drill down a bit into a speciﬁc scenario. Sachin, a large
telecommunications, media and Internet services company, tell us about what their goals were
and why they were pursuing DevOps and improvement in how they have a test/deploy synergy?
Ohal: When we talk about telco, pharma or retail customers, they fundamentally come up with
many upstream/downstream revenue-oriented, customer service, workbench platforms, and it's
very hard to establish a synergy between all the platforms and make them understand what their
end goal is.
Obviously the end goal is customer service, but to achieve that goal you have to go through so
many processes, so many handshakes on a business level, on a technology level, on a customer-
service level, and even internal customer service level.
Always supporting
In today's world, we are IT for IT. None of the organizations inside a company is working as an
independent IT group. They work IT for IT. They are always supporting either business or
internal IT group.
Having this synergy established, having this core value established, we come across many people
who don't understand the communication. The right tools are not in place. Once we overcome the
tools and the communication process, the major question is how I'll put that process in end-to-
end in IT organization
That, again, becomes a key challenge to that process, because it's not easy to have it adopted
with something new. As Todd said, we're talking about agile development and mobile. Your IT
organization becomes your business. You're asking to inject something new with no result. It's
like injecting like some test assay with some new drug. That's exactly the feeling any IT
executive has: "Why am I supposed to be injecting this thing?"
Do I have a value out of it or don't I, because there is no benchmark available in the industry that
people succeed in a certain domain or a certain area. There are always bits and pieces. This is a
key challenge that we observe across the industry -- a lack of adaptiveness to a new technology
or a new process. We're still seeing that.
I have a couple of customers who say, "Oh, I run Windows 2000 server. I run Windows 98. I
have no idea how many Java libraries my application is using." They are also unable to explain
why still they have so many.
It's similar on the testing side. Somebody says, "I use a Load Testing Solution 9," where even
HPE themselves got rid of it three or four years back.

Then, if you come to the operations organization, people say, "I use a very old server." What
does it mean? It means that like business is just getting IT service. They have to understand that
this service needs to be enhanced so business will be enhanced.
Technology enhancement doesn’t mean that my data center is flooded with some new
technology. Technology enhancement means that my entire end-to-end landscape is upgraded
with a new technology that will support for next gen, but I'm still struggling with legacy. These
are the key challenges we observe in the market.
Gardner: But specifically with this use case, how did you overcome them? Did you enter into
the test environment and explain to them how they should do things differently, leverage their
data in different ways, or did you go to the developers first? Is there a pattern to how you begin
the process of providing a better DevOps outcome?
End-to-end process
Ohal: First of all, we had to define an end-to-end delivery process and then we had to identify
end-to-end business value out of that delivery process.
Once we identified the business value, we drew a line between various organizations so they
could understand that they were not cutting across each other, but going parallel. But this is a
thin line, which is going to work, and which will definitely vary domain-to-domain.
In a multigenerational business plan, when we talk about drawing this thin line, we don’t have
any scope that tells exactly how we draw it in IT organization, a business organization, or inside
IT. We draw it in a testing organization or a development organization.
DevOps can be started in any landscape, particularly in our case. We may start with a testing
organization and then we decide to pull it into the development and IT organization.
In some cases we may start with a development organization, and then testing and operational
organizations come into place. Some businesses start DevOps and they say that they want to do
things the way they want.
If you really ask me about a specific case study, rather than giving a very centric answer, I want
to tell you that the answer is a wide area. I don’t just want to take our audience in a wrong
direction. Somebody else started in testing. So we'll just start in testing. Somebody else started in
development. Let’s start in development.

You can start anywhere, but before starting, just stay back, decide where you want to start, why
you want to start, how you want to start, and get the right folks and the right tools in the picture.
Gardner: Given that there is a general pattern but there are also deep speciﬁcs, could you walk
us through the general methodology that you have been talking about and that you are
describing?
Ohal: At one point in time, most users or most listeners on this podcast, were startup companies.
They started up their company as a product or as service and they were struggling with a market.
Then, they shifted themselves as a product company. When I say product it doesn’t mean a
physical product; it might be service as a product. Then, they started merger, acquisition, and
enhancing their portfolio in the market. They've done a couple of exercises that fundamentally
industry does.
Service companies
Now, more big companies are transforming themselves to the service companies. They want to
make sure that their existing customers and their new customers are getting the same values,
because challenges remain, while adding new customers. Are my existing customers still with
me? Are they happy and satisﬁed, and are they willing to continue business with my company
Are they getting equivalent service to what we have committed to them? Are they getting my
new technology and business value out of those services?
This creates a lot of pressure on IT and business executives. In mobile computing and cloud
computing, suddenly some companies are trying to transform themselves into cloud companies
from service companies. There is a lot of pressure on their IT organization to go towards cloud.
They're starting with using cloud web services, cloud authentication at a very IT level. We're not
talking a larger landscape, but they're trying that. Basically this transformation from startup to
product, product to services, services to cloud has only one thing tied up. That is your
multigenerational vision with your multigenerational business plan, because your people change,
your IT changes, your technology changes, your business models keep changing, your customer
changes, your revenue changes, and the mode of revenue changes.
Consider the example of eBay and Google. At some point in time, they never existed. We never
even thought that these companies would be leading in Wall Street, giving us so much
employment, or having a consumer database.
Being a consulting company like Cognizant, we observe those trends in the market very quickly.
We see those changes in the market, we assist them, and we come with our own internal teams
also understanding that, but the customer multigenerational vision remains the same.

To run this vision I have a strategic business objective, a strategic business unit. How will this
unit communicate with the strategic business objective? That's where your IT plays a key role.
Information technology becomes a key strategic business unit in your organization that is driving
this whole task force.
While driving this task force, if you didn’t define your DevOps in a multigenerational business
plan, what will happen is that your focus is IT centric. The moment technology changes, you're
in trouble. The moment the process changes, and the moment you think about cross domain in
your company, you're in trouble.
As an example, a telco is doing a cross domain with the retail. Then, pharma is doing cross
domain with the telco. Do you want to spend double for your IT or your business, or do you want
to shut down the existing project and fund a new project?
There are so many questions that come into the picture when we talk about IT centric DevOps
organization, but when we have business-centric DevOps initiation, we accommodate all the
views and accordingly, IT takes control of your business and they help you to run your business.
Gardner: So business agility is really the payoff, Todd.
Looking at disruptors
DeCapua: Yes. Dana and Sachin, as we look at this challenge and wrapping this around the
use case that Cognizant has with not only the one customer that we are talking about, but really
all of them, and thinking through this multigenerational business plan using DevOps, there are
some real fundamentals to think about. But there are disruptors in the world today, and maybe
starting there helps to illustrate a little bit better why this concept of a multigenerational business
plan is so important.
Consider Uber, Yelp, or Netflix. Each one of them is in a different stage of this multigenerational
business plan, but as to this foundational element that Sachin had been explaining, where some
organizations today are stuck in a legacy technology or IT organization, it’s really starting at that
fundamental level of understanding what are our strategic business objectives.
Then look at this from whether there's a strategic business unit and where that's focused. Then,
build up from there to say you have technology that lives on the top of that.
What’s fun for me is when I look at Uber, Yelp, or Netflix, knowing they are all different, but
some of them do have a product and some of them don’t. Some of them are an IT organization
that has a services layer that connects all of these pieces together.
So whether it's a large telecom or an Internet provider, there are products, but there has really
been a focus on services.

What can help is that this organization multigenerational vision is going to live through the
iterations that every organization goes through. I hate to keep pounding on these three examples,
but I think they're great in ways that help illustrate this for us.
We all remember when things like Uber came in as a startup and was not really well-understood.
Then, you look down, and it has become productized. It’s probably safe to assume that we've
reached a certain level, where it's available in most cities that I travel to.
Then, you move into something more like a product, looking at Yelp. That is definitely a product
that’s mainstream. It definitely has a lot of users today. Then you move down into the service
area, and as something would mature into a service it has now become definitely adopted in the
majority of their target users.
The fourth I would like to call on is cloud. As you move to something like cloud, that's where
Netflix becomes a perfect example. It’s all cloud based. I'm a subscriber. I know that I can have
streaming video any device, anywhere in the world, at any time, on Netflix delivered from the
cloud.
So these four generational business plan items that we are talking about -- startup, products,
service, and cloud, again, carrying that underlying vision, all supported by information
technology and a defined strategic business objective, focusing on a strategic business unit.
It’s really important to help understand that as I look at somebody like Cognizant as a partner
and the approach that they have used with several of their customers.
Gardner: For organizations reading this or listening in that are interested in getting to that
multigenerational benefit, where their investments in IT pay off dividends for quite some time,
particularly in their ability to adapt to change rapidly, any good starting points? Are there proof
of concept (POC) places where you start? I know it’s boiling the ocean in some ways, but there
must be some good principles to get going with?
Sensing inside
Ohal: Definitely there are. In this 21st Century IT business goal, first you have to sense
everything inside of your business, rather than sensing the outside market, sense all your
business thoroughly, in real time. What is it doing?
You have to analyze your business model. Does my business model fit in these four fundamental
parts? Where am I right now? Am I into the startup side, product side, service side, or cloud and
where do I want to go? We have to define that, and then based on that, you have to adopt
DevOps. You have to make sure where you are adopting your DevOps.

I was on product and I'm going to services, so I need a DevOps fitting here. Or I'm right now in a
well-matured product and I want to go on a cloud. Where I am going? Or I'm right now on a
cloud and I want to have more and more refined services for my customers.
Find out that scale and define that scale, rather than getting many IT group together and just
doing a brainstorming session. Where am I supposed to stand? No. What is your business vision?
What is your customer value? Those values really derive your business, and to derive that
business use a DevOps.
It's not for just getting the continuous delivery in a place or continuous integration in a place.
Two IT executives are talking, "You're in my organization doing a great handshake," and the
business says, "I don’t want that handshake. I want that uptime."
There are so many various aspects, various views. Todd mentioned, he has all these examples,
but if you really check other example as well, they're very focused on their multigenerational
business plan, and if you want to succeed, you have to be focused on those aspects as well.
Gardner: Well, great. Anything else to add, Todd?
DeCapua: As far as getting started and what works and where you go, there are a number of
different ways that we've worked with our customers to get started.
One of the ones that I have seen proven is something that has been neglected. For example,
there's a maintenance backlog. Here are items that over six months, a year, or sometimes even
two years, have just been neglected. If you really want to try to find some quick value, maybe it’s
pulling that maintenance backlog off, prioritizing that with your customer, understanding what's
important still, what’s not important any longer, and shortening it down to a target list.
Then being able to identify that if we're going to focus a few resources on a few of these high-
priority items that are going to continue to be neglected, then starting to adopt some of these
practices and capabilities to then immediately show value to that business owner because we
have applied a few resources with a little bit of time and gone after the highest priority items that
otherwise would have been neglected.
The second piece that comes in is this analysis capability. How are you tracking the results?
What are those metrics that you're using to show back to the business that they have their
multigenerational plan and strategy laid out, but how is it that they are incrementally showing
this value as they're delivering over and over again?
But start small. Maybe go after that neglected maintenance backlog being a really easy target,
and then showing the incremental value over time, again, through the sensing that Sachin has
mentioned. Also be able to analyze and predict those results and then be able to adapt over time
with speed and accuracy.

Gardner: Great, I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning about how
Cognizant Infrastructure Services has worked with HPE to help a large Internet services provider
to make DevOps benefits a practical reality.
And we've heard some powerful best practices on making DevOps an accelerant to broader
business goals, but at the level of a multigenerational IT activity.
So I want to thank our guests. Sachin Ohal, Manager Consulting at Cognizant Infrastructure
Services. Thanks, Sachin.
Ohal: Thank you very much. Glad to have been on your show.
Gardner: And we have also been talking with Todd DeCapua, Senior Manager for Product
Marketing and Technology Evangelist at HPE Software. Thanks, Todd.
DeCapua: Thank you, and speak with you guys soon.
Gardner: And a big thank you also to our audience for joining us for this special DevOps case
study discussion.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HPE sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on some powerful best practices on making DevOps
an accelerant to broader business goals, but at the level of a multigenerational IT activity.
Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
• Need for Fast Analytics in Healthcare Spurs Sogeti Converged Solutions Partnership
Model
• Nottingham Trent University Elevates Big Data's role to Improving Student Retention in
Higher Education
• Big data enables top user experiences and extreme personalization for Intuit TurboTax
• Feedback loops: The confluence of DevOps and big data
• Spirent leverages big data to keep user experience quality a winning factor for telcos
• Powerful reporting from YP's data warehouse helps SMBs deliver the best ad campaigns

• IoT brings on development demands that DevOps manages best, say experts
• Big data generates new insights into what’s happening in the world's tropical ecosystems
• DevOps and security, a match made in heaven
• How Sprint employs orchestration and automation to bring IT into DevOps readiness
• How fast analytics changes the game and expands the market for big data value
• How HTC centralizes storage management to gain visibility and IT disaster avoidance
• Big data, risk, and predictive analysis drive use of cloud-based ITSM, says panel
• Rolta AdvizeX experts on hastening big data analytics in healthcare and retail

DevOps by Design -- Practical Guide to Effectively Ushering DevOps into Any Organization

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to DevOps by Design -- Practical Guide to Effectively Ushering DevOps into Any Organization (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

DevOps by Design -- Practical Guide to Effectively Ushering DevOps into Any Organization