Friday, January 8, 2016

Redmonk analysts on best navigating the tricky path to DevOps adoption

The next BriefingsDirect analyst thought leadership discussion explores the pitfalls and payoffs of DevOps adoption -- with an emphasis on the developer perspective.

We're joined by two prominent IT industry analysts, the founders of RedMonk, to unpack the often tricky path to DevOps and to explore how enterprises can find ways to make pan-IT collaboration a rule, not an exception.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

With that, please join me in welcoming James Governor, Founder and Principal Analyst at RedMonk, and he is based in London, and Stephen O'Grady, also Founder and Principal Analyst at RedMonk, and he is based in Portland, Maine. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Gentleman, let’s look at DevOps through a little bit of a different lens. Often, it’s thought of as a philosophy. It’s talked about as a way of improving speed and performance of applications and quality, but ultimately, this is a behavior and a culture discussion -- and the behavior and culture of developers is an important part of making DevOps successful.

What do developers think of DevOps? Is this seen as a positive thing or a threat? Do they have a singular sense of it, or is it perhaps all over the map?

O'Grady
O’Grady: The overwhelming assessment from developers is positive, simply because -- if you look at the tasks for a lot of developers today -- it’s going to involve operational tasks.

In other words, if you're working, for example, on public-cloud platforms, some degree of what you're doing as a developer is operational in nature, and vice versa, once you get to the operational side. A lot of the operational side has now been automated in ways that look very much like what we used to expect from development. 

So there is very naturally a convergence between development and operations that developers are embracing.

Driven by developers

Governor: I think developers have driven the change. We've seen this in a number of areas, whether it’s data management or databases, where the developers said, "We're not going to wait for the DBA anymore. We're going to do NoSQL. We're just going to choose a different store. And we're not going to just use Oracle." We've seen this in different parts of IT.

Governor
The bottom line is that waterfall wasn’t working. It wasn’t leading to the results it should, and developers were taking some of the heat from that. So engineers and developers have begun to build out what has now becomes DevOps. A lot of them were cloud natives and thought they knew best, and in some cases, they actually did some really good work.

Partly enabled by cloud computing, DevOps had made a lot of sense, because you're able to touch everything in a way that you weren’t able to on your own prem. It has been a developer-led phenomenon. It would be surprising if developers were feeling threatened by it.

Gardner: Enterprises, the traditional Global 2000 variety, see what happens at startups and recognize that they need to get on that same speed or agility, and oftentimes those startups are developer-centric and culturally driven by developers.
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If the developers are, in fact, the tip of the arrow for DevOps, what is it that the operations people should keep in mind? What advice would you give to the operations side of the house for them to be better partners with their developer core?
Governor: The bottom line is that it’s coming. This is not an option. An organization could say we have this way of doing ops and we will continue doing that. That’s fine, but to your point about business disruption, we don’t have time to wait. We do need to be delivering more products to market faster, particularly in the digital sphere, and the threat posture and the opportunity posture have changed very dramatically in the past three years.

It's the idea that Hilton International or Marriott would be worrying about Airbnb. They weren’t thinking like that. Or transport companies around the world asking what the impact of Uber is.

We've all heard that software is eating the world, but what that basically says is that the threats are real. We used to be in an environment where, if you were a bank, you just looked at your four peer banks and thought that as long as they don’t have too much of an advantage, we're okay. Now they're saying that we're a bank and we're competing with Google and Facebook.

Actually, the tolerance for stability is a little bit lower than it was. I had a very interesting conversation with a retailer recently. They had talked about the different goals that organizations have. And it was very interesting to me that he said that, on the first day they launched a new mobile app, it fell over. And they were all high-fiving and fist pumping, because it meant they had driven so much traffic that the app fell over, and it was something they needed to remediate.

That is not how IT normally thinks. Frankly, the business has not told IT they want it to be either, but it has sort of changed. I think the concern for new experiences, new digital products is now higher than the obsession with stability. So it is a different world. It is a cultural shift.

Differentiator

Gardner: Whether you're a bank or you're making farm equipment, your software is the biggest differentiator you can bring to the market. Stephen, any thoughts about what operations should keep in mind as they become more intertwined with the developer organization?

O'Grady: The biggest thing for me is a variety of macro shifts in the market, things like the availability of open-source software and public cloud. It used to be that IT could control the developer population. In other words, they were essentially the arbiter of what went to production and what actually got produced. If you're a developer and you have a good idea, but you don’t have any hardware or infrastructure, then you're out of luck.

These days, that’s changed, and we see these organizationally, where developers can go to operations and say, they need infrastructure, and operations will say six months. The developers say, "To hell with six months. I'm going to go to Amazon and I have something up in 90 seconds." The notion that's most important for operations is that they're going to have to work with developer populations because, one way or another, developers are going to get what they want.

Gardner: When we think about the supplier, the vendor, side of things, almost every vendor I've talked to in the last two or three months has raised the question of DevOps. It has become top of mind for them. Yet, if you were to ask an organization, how do you install DevOps, how do you buy DevOps, which shape box does it come in, none of those questions are relevant because it’s not a product.
If you're in ops and you are not currently looking at tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or SaltStack, you're doing yourself a disservice. They're powerful tools in the arsenal.

How do the vendors grease the skids toward adoption, if you will? What do you think needs to happen from those tools, platforms and technologies?

Governor: It’s very easy to say that DevOps is not a product, and that’s true. On the other hand, there are some underlying technologies that would have driven this, particularly in automation and the notion of configuration is code.

If you're in ops and you are not currently looking at tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or SaltStack, you're doing yourself a disservice. They're powerful tools in the arsenal. 

One of the things to understand is that in the world of open source, it's perhaps going to be packaged by a more traditional vendor. Certainly, one of the things is rethinking how you do automation. I would counsel anyone in IT ops to at least have a team starting to look at that, perhaps for some new development that you're doing.

It’s easy to say that everything is a massive transformation, because then it’s just a big services opportunity and there's lots of hand waving. But at the end of the day, DevOps has been a tools-driven phenomenon. It’s about being closer to the metal, having better observability, and having a better sense of how the application is working.

One of the key things is the change in responsibility. We've lived in an environment where we remember the blame game and lots of finger pointing. If you look at Netflix, that doesn’t happen. The developer who breaks the build fixes it.

There are some significant changes in culture, but there are some tools that organizations should be looking at.

What can they do?

O’Grady: If we're talking from a vendor perspective, they can talk to their customers about the cultural change and organizational change that’s necessary to achieve the results that they want, but they can't actually affect that. In other words, what we're talking about, rather, is what they can do.

The most important thing that vendors who play in this and related spaces can do is understand that it’s a continuum. From the first code that gets written, to check-in, to build, to being deployed on to infrastructure that’s configured using automated software, it’s a very, very long chain, a very long sequence of events.

Understanding from a vendor perspective where you fit into that lifecycle, what are the other pieces you have to integrate with, and from a customer perspective what are all the different pieces they are going to be using is critical.

In other words, if you're focused on a particular functional capability and that's the only thing that you are aware of and that’s the only thing that you tackle, you're doing your customer a disservice. There are too many moving pieces for any one vendor to tackle them all. So it’s going to be critically important that you're partner-friendly, project-friendly and so on and integrate well and play nicely with others.
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Governor: But also, don’t let a crisis go to waste. IT ops has budget, but they're also always getting a kick in the teeth. Anything that goes wrong is their fault, even if it’s someone else's. The simple fact is that we're in an environment where organizations, as I've said, are thinking that the threat and opportunity posture has changed. It's time to invest in this.

A good example of this would be that we always talk about standardization, but then nobody wants to give us the budget to do that. One of the things that we've tended to see in these web-native companies and how they manage operations and so on is that they've done an awful lot of standardization on what the infrastructure looks like. So there is an opportunity here. It’s a threat and an opportunity as well.

Gardner: I've been speaking with a few users, and there are a couple of rationales from them on what accelerates DevOps adoption. One of them is security and compliance, because the operations people can get more information back to the developers. Developers can insist that security gets baked in early and often.

The other one is user experience. The operations side of the house now has the data from the user, especially when we talk about mobile apps and smaller customer-facing applications and web apps. All that data is now being gathered. What happens with the application can be given back to development very quickly. So there is a feedback loop that's compressed.

What do you think needs to happen in order for the incentives to quicken the adoption of DevOps from the perspective of security, user experience, and feedback loops of shared data?

Ongoing challenge

Governor: That’s such a good question. It’s going to remain an ongoing challenge. The simple fact is that, as I said about the retail and the mobile app, different parts of the business have different goals. Finance doesn't have the same goals as sales, and sales does not have the same goals as marketing in fact.

Within IT, there are different groups that have had very different key performance indicators (KPIs), and that’s part of the discussion. I think you are absolutely right to bring that up, understanding what are the metrics that we should be using, what are the new metrics for success? Is it the number of new products or changes to our application code that we can run out?

We're all incredibly impressed by Etsy and Netflix because they can make all of these changes per day to their production environment. Not everybody wants to do that, but I think it’s what these KPIs are.

It might be, as Stephen had mentioned, if previously we were waiting six months to get access to server and storage, and we get that down to a minute or so, it’s pretty obvious that that’s a substantive step forward.
The big one for me is user experience, and that to me is where a lot of the DevOps movement has come from.

You're absolutely right to say that it is about the data. When we began on this transition around agile and so on, there was a notion that those guys don’t care about data, they don’t care about compliance. The opposite is true, and there has been a real focus on data to enable the developer to do better work.

In terms of this shift that we're seeing, there's an interesting model that, funnily enough, HPE has begun talking about, which is "shifting left." What they mean by that is taking that testing earlier into the process.

We had been in an environment where a developer would hand off to someone else, who would hand off to someone else, at every step of the way. The notion that testing happens early and happens often is super important in this regard.

Gardner: Continuous delivery and service virtualization are really taking off now. I just want to give Stephen an opportunity to address this alignment of interests, security, user experience, and shared data, and thoughts about how organizations should encourage adoption using these aligned interests.

User experience

O’Grady: I can’t speak to this query angle as much. In other words, there are aspects to that, particularly when we think about configuration management and the things that you can do via automation and so on.

The big one for me is user experience, and that to me is where a lot of the DevOps movement has come from. What we've found out is that if you want to deliver an ideal experience via an application to 100 people or 1,000 people, that’s not terribly difficult, and what you are using infrastructure-wise to address that is also not a sort of huge challenge.

On the flip side, you start talking millions and tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions of users potentially, then you have a completely different set of challenges involved. What we've seen from that is that the infrastructure necessary to deliver quality experiences, whether you're Netflix, Facebook, or Google, or even just a large bank, that's a brand-new challenge.
But security is definitely an elephant stomping around the room. There's no question. The feedback loop around DevOps has not been as fixated on security as it might be.

Then, when you get into not just delivering a quality experience through a browser, but delivering it through a mobile application, this encourages and, in fact, necessitates a series of architectural changes to scale out and all these other sort of wonderful things that we talk about.

Then, if we're dealing with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of machines, instead of a handful of very, very large ones, we need a different approach, and that different approach in many respects is going to be DevOps. It’s going to be taking a very hands-on developer approach to traditional operational tasks.

Governor: But security is definitely an elephant stomping around the room. There's no question. The feedback loop around DevOps has not been as fixated on security as it might be.

Quite frankly, developers are about getting things done and this is the constant challenge, ops, security, and so on. Look at Docker. Developers absolutely love it, but it didn’t start in a position of how do we make this the most secure model you could ever have for application deployment.

There are some weird people who started to use the word DevOps(Sec), but there are a lot of unicorns and rainbows and there is going to be a mess that needs clearing up. Security is something that we generally don’t do that well.

On the other hand, as I said, we're less concerned with stability, and on the security side, it does seem like. Look at privacy. We all gave up on that, right?

Gardner: I suppose. Let’s not give up on security though.

Governor: Well, those things go together.

Gardner: They do.

Need to step up

Governor: Certainly, the organizations that would claim to be really good at security are the ones that have been leaving all of their customers' details on a USB stick or on a laptop. The security industry has not done itself many favors. They need to step up as much as developers do.

Gardner: As we close out, maybe we can develop some suggestions for organizations that create a culture for DevOps or put in place the means for DevOps. Again, speaking with a number of users recently, automation and orchestration come to mind. Having that in place means being able to scale, to be able to provide the data back, monitoring, and data from a big-data perspective across systems to pan IT data, and the ability to measure that user experience. Any other thoughts about what you as an organization should put in place that will foster a DevOps mentality?
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Governor: There are a couple of things. One thing you didn’t mention is pager duty. It's a fact that somebody is going to get called out to fix the thing, and it’s about individuals taking responsibility. With that responsibility, give them a higher salary. That’s an interesting challenge for IT, because they're always told, here are a bunch of tools that enable the Type As to get stuff done.
What’s important is to just get out and start spending time reading the stuff that the web companies are doing and sharing.

As to your point about whether this is a cultural shift or a product shift, the functional areas you mentioned are absolutely right, but as to the culture, just what’s important is to just get out and start spending time reading the stuff that the web companies are doing and sharing.

If you look at Etsy or Netflix, they're not keeping this close to their chest. Netflix, in fact, has provided the tools it uses to improve stability through Chaos Monkey. So there's much more sharing, there's much more there, and the natural thing would be to go to your developer events. They're the people building out this new culture. Embed yourself in this developer aesthetic, where GitHub talks about “optimizing for developer joy." Etsy is about “Engineering Happiness.”

Gardner: Stephen, what should be in place in organizations to foster better DevOps adoption?

O’Grady: It’s an interesting question. The thing that comes to mind for me is a great story from Adrian Cockcroft, who used to be with Netflix. We've talked about him a couple of times. He's now with Battery Ventures, and he gives a very interesting talk, where he goes out and talks to executives and senior technology executives from all of these Fortune 500 companies.

One of the things he get asked over and over and over is, "Where do you find engineers like the ones that work at Netflix? Where do we find these people that can do this sort of miraculous DevOps work?" And his response is, "We hired them from you."

The singular lesson that I would tell all the organizations is that somewhere in your organization probably are the people who know how this stuff works and want to get it done. A lot of times, it’s basically just empowering them, getting out of the way and letting the stuff happen, as opposed to trying to put the brakes on all the time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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Monday, December 21, 2015

How INOVVO delivers big data network analysis for greater mobile user loyalty

The next BriefingsDirect big-data case study discussion examines how INOVVO delivers impactful network analytical services for mobile operators to help them engender improved end-user loyalty.

We'll see how advanced analytics, drawing on multiple data sources, enables INOVVO’s mobile carrier customers to provide mobile users with faster, more reliable, and relevant services.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn more about how INOVVO uses big data to make major impacts on mobile services, please join me in welcoming Joseph Khalil, President and CEO of INOVVO in Reston, Virginia. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: User experience and quality of service are so essential nowadays. What has been the challenge for you to gain an integrated and comprehensive view of subscribers and networks that they're on in order to uphold that expectation for user experience and quality?

Khalil: As you mentioned in your intro, we cater to the mobile telco industry. Our customers are mobile operators who have customers in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. There are a lot of privacy concerns when you start talking about customer data, and we're very sensitive to that.

Khalil
The challenge is to handle the tremendous volume of data generated by the wireless networks and still adhere to all privacy guidelines. This means we have to deploy our solutions within the firewalls of network operators. This is a big-data solution, and as you know, big data requires a lot of hardware and a big infrastructure.

So our challenge is how we can deploy big data with a small hardware footprint and high storage capacity and performance. That’s what we’ve been working on over the last few years. We have a very compelling offer that we've been delivering to our customers for the past five years. We're leveraging HPE Vertica for our storage technology, and it has allowed us to meet very stringent deployment requirements. HPE has been and still is a great technology partner for us.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit more about how you do that in terms of gathering that data, making sure that you adhere to privacy concerns, and at the same time, because velocity, as we know, is so important, quickly deliver analytics back. How does that work?

User experience

Khalil: We deal with a large number of records that are generated daily within the network. This is data coming from deep packet inspection probes. Almost every operator we talk to has them deployed, because they want to understand the user experience on their networks.

These probes capture large volume of clickstream data. Then, they relay it to us almost in a near real-time fashion. This is the velocity component. We leverage open-source technologies that we adapted to our needs that allow us to deal with the influx of streaming data.
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We're now in discussion with HPE about their Kafka offering, which deals with streaming data and scalability issues and seems to complement our current solution and enhances our ability to deal with the velocity and volume issues. Then, our challenge is not just dealing with the data velocity, but also how to access the data and render reports in few seconds.

One of our offering is a care product that’s used by care organizations. They want to know what their customers did the last hour on the network. So there's a near real-time urgency to have this data streamed, loaded, processed, and available for reporting. That’s what our platforms offers.

Gardner: Joseph, given that you're global in nature and that there are so many distribution points for the gathering of data, do you bring this all into a single data center? Do you use cloud or other on-demand elements? How do you manage the centralization of that data?
Our customers can go and see the performance of everything that’s happened on the network for the last 13 months.

Khalil: We don’t have cloud deployments to date, even though our technology allows for it. We could deploy our software in the cloud, but again, due to privacy concerns with customers' data, we end up deploying our solutions in-network within the operators’ firewalls.

One of the big advantages of our solution is that we can choose to host it locally on customers’ premises. We typically store data for up to 13 months. So our customers can go and see the performance of everything that’s happened on the network for the last 13 months.

We store the data at different levels -- hourly, daily, weekly, monthly -- but to answer your question, we deploy on-site, and that’s where all the data is centralized.

Gardner: Let’s look at why this is so important to your customer, the mobile carrier, the mobile operator. What is it that helps their business and benefits their business by having this data and having that speed of analysis?

Customer care

Khalil: Our customer care module, the Subscriber Analytix Care, is used by care agents. These are the individuals that respond to 611 calls from customers complaining about issues with their devices, coverage, or whatever the case may be.

When they're on the phone with a customer and they put in a phone number to investigate, they want to be able to get the report to render in under five seconds. They don’t want to have the customer waiting while the tool is churning trying to retrieve the care dashboard. They want to hit "go," and have the information come on their screen. They want to be able to quickly determine if there's an issue or not. Is there a network issue, is it a device issue, whatever the case may be?

So we give them that speed and simplicity, because the data we are collecting is very complex, and we take all the complexity away. We have our own proprietary data analysis and modeling techniques, and it happens on-the-fly as the data is going through the system. So when the care agent loads that screen, it’s right there at a glance. They can quickly determine what the case may be that’s impacting the customer.
Our care module has been demonstrated to reduce the average call handle time, the time care personnel spend with the customer on the phone.

Our care module has been demonstrated to reduce the average call handle time, the time care personnel spend with the customer on the phone. For big operators, you could imagine how many calls they get every day. Shaving a few minutes off each call can amount to a lot of savings in terms of dollars for them.

Gardner: So in a sense, there’s a force-multiplier by having this analysis. Not only do you head off the problems and fix them before they become evident, which includes better user experience, they're happier as a customer. They stay on the network. But then, when there are problems, you can empower those people who are solving the problem, who are dealing with that customer directly to have the right information in hand.

Khalil: Exactly. They have everything. We give them all the tools that are available to them to quickly determine on the fly how to resolve the issue that the customer is having. That’s why speed is very important for a module like care.
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For our marketing module, speed is important, but not as critical as care, because now you don’t have a customer waiting on the line for you to run your report to see how subscribers are using the network or how they're using their devices. We still produce reports fairly quickly in few seconds, which is also what the platform can offer for marketing.

Gardner: So those are some of the immediate and tactical benefits, but I should think that, over time, as you aggregate this data, there is a strategic benefit, where you can predict what demands are going to be on your networks and/or what services will be more in demand than others, perhaps market by market, region by region. How does that work? How do you provide that strategic level of analysis as well?

Khalil: This is on the marketing side of our platform, Subscriber Analytix Marketing. It's used by the CMO organizations, by marketing analysts, to understand how subscribers are using the services. For example, an operator will have different rate plans or tariff plans. They have different devices, tablets, different offerings, different applications that they're promoting.

How are customers using all these services? Before the advent of deep packet inspection probes and before the advent of big data, operators were blind to how customers are using the services offered by the network. Traditional tools couldn’t get anywhere near handling the amount of data that’s generated by the services.

 Specific needs

Today, we can look at this data and synthesize it for them, so they can easily look at it, slice and dice it along many dimensions such as, age, gender, device type, location, time, you name it. Marketing analysts can then use these dimensions to ask very detailed questions about usage on the network. Based on that, they can target specific customers with specific offers that match their specific needs.

Gardner: Of course, in a highly competitive environment, where there are multiple carriers vying for that mobile account, the one that’s first to market with those programs can have a significant advantage.

Khalil: Exactly. Operators are competing now based on the services they offer and their related costs. Back 10-15 years ago, radio coverage footprint and voice plans were the driving factors. Today, it's the data services offered and their associated rate plans.

Gardner: Joseph, let’s learn a little bit more about INOVVO. You recently completed purchase of comScore’s wireless solutions division. Tell us a bit about how you’ve grown as a company, both organically and through acquisition, and maybe the breadth of your services beyond what we've already described?
Our tool allows them to anticipate when existing network elements exhaust their current capacity.

Khalil: INOVVO is a new company. We started in May 2015, but the business is very mature. My senior managers and I have been in this business since 2005. We started the Subscriber Analytix product line back in 2005. Then, comScore acquired us in 2010, and we stayed with them for about 5 years, until this past May.

At that time, comScore decided that they wanted to focus more on their core business and they decided to divest the Subscriber Analytix group. My senior management and I executed a management buyout, and that’s how we started INOVVO.

However, comScore is still a key partner for us. A key component of our product is a dictionary for categorizing and classifying websites, devices, and mobile apps. That’s produced by comScore, and comScore is known in this industry as the gold standard for these types of categorizations .

We have exclusive licensing rights to use the dictionary in our platform. So we have a very close partnership with comScore. Today, as far as the services that INOVVO offers, we have a Subscriber Analytix product line, which is for care, marketing, and network.

We talked about care and marketing, we also have a network module. This is for engineers and network planners. We help engineers understand the utilization of their network elements and help them plan and forecast what the utilization is going to be in the near future, given current trends, and help them stay ahead of the curve. Our tool allows them to anticipate when existing network elements exhaust their current capacity.

Gardner: And given that platform and technology providers like HPE are enabling you to handle streaming real-time highly voluminous amounts of data, where do you see your services going next?

It appears to me that more than just mobile devices will be on these networks. Perhaps we're moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT). We're looking more towards people replacing other networks with their mobile network for entertainment and other aspects of their personal and business lives. At that packet level, where you examine this traffic, it seems to me that you can offer more services to more people in the fairly near future.

Two paths

Khalil: IoT is big and it’s showing up on everybody’s radar. We have two paths that we're pursuing on our roadmap. There is the technology component, and that’s why HPE is a key partner for us. We believe in all their big data components that they offer. And the other component for us is the data-science component and data analysis.

The innovation is going to be in the type of modeling techniques that are going to be used to help, in our case, our customers, the mobile operators. Moving down the road, there could be other beneficiaries of that data, for example companies that are deploying the sensors that are generating the data.

I'm sure they want some feedback on all that data that their sensors are generating. We have all the building blocks now to keep expanding what we have and start getting into those advanced analytics, advanced methodologies, and predictive modeling. These are the areas, and this is where we see really our core expertise, because we understand this data.

Today you see a lot of platforms showing up that say, “Give me your data and I'll show you nice looking reports.” But there is a key component that is missing and that is the domain expertise in understanding the data. This is our core expertise.
My advice is that it’s a new field and you need to consider not just the Hadoop storage layer but the other analytical layers that complements it.

Gardner: Before we finish up, I'd like to ask you about lessons learned that you might share with others. For those organizations that are grappling with the need for near real-time analytics with massive amounts of data, having tremendous amount of data available to them, maybe it’s on a network, maybe it’s in a different environment, do you have any 20/20 hindsight that you might offer on how to make the best use of big data and monetize it?

Khalil: There is a lot of confusion in the industry today about big data. What is big data and what do I need for big data? You hear the terms Hadoop. "I have deployed a Hadoop cluster. So I have solved my big data needs." You ask people what’s their big-data strategy, and they say they have deployed Hadoop. Well, then. what are you doing with Hadoop? How are you accessing the data? How are you reporting on the data?

My advice is that it’s a new field and you need to consider not just the Hadoop storage layer but the other analytical layers that complements it. Everybody is excited about big data. Everybody wants to really have strategy to use big data, and there are multiple components to it. We offer a key component. We don't pitch ourselves to our customers and say, “We are your big data solution for everything you have.”
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There is an underlying framework that they have to deploy, and Hadoop is one of them. then comes our piece. It sits on top of the data hosting infrastructure and feeds from all the different data types, because in our industry, typical operators have hundreds if not thousands of data silos that exist in their organization.

So you need framework to really host the various data sources, and Hadoop could be one of them. Then, you need a higher-level reporting layer, an analytical layer, that really can start combining these data silos and making sense of it and bringing value to the organization. So it's a complete strategy of how to handle big data.

Gardner: And that analytics layer that's what HPE Vertica is doing for you.

Key component

Khalil: Exactly. HPE is a key component of what do we do in our analytical layer. There are misconceptions. When we go talk to our customers, They say, “Oh, you're using your Vertica platform to replicate our big data store,” and we say that we're not. The big data store is a lower level, and we're an analytical layer. We're not going to keep everything. We're going to look at all your data, throw away a lot of it, just keep what you really need, and then synthesize it to be modeled and reported on.

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Thursday, December 17, 2015

DevOps by design--A practical guide to effectively ushering DevOps into any organization

The next BriefingsDirect 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 important ways to successfully usher DevOps into any large, complex enterprise IT environment, and we'll hear best practices on making DevOps a multi-generational 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.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

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, and Todd DeCapua, Chief Technology Evangelist at HPE Software. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: When we talk about DevOps in a large environment, what are the barriers that we're facing these days? It's a complex undertaking, but what are the things we need to be thinking about in terms of making DevOps a beneficial reality?

Ohal: Fundamentally, industries come in many different models, which is often a sending and receiving mode rather than a communicating mode.

Ohal
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 they 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 plays a key role.
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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 developers are communicating with each other, or the security team for security-related issues. An operations engineer has KPI up-time, but he really doesn’t know the various application modules he's supporting.  

Suddenly, by enforcing DevOps, we're telling all the organization to begin 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, 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, to work with us, have a handshake, form a high-performance team, and deliver into an enterprise solution to Cognizant's and HPE's 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. It's 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.

DeCapua
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.

Gardner: 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 practical 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 to 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 works 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 the 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 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.
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.

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 they still 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 business is just getting IT services. They have to understand that this service needs to be enhanced so that the 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 multi-generational 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. We may start with a testing organization and then we decide to pull it into the development and IT organization.
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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 toward cloud.

They're starting with using cloud web services, cloud authentication at an IT level. We're not talking a larger landscape, but they're trying that. Basically this transformation from startup to product, product to services, and then services to cloud. That is your multi-generational vision with your multi-generational business plan, because your people change, your IT changes, your technology changes, your business models keep changing, your customers change, your revenue changes, and the mode of revenue changes.
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.

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 on Wall Street, giving us so much employment, or have such a large consumer base.

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 that understanding this all -- yet the customer multi-generational 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 multi-generational 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 retailer. 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 an 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 disruptions

DeCapua: Yes. Dana and Sachin, as we look at this challenge and wrapping this around the use case that Cognizant has -- not only the one customer that we are talking about, but really all of them -- and thinking through this multi-generational business plan using DevOps, there are some real fundamentals to think about. But there are disruptions in the world today, and maybe starting there helps to illustrate a little bit better why this concept of a multi-generational business plan is so important.

Consider Uber, Yelp, or Netflix. Each one of them is in a different stage of a multi-generational 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 where 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.
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.

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 organizational, multi-generational 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.

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.
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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 multi-generational 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 groups 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 DevOps.
You have to make sure where you are adopting your DevOps.

It's not for just getting the continuous delivery in-place or continuous integration in-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 up-time."

There are so many various aspects, various views. Todd mentioned that he has all these examples, but if you check other example as well, they're very focused on their multi-generational business plan, and if you want to succeed, you have to be focused on those aspects as well.

Gardner: 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.
The second piece that comes in is this analysis capability. How are you tracking the results?

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 multi-generational 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.

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