The theme for our next meeting will be DevOps. We’ll be bringing in a couple of great speakers from HP and one of its biggest and most highly-regarded customers in the St. Louis area. I’m hoping you all will realize the value of this upcoming event and plan to attend. But for those of you who don’t know of this DevOps thing I speak of, please allow me to elaborate.
To understand DevOps, you must first understand Agile Software Development. Agile is a strategy for developing software that simply put, is geared towards decomposition of complexity. Learn more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
http://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2013/november/the-agile-manifesto-principles-what-do-they-mean
With that out of the way, DevOps can trace its origins to Agile Software Development and is geared more towards the collaboration of software development and IT operations personnel for the sake of the rapid delivery of software products and services. Learn more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps
So why is this necessary? With the digital society we live in, there are more business opportunities than ever. However, the window for successful capitalization upon them can often be very short. Companies need to be able to quickly identify & exploit them before their competitors do. At the same time, customer needs and expectations are evolving at breakneck speeds. With the number of choices available nowadays, companies that fail to quickly meet their customer’s needs risk losing them to faster, more responsive competitors. Agile was a good start in addressing these problems, but DevOps is an improvement. After all, the ability to quickly develop working software is meaningless without the ability to fast-track its delivery to the market.
So why is this important to you? Chances are, DevOps stands to change the way you work in the near future. Regardless as to what role you have within your organization, it would behoove you to attend. Perhaps you’re already part of an Agile shop and are feeling the strain created when the development teams can’t deploy their software as quickly as the business needs them to? Or maybe you’re already doing (or attempting to do) DevOps and would like to know more about it and hear it from experienced and successful professionals operating in this arena? Finally, maybe your organization is evaluating this approach and simply wants to learn more about how HP can help you be successful in this arena and how one of their premier customers is already doing it. Regardless as to your motives, I encourage you to register for this event. Whether you’re looking for product information or implementation advice, you’ll add value to your organization through the knowledge gained by attending.
Register for the event here:
http://vivitworldwide.site-ym.com/events/event_details.asp?id=395188&group=
In the coming weeks, I’ll be speaking to the different presenters we’ll have at the event. I’ll also be addressing any housekeeping issues or questions that might arise. Some of this will take place on the Vivit Blog (because I get participation points in doing so) whereas the rest will take place via email. Regardless, stay tuned because there will be more information to come.
