By Dan O'Brien
SHARE’s twice yearly, weeklong events have always been a robust source of education for enterprise IT professionals because of the intensive technical tracks that comprise the bulk of the sessions. The educational experience at SHARE in San Antonio will be all the richer, thanks to the addition of the DevOps in the Enterprise track, which will feature presentations from TechBeacon’s 100 DevOps “ones to watch.”
Featured sessions will include Mind the Gap: considerations for your DevOps in the enterprise, DevOps Principles Applied to Mainframe Application Development, and Apps and Ops: Keys to a Superior Mobile to Mainframe Customer Experience.
So why all the focus on DevOps? Though use of the term is relatively new, DevOps deserves a prominent place in even the most traditional enterprise IT organization. IT shops that don’t get on board now will find themselves left behind as the companies around them maximize their value through more efficient and agile practices.
Every IT organization strives these days to achieve balance between their quest for innovation and the practical reality of keeping the lights on. It is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time, especially as organizations strive to be the next great disruptive force in business. That’s where DevOps comes in. It’s a way of thinking that fosters the experimentation and dexterity critical to advancing the business while preserving the reliability and predictability necessary to maintain core operations. In other words, it’s a way to bring a startup culture to an established organization.
Here’s just one example of DevOps in action. Nationwide Mutual Insurance, a financial services company with more than $135 billion in statutory assets, needed to speed up its response time to changes in the market, while getting new products and services out to customers more quickly, according to IBM. Within three years of adopting DevOps practices, Nationwide saw dramatic results. “This [solution] allows us to be more agile as a business and more responsive to our customers,” Steve Farley, vice president of Nationwide’s application development center, told IBM. “This has led to improved quality by 50 percent and reduced system downtime by 70 percent over the last three years.”
Easier said than done, though, right? That’s where SHARE comes in, helping you bring the agile practices of DevOps to the reliable infrastructure of the mainframe. For a wonderful primer on DevOps and enterprise IT, download IBM Distinguished Engineer Rosalind Radcliffe’s fantastic eBook, Mobile to Mainframe DevOps for Dummies, which outlines why DevOps is necessary, how to apply its best practices to the mainframe, and what to expect as you transform your operations. And of course, don’t forget to register for SHARE in San Antonio, February 29-March 4, to take advantage of the full DevOps educational track!