What is the Threat to the CIO? Competition baby

I was reading this guest post on Forbes by Gartner research VP Peter Songaard.

Many CIOs Are Unprepared For The Next Era In Enterprise IT

Comment Now

By Peter Sondergaard

Gartner, Inc.

The next era of enterprise IT is upon us, but many CIOs are not prepared to manage the demands that come in this new era. We refer to this next era as the digitalization of IT, and it’s the beginning of the digital industrial economy.

According to Gartner’s annual CIO Agenda survey, the CIOs responded to say that they often feel overwhelmed by the prospect of building digital leadership while, at the same time, renovating the core of IT infrastructure and capability for the digital future. The survey found that 51 percent of CIOs are concerned that this change is coming faster than they can cope and 42 percent don’t feel that they have the talent needed to face this future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now one answer could be go to Gartner to be prepared for the changes.  Or the other way to look at this problem of being unprepared as Enterprise IT has competition. Check out this Dell Video with Safeway’s CIO Barry Libenson and PuppetLab’s Luke Kaines.

IT is Facing Competition for the First Time Ever

Do the CIOs realize that they are now competing for IT services?

IT Automation companies Puppet Labs and Chef invest in new CFOs

Some things  I hear before the press release and hearing something in a bar is not acceptable to write a blog entry.  On Nov 29th I was sitting in a bar and Bill Koefoed said he had a new job and was leaving Microsoft.  Bill’s latest job was CFO at Skype, and he had a new job at a company called Puppet.  Sitting in a bar with a bunch of other ski friends he was used to people saying “Puppet?  What’s that?”  When Bill told me, I said awesome Luke is great.  Scott and Nigel too.  You joined a great team.  It’s a two man race against Chef who just hired another Microsoft CFO.

Now that the news is public I can reference the public disclosures.  AllthingsDigital referenced Bill’s job change.

Top Microsoft Finance Exec Koefoed Departs for Puppet Labs

DECEMBER 4, 2013 AT 1:08 PM PT

One of the voices I always enjoyed over the years at the start of Microsoft earnings calls, Bill Koefoed, will be leaving the software giant after eight years to take a job as CFO of Puppet Labs. Most recently, he was working as CFO in the Skype and then in the marketing and business development unit. But Koefoed is perhaps best known, as I called him, as “Microsoft investor relations dude-in-chief.” Puppet Labs develops IT automation software, with almost $46 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, True Ventures, VMware and others.

Opscode CFO announcement is here in GigaOm.

Opscode, the company behind the popular Chef configuration management tool set, has a new name (it’s Chef, duh); a new CFO in Microsoft alum Curt Anderson and $32 million in new Series D funding to make the most of that new identity and to promote itself as an IT management “platform.”

Living in Seattle (Chef HQ) and making trips to Portland (Puppet HQ) it is hard not to run into Chef and Puppet employees especially since I write articles on DevOps for GigaOm.

Here is the article I wrote on Continuous Delivery and Devops sponsored by Opscode last year.

Continuous delivery and the world of devops

by 
 Oct. 1, 2012
This report underwritten by: Opscode.
1Executive Summary

The advent of online businesses has created new opportunities and fierce competition. Companies want to get their products and services to market as fast as they can, and releases that occur in periods of months or years are no longer competitive. As a result, the pattern of how to release software is changing from large, infrequent releases of new software to small releases that occur very frequently, as shown in Figure 1. The ultimate goal is the continuous delivery of software updates.

Figure 1. The changing pattern of software releases

 

This paper explains the world of continuous delivery and its underlying philosophy, devops. Continuous delivery is an automated pipeline constructed with various technologies that allows you to ensure that your code is always ready to be released. It does not mean that you have to release every change you implement: That is a business decision. It does mean that when you choose to release, your code is ready, fully functional, and fully tested.

In conjunction with the technology is the emerging devops methodology, which is an outgrowth of the agile movement. This movement stresses collaboration among groups that have often found themselves at odds, in particular development teams and operations teams. This increased level of collaboration blurs the boundaries between infrastructure and code. Looking at application code and infrastructure holistically rather than as separate disciplines and treating them the same in terms of automated delivery provides compelling benefits in terms of time to market and overall stability.

Introduction to Continuous Delivery

I am off to PuppetConf to spend a day in the world of DevOps and Continuous Delivery.  DevOps is pretty familiar to most of you.  What is Continuous Delivery here is a pointer to a GigaOm Research paper I wrote and was published back in Oct 2012.

Continuous delivery and the world of devops

Summary:

Thanks to the rise of online business, companies must now get their products and services to market as fast as they can, and releases that occur in periods of months or years are no longer competitive. As a result, the pattern of how to release software is changing from large, infrequent releases of new software to small, frequent releases. This paper explains the world of continuous delivery and its underlying philosophy, devops. It is intended for executives who determine their organization’s business strategies. If you are looking for ways to reduce time to market and are considering a realignment of traditional assumptions about the roles of development and operations, you require knowledge of new tools and new approaches.

  1. Table of contents                                                                                                            
  2. Executive summary                                                                                                    
  3. Introduction                                                                                                                 
  4. What is continuous delivery?                                                                              
  5. Trends driving continuous delivery                                                              
  6. What is devops?                                                                                                        
  7. Technologies                                                                                                            
  8. Constructing a continuous-delivery pipeline                                          
  9. Infrastructure as code                                                                                      
  10. Tips for success                                                                                                       
  11. Ancestry.com: a case study                                                                                
  12. Key takeaways                                                                                                            
  13. List of resources                                                                                                    
  14. About Dave Ohara                                                                                                    
  15. About GigaOM Pro          

A Game Plan for Adoption and Implementation of DevOps GigaOm Webinar July 11, 2013 10-11a PT, sponsored by PuppetLabs

I've been spending a bunch of time in DevOps space, going so far into the operations perspective one of my friends it is like OpsDev where Operations is defining the Development.

On July 11, 2013 10-11a PT, I am moderating a panel discussion a PuppetLabs sponsored GigaOm Webinar.

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In this webinar, the panelists will present concrete steps IT can take to get started, provide strategies to quantify and benchmark the benefits of DevOps within their organizations, and examine case studies of successful DevOps adoptions in other businesses.

Given I am moderating the panel and in charge of putting together the slide deck I can tell you ahead of time what to expect.  The panelists are as follows.

Panelists

Research Director, GigaOM Research
CEO and CTO, Stelligent Analyst, GigaOM Research
CTO, Puppet Labs Puppet Labs
IT researcher and author, Puppet LabsPuppet Labs

Instead of a typical Q&A type of format. We well be using survey results from a PuppetLabs DevOps study shared here as discussion areas for the panelists.

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