No DevOps? No Cloud? No Digital!
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
DevOps, Cloud and Digital are closely linked subjects. Organisations across sectors are realising the transformative power of digital. However, while there is increased appreciation of digital’s role, many organisations are struggling to take their transformation initiatives to the next level.
They are caught struggling for pace, and risk falling in the chasm between initiation and termination of transformation initiatives as well as are missing key ingredients – DevOps and Cloud.
Without a question Digital is key for many, if not all organisations nowadays. Every sector is impacted by the emergence of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud). For instance the Retail sector is “being” driven by SMAC and in order to measure the impact Uber’s Chris Messina coined the term “Conversational Commerce” in a 2015 piece published on Medium.
It refers to the intersection of messaging apps and shopping. Meaning, the trend toward interacting with businesses through messaging and chat apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Talk, and WeChat. To figure out what the social app impact is on a retail organisations, MIT compare the MCAP (market capitalisation) of retailers that fully embrace social media and those who don’t. The impact is clear to see – the MCAP for the top 10 retailers who fully embrace Digital is $4T, whereas it is -$2T for the retailers who don’t.
And how can organisations like a retailer capture this opportunity? Retailers have to focus on customer experience; super-fast speed; top class quality and by ensuring it can shift and move with the market; fast.
DevOps is all about speed, quality and value for money and Cloud is the main vehicle for the Digital Masters to provision applications and infrastructure capabilities in an agile, flexible and speedy way – 15% of all new applications are born in the cloud, rising to 30% by 2020 [1].
Of course there is a question of “the how”; how to move traditional IT – in the retail example this is typically related to an inflexible, silo’ed and separate store setup, separate backoffice / headoffice related core merchandising, marketing and distribution systems – to a customer centric, agile, flexible and seamless multi-channel experience aka Amazon.com, Netflix, etc.
To find the answer to that question many start with finding and defining the journey. Whatever the “how”; what is clear is that it has to include DevOps and Cloud related aspects. .
Summary
Without DevOps a retailer will not be able to react and respond to the ever shifting and changing customer demand profile and without Cloud it will be impossible to provision, shift and deploy applications and infrastructure capabilities.
Thanks for Reading.
About the Author: Gunnar Menzel has been an IT professional for over 29 years and is VP and Chief Architect Officer for Capgemini’s Cloud Infrastructure Business. His main focus is business – enabling technology transformation & innovation
Reference : [1] cloud_native_comes_of_age.pdf
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