DevOps Chat: InterConnect 2017 w/ Randy Newell, IBM DevOps

In this episode of DevOps Chats we are again joined by Randy Newell, Director World Wide Marketing for DevOps. Randy had a bunch of news he wanted to share with us including the call for speakers for IBM’s InterConnect 2017 which is open until November 11th. Randy also gave us a preview of the IBM sessions at the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit.

Randy always has some good news and point of views to share. This interview is no different. Enjoy!

As usual the streaming file is below with a printed transcript below:

Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. Alan Shimel for another DevOps Chat. Happy to be joined on this episode by Randy Newell, Director Worldwide DevOps Marketing for IBM and a friend of mine. Randy, welcome to DevOps Chat.

Randy Newell: Thanks, Alan. Good to be here.

Alan Shimel: Absolutely. Randy, I invited you on because it’s getting near that time of year again where we’re ramping up for IBM Interconnect and I know you and your team have spent – have already invested weeks if not months of man hours and blood, sweat and tears in getting Interconnect ready to rock for this year. Why don’t you give our audience some highlights?

Randy Newell: Okay, sure. Yeah, I mean this is absolutely the most exciting time of the year for a number of reasons. I mean we’re getting ready for Interconnect, which we’ll talk about. We’ve got really key events in the DevOps space like the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Gartner puts on a big applications strategies event in December and so forth, so this is absolutely, you know, my favorite time of the year.

I think the – kind of the cool thing that’s hot right now is we have just gone live with the call for speakers for IBM Interconnect 2017. That event is March 19^th to the 23^rd in Las Vegas. Last year we had, you know, over 20,000 attendees. Next year, this coming year, we’ll be even bigger. So it’ll be over 24,000 attendees.

Alan Shimel: Wow.

Randy Newell: Yeah. Where we ended up last year – and you were there, Alan. I mean the – it’s exciting, it’s a big conference. DevOps is a major piece of what happens at this bigger conference that has, you know, cloud and cognitive and mobile going on as well, but the DevOps piece itself I think was almost 250 sessions last year, labs, workshops, sessions, and I think one of the big things that we’re doing this year is actually bolstering the ops side of this thing. So we’ll have over 300 sessions and labs and workshops this year with a really good balance across the DevOps lifecycle, if you will, and we’re pretty excited about it.

Alan Shimel: Yeah. Sounds great, Randy. Randy, I – you know, you mentioned the call for speakers. If I’m – I happened to take a look. I believe the call for speakers is open through November 11^th, correct?

Randy Newell: Yep. We’ve just opened it up in the last week so now through November 11^th, you know, we’d encourage everybody to get their proposals in. I mean if it’s not something that you want to speak at we would obviously encourage you to attend the event anyway but would encourage, you know, a lot of the subject matter experts and thought leaders that pay attention to DevOps.com to submit papers to this. It is – you know, if people have not attended before or watched online, you know, just thinking about some of the highlights from last year, and you interviewed [laughs] so many of these people –

Alan Shimel: Yeah.

Randy Newell: – you know, Lloyds with Mark Howell and John LaFreniere at Hertz, Topo Pal who is a Cap One fellow from Capital One, Nationwide with Carmen DeArdo and just some really super innovative smaller companies like Security First Insurance, Ben Bomhoff, who I know you interviewed

Alan Shimel: Yeah.

Randy Newell: – and, you know, it just keeps going. Presentations from a lot of our cool business partners like Datical and Blue Agility and PointSource, so it’s really high quality presentation content from organizations big and small who have figured out DevOps and are scaling it and getting, you know, real success out of it, and then I think we’re also drilling down from an IBM perspective to provide labs and workshops and so forth to really get deep into some of the sever system tools that we’re providing.

Alan Shimel: You got some good hands-on stuff. Randy, for those who might be listening and saying, “Geez, I’d – you know, I’d like to throw my hat in, I’d like to speak,” what are you looking for in not only speakers, obviously, but in subject matter?

Randy Newell: Well, I think it’s actually an interesting topic for this year because I think we’re really expanding what we want to see. I think kind of standard fare, but we want to continue to push on these areas because we’re pushing the envelope on what we’re seeing clients able to achieve, you know, areas of continuous delivery, application release automation, software test automation including things like API testing and virtualization, but I would underscore and expand some of the areas on the ops side, especially where we’re looking for application performance management, IT ops management, IT ops analytics, and then I think especially kind of where we’re come over the last year with the introduction of the garage method as well as what we’ll be doing between now and Interconnect around tool chains. I think those are areas that are particularly exciting for us to see new presentation proposals on, so we’d really encourage some of those topics.

Alan Shimel: Yep. And I’ll just mention – ’cause, Randy, as I mentioned to you offline, I myself am submitting a speaking proposal. What’s nice is you can submit basically a one-man speaking proposal, you could submit a panel or anything in between there, so there’s lots of options and also if you go and register or to submit you will see – I think you guys did a great job of kind of guiding people what area you’re proposed session deals with so that it can be categorized and put in there and, you know, kind of so you could pick the best of the best, right, within an existing –

Alan Shimel: Yeah, there’s a –

Randy Newell: – subject matter.

Randy Newell: – lot of prompting, you’ve got a lot of prompting. So if people are going about doing this go to – you know, I mean the easiest way is just to search on IBM Interconnect 2017 call for speakers, and when you get into the tool just take a look. There’s two main topic areas where we’ll find the DevOps stuff. It’s listed directly under hybrid and DevOps and then also under Bluemix and Softlayer there’s DevOps as well. There’s an awful lot of prompts under the hybrid category for some of the topics that I just reeled off in addition to a whole bunch of others and don’t stop there. I mean people should have some fun with this; what they’re challenged with, where they’re seeing successes. I mean we want to push the envelope a bit on the type of topics that we’re seeing.

Alan Shimel: Sure. And Randy, just as an aside, it’s not all DevOps all the time – well, actually it is all DevOps all the time for me anyway, but IBM Interconnect also – like last year, for instance – cognitive and Watson and some of the really good kind of gee whiz kind of stuff that IBM’s working on is also on full display at Interconnect.

Randy Newell: Absolutely. Yeah, there’s a whole – as you’re aware, we did the whole _____ arena which is a lot of hands-on to be able to play with brand new capabilities, Watson APIs, [laughs] a foosball table that’s hooked up live to a Bluemix application. I mean there’s just – there’s so much kind of exciting stuff to do and it is – you know, while I think we lead with Interconnect as our key presentation of our cloud capabilities, we’re so integrated, you know, within IBM that you will see how that plays out in collaboration with Watson capabilities. We’ll see representation of our systems group and, you know, representation of Z mainframe technology. We’ll see mobile capabilities.

It really is a great display. And I think it’s actually – in the industry, it’s probably pretty unique in the fact that – I mean historically Interconnect represents many different conferences coming together that IBM offered, and so you have a slice of the IT organization and now kind of increasingly bringing in line of business representatives and so forth so you’ve got – for me anyway, looking at it from a DevOps perspective, you’ve got dev, you’ve got ops, you’ve got your business owners, you’ve got everyone attending, you’ve got practitioners that are attending, you’ve got architects. It’s really a neat opportunity and I think when organizations are evaluating their attendance at Interconnect, you know, it’s really – the interesting part of it is we can bring a large organization and there is deep content for all parts as you drill down and get technical and there are also very interesting subjects for the organization as a whole, so it’s a very broad and deep context from an IT perspective.

Alan Shimel: Excellent. And Randy, for those who maybe don’t want to – you know, are not planning on speaking or presenting but would like to still attend, of course it’s open to anyone, right?

Randy Newell: Absolutely.

Alan Shimel: You can buy tickets. I mean, again, I would just probably Google search IBM Interconnect 2017. And Randy, the dates – I know you moved it later in March this year. Just again for our audience.

Randy Newell: Yep. It’s March 19^th to the 23^rd in Las Vegas –

Alan Shimel: Perfect.

Randy Newell: – at the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay.

Alan Shimel: And Mandalay Bay, yep. That’s a big show. But Randy, that’s not the only conference IBM DevOps is kind of really exerting a strong presence. We have the Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit coming up around Election Day, November – I think it’s 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, perhaps in San Francisco.

Randy Newell: We will be out there on Election Day, yes. So all attendees make sure you do your absentee vote before you go unless you’re in the Bay Area. [Laughs]

Alan Shimel: Yeah. Exactly. But you guys have kind of an all-star lineup and a bunch of different activities lined up for that week. Why don’t you just give us a quick preview, if you don’t mind.

Randy Newell: Sure. So DevOps Enterprise Summit, you know, this is Gene Kim’s lead event and it’s November 7^th to 9^th in San Francisco. IBM’s a platinum sponsor, there’s a lot of great sponsors. It’s an exciting event and so we’re really looking forward to it. I think it’s – you know, the content especially is very well curated and I think a lot of the success stories that are brought forward are really in tune with kind of the frontend of what’s happening with DevOps where organizations are achieving scale and real results, so I think in that case it’s particularly exciting among the many DevOps events that are out there. We’ve put together I think a really interesting set of presentations, and I’ll click through them real quickly here. I think one that’s particularly exciting is we call it adopting DevOps at scale, lessons learned at NBCUniversal, Kaiser and GitHub and IBM. So Sanjeev Sharma, who you’ve interviewed a number of times –

Alan Shimel: Sure.

Randy Newell: – he’s an IBM distinguished engineer and the author of DevOps for Dummies is going to kind of host that panel, and on that panel we’ve got John Comas from NBCUniversal, Raghu Raman from Kaiser, and we’ll also represent some of what we’ve been doing inside at IBM where we’re about – you know, we’re kind of well into our DevOps transformation. We’ve got about 40,000 developers that are in the process of transforming to a DevOps approach and we’re through about 10,000 of those and a lot of that learning we’ll be bringing forward as part of this presentation. So the idea is, you know, how do we use that time that we’ve got in that particular session to really show off three or four very significant organizations that have been able to achieve some scale? And I think what Gene has represented as kind of the horses, but you know, the more typical, big, complex enterprise organization and how they can succeed at both, you know, the two-pizza team and scale it all the way up to, you know, kind of enterprise adoption.

Alan Shimel: Sure. You know what, Randy, I wanted to just mention – you mentioned Raghunath Raman from Kaiser Permanente and actually he and another fellow who I interviewed at Interconnect last year, John LaFreniere – I probably butchered John’s name, I apologize, I’m better with Indian names than French names but… [Laughs]

Randy Newell: Well, just say John’s name with a French accent and you’ll get by.

Alan Shimel: John from Hertz, doing an amazing transformation there. I have both Raghunath and John on a webinar. I think it’s on November 29^th, so this’ll be after DevOps Enterprise Summit, but we’re gonna talk about, you know, transformations and checking in – both of these gentlemen, Raghunath and John have really done some pretty cool stuff with, as you say – you know, or as Gene says horses, right? Not unicorns but large organizations and especially the Hertz one, Randy.

It’s kind of just an out with the old and in with the new kind of transformation and a little unusual where Raghunath I think has gone more of a traditional transformation, but he’s also pushed the needle a heck of a lot there. So for those – the audience out there, November 29^th is that webinar on DevOps.com. You can register online. Highly, highly recommend that one. Randy, I think there’s some news around Bluemix garage method around for Gene’s event as well or no?

Randy Newell: Yeah, definitely. And so let me – and let me tell you that there’s a couple of sessions, additional sessions at DevOps Enterprise Summit where we’ll be showing some of that off. So one is adapting the squad model with Ann Marie Fred, at – and she’s an IBMer – and she’ll talk about some of the transformation that we’ve done internally at IBM. So that’s an exciting one. And then, of course, you know Rosalind Radcliffe.

She’s co presenting with Rich Jackson from Walmart and that is a mainframe DevOps team savings of the day at Walmart. So there’s a number of really interesting presentations. We’re also running a series of lightening talks, demos, in our booth area and we’ll publish a schedule. So for people who are attending that particular conference, you know, look for a theater presentation for what we’ll be doing in the booth, we’ll be driving down into some key offerings like method and tool chain into urban code into test automation, Bluemix, et cetera. So that can be a lot of fun, and then of course, encourage people to attend the overall conference and we’ll be highlighting these other presentations that we just talked about.

But you asked about, you know, kind of methods and tool chains and I – you know, for those of your listeners and readers who may have missed it, last year at Gene’s conference we introduced the Bluemix garage method – we refer to it just generally as a method – and as I indicated earlier, we’re kind of, you know, a CIO-level endorsed movement, transformation to DevOps inside of IBM. We’ve got, you know, over 40,000 developers. We’re about 10,000 developers into this material transformation which impacts process and tooling and underlying infrastructure technology and methods that we’re using, and we’ve harvested a lot of the learnings from this significant transformation as well as what we do through global services, client interactions and codified that into a methodology, and so, you know, people can go to http://www.ibm.com/devops/method or just Google Bluemix garage method. And what you’ll find is we’ve populated this with elements of the methodology.

What’s evolved since we announced this thing is we’re now rolling in reference architectures, a concept of tracks, you know, syncing with online courseware, the idea being, you know, as we’ve dealt with both transforming ourselves and as we see our clients adopting DevOps some of the challenges are how do we take the success of that two-pizza team where you have focused on business outcomes and technical outcomes and then scale that. And some of the challenges are cultural, some of them are process-related, some of them are tools-related, and so that’s a lot of what’s gone into the methodology, and so these tracks are somewhat – are basically use case-oriented. I am building, you know, some bimodal or multispeed application, I’m building a cloud native application, I’m building a mobile app, those sorts of things, and it surrounds you with elements of the methodology, of reference architectures, and now we’re moving towards this introduction of tool chain.

And the tool chain concept is really cool and people will find it especially cool coming from IBM, is because based on that use case that you select, the specific tool chain, you will be prompted with a set of services that sit on Bluemix, which is our cloud platform, and it’s a mix of both IBM services as well as third party services that represent the key elements and key services that you need in your tool chain for the particular use case. So if you’re, you know, selecting a – you know, let’s say a simple cloud native application it would prompt you on, you know, GitHub and a WebIDE and our delivery pipeline service from IBM and you literally click a button that says, you know, build this tool chain for me and it instantiates that, provisions it and integrates those tools and presents it to you as your dashboard on Bluemix and all of that takes, you know, a couple of minutes. So the idea is that through method reference architecture tool chain you have the ability to spin it very rapidly and then some guidance and architectures for actually how to move forward and how to scale, and so that’s kind of it. And I know you’ve spent some time with Rachel and so forth who’s, you know, directly involved with the garage method and kind of expanding this thing in conjunction with how we’re using it in the Bluemix garages and really seeing some pretty exciting response to it.

I think some of the customer’s names that we’ve mentioned earlier as well as others, you know, have seen some of this stuff firsthand and benefited from it, so we’re looking forward to gaining some commentary on that. It’s part of the reason that we’ve brought the GitHub team into the presentation that we’re doing at DevOps Enterprise Summit, because I think they’ve seen firsthand how the IBM transformation has actually utilized GitHub Enterprise, which is taking all the benefit of GitHub and using that within the Enterprise firewall through GitHub Enterprise and we have that instantiated as a, you know, full Bluemix service. So it’s pretty exciting execution.

Alan Shimel: Cool. Randy, we have gone significantly over our allotted time here. I apologize. I didn’t want to interrupt you and I think our audience finds it – will find it useful and informative, but I – for those of you who are still listening at the end of our interview, I thank you very much for staying with us and I think it was worth your time and I certainly hope so. Well, Randy, we’re gonna have to call it a wrap on this version of DevOps Chats. Perhaps we’ll have you back on if we have time before Enterprise –DevOps Enterprise Summit, but if not I’m sure we’ll have you back on before IBM Interconnect in March, maybe once we have some more information on speaker selected and stuff we can review some highlights.

Randy Newell: Yep. Fantastic. Appreciate the time, Alan. This was great.

Alan Shimel: Not a problem. Randy Newell, Worldwide Marketing – Director Worldwide Marketing for DevOps IBM. Thanks for being this segment’s guest on DevOps Chat and continued success and good luck. We’ll see you San Francisco I guess next for Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit. Until then, this is Alan Shimel of DevOPs.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you on another DevOps chat.

— Alan Shimel