In anticipation of the DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) London 2017, we are interviewing a series of the announced speakers who will be appearing there. The first in our DOES London 2017 speaker interviews is with Jose Quaresma of Accenture. Jose is a leader at Accenture and has a lot of knowledge on real DevOps transformations. I think you will find this conversation very enlightening.
As usual immediately below is the streaming audio of our chat, followed by the transcript of our discussion below. DOES London 2017 is shaping up to be another great conference. Also as usual, we will be live on-scene with coverage.
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel, Editor in Chief of DevOps.com, and we’re here for another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat guest is Jose Quaresma—and I probably messed that up, but Jose is with Accenture, and he’s based over in Denmark. Welcome, Jose—how are you?
Jose Quaresma: Thank you, Alan. I’m pretty good. First of all, thanks a lot for having me. I would say it’s quite an honor to participate in this chat with you.
Shimel: Oh!
Quaresma: Oh, and yes—and by the way, you got the—
Shimel: Well, flattery will get you everywhere.
Quaresma: [Laughter]
Shimel: But we’re talking a little bit today, and it’s regarding, you know, the second annual DevOps Enterprise Summit London is coming up June 5th and 6th at the QE2 in London, and you will be presenting there, correct?
Quaresma: Yes, that’s correct—yeah.
Shimel: And I wanted to—well, before we get into your presentation at DevOps Enterprise Summit, why don’t we give people a little bit of your background?
Quaresma: Sure. I can give it a quick try. So, as you said, I’m Jose, and Quaresma is the last name, so you actually did pretty well, Alan. And I’m originally from Portugal, but I’ve been living in Denmark for almost eight years now. I kinda moved in here to study, and kinda after university, then I started Accenture here in Denmark as well, which I’ve been for around three and a half years now.
I am an Application Development Associate Manager in Advanced Technology in a subgroup called Advanced Technology and Architecture, and I am the DevOps lead for Accenture Denmark.
Shimel: Excellent. And Jose, as part of that, why don’t—any particular engagements of interest that you can talk about right now?
Quaresma: Yeah. So I had, I can say, so, there were two main engagements that I’ve been involved with, and the first one was actually not so much involved in DevOps. I kinda started more as a middleware developer and kind of then walked towards the kind of web service design and team lead on that middleware area, and there was some DevOps work related there kind of with deploying the web services. But that wasn’t really something that I was driving.
But then around two, two and a half years, I kind of, it was actually, my manager—and I guess I have to thank him for that; thanks, Jarom—he kind of, he was the one kind of guiding me towards, “Okay, we have this kind of DevOps domain getting a bit more traction, and we would like to, how would you like,” it was actually asking, “How would you like to lead that domain and try to raise a bit more awareness of DevOps here in Denmark?”
So that was an interesting opportunity that I saw and yeah, from then, I was also then transitioned to a new project, which is actually the project that I’m going to co-present at DevOps Enterprise Summit now in London in June, and I’m co-presenting that with Amin Budali from Nordea, and that is the client that I’m currently working with, and this is a huge project. So Nordea, for the ones who don’t know, it’s a huge Nordic bank, being active in Denmark and Sweden and Norway and Finland. And this is, the project is about replacing their core banking application across the four countries. So it’s a huge project, a five-year project where we are working on replacing the core application with a new T24 application provided by Temenos. And that—
Shimel: Go ahead. Go ahead, Jose.
Quaresma: —and then that’s where kind of the more, it was, the DevOps, it has been very relevant now in this project, and the main thing is that, what we are, the part that we are presenting at DOES now, it’s, as I was saying, it’s not really a finished story, I would say it’s a story that has started around one year ago and we already have some interesting successes that I’m happy to talk about, but it’s hopefully a story that will have one, two, three more years until we have this very successful destination that I’m hoping I can come back to, to the DevOps Enterprise Summit and talk about that in one or two years. That would be great.
Shimel: That would be great.
Quaresma: Yeah, and that’s something I hope for, and I work for as well.
Shimel: So I’d like to ask you, Jose, for our listeners out there who maybe are listening and saying to themselves, “Man, I sure would like to present one day at a DOES, you know, a DevOps Enterprise Summit or a similar thing.” Can you give our audience maybe a little bit of background on how it came to be?
Quaresma: Yeah. I can try. So, it was actually, we have, this all kind of started with, we have a DevOps Week internally in Accenture as well, and in that internal DevOps Week, which was maybe one or two months ago, around there, maybe one month ago, we were actually, I was—I got to present this kind of, a little bit this story as well together with the client at our kind of internal DevOps Week.
And then the idea came, from that point on, it’s like, “Oh, we actually have, there’s this really amazing conference in London. Why don’t we just try, maybe?” And we did have—I confess, we did have some doubts whether we would get in, and I think the main part is thinking that, okay, we don’t actually have this beautiful, happy ending story yet. We’re still struggling, we’re still halfway through our journey. But then, also, reading through the description, we saw that these kind of ongoing journeys are also welcome at the conference, so we thought, “Well, let’s write down the things that we have learned and what we would like to present, and then let’s see if they think that will be interesting.”
Shimel: Got it. And sort of, you know, I think that’s a great description of the process and everything. Have you spoken at other events, Jose?
Quaresma: No, not really. Not at this magnitude. I’ve given kind of more internal presentations and also outside Denmark, but not really, not an event of this magnitude. So yes, I’ll be pretty nervous. [Laughter]
Shimel: What? There’s nothing to be nervous about. I’ve always found that as long as you are fluent in what you’re going to speak about, as long as you’re comfortable with that, you know, whether it be a big audience, a small audience or have you, it’s all the same, really.
Quaresma: Yeah. That’s a good point. I’ll take that with me. And not only being fluent, but also that, I think it will help that I will be talking about something that I’m really excited about and that I’ve been working hard for, so I think that will make it a little bit easier.
Shimel: Got it. You know, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is, you know, working for Accenture, you—a little different than working for just a single company in that you work with multiple clients, right, and so that gives you a chance to see sort of transformational issues, you know, across multiple organizations.
Quaresma: Yeah.
Shimel: Where a lot of people, you know, they work at Disney or they work at NBC Universal or they work at a company and sort of very much—and even at jeans events like the DevOps Enterprise Summit, it’s very much, “Here is my company’s transformation story.”
Jose, having looked at multiple companies’ transformations, what do you think you can share with our audience that sort of transcends any one organization, right, and go into multiple ones?
Quaresma: Yeah, there’s—so, one thing is, I won’t lie to you or the audience. I mean, this is the first big DevOps transformation that I’m involved with, so I can’t really kind of pull out of my hat kind of the 10 transformations that I’ve been involved with and share some kind of overall wisdom on that.
So this is definitely an advantage that I see and that I hope to use more in the future once I kind of, as you say, keep getting the experience of several different transformations in different clients with different scenarios, when you kind of—once you’ve started getting more experience with all those different transformations, there will always be things that are different, then I hope I can kind of learn from that and be able to extract some knowledge from those differences as well.
Shimel: Sure, sure. Jose, we’re almost out of time. As I promised you, it goes really quick. But let’s talk for a moment about, and this is something—so you did it, when you started your career and, you know, you said you’ve been in Denmark now eight years. Certainly it wasn’t to do DevOps transformations and so forth, but where did you come from to get to here, kind of, if you know what I mean?
Quaresma: Yeah, and that’s a pretty tough question. So, it’s kind of, my background is mostly on security and also related with—so my Master’s was actually called Security in Mobile Computing, and then I also had a, after that I had a Ph.D. in network security, mostly related with formal methods and how to kind of analyze the security of a communication protocol.
But I think the, kind of my career evolution, if—[Laughter] I never thought about it like that, but if you can say that, it has been pretty, I would say pretty organic. I mean, I have—it’s not like I’ve been forcing myself or have this five-year plan that I think, “Okay, in five years, I wanna be there.” It has been mostly about doing the things that I kind of enjoy doing and that I can see that I’m providing some good value, and also following the interesting thing.
So, for DevOps, it was actually that, before it was my work, it was already kind of a hobby in that I was at home outside working hours playing around with some Docker setup and trying out some different technologies there, and then I think that also made it easier to bring that to work, because if it’s something that I’m excited about also outside work, then it was even easier to just bring that excitement and motivation for something that I do in my everyday life.
Shimel: Excellent. Well, Jose, I’m sure you’re gonna have a great presentation with the bank at DevOps London, DevOps Enterprise Summit London, and we’re looking forward to seeing you there.
Quaresma: Yeah.
Shimel: And thanks for being our guest on this episode of DevOps Chat as well.
Quaresma: Yeah, thanks so much, Alan.
Shimel: Thank you, and continued success, Jose Quaresma of Accenture, who is a speaker for DevOps Enterprise London 2017 on June 5th and 6th, our guest today on DevOps Chat. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps.com. Thanks, everyone, and have a great day.