[Coté Memo #019] Selling DevOps, the WTF on industry analysts, champaign over health food

Meta-data

Hello again, welcome to #19. Today we have 30 subscribers, so we're +1. I'd love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io.

See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote.

Sponsor

• Come check out cloud hijinks at 451's HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I'll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

• Come hear me yammer on about DevOps: I'll be in Chicago (Sep 23rd) and Toronto (Nov 18th) giving my DevOps and cloud talk with TechTarget

Tech & Work World

Travel

I've been lucky to have little travel this summer. However, it's ramping back-up. It'd be dandy to meet you, dear reader.

Here's where I'll be over the next few months:

• 8/25/2014 to 8/27/2014 VMworld, San Francisco

• 9/22/2014 to 9/23/2014 TechTarget Speaking (see above), Chicago

• 10/6/2014 10/8/2014 451 HCTS (see above), Las Vegas

• 10/13/2014 to 10/15/2014 BMC Engage, Orlando

• 11/3/2014 to 11/6/2014 OpenStack Summit, Paris

• 11/10/2014 to 11/11/2014 CA World and AWS:reinvent, Las Vegas (the dreaded two-headed Strip conference trip)

• 11/16/2014 to 11/16/2014 TechTarget Speaking (see above), Toronto

Selling DevOps

I finally posted the "hey, here's what we think vendors should know about our DevOps work" presentation today. It builds off the same study I speak to in most of my talks now-a-days with some new looks at the survey data:

Obviously, my hope is that it drives some further 451 work, but feel free to just free-load, of course, as well.

Those damned industry analysts

Speaking of analysts shamelessly flogging their wares, I noticed that there's now 12 comments on a recent "industry analysts, WTF?!?" post, including from Gordon Haff (formally Illuminata, now at Red Hat) and Lydia Leong (Gartner, works on the cloud MQ) As you can imagine, I'm always curious what people have to say.

Lydia (who left many comments), for example, laundry-lists some of the reasons companies bring a third party (analyst) in instead of "trusting" your own people:

For instance, management may have already come to an unpleasant conclusion, but they don't want to be the bearer of bad news, Or an innovative younger manager may have had a great forward-thinking idea but his upper management is mired in their existing mindset. Or someone has an idea that's genuinely good, but it also happens to be politically advantageous to his ascent in the organization. Or a VP likes a piece of software that's pretty good, but he happens to be a good pal of an exec at that vendor. Or the engineers are correct from their perspective but they aren't doing a good job of reconciling the "right solution" from the needs of the business. 30 minutes with an analyst can help people separate the business issues from the personalities involved.

Yup.

There's usually a good one of these each year from someone on the web. This time, Matt (the poster) has a somewhat new take on theme, namely, what's up with the people who are the buyers of analyst work? (Usually, the post goes "these guys are pay for play and/or don't know what the fuck they're talking about." Delightful.)

Cloud spending effecting software spending

One of the little known, but interesting, survey-driven data sources we have at 451 is ChangeWave. It has a sort of cultish following, I'm told, among finance folks and a few others. Their recent survey on quarterly software spending is out.

I like to track the question they have around cloud spending vs. (on-premises) software spending:

  Current Survey Jul ‘14 Previous Survey Jul ‘13 Cloud Spending is Decreasing Company’s Budget for Other IT Products and Services 24% 22% Cloud Spending is Increasing Company Budget for Other IT Products and Services 11% 12% Cloud Spending is Having No Effect on Company
Budget for Other IT Products and Services 53% 52% Don’t Know 11% 13%

As the report summarizes:

The findings show cloud spending continues to have a negative impact on spending for other software and IT services. One quarter (24%) say their company’s cloud spending is Decreasing their budget for other software and IT services, and only 11% say Increasing.

So, that's something.

DevOps Checklist

If you remember the Under Development episode from yesterday (now posted), Bill read out a sort of checklist that he had. He sent it to me, so here's the list:

Culture: Empathetic/Adaptive

• Can your developers deploy to production? YES

• Are your developers on-call? YES

• Do your sysadmins understand the intent of the code in production? YES

• Do your testers write automated tests? YES

• Do your product managers deploy experiments? YES

• Have you hugged your compliance focal point lately? YES

• Could you drop everything and deliver something completely new in a week? YES

• Do you attribute outages to "human error"? NO

• Do you believe in a single root cause of incidents? NO

Practices: Continuous Everything

• Can you push a button and run a full regression test? YES

• Can you push a button and deploy to production? YES

• Can you deploy more than five times a day? YES

• Can you measure the technical and business impact of a feature? YES

• Can you measure impact on a feature before it's "done"? YES
  Can you run a controlled experiment to test a business or design hypothesis? YES

Fun & IRL

"I'm not much into health food, I am into champagne."

Musically, my main guilty pleasure is "Yacht Rock" and associated 80s crap. There's almost a rule - total coincidence to my own hair-festooned maw - that the more beards in the 70s band the more I'll like it. I have no idea; I think my mother played that kind of stuff all the time.

Anyhow, I have a play list in Spotify that I copied from some Scandinavian and modified to suite my needs. I present it here for your pleasure, dear readers.

I welcome your suggestions.