The DevOps disruption

With enterprises looking at new ways to reduce costs without compromising quality, open source dev ops models are bound to get many more adopters. As part of a joint CXO dialogue, we interact with Ashok Cherian, CIO, JK Cements, Mani Kant Singh. R, Head-IT & CISO, ORBIS Financial Corporation, and Anuj Bhalla, VP & Business Head, Global-System Integration & Maintenance Services & Products, GIS Wipro, to delve deeper into the evolving open source DevOps landscape and the possibilities it can open up for enterprises.

How do you think open source for DevOps solutions can help the manufacturing sector manage their assets more effectively?

Today, irrespective of the verticals and sectors, the focus is to delivery IT smartly. Open source can get us cost effective, nimble, and even scalable platforms. Not many platforms can help us in reducing costs without compromising quality and opesource DevOps can do it. While the traditional proprietary systems locks us down to narrow options, the open systems gives as varied open options and it is for the IT managers to leverage this to its best.

The line-up for open source development operations is ever growing and there are many stable, secure, and sustainable options available. These true enterprise class capabilities are shattering the myth that open DevOps are for the amateurs and academics. We at JK Cement runs a mission critical application with millions of records on an open source development platform based on LAMP (Linux-ApacheMySQL-PHP) architecture. This has ensured us to deliver the project in an extreme cost effective manner but without any compromise on quality, performance or even scalability.

Can you share some insights on how open source for DevOps is impacting the manufacturing sector? What are the key trends shaping up?

Topics like security, quality, and stability are gaining ground in the open DevOps and they are making them more easy to deploy and use. Use cases of options like IoT, manufacturing excellence is on the rise and I see open dev ops all set to take a good share of them pitching with optimal cost, easy to use solutions capable of integrating with almost everything. Enterprises are looking for reducing licensing burden and bringing in predicable expense models to support business growth and open Dev Ops models is bound to get many more adopters at all type of enterprise sizes and territories. I can also see the open source providers becoming more focused on addressing the enterprise need of providing “assured uptimes with SLAs” and this need to progress more for removing the mind share challenges and seamless adoption and growth.

What should be the strategy and points of consideration in an enterprise open source DevOps journey?

Every CIO must get a proper study and opportunity assessment done to understand the candidates for open source adoption. The roadmaps of the key open source players must be understood in detail and then mapped with our own strategic roadmap. There are enough opportunities for us to partner with the open source platform developers and becoming influencers in their roadmap as well and co-create value for each other. CIO also has to take steps to educate their team as well as their Csuite peers on the overall value proposition to counter the IT monoliths which have massive advertisement budgets and brand positioning. While open source options can be music to the CFO, the IT leadership’s efforts to drive this transformational change to get it well endorsed by the IT team and business leaders will pay long term dividends to organizations.

Mani Kant Singh. R, Head - IT & CISO, ORBIS Financial Corporation

As the BFSI sector has huge volumes of data, how do you think open source DevOps can help the sector manage its assets effectively?

Open source can create a major impact for DevOps. On close inspection of the EULA ensures the support and accountability of open source fitness for purpose, reliability, fixing of bugs within hours since availability of source code, of the software which helps to manage the assets effectively. With DevOps integrating changes can be made on the fly with help of source codes.

What are the key trends on how open source DevOps impact the financial services sector?

Open source is very largely impacting the DevOps. Especially open source has helped in the following ways.

Flexibility: There is no dependency on the manufacturer and gives freedom from lock-in from OEM.

Auditable: In closed software all the claims of auditability is just a myth, but in case of open source these claims are more confident.

Key Trends: Acceptability by many industries, R&D for inclusion of open source in DevOps, contribution to industry by innovation, venture capitalists investing in open source.

What should be the strategy and points of consideration in an enterprise open source DevOps journey? „

• Enterprise should contribute and engineer open source for better journey in future. „
• Open source DevOps helps enterprise competitive advantage. „
• Ability to scale, ease of deployment, competitive features makes open sources DevOps the future. „
• Superior security is confirmed by many. „
• Speeds up the innovation. „
• Better compliance on license perspective.

—Anuj Bhalla

Vice President &

Global Business Head,

System Integration &

Maintenance Services

& Products, GIS, Wipro

How do you see the DevOps movement impacting the IT industry?

From the traditional way of Dev & QA coming to IT for specific services related infrastructure tasks, world is moving towards Industrialization of IT. Where IT is enabling automation parts available for consumption by Dev & QA. This means traditional IT services outsourcing business would no longer demand for admin skills but would ask for infrastructure programmers.

What is your view of open source for DevOps? What benefits can developers or software firms get by adopting open source DevOps?

Since the very beginning of such concept DevOps tools and technology itself is developed by Dev & QA teams to solve their own problems. That’s how the adoption of open source technology in DevOps was triggered and is on the rise ever since. It enables user with more flexibility in choice of tools as per their comfort level but still allows to customize it to their needs.

What are the prime factors driving adoption? Business pressure to bring out new features to meet market needs quicker in production and available for customer utilization right at the ideation level. Due to shrinking timelines between ideas to GTM, we are seeing adoption of DevOps more and more.

Can you point industries which are prime adopters of open source DevOps?

Retail, telecom , Finance and Banking industries are the industries which are very much keen to experiment with open source for DevOps.