 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE. We're live here in Santa Clara Convention Center. This is theCUBE at Velocity Conference, a Riley medias show around DevOps, CloudOps, application developers, really the operational systems and technologies of the web, mobile, all one and the same, all under a new paradigm. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. Jonathan Thorpe is here. He's the DevOps evangelist at Serena Software. Jonathan, welcome to theCUBE. Let's talk DevOps. We love the topic. Okay, nice to be here. Good, so talk about your role at Serena Software. That's, I love the title. Okay, so at Serena Software, I work as part of the marketing organization and before that, I've actually been a DevOps practitioner for many years, but now what I'm actually doing is engaging with the community, going around events like DevOps days, Velocity and FlowCon and talking to a lot of the people of DevOps practitioners and making sure that Serena has its finger on the pulse of what's happening in the DevOps world. So tell me, what does DevOps mean to you in Serena Software? You're a practitioner of DevOps, what is it to you? Well, part of me, when I've worked in DevOps in the past, it's been, well before DevOps I should say, there's always been that divide between the dev and the operations teams and I found myself usually falling in between that gap because I have dev and ops experience. You were the hybrid. Yes, exactly. So essentially what you did in the finding is what I've always called the coalition of the willing where even if your organizations were not open to more collaboration, you'd usually find some like-minded people to actually try and work together and if you look at actually what that means, people tearing down the silos, giving each other limited access to each of the group's tools, it's not like DevOps actually is basically, but that was much more ad hoc and should I say perilous basically because when people found out you are bending the rules in order to try and be more effective, sometimes people loved it, sometimes people hated it. So there's a spectrum of DevOps, right? There's what you just described is sort of the initial collaboration, sharing of tools, sharing, like-minded people want to get some stuff done in a better fashion and then there's the other end of the spectrum which is sort of hyper DevOps where you're cross-training and it's essentially one role and so talk about that, I'm sure, in between. So talk about that spectrum, where are organizations relative to that spectrum? Are they just thinking about maybe collaborating or is the bell curve such that 10% are actually in that hyper DevOps cycle? So what I'm finding is I can't stride a lot more on sort of the enterprise side of things and there are quite a few companies that are doing DevOps in the way I described to the collaboration way of doing things but they're actually not really even aware of the term DevOps for large part. They're doing DevOps like practices but you know, you introduce the term and they don't know what it is really. And then you get places like FamilyServe, chance.sg.com. I like to use those as examples because they're companies that you really wouldn't think are traditional, they're not really companies that really do high performance things as far as really pushing out a lot of releases but they really push the edge with the mixtures of commercial and open source tools to deliver an absolute ton of updates really, really frequently. So it's hitting places where you wouldn't necessarily expect. It's left the Etsys and the Amazons and the Googles and it's out in the wild. John, I got to ask you mentioned you're going out to the community and talking to folks. Obviously one of the hottest trends in DevOps is OpenStack. In terms of the conversations, OpenStack has generated a lot of the lift in terms of folks in the build your own cloud and that's the developers basically. And the developers are saying, hey, we love Amazon, we've been using Amazon all day long, thank you very much. Varun or Vogels and everyone else in the Amazon team has been fantastic. When you start to get into the enterprises where it needs to be industrial strength, the SLAs, all the other things happening. So OpenStack's important. What's your take on OpenStack? And is that DevOps? Is that not DevOps? Is that kind of on the edge? Well, the cloud part of it is, that's about providing resources. Now, if you think about driven DevOps, it's the more releases, more frequently more releases and that actually requires more infrastructure whether it's physical or virtual to actually process all of those builds or the push between dev to different QA environments and financial production. So, cloud, just like release automation and other tools like Pop and Chef, they're just enablers of an effective process that's sort of encompassed by DevOps. What about Node.js? What are you seeing in the Node community? Okay, I'm sort of a little outside that community. I've played a little bit myself, but that's my experience with the Node community is literally just to playing with the code myself. We've had Tom from SOAST to Ani was saying, get it out there fast, that's which is agile or time to market and make it highly high quality. Big focus of developers, high quality and fast. Any things that you're seeing here at Velocity that gets your eye, captures your attention in terms of hitting that mark? Well, there's a lot of best practices going and what's really impressed me at one of my key areas that I'm interested in personally is mobile and a lot of the analysis on how to get high performing mobile webpages, a lot of the different ideas for analyzing the problems that you're getting, the page load times. Now it's really interesting that actually turning it for more of an art into a set of best practices so that you don't have to spend so much of your time really trying to guess at what's going to work. I mean, I was really shocked to actually hear earlier that your typical webpage now has a one and a half megabyte download. You know, that's huge basically if you're looking at page load times. So this is really interesting. 50 megabytes if you're a gamer. Yeah. That's a Google told us. So I mean, this is really interesting as far as trying to make sure that you get something out that not only meets application quality but also performance quality because if your pages take too long to load people just assume it's broken quite often. And that's, you know, I came across that back working in the web in the early 2000s and it's just as true now. People are even more impatient. So there's this big cultural shift going on with DevOps. You know, you were talking about, you know that you focus on the enterprise and the enterprise customers that I talked to that are actually doing DevOps, they really look at it in sort of three dimensions. One is the business value. How's it going to save cost, drive revenues, you know, improve quality, speed development, et cetera, this clear business case that they can make. And that's what enterprise IT people do, is they make business cases and then they invest. The second thing they look at is passion. What's going to excite my people? And the third is, okay, what kind of skills and knowledge and tools do I need to deploy? And many of the guys that are succeeding in DevOps are saying if it's not a project that drives value, excites my people and uses these sort of new methods and new tools, I'm going to outsource it. I don't want to spend time with it because it's not going to drive my organization forward. Now that is sort of a radical view of the development cycle within the enterprise. But so first of all, does that resonate with you? And second of all, given the successes that enterprises have had with DevOps, what's holding people back? Okay, so that definitely does resonate with me. I mean, it's all about delivering business value faster. And yes, that's a lot of work to sort of get this sort of thing started. So you definitely need people to be passionate about it. Now, one of the things that you mentioned was the skills involved, people using the latest technology. Outside of Silicon Valley and some of the larger areas that are maybe some of the financial companies that are in the hot areas like New York on occasions, you've got people that are, they have skills, but there are not that many people actually in the teams that know how to hook all these disparate open source systems together. And that's where the opportunity is for a company like Serena, where we handle the whole workflow management side of it and the integrations, a lot of the process things. When I was talking to Patrick de Bois at DevOps days, Austin, he agreed that that's the bit that's not sexy. The people doing DevOps like to talk about Puppet and Chef and to actually have vendors that can actually take care of the framework sort of things and the integrations that lets them focus on what they're passionate about and what they're interested in. So the exact scenario you described is what we see as the opportunity there. So talk more about Serena and how you add value. So let's say I'm a CIO and I'm saying, hey, this DevOps thing sounds pretty good to me, but I'm getting all these cultural issues. I got my guys are in silos and they're fighting me. How can you help me break through some of those barriers? Okay, so obviously we're sensitive to the cultural side of things, which you can't solve that with technology. That's kind of my problem, right, as the CIO, but any advice you can give me, but go ahead. But what we actually can do there is we can provide a common process layer across all the different organizations that are interested in being able to see where your releases are, whether you're at the CIO level, or you're the project manager side of things, we can track all the way through no matter what group you're in and provide a common high level framework for you to move through. And then at that point, you're providing visibility to people in the format that they need and the underlying tools that are maybe department specific. They're not exposed to them, basically. They're taking a higher level, a higher business level view of where things are. And also, it takes away some of the pains of the staffing. Remember if you're using something like a Surina release automation tool, that actually does a lot of the integration out of the box, sort of the different systems that enterprises have. Remember it's if you get something that's open source and we love open source, but they usually have some troubles integrating with some of the bigger systems out there because people writing it don't necessarily have access to SAP other than the enterprise class systems. So if you get somebody like a Surina that really has the toolbox so that you integrate with whatever number of systems you have, especially if it's on enterprise scale, once it moves out from a team in the enterprise or two but into every aspect of the enterprise that could use DevOps, then you need those out of the box integrations that are tested. So is this common process layer that you're talking about? Is that a first step in actually moving toward a DevOps environment? Or is it, there's got to be some skills, training, involved as well. But talk about sort of. But I mean, if you can at least start to smooth out the silo, you know, the gap, the arguments between the teams by having a common process that they can all agree on and whether that's got lower level processes that each team cares about in detail. And they can cling on to. Yeah. But that's what you're doing, right? They're clinging on to these old processes. But they work, and that's why they're clinging on to them. This is working. Let's not screw that. So it's essentially you're describing an abstraction layer across the silos that begins to break down some of those silos in a way and foster communications and knowledge sharing across those silos. Is that fair? Yes, and the benefit is that you're putting out more releases, you're getting visibility because it's all going through that common process above, you can get the approval. So you're getting visibility, not just smoothing out where the silos, you know, but you're getting visibility and control as well. Ultimately, again, let's say as a CIO, is it not my objective over, let's say a five year plan to eliminate the barriers between ops and dev and actually cross train people such that my high performance team is essentially can do both jobs. So that I don't have to have separate organizations. Is that too lofty? Is that overzealous or is that actually what CIO should be pushing for? I believe it's overzealous actually. It's not, having that wide range of skills across all those teams, it's not in everybody's skill set. You know, it's not what everybody's interested in. And you know, there's already a shortage of people working in the industry basically. If we try to actually limit that to just like people that are passionate about dev and ops, I mean, everybody needs to be passionate about adding business value. You know, but maybe taking it to that extreme where everybody needs to be fully cross trained would make kind of current skills really less. What if I doubled everybody's pay? What if I doubled everybody's pay and said, you're not going to work for me unless you're of this ilk? Would I be able to justify the business value? I bet you in some industries I would. Yes, you would. But I honestly think that the current skills that are coming, you know, they're in the market and the tools that are available really aren't going to support that. Yeah, okay. Maybe there's an investment in training that has to occur as well. If you don't mind me adding, what I did, I was with Dave Nielsen of who does Cloud Camp. It's a five year, it's basically. Cloud Camp, you know, Cloud Camp. Yeah, absolutely. Cloud Club, early days. Now it was DevOps, you know, pre-Hiruku, pre-everything, Amazon was just making their bones and their right scale was just entering. You know, you had things like, I mean, little things were like provisioning and there was a core group of people that early on were really setting the kernel, the foundation for that movement. And that's why I brought up the OpenStack question because OpenStack has similar mindsets. It was a lot of cloud washing at first. It felt like a marketing program for a lot of people. But what happened was you saw the community galvanize around it. And we are so pro-Open Source because we've seen it work, right? Look at Cloud Era. I was talking about Mike Olson early this morning. I just stepped down as CEO because it's got new guys who are going to take it public. But Open Source is the new standards bodies, right? That is what is happening. In the old days you had these standard bodies, these high priests that would anoint standards. You know, IEEE, ITF, all these boys. And that's gone. It's the communities now. It's been sure enough with Open Source. So obviously DevOps has accelerated. So the question I have for you is, what has changed today? Just from two years ago, we did two years ago, we brought theCUBE when theCUBE was early on in our formation, going to events. We went to an event no one's ever heard of called Node Summit. That was the guys just doing the notes. That was the beginning of JavaScript going server-side. So go back two years to today. What's different for, not no, but DevOps in general. What can you share, given your feedback of the market and evangelizing? I think what's actually different is, I think finally developers are understanding that it's not about writing cool code. There is real, there is business value. And that's, you know, it's not seen as, people haven't got their heads down in their silos so much. People are open to their business value. And then you've got bugs like the Phoenix project by Gene Kim, which actually go a long way as far as articulating to everybody, you know, what the business value of IT is in general. And that's, you know, that's getting people, that's the start, getting people out of their silos and actually looking at the business value. Now people are realizing that if they don't, before when you're traditional waterfall, you can actually work on a project for like a year or two years or whatever, writing your cool code that you are happy with. Really didn't matter whether added value to the customers from the guy on the ground. I tell you, that's a real home run, that business value is a constant that has to be had. We were yesterday at GE, had the industrial cloud of the Internet of Things event and Wikibon's Jeff Kelly was talking about big data. And he gave the example, he said, hey, you know, big data value can be looked at from a couple of perspectives. One is serving the right ad to the right user. And if that doesn't work, big deal, you get a bad ad. But what about delivering medicine to a patient, a critical patient, and that gets messed up via some app? That's critical. So what's the value? Or a jet that has turbines and the engines, the data from the engines doesn't get delivered because it's ops not working. I mean, that's critical danger. That's value. Yes, and the key thing is right now with the pace of deliveries with web 2.0, is you're going to get called on working on something that doesn't add value much faster. And I think that's why people have stopped data. The utility of the application market right now is so, so focused on this and I think it's very relevant. So my final question I want to ask you, Jonathan, because we've got a break, our next guest is, tell the folks out there what's going on at Velocity this year? What is it about here? Why is this show so special? And why isn't this just some like a cloud show or an app show? Why is it different? And what's so important about Velocity? Well, what's something Velocity apart right now is that each session I've been to has added some real value, real technical value there for the people that are attending. It seems to be very much in tune with the people that are here, giving the right tricks and tips. Everybody seems to be very enthusiastic about all the sessions. You know, I mean, you could be a little concerned by, hey, the sessions all, you know, a lot of the people giving sessions are the sponsors. But a lot of the sponsors are people really doing cutting edge, you know, application development and deployment. And that's what's important here. You're really getting a good sense of the people that are here, they're pushing the boundaries and they're sharing what they're doing to push the boundaries and helping move everybody forward. Jonathan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. This is live coverage of Velocity Conference of Riley Media's great event around Dev Ops, infrastructure as code, applications and really powering web scale, hyper-scales, even small-scale, it's got business value. This is the new integrated technologies, design meets infrastructure. We'll be right back here inside theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out through the events and start to see from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.