“They started with 95 percent resource utilization in maintaining legacy processes, and a mere five percent of resources free to invest in new innovation. By the end of their transformation, just three years later, the percentage of resources available for new innovation was up eight times to 40 percent. In addition, with the introduction of automation, low-value and frustrating efforts such as manual testing, porting code, etc. were reduced to a bare minimum.

The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2015

I was asked to talk to do an internal, “brown-bag” style talk at a company this week. I chose to do a slightly more technical-oriented version of the talk I tend to give, commentary and pointers on moving your orginization over to relying on more and more custom written software to run your business. Here, I give a brief business context and then throw out three areas to start focusing on if you’re interested in cloud, DevOps, and all this nonsense.

My second column from FierceDevOps is up. It’s essentially a write-up of my DevOpsDays Austin talk (see slides here): a quick check-in on how DevOps is doing (good!) and my advice on what it can do to keep being successful. Check out the piece, tell me what you think!

Can DevOps declare victory yet? Not quite, but soon. Figuring out when a technology inflection point happens is always hard, if not impossible, in real-time. It’s easy to point backwards and say when ERP, agile software development, the Web, business intelligence, mobile or cloud suddenly became “normal.” I think DevOps is right at the door of that point, and as some recent Gartner predictions have proffered, we could see something like a quarter of all large enterprises using DevOps next year.

Chris Kemp speaking recently: “Openstack is not a product, it is a collection of projects designed to be productised,” he said. The companies making that effort today, he said, are focusing on large-scale opportunities. “Customer participation drives the change that customers want,” he said, and with not many users deploying OpenStack to date there’s therefore not much impetus for change or innovation. What is OpenStack?

Quick overview of the new OpenStack version. OpenStack Kilo Rolls With Network, Storage Upgrades

Microsoft Corp. wants to reach annualized revenue of $20 billion in its corporate cloud business in the fiscal year that ends in June 2018. At the moment, it’s: The company last week said it has a current run rate of $6.3 billion for the cloud business, which includes its Azure data-center services and cloud versions of Office software and customer management programs. Microsoft targeting $20bn cloud business by 2018, currently at $6.

From the perspective of the xMatters engineering team, Serediuk and Dunn-Krahn told me they see themselves as a service provider helping the business and customers to achieve their goals. They got those super short pieces over at FierceDevOps. Organizational change is only first step to ensure DevOps success