Gene Kim

Good morning. Hey, thank you so much for being here.

I'm so delighted that we've gathered here so many people who believe that DevOps is important, that we believe that DevOps creates genuine business value and helps advance societal goals, and it makes technology work more humane.

And this is not just based on a belief. On the next slide, on the State of DevOps Reports slide, one of the professional achievements that I'm most proud of is being associated with the State of DevOps Report. So this is work that we did with Jez Humble, Dr. Nicole Forsgren. For four years, we worked with Puppet to understand what factors predict performance.

And we know that high performers are massively outperforming their non-high-performing peers. And this research continues in 2018, this time with Google Cloud. So we know that high performers, they're doing 46 times more frequent deployments. They can complete those deployments 440 times more quickly. They have far better deployment outcomes. They have five times higher change success rates, and they can fix issues when bad things occur 100 times faster.

On the next slide, we know that because high performers integrate information security objectives into every stage of daily work, they spend one half the amount of time remediating security issues. And so as a population, for four years in a row, we call this IT performance.

On the next slide, I think what really brings us here is not just IT performance, but the fact that, on the next slide, two times more likely to exceed organizational and mission goals. Next slide, if I can only do this.

It's not just about IT performance, it's also about organizational performance. We now know that high performers, they're twice as likely to achieve profitability, market share, and productivity goals. And this year, for the first time, we actually had a separate path in the survey for not-for-profit organizations, for military organizations, for government agencies, and we found the same multiple of performance there. Those high performers are twice as likely to achieve organizational and mission goals.

And so I think what this shows very decisively is if mission achievement is reliant upon the work that we do every day, DevOps helps with the achievement of those.

Another marker of organizational performance is that high performers' employees are twice as likely to recommend their organizations as a great place to work to their colleagues and peers. And so not only does DevOps help organizations, it also makes for happier employees. And in this age where we are all fighting for talent, this is so important.

So I helped co-author a book called The Phoenix Project in 2013, and one of my most favorite lines in that book comes from Erik, the Yoda-like character, and he says he wanted to improve the lives of one million IT workers in the next five years. And I think this has really become my area of passion, which is helping understand how can we use these DevOps principles and patterns and use them not just in the Googles, Amazons, Microsofts, Facebooks, and Netflixes, but in large, complex organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries.

And the reason why I believe that's so important is that I think that's where the majority of economic value and societal good will be created, not in the FAANGs, the Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Googles, but instead in the largest brands in every industry vertical, across every government agency.

And so that's what led to us creating the DevOps Enterprise Summit, the first one in 2014. And the goal was really to show that DevOps was possible in traditional enterprises. And our main goal in that conference in 2014 was to collect experience reports to show that it is possible.

Another thing that experience reports are great at is helping negate objections to show that it is possible in financial services, whether we're a telco, even in classified military programs. And we use that to collect experience reports from technology leaders who are doing this under conditions of incredibly conservative organizations and that are regulated.

In fact, just so you know, in 2014, among the programming committee, we had this phrase. We said, "This conference is not for the unicorns," despite the fact that we have many friends in the unicorns. Instead, this was supposed to be a conference for horses by the horses.

And so over the next several years, we relied heavily on the experience report format. And I think the reason why experience reports serve us so well is that as leaders, as adult learners, we tend to learn not through people telling us what to do or what people think we should do. Instead, we learn better by hearing what other people in similar situations, what they did.

And so the goal was to collect experience reports across the broadest population of industries, company sizes, profit or not-for-profit. And the experience report format follows this form, and you'll be hearing a lot of these today, which is: here is the organization that I'm part of. Here is the industry that we compete in. Here's the business problem that we set out to solve. Here's where we started and why. Here's what we did. Here were the outcomes that resulted, and here are the challenges that still remain.

And so by doing that, I think this is how we teach each other how to make DevOps initiatives work.

One of the things that we did in 2014 and continues to this year is we also have every speaker share, here's what we still don't know how to do, and here's the help that we're looking for. And I think what makes this so magical is that we're actually helping each other by bringing to us the biggest obstacles and challenges that still remain.

And from that, we've been able to create essentially a research roadmap that says, here are the challenges that we want to understand better how to overcome, and we use that to inform the next year's programming.

So the problem statements often look like this, whether it's leadership and culture, organizational design, metrics, architectural and technical practices, automated testing, information security and compliance. And so that's what we've done over the last several years.

This year, here is what we are focused on. So in DevOps Enterprise 2018, not only is our goal to collect great experience reports, but also to collect repeat experience reports. In other words, we have leaders who have been presenting in the United States for five years in a row. Here in London, we've had speakers who are speaking for the third time in a row. And for me, this is so wonderful because we are almost like documentary filmmakers following people on their journey and seeing what happened.

And it has been my observation that the people who are driving DevOps transformations are succeeding. Just a rough computation says that almost a half of people who have presented at DevOps Enterprise have been promoted, often more than once. And I think this is because it shows that these people are creating genuine value that's recognized by their organizations, that they are winning in the battles of fighting very powerful incumbent systems, and that they're being asked to solve even larger problems.

So this year, among the people who are presenting repeat experience reports are Jonathan Fletcher, CTO of Hiscox; Dr. Tapabrata Pal from Capital One; Mieke Deenen from the UWV Netherlands; Tom Clark, head of common platforms at ITV.

So that's one area of focus for DevOps Enterprise 2018. The second one is an elevated focus on next-generation operations and infrastructure.

To sum this up, Jason Cox, one of our programming committee members, for five years in a row, he said, "This was a wonderful conference, really great for developers, not as good for operations." And so this has happened now four years. This time I promised him that we're going to do something very decisive about it.

So we actually created a separate programming committee just focused on operations and infrastructure leadership issues. We dedicated at least 20% of the programming for these topics, and I think it's going to be reflected in the program.

And my goal is, at the end of this conference, Jason Cox, for the first time, will say, "Great conference for developers, but even better for operations." So hopefully this will be your reaction as well.

Another thing that we are looking at this year is spanning the business and technology divide. I think increasingly as technology leaders get elevated in their organizations, the constraints and obstacles that they face are not between dev and ops. Increasingly it is in the organizations, in the product management, project management, funding regimes.

And so this year we have a bunch of talks that show how business and technology can really work together to help their organizations win in the marketplace. This includes talks from Verizon Enterprise, Nike EMEA, Capital One, and the first talk, Chris Hill from Jaguar Land Rover.

And again, we'll be seeking out subject matter experts from those domains that we are asking for their expertise on. I think the two communities that DevOps has drawn upon the most from include the lean community and safety culture, transformational leadership. And so we've sought out the best experts in those fields, and they will also be presenting here at DevOps Enterprise 2018.

So, the first thing, I want to thank and acknowledge the help from the program committee members. Whoops.

So this is where each year we design what the program objectives are. That gets translated into how we allocate talks, and then we use all of our networks to try to find the best experts to help us learn those things that we want to learn. So I really want to acknowledge all of their help.

One of the other things I very much appreciate about the program committee is that all of these program committee members are semi-professional conference goers. And I think we've all seen what makes great conferences really, really great and what conferences make it not so great.

And I think we all know how it feels when you're at a conference and there are people and experts that you want to talk to, but you can't reach them. They're on the other side of an invisible or sometimes a visible velvet rope. Sometimes you feel surrounded by people that you think you should have a lot in common with, but somehow you can't find those people to talk to. And yet you know that somewhere in the room is someone that is fighting the same problems that you are facing.

And so this was actually one of our goals for DevOps Enterprise 2018, which is how to help all conference delegates achieve their goals.

So it takes more than just great programming to make an event like this happen. To make an event this big work requires help from sponsors. So I'm extremely grateful to XebiaLabs, who is our premium sponsor. Derek Langone, CEO of XebiaLabs, please come on out. I understand that you have some news to share.

Thank you. Thank you.

Derek Langone

Okay, you knew it was coming. This is the vendor pitch. You ready?

I'm kidding. Good morning, everyone.

Before I begin, I'd love to start with a couple of thank yous. Number one, to Gene Kim and the IT Revolution team for putting on such a great event. And then to my own XebiaLabs marketing team, I can tell you that both of these groups have really been working around the clock to make sure this event is as successful as it can possibly be.

So XebiaLabs just celebrated our 10-year anniversary. So if you can believe it, we've been helping large enterprises achieve DevOps success since 2008. So we're quite a constant in the market. However, a lot changes from day to day. So we created the Periodic Table of DevOps.

Yeah.

So if you don't know XebiaLabs, probably you've seen our periodic table. And I'm happy to report this is version three that we just released today, which includes 52 new products that weren't in the previous version. So that reflects the kind of current state of DevOps tooling.

Everyone receives a small little magnet inside their swag bag of the periodic table, and if you come by our booth later, we're giving away poster-sized versions that you can bring home, hang up on the wall, and use as a point of reference.

So the DevOps Enterprise Summit's really my favorite shows in the industry, and the reason for that is they are really oriented around the practitioners. So I'm going to give everyone four action items for the next couple of days.

Number one, learn as much as you can. If you take the time to attend the sessions, network with your peers, visit the vendors, you will absolutely leave here with valuable advice that you can use when you get back to your offices.

Number two, enjoy the food. It's always fabulous.

Number three, have fun. You're in London. The weather is absolutely beautiful. You've got two days away from the office. Enjoy yourselves.

And number four, please come to the XebiaLabs booth later so we can teach you how to do enterprise DevOps for real.

And with that, I'll hand back to Gene and Jeff. Thank you very much.

Gene Kim

Thank you, Derek.