My name is Gene Kim, and it is an honor and a privilege to be your co-host, along with Steve Brody, here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco. First, let me start off by saying welcome, and thank you so much for being here. So I'm grateful beyond words that all 600 of you are here today for this three-day conference. It's been a very wild ride since my co-authors and I released "The Phoenix Project" last year.

Just give me one second while I figure out these notes here. And maybe to paint the genesis of how this conference came to be, I remember a conversation I had with Erez Neir. He is the CTO of Mitchell, an amazing leading claims management software company. They were founded in 1946.

They have 15,000 repair shops as their customers. And he asked me a question, "What do DevOps transformations look like when organizations have legacy code and processes that existed for decades?" And I told him, "Honestly, I don't know." But I think Erez was thinking something that we're all thinking, which is, what do DevOps transformations look like outside of the unicorns? So, we wrote the book to really describe the hero's journey of when dev, test, and operation, and even information security, work together to create amazing outcomes that we didn't even think possible five years ago. So this is a first-year conference, and it's not often obvious what would cause 600 people to gather together in one place, but I do have some theories.

And let me share with you what I think those reasons might be. The first is that we all have a genuine conviction that DevOps is not just for the unicorns, but it's for large, complex organizations. And so after that conversation with Erez Neir, we looked for these stories. And one of the things I want to convey to you is that DevOps is indeed being applied in large and complex organizations, and those stories are as awe-inspiring, as technically amazing and courageous as any story that you would hear from a Google, Amazon, or SC.

And you're going to hear those stories over the next three days. So, do we think that DevOps can be done in the enterprise? And I think among this crowd, the answer is absolutely yes. So we know that implementing DevOps principles and patterns can be done in large, complex environments, and I think we all share a conviction that there's tremendous value created when we can get dev, test, operations, information security to work together, and it helps us win in the marketplace.

And just to put this into perspective of how amazing the outcomes are, I would offer you this perspective. During the 1980s, the researchers at MIT, at the Center for Automotive Research, they studied the Toyota Production System. And they were marveling for decades about how Toyota was able to achieve four times the productivity of their competitors, twice the outputs with one half the inputs. But in DevOps organizations, the performance is not a 4X gap, it's orders of magnitude.

Thirty times more frequent deployments. It takes 8,000 times less time. They can do it with twice the success rate, and they can fix issues 12 times faster. So we're not looking at a 4X difference in productivity.

We're looking at hundreds or maybe even thousands of orders of magnitude difference in productivity. So, I think we are here because not only can it be done in large, complex organizations, but it should be done, absolutely. But I don't think that's enough to explain why we're all here in the room today. In other words, why do people come from so many corners of the globe to spend three days here?

And I think to answer that question, we all realize that it's not just about engineering practices, whether it's in horses or unicorns. It's not just about dollars and cents. So I think there's another fundamental reason that brings us here today, and I think having been doing this work for decades, I think we all share a deep dissatisfaction about the way work is performed in the technology space. That we are here because we know what a better way looks like, and we want to make it so.

There was a story for me that really hit home for me. Well, I heard this from Nathan Shimkuch some weeks ago. We were at FlowCon. In here he said, "The Phoenix Project was important to me because it helped explain why we need DevOps to make our work humane." In other words, he was explaining to me how he, over the course of his career, has worked on every birthday, on his spouse's birthday, on every holiday, and even on the day that his first son was born.

So I think we all have stories like that, and I think we all have this deep desire to rewrite a wrong. And I think for many of us, we have felt that there's an injustice being done. And for many of us, we have even created those systems or even enabled those systems to exist. So we're here because we want to create a system of work spanning dev, test, operations, and information security that's safe, humane, and helps our organizations win in the marketplace.

And I think that's why we think this matters. Right now, we're working on the DevOps Cookbook. And among my fellow co-authors, we have this desire to positively influence the lives of one million IT professionals. And to get there, I believe we need to figure out how do we accelerate the rate of DevOps adoption and increase the likelihood of those transformations succeeding.

I've asked every speaker over the next three days to have as their last slide this title, Here's What I Don't Know How To Do, or Here's Something That I Want Help On. Why? Because if I could wave a magic wand, all of us will find some way to get the help we need to get from here to there, and that help will be in this room. So if we can make that so, I think we create a community of practice that is helping each other achieve our goals.

And if we can create those mutually exothermic interactions, we earn the right to even talk about whether we do this next year.So in the spirit of people helping people, I cannot overstate my gratitude and appreciation for the program committee who made this happen. I love this quote, "You're only as smart as the average of the top five people you hang out with." And when you get to hang out with people like this, the level 30 death mages and the level 30 paladins, you can't help but get a little bit smarter. But I also want to acknowledge Patrick Debois, who is one of the main reasons why we're even talking about DevOps at all, and he'll be sharing a recorded message because he can't be here with us this week, either this afternoon or tomorrow. So again, in the spirit of gratitude, I want to turn it over to my co-host, Steve Brodie, CEO of Electric Cloud.

Thank you. Thank you, Gene. And I would like to just extend a welcome to everyone that's in the room, as well as everyone that's joining us over the internet on the live stream at the conference here today. At Electric Cloud, we share Gene's view that DevOps and continuous delivery is relevant to larger organizations and larger development teams.

Last year, Gene joined us at our user conference, and we agreed that there was a gap in the industry conference lineup, that there was no real forum for large organizations that were trying to do continuous delivery and DevOps transformation at scale. So we're thrilled to partner with Gene to underwrite and to produce this event here today. And I think there's definitely a gap. Based on the response that we saw, this event was sold out.

There's a waiting list of people still waiting to get into this room today. People were offering us double the price, double the list price of tickets to get in here. So there was definitely a demand for a conference like this. There's a significant number of Electric Cloud customers in this room, so I wanted to particularly thank the Electric Cloud customers that are here with us today.

Traditionally, Electric Cloud has done an annual user conference, and the attendees have been Electric Cloud customers and speakers. And we made the decision this year, again in partnership with Gene, that we wanted to extend our user conference and weave it in, wrap it with this industry event. And we think that has significant benefits for everyone here. For our Electric Cloud customers that are here, we're going to have tracks on day two and day three.

We'll be talking about the Electric Cloud technologies. We'll be talking about the real-world implementations from customers. I'll be delivering a keynote tomorrow morning at 8:30. But we see huge benefits to have this sort of broader audience.

We have with us today the change agents, the innovators in many, many more organizations that you can interact with, that you can hear from and learn from. One of the things we consistently hear is one of the biggest impediments to driving this kind of transformation is culture. And what you can hear from these folks is what worked in their organizations, what didn't work, what were some of the learnings. So there's huge value, so I encourage you to engage with the folks that you see here.

Okay, next I would like to extend a big thank you to our platinum sponsors, PricewaterhouseCoopers, PWC, IBM, CA, Delphix, Microsoft, and Axelos. We are thrilled with the vendor support that we've had here to kind of produce this event. This event wouldn't be possible without these sponsors. And it's also great to see the community of vendors supporting DevOps come and support DevOps for the enterprise.

So a big round of applause for our platinum sponsors.