Rob Mee on the Evolution of Agile to DevOps

Great to hear Rob Mee, CEO at Pivotal share his insights at Dynatrace Perform 2018 on the evolution of his company and the transition from Agile to DevOps. Rob was an early advocate of the Agile methodology.

The vision behind Pivotal in 1989 and when the Agile revolution started in late 90’s was co-development with customers. Pivotal started by working with venture-backed startups as opposed to established enterprises.

The vision has changed with the adoption enterprise cloud. Pivotal now helps transform how the world builds software. Today’s start-ups are cloud-native. This provides a substrate that allows them to move quickly with continuous delivery. Pivotal brings a methodology and technology to run on-prem or in the cloud.

Today, Pivotal is working more with enterprises and helping them to unlock domain knowledge via User-Centered Design, Design-Centered Thinking, and DevOps based on continuous feedback and optimization for change. Enterprises are seeing the need for that capability. They are able to "level the playing field" by adopting modern technologies to take advantage of decades of technical knowledge and data.

Pivotal comes together to enable enterprises to move quickly. Spring is the primary development framework. Pivotal Labs is building very complex applications and rapidly evolving landscapes in the cloud.

Processes have been changed for mass adoption. Pivotal was acquired by EMC in 2012 and it has gone through a significant transformation. The develop platform scales out of necessity. Customers have shifted from startups to large enterprises transitioning from Waterfall to a culture of a scientific-based approach that allows them to move in a cycle of weeks. Entire corporations are making this shift. They especially need help navigating the radical cultural shift that's necessary for success.

Monitoring for companies seeking to make the digital transformation is all about feedback. It needs to be more continuous. Dynatrace is doing well because it is API-based and can be built into everything a company is doing. Dynatrace is part of the Pivotal ecosystem integrating tightly and early always ready with the latest release.

Pivotal encourages clients to update quickly and automate release with BOSH while employing full-stack monitoring, short feedback loops, and API management. Monitoring is about feedback and discovering how monitoring can be used on the platform to enable the customer outcomes. By doing this you discover a lot of things that can be done.

Culture busters to embrace:

• Experimentation is crucial.

• Moving to rapid evolution with lots of feedback – DevOps and Security.

• Looking for similar patterns across different domains.

• A more evidence-based, scientific approach.

Think about how to embrace continuous change to do something more significant than you and your company are currently doing. Look for opportunities to make exponential, rather than linear, shifts.