As a CIO I’m often asked about DevOps and the Agile approach to application development and deployment. I never have a problem with that, because I’m a big proponent of DevOps. My experience with the program at NetApp has proven out the value of this approach several times.
Implementing Salesforce Faster and Cheaper
When I arrived here just over three years ago, we had a project underway to implement Salesforce.com. I partnered immediately with the head of Sales Operations because we both knew that these projects had not been successful in the past at the company. Either they didn't deliver what the business expected or they were really late and over budget.
I had made use of some Agile techniques in the past that included using a scrum environment, and using those techniques we were able to get the initial Salesforce release up and running within seven months. It met the requirements and we started to build on that framework and actually on the first implementation after that. By our calculations we shaved about three months off of the implementation timeline using this approach.
Through our DevOps program we also have pushed tremendous savings down to NetApp’s bottom line. One example is the savings we realized for L2/L3 support after our Salesforce implementation. Using our preferred vendor initiative, building teams at the right-shore and bringing targeted roles in-house at the right location to support the DevOps program, we were able to decrease the annual support cost by 76 percent while increasing productivity by 36 percent.
The Leading Role of Cloud in DevOps
Cloud computing is important in DevOps to manage your backlog and prioritize the work you have. When you have free time you want to be able to pull the next batch of important priority items out of the backlog and be able to have a team get to work on it. We've employed two of our teams to be able to manage that and prioritize with our business users and ensure that the backlog of requests and tickets is accounted for so it can be prioritized and accessed by the team. You don’t look at your work requests in DevOps environments as you would traditional projects. You have project requests, enhancement requests, problem tickets and questions. They are all just a base of work.
When you look at DevOps and bringing agility into the organization, the cloud strategy is important. This strategy will equip your IT organization with the tools they need to be responsive to the business and at the same time equip the business with tools to be self sufficient. To enable these efficiencies, one of the things we’ve done is built a hybrid cloud environment that we call nCloud. It’s used by IT to do some development on a certain percentage of our applications, but we also equip our business users with self-service tools so that they can provision environments themselves where they might need to do development on their own. It has single sign-on capabilities, provides better capacity management and frees up investment dollars that can be applied elsewhere.
Today we have more than 65 applications running in nCloud, of which over 50 percent were moved from public cloud providers. This is saving NetApp over $1.5 million annually. In addition, we continue to save opportunity costs, thanks to DevOps and Agile approaches. This ranges from faster time to delivery as workloads can be deployed in minutes depending on the requirement, to enhanced reliability that offers superior service-level agreements to our business. Our partners are also finding it easier to do business with NetApp because of self-provisioning, single-sign-on capability, improved scalability and better security.
Getting Clear on Your Cloud
When I engage with our customers and attend cloud events to talk about topics like DevOps and Agile, one of the things I mention is that you need to have a cloud strategy. If your cloud strategy is one of ‘I’m going to do cloud first and throw everything out to cloud or SaaS,’ you’re going to have a mess. And that mess is probably going to end up being more expensive than the traditional IT infrastructure you already have.
One of the things we’ve done here with our strategy is to form what we call the Cloud Decision Framework. It takes a number of different criteria into account including Gartner’s Pace-Layered framework around System of Record, System of Differentiation, and System of Innovation. This decision framework lets us look at applications and ask ourselves ‘Is it a system of record? Where does it belong? Where does the data belong? Do we have existing assets on the books that are still not fully depreciated? What does our current software licensing look like in this space?’
We go through these decision criteria to arrive at a recommendation of whether or not the capability and the application should be within the four walls of our data center or out in a public cloud. Having an architecture around your data needs is critical, because every organization will have a different definition of what is ‘private for them’. Understanding the architecture is critical to ensure you have the right policy around data movement and data backup. You don’t want to lose your data because the cloud provider you trusted goes out of business. There are a lot of architectural decisions that need to be made and planned for, or people are going to end up with a real mess costing a lot more.
Cynthia Stoddard is the Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer (CIO) at NetApp. In her role as CIO, she is responsible for providing a long-term technology vision that supports and is aligned with the company’s strategies and goals, business plans, operating requirements, and overall efficiencies. She provides leadership to the Global IT organization to enable delivery of worldwide business solutions and infrastructure that support the company’s growth.
As senior vice president and chief information officer of Adobe, Cynthia Stoddard oversees Adobe’s global Information Technology team. In her leadership role, Cynthia spearheads a global strategy for delivering services that form the mission-critical backbone for the company.