DevOps Summit: Are you a digital unicorn, or still held back by 'hysterically-grown' legacy systems?

Streamlining and visibility are your best friends in DevOps, says CA's Georg von Sperling

The quality of your DevOps process can mark your firm out as a digital unicorn, or an "original enterprise" firm with "lazy, hysterically-grown systems", Georg von Sperling, senior director of pre-sales for application delivery EMEA at CA Technologies, said today.

Speaking at Computing's DevOps Summit 2015, von Sperling was pulling no punches when advising companies on how to become more agile.

"When you look at it, the digital unicorns are the Ubers, the Amazons, or little startups," he said.

"The original enterprise is actually encumbered by lazy or hysterically-grown systems and processes - so you have your mainframe systems, various backend systems, supply chain, SAP - all those things that Uber doesn't have."

By "hysterically grown", von Sperling suggested that many organisations' systems had been forced to adapt, often quickly, in response to changing competitive, legislative and regulatory changes.

But as Uber is unencumbered by such legacy systems, it doesn't need to deal with these issues, said von Sperling, "people say ‘let's put together some innovation. We have this great idea, we can bring this innovation to market as quickly as possible without having to deal with lots of process'.

"The traditional enterprise has to deal with all these legacy processes, and there is a fear to deliver a two-speed IT system, and being able to converge that has proved difficult," he said.

Quoting novelist George Eliot, von Sperling stated: "Friction is likely to generate heat instead of progress."

"You want to go and remove friction as best as possible in order to deliver innovation to the customer experience," he said.

"One approach is that you have the agility, so try to parallelise the work streams as close as possible and remove the chokeholds. But how do you achieve continuous delivery approach?

"The maximum amount of test coverage with the minimum amount of test cases to cover the highest amount of technology."

To conclude, von Sterling said that "it's important the business knows when components are coming down the line, and you need to get that visibility end to end".