What are you going to do about DevOps?

Dale Vile says it is all about turning the next big thing into channel opportunities

Having to deal with the "next big thing" once or twice a year is a fact of life in the IT industry. Whether it's cloud, social, big data or the Internet of Things, we seem to go from no one having heard of a term to widespread frenzied promotion almost overnight.

All this is fine for IT vendors who can afford and justify the expense of an evangelical sell, and are prepared to absorb the additional cost of non-billable effort needed to implement unfamiliar and unproven solutions successfully.

Looking for early market leverage and high-profile reference sites, they tool up and get stuck into large, progressive accounts that have lots of IT resources and an appetite for risk.

Things are usually different if you work in the channel, though. Seeking out early adopters and gaining initial experience is fine, but without the same motivation as vendors to recover product or service R&D costs, there's probably a limit to how much of this you can sustain.

Meanwhile, the more conservative accounts that are likely to make up the bulk of your target market will want to talk about the next big thing but will rarely spend money on it until it has been proven in organisations similar to theirs.

So how do you avoid getting sucked into conversations that go nowhere, and redirect that interest into tangible opportunity?

This can be achieved by working back from what's being promoted to the underlying business need or objective, then tabling a more established alternative.

If the starting point is big data, for example, and the prospect has latched onto the idea of gaining greater customer insight, you can talk about how things such as Hadoop might be overkill in their environment, but a lot can be achieved by exploiting the latest developments in more familiar data management, CRM and BI tools.

If it's mobile technology, and the focus is flexible working, you can point out that the latest email and collaboration environments deliver mobile access as standard, without the need for specialist tools and skills.

The aim is to redirect interest to system upgrades, extensions and other proven solutions that might be less glamorous than "the next big thing", but are much more likely to be do-able, and will often deliver against customer needs pretty well anyway.

The key principle is: keep it real; keep it something they can buy.

The same applies to dealing with conversations about DevOps, the latest big thing coming down the pipe.

While precise definitions vary, DevOps is fundamentally about implementing a smooth and lean approach right through software development, integration, testing and live rollout, with feedback mechanisms to enable continuous improvement.

An important part of this is breaking down the traditional barrier that exists between development and operations teams – hence the name.

In practical terms, a multitude of tools and techniques can be used to enable a DevOps way of working.

If you want to learn more, look out for concepts such as Agile development, continuous delivery and codification of the operational environment.

If you sell to organisations that do a lot of in-house development, there may be a direct DevOps-related opportunity around tools and consulting.

To implement DevOps properly, though, requires a fundamental cultural and philosophical shift.

Unless a serious commitment is already in place (not very likely at the moment), you are back to that expensive evangelical sell.

By focusing on the underlying business drivers, however, conversations can lead to other more tangible opportunities.

If you listen to a vendor pitching DevOps, they will generally start with the imperative for IT teams to deliver value on a more rapid and continuous basis.

Whether this is to support ever-evolving working practices within the business, or to keep up with ever-changing customer demands and expectations in a digital customer engagement context, the days of six- to nine-month delivery cycles are over.

Fair enough, but if you focus on the business problem, the discussion is not just about software development, rollout and iterative improvement, which is the DevOps view.

Indeed, in many cases that's the least of people's worries. What's more likely to be throttling the pace of change and continuous optimisation at a business level is rigid and poorly integrated systems that require IT expertise and resource when you want to do anything new with them.

So if it's business-level agility and responsiveness the customer is after, focus on selling them modern systems that put more control in the hands of non-technical people. This could translate to ERP, CRM and other applications that allow user provisioning and the setup of rules, workflows and analytics independently of IT.

It could also be a website infrastructure that enables business users to create pages, define navigation, and publish content themselves.

One or two data-driven mobile apps might be another possibility, and you'll undoubtedly be able to think of more options yourself based on the nature of your business and its customers.

So rather than groan when vendors ask you to take their DevOps story to market, take it as a hook to stimulate a broader business agility discussion. Play it right, and you'll be able to open up a much broader opportunity.

Dale Vile is research director at Freeform Dynamics