The IT world has been changing very fast over the past few years, with seemingly everything going to the cloud and virtualization. Advanced enterprises are using cloud in ways that are far beyond where most companies are today, and many others are jumping on the business opportunities that cloud can enable.

Success in modern IT business comes through automation and scale and that means DevOps–where developers and system admins work closely together to realize a quicker lifecycle. At the VMWorld 2013 conference, industry leaders talked on DevOps as how the community is taking a huge part of the shift to the IT of the future.

DevOps technology ready for software driven model

The growing popularity of the cloud indicates the birth of a new era of how applications will be developed and designed and the shift is happening on a software driven model. At the 10th anniversary of VMware’s annual user conference, Carl Eschenbach, President and Chief Operating Officer for VMware discussed how VMware’s virtualization technology making inroads to computing, networking, storage and several other verticals.

Eschenbach sees software defined data centers, end user computing and the hybrid cloud will play a crucial role for companies to stay a leader in the market. He said each product of VMware that have brought to market has been a direct result of their own internal development. He claims their products can be seamlessly adopted allowing end users to not only extend using agile method but ultimately leverage it with VMware complementary product lines. DevOps will play a key role here maintaining infrastructure upon which companies run will need people producing and maintaining tools.

When it comes to orchestration and service management, companies like VMware are moving towards the software defined data center and virtualization of everything. Shawn Douglass, ServiceMesh CTO spoke about the increasing momentum of open source technologies like OpenStack.  VMworld and OpenStack both offer virtualization of network, compute and storage, but OpenStack has the advantage to drive a 30 to 40 percent cost reduction.

Open Source, DevOps and More

What open source technology is doing is to allow companies to deliver business value really quickly. Rackspace CMO Rick Jackson talked about the growing strength of open source technologies like OpenStack. He said the growing popularity of the cloud indicates the birth of a new era of how applications will be developed and designed. Those applications are being created by developers, who have become the bellwethers of open source environments like OpenStack.

Virtualization is eliminating the major hardware problem enterprises used to see in expanding their infrastructure or developers who dreamed up applications. Rackspace Director of Strategy Scott Sanchez discusses that developers now have more power. The software defined model has become the new hardware for developers, while hardware is becoming a resource that can be provisioned.

“DevOps is not something that you go out and buy, it’s a mindset and an outcome,” said Sanchez. “There are tools and platforms that allow you to move to that model,” he adds.

He also indicated that people are both excited and scared about the DevOps. Compliance, security, and access control are pieces of it, but it also has a lot to do with the visibility of DevOps process.

People + Process

VMware helps companies realize the business benefits of virtualization. VMworld is about virtualization and that means taking tasks that were usually dependent on hardware and making them virtual – mostly driven by software.

Mike Koehler, COO, EMC Global Services, discussed the IT transformation in the enterprise as companies adapt to the virtualized and hybrid ecosystem. He said for a radical IT transformation, people and process both need to be changed, since DevOps is all about the team and their connectivity to production of software and implementation of that software.

“The process and the people side, that’s the trick that gets missed a lot,” Koehler said. “IT organizations want to change, but if people don’t see how their jobs are going to change and how their skill sets are going to grow, they resist the change. The IT transformation can be likened to a house renovation, that’s done one room at the time.”

Moving to an agile development requires skill sets and capabilities as well as learning a lot more about the server and network. He added as IT becomes more flexible, the IT process needs to change.