$30m launch as Sendachi brings devops to enterprise
- Summary:
- A US and UK IT services company that brings devops to enterprise launches today, backed by the same investor that bankrolled cloud integrator Cloud Sherpas
Backed by a $30 million venture investment from Columbia Capital — the same investor that bankrolled the growth of Salesforce, Google and ServiceNow integrator Cloud Sherpas, which Accenture bought last year for a rumored $400 million — Sendachi is formed from the merger of existing Seattle-based business Clutch with London-based Contino.
With plans to grow its payroll from less than 50 today to 100-200 by the end of the year, Sendachi plans to ride a growing surge in enterprise adoption of devops, continuous delivery and related technologies. Contino co-founder Ben Wootton, now Sendachi's VP of technology for Europe, briefed us yesterday on what he sees as the market opportunity:
We think there is a big industry shift going on, so we'll get our scale from the volume of things that's happening.
People are under pressure to go faster, be more iterative, agile, more experimental. It's such a huge problem enterprises are having — they're having to make really big bets, whole industries are being disrupted.
Not old school
Established IT services companies aren't equipped to guide organizations into this new world of rapid, iterative IT delivery, says Wootton.
I like to think we're the antithesis of big consulting. I think devops suffers a little bit from ... trying to adopt it in an old school way — planning the transformation, understanding the operating model. That holds devops back from wider adoption.
I've seen that go wrong when companies say, 'We want to do devops' and it's very much paper-based and planned in conference rooms.
This type of technology really benefits from just jumping in.
That usually means starting off with a short project for a few days to work up an application as a proof of concept and demonstrate something working. Once a first lighthouse project has been delivered then it becomes possible to scale up more ambitiously. All the while, people are learning the new methodology and tools by doing, as Sendachi CEO Steven Anderson explains in a press release issued today:
Our biggest differentiator is that we don’t train internal teams in an abstracted way, we participate with them, showing them how by executing their real-world work. It’s not academic; it’s absolutely practical. We show them how to use new stack technologies and work differently to achieve acceleration and quality.
One of the most significant barriers to get over is the change to reporting lines and working relationships that devops requires. Functions such as development, test, operations, security, all need to reorganize into more cross functional teams, says Wootton.
For devops to do well it is a restructure.
The other half is about technology stacks. How do I leverage Puppet, Chef, Ansible and container stacks in an enterprise setting? Companies need a lot of help to deploy it in a production setting.
Enterprise adoption
Despite the obstacles, large enterprises are moving ahead with devops. The new company inherits Contino's existing UK client base, which includes the likes of leading UK retailers Tesco and Sainsburys, financial services giants such as Banco de Chile, Barclays, CapitalOne and Icap, and media businesses Sky and MailOnline.
In the past year, the company has done a lot of work in the insurance sector and now it is starting to talk to automotive and manufacturing, says Wootton.
Companies are feeling so much pressure they're willing to make increasingly bold bets. Last year we were doing small proofs of concept. As they're feeling more pressure, I'm quite surprised at the industries that are adopting devops and new ways of working.
If insurance companies can do it any company can. We're really getting right into the heart of the mainstream. I think 2016 is the year devops in the financial services sector will go mainstream.
But devops needs to evolve to meet enterprise needs — which is exactly where Sendachi believes it can add value, as Wootton explains.
Devops doesn't really help itself. There wasn't really a template for how to do it. What we wanted to do was develop this roadmap for how to do it — organization, structure, processes, how do you fund it. Not many people have really developed a methodology in that kind of detail.
One of the most difficult aspects is handling changes to reporting lines and organization. It's important to establish a collaborative ethos that gets people from different teams working together right from the start, he says.
You're going to get more collaboration if you understand each other's areas. This collaborative culture is what you want to ultimately achieve. What we've done is build this roadmap for how you get there.
But there's still room for different working styles to co-exist within an organization, he believes, lending support to the often criticized notion of bimodal IT.
Some systems, the pace isn't there, it's about keeping the lights on. There's always some things that have to move faster than others.
Finding the right path for the enterprise as it negotiates the unfamiliar waters of technologies such as cloud and containers, microservices architectures, and methods like agile and devops is Sendachi's vocation.
We feel the funding is a validation for what we've been doing. We need this kind of enterprise-specific view about how you do devops.
People want to move things forward while still keeping the lights on. We feel we can help them get out from between a rock and hard place.
My take
Today's launch is further validation of what we heard yesterday from Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies that devops is starting to emerge into the enterprise mainstream.
Just as in the early days of cloud applications, when pureplay cloud integrators met a demand for skills and methodologies that the incumbent IT services companies simply didn't possess at the time, now it seems the same pattern is playing out in the devops field. And if it turns out with the same kind of ending as Cloud Sherpas, then Columbia will be very happy with the payback on its $30 million investment.
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Disclosure - Salesforce is a diginomica premier partner at the time of writing.