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CA Technologies reinforced its commitment to DevOps by creating a new position in the company: chief DevOps architect.
CA has appointed Ruston Vickers to the new role. Vickers will work with CA customers to sharpen their DevOps strategies to help them deliver higher quality software and services to market faster.
DevOps is an IT methodology, which helps foster collaboration between the teams that create and test applications (Dev) with those that maintain them in production environments (Ops).
DevOps is primarily a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and other IT professionals, particularly operations staff. It is an Agile-related practice that is a response to the interdependence of software development and IT operations. It aims to help an organization rapidly produce software products and services, and benefits companies with very frequent releases.
In the new role, Vickers will also lead the company’s global engagement in initiatives on DevOps and implementation of CA LISA Service Virtualization, Release Automation and Pathfinder, all of which are useful in the implementation of DevOps.
“We are one of the first companies to establish the chief DevOps architect position,” Shridhar Mittal, general manager of Application Delivery at CA, said in a statement. “With Ruston’s depth of knowledge and expertise, he can help our customers transform their application development and deployment process.”
CA officials said Vickers was part of the team that pioneered service virtualization in enterprise systems environments at ITKO, which was acquired by CA Technologies in 2011. He brought LISA to market in the distributed application space in 1999. He also is a contributor to the best practices book, “Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated.”
“Many companies are realizing that the conventional methods of creating and releasing applications are not good enough in today’s complex environments,” Vickers said in a statement. “As a pioneer of service virtualization, we are in a leading position to help our customers implement DevOps strategies to stay competitive and meet innovation challenges.”
CA expanded its portfolio in the DevOps space with the recently released CA LISA Suite 7.1, including CA LISA Service Virtualization, which allows customers to build and test new applications in simulated environments, and Pathfinder, a data mining offering that provides business workflow information to development and test teams. CA also helps enterprises optimize a large number of complex releases across the application lifecycle with CA LISA Release Automation.
“DevOps is about breaking barriers in IT which have slowed down IT change,” Al Hilwa, an IDC analyst, said. “Historically, developers, who are usually tasked with the transformative task of changing the business, are not well aligned with operations staff that is tasked with running the business as efficiently and reliably as possible. This separation has meant that resource provisioning for new applications took weeks and months, and troubleshooting and scaling newly deployed applications required working across this organizational divide.”
IT leaders in the United States have seen concrete business benefits as a result of their organizations’ DevOps implementation, according to TechInsights Report: What Smart Businesses Know About DevOps, a study commissioned by CA and conducted by Vanson Bourne. Based on survey of 1,300 senior IT decision-makers worldwide, the study found that respondents experience anywhere from a 17 to 23 percent improvement in business in the form of increased revenue, faster time to market, improved competitive positioning and enhanced customer experience. And 99 percent of U.S. respondents said they recognize a greater need for DevOps strategies now than before.