Jasmine Noel

True business agility is not about doing more application updates faster.  True business agility is about doing more application changes faster without sacrificing the application's performance or service quality. From my perspective, achieving that second part of business agility means preventing application performance and service quality problems.  For the longest time IT operations have focused solely on remediating problems, which is not the same thing.  When someone's focus is on remediation, they quickly realize that it is easier to remediate problems when the environment does not change very often.  So no matter how much IT operations teams have streamlined their application problem resolution processes, there has still been an undercurrent of resistence to the constant change that is business agility. Resistence is futile, and operations teams know this.  ... (more)

DevOps, ITIL and Enterprise Adoption

I read two interesting articles last week. No operations team left behind where John Vincent wants folks to realize that enterprise IT organizations can only take baby steps on their way to adopting DevOps.  He is right, getting any large enterprise to change any of their processes is not for the faint-of-heart.  Most enterprises are using some version of ITIL processes for managing and auditing their infrastructure and applications. This means that enterprises would have to change those processes to adopt a DevOps approach -- which is the reason I thought it was interesting that... (more)

Why Would Anyone Choose IBM zEnterprise?

In the wake of IBM's zEnterprise announcement I've seen and heard many different reactions. On one end of the spectrum is "ho hum, another attempt to make the mainframe relevant." On the other end is "why would anyone choose zEnterprise as a hardware platform when the whole point of cloud applications is that users don't know what's under there." Those extremes miss the point, as extremes often do.  From my perspective, users are not the direct consumers of these large server platforms. Users consume application services -- users shouldn't care whether the hardware platform is c... (more)

Measuring the Positive Impact of Devops

Fostering application collaboration between development and operations should be a cornerstone any business agility strategy.  The amount of rework developers have to do to fix deployment rollbacks and application performance problems determines the upper limit on business agility.  The more deployment and production problems your developers must fix the less time they have to  develop new applications. One way to drive down the amount of developer rework is to improve how applications are designed and engineered for the production environment.  This improvement is also a key mo... (more)

MaximizingThe Benefits ofWeb Applications

Enterprises rely on IBM's WebSphere Application Server to quickly build complex applications and highly scalable transaction services. As such, the business criticality of these J2EE applications has grown. WebSphere's importance will continue to expand as businesses look to Web services as the next evolution of application architectures. Trusting your business to this future means that IT must guarantee a quality end-user experience by managing the application server and application components' performance. This challenge is daunting because proactive administration of complex ... (more)