By Olive Brady, Technical Consultant, Integration & Architecture, Devoteam
SEACON2018: Study of Enterprise Agility Conference on 12 November 2018 was an insight into three keywords: Engagement, Agility and Growth. Based in the HereEast Innovation Centre in the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London, the modern architecture gave the perfect backdrop for the talks and discussions which followed later in the day.
There were eleven keynotes speakers, the most prominent being Barry O’Reilly who was promoting his new book Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, a copy of which was given to all attendees. O’Reilly writes about leaders having to unlearn and rethink what they know in order to revitalise their businesses for stronger, longer-lasting success.
It is worth mentioning that the majority of the presentations were non-technical. Personally I found this surprising given that many of the vendors are technical leaders in their field. The focus was more on the higher level enterprise strategies to survive and succeed in an ever-changing environment where the competitors are now lean and agile. This leads nicely onto one of the most thought-provoking topics which was touched upon by several of the speakers was around disruption and its consequences.
The traditional banking institutions are a classical example of how new fintech companies such as Monzo and Revolut are disrupting their natural order. Instead of the customer remaining loyal to such companies, it is now the turn of the institutions to become loyal to the customers by providing a better service. If they are to survive against such agile and engaging companies, they must adapt their way of working and quickly.
The vendors supporting the event (Docker, Red Hat & GitHub to name a few) also had stands at SEACON. However, there were a few less-well known vendors who I spoke with, xMatters being one of the best. They offer a PaaS which integrates all of your collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence and Slack. From decreasing outage times during major incident management (ServiceNow can also be integrated) to solving internal problems between Dev and Ops, such tools are proving invaluable to both the business and technology needs.
Among the keynote speakers was a noticeable amount of male v female diversity. Out of the eleven, five were women. Although the same could not be said for the attendees, it was nice to see changes are beginning to take place for business and tech to become more inclusive for all.
Overall it was fantastic day full of fun, stimulating talks and great pastries!
Devoteam is a leading ICT specialist with deep expertise of integration and API management technologies (Red Hat, Google, TIBCO, Mulesoft). Devoteam builds seamless frameworks of applications, data sources, and devices connected by APIs anywhere to enable companies to do more, faster, with less.
To discuss how Devoteam can help your organisation adopt DevOps successfully, please contact uk.info@devoteam.com.