| By Jasmine Noel |
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| November 19, 2010 03:24 PM EST |
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4,468 |
At an IBM analyst event earlier this week, Steve Mills, IBM Senior VP & Group Executive, Software and Systems, made some interesting observations about how the microprocessor industry makes no distinction between design and fabrication anymore. He noted that it is simply impossible to produce new high density, high performance microprocessors without tightly integrating fabrication know-how into the creative design process. While discussions about microprocessors are somewhat nostalgic for me (reminds me of my college goals of working at Intel as a materials scientist), I think Mills’ description is an excellent analogy of where enterprise software development and management is heading.
High density software provisioning is available courtesy of virtualization, cloud computing, etc. High performance software is available courtesy of code optimization automation, load-balancing, traffic optimization, location optimization and so on. However, producing software that is both high density and high performance requires tight integration and collaboration between development and operations. That sounds like the DevOps movement to me.
From my perspective there’ll be only one real difference between the microprocessor industry and enterprise DevOps. That difference being, software development and operations teams can create new high density, high performance software MUCH FASTER than hardware folks can create new high density, high performance microprocessors.
Jasmine Noel is a founding partner of Ptak, Noel & Associates. She has over 15 years experience analyzing and consulting on IT management issues. She currently focuses on technologies and processes that organizations require to design, engineer and manage the performance and service quality of business applications, workloads and services. Noel served previously as director of systems and applications management at Hurwitz Group, where she formulated and managed the company’s research agenda. She was also a senior analyst at D.H. Brown Associates, where her responsibilities included technology trend analysis in the network and systems management space. Noel is regularly quoted in and contributed articles to several leading publications and content portals on various IT management topics. She holds a bachelor of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master of science from the University of Southern California.
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