In a move that should accelerate adoption of best DevOps practices in the enterprise, CloudBees and Atos announced this week that the two are collaborating to advance adoption of continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platforms on the Google public cloud.
Announced at the Google Cloud Next 2019 conference, the alliance will result in the IT services giant delivering a managed instance of a CloudBees CI/CD platform running on the Google cloud, in addition to providing traditional consulting services.
Francois Dechery, chief strategy officer for CloudBees, said the alliance with Atos will accelerate adoption of DevOps processes in traditional enterprise IT organizations as Atos consultants engage customers looking to modernize their application development and deployment processes. In fact, many of the principles first pioneered by proponents of agile development methodologies are now being applied to business process management, he noted.
Atos plans to add a DevOps practice as a complement to its existing processes. Michael Kollar, senior vice president for cloud engineering, said the company expects that, for the foreseeable future, most of their clients will be trying to meld some degree of DevOps and existing ITIL-based approaches to IT services management (ITSM). The alliance with Google will go a long way to accelerating that transition because it will allow Atos to deliver access to a CI/CD platform based on a consumption model that reflects the way public cloud infrastructure is consumed, he said.
Kollar noted enterprise IT organizations are under more pressure than ever to deliver applications faster as more organizations recognize they are a software company that happens to make something. Most organizations today need to create a superior customer experience through software to differentiate themselves from their competition, he said.
Many of those companies will need help setting up the processes that will enable them to function as a software company, he added. The biggest challenge, however, is finding a way to meld new ways of building and deploying applications with investments in legacy systems on which the business still depends, he said.
Naturally, Atos won’t be the only IT services firm to launch a managed DevOps process. But as more IT services firms invest in developing managed services, there will be need for a balance between the managed services provided by IT services providers and cloud service providers such as Google and the IT services that will continue to be managed and delivered by internal IT organizations. The degree to which organizations will rely on external IT services firms for DevOps will be dictated by how mature they are today. But it does not follow that an organization which sees a need to rely on external expertise today will be that position tomorrow. As more organizations develop internal expertise, a managed service provider will need to earn its seat at the table every time its contract comes up for renewal.