Last week I was able to get the most out of my trip to Austin by attending Puppet Camp and then DevOpsDays.  Puppet Camp was a high quality event with great sessions.  The content was quite varied and really resonated with me.  I’ve noticed that the Puppet community is undergoing phenomenal growth and I’m impressed with the level of community engagement.  Initiatives such as ask.puppetlabs.com and Puppet Forge make community involvement easier than ever.  A couple of highlights from the event…

@GrandmaHenri, a technical writer at Puppet Labs, presented a session on how to document modules on the Puppet Forge.  This should keep the quality of

I just got back from attending a few back-to-back events.  One of which was ChefConf 2013. It was my first ChefConf and it was a really high energy event with a wide variety of speakers and attendees.  I chose to focus on the sessions covering culture, but there were many great sessions.

The first memorable session was “Scaling systems configuration at Facebook,” presented by Phil Dibowitz from Facebook.  A larger-than-life rock and roll guy if ever I saw one, Phil did an awesome session on why Chef was the appropriate tool for use at Facebook.  I think Phil probably made Chef support staff cringe when he discussed “tweaking” the Chef libraries to meet his needs, but he did add a

My recent post at WIRED Insights on the Evolution of RevApps is generating plenty of positive feedback.  People are commenting that the focus on Revenue Applications brings fresh insight to a variety of related topics, most especially DevOps.  Or as the posting says, enterprises must properly organize themselves, adopt the necessary tooling and set the right goals to succeed in this brave new world.

What brave new world is that?  The one that has crept up on us, where industry after industry now markets themselves to consumers via the wonders of their RevApps. File an insurance claim? Check in for a flight? Deposit a

We premiered our latest video in front of 1,500 people this week at the Pink13 conference.  You never know how these things will be received until they air, especially when they’re supposed to be funny.  I like to think I know funny, but I’m darn sure I know laughter, and I’m pleased to report that the Change & Release Dino video triggered uproarious

Continuous Delivery is all the rage for dev teams and the release management / application delivery marketplace.  And rightfully so, as it is the application delivery methodology that lets App Dev deliver the code.  It saves time and money as it cuts the time for applications to be delivered into production.

A key driver for Continuous Delivery has been the adoption of Agile as a development methodology.  Most of our long-term application lifecycle management (ALM) customers have implemented at least some agile development processes,

This never gets old.  Innovation and validation, that is.  Serena’s innovation in the broad realm of ITIL processes was validated almost a year ago when we won Pink Elephant’s prestigious ITIL Innovation of the Year Award.  The new news is that we’ve just been selected as a finalist for this year’s award, further validating our ongoing innovation.

Our innovation this time is to directly address and automate the challenges of

Think You Know Your Team?

When was the last time you sat down with your peers and had a discussion about their priorities? What drives your priorities and what drives those of your peers may be widely dissimilar. Time-to-market may be your watch word. Maybe up-time and availability are key for your colleague downstream and driving out costs for an associate upstream.

What if you could have a Leadership Priorities Matrix for everyone in your

IT organizations are being called upon to provide the most mission critical of services – delivering and maintaining revenue-generating applications that are the face of the business. But a recent survey of 200 IT professionals from a variety of industries revealed an appalling lack of service management process and tool maturity within organizations. This severely impacts their ability to respond to the increasing pace of service demand from the

In my last blog post, I wrote that the “7 Deadly Sins of IT Demand” are driving down business satisfaction with IT. Any of these sins can make it extremely challenging for IT to efficiently and quickly fulfill demand. Recognize any of them?

1. The Squeaky Wheel, who constantly harasses IT or escalates requests.
2. The Black Hole where good requests

The “7 Deadly Sins of Managing IT Demand” are undermining business satisfaction with IT. They’re the reason why IT struggles fulfilling business demands and answering some key questions from the business:

• What’s the status of my requests?
• Why can’t IT fulfill my demands faster?
• What’s IT doing with my budget?

So what are the 7 Deadly Sins and how are they jeopardizing IT success?

1. The Squeaky Wheel: Whether it’s constantly