Mobility, the Internet of Things, and the API economy are putting new pressure on IT, delegates heard at the opening of the CA IT Management Symposium Africa in Midrand.

CA’s symposium, attracting around 1,000 delegates this year, focused on delivering IT with Impact, as enterprises increasingly depend on their IT systems to gain a competitive advantage.

In his keynote at the event, Shridhar Mittal, general manager of the CA Application Delivery Business Unit, noted: “There is major transformation happening. Companies that move fast and adapt to the change will be the winners in this revolution.”

Mittal highlighted the rapid growth in the number of mobile users and connected devices. “Now, there are around 3.3 devices per knowledge worker. Each of them is loaded with numerous apps. In the Internet of Things era, humans, animals and a multitude of new devices will also be connected. Managing this connectivity and ensuring stability and security will put pressure on the IT department,” he noted.

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Gary Lawrence, MD of CA Southern Africa" />In the race to embrace IT advances and deliver business innovation, DevOps is delivering spectacular results to early adopters, said Mittal. “You can’t keep innovations waiting for a year anymore,” he said.

Mittal explained that developers are challenged by the demand to deliver quality applications, fast, in a highly complex environment, which may include a distributed, heterogeneous architecture and distributed teams collaborating globally. “Theoretically, you might want to get the new code to market the same day. But compliance and quality control processes may slow release to the point that it can take 6 to 12 months to release. This situation is untenable, and has informed the need for new methodologies. Effective DevOps models can reduce this time to market to weeks – or even days,” he said.

However, “DevOps is neither a system to acquire nor a big bang approach,” Mittal says. Moving to DevOps methodologies can be done in ‘consumable chunks,’ each of which is driven by value. “We have developed a value release model in which you grab the low-hanging fruit to see immediate value. Our work with partners and customers, in addition to our own research, has resulted in a model through which enterprises can move towards a full DevOps methodology in a phased manner.”

The first step tackles the delays and complexity that occurs during development, he says. “Our ‘shift left’ model uses service virtualisation to support improved engineering and testing much earlier in the development process, so minimising time spent in application testing. This can speed up time to market by about 30% and reduce bugs by up to 60%-80%,” he says.

The next step entails intelligent, model-based release automation, which also addresses the need for speed – with a 30-40% improvement in time to market, as well as improving quality.

Shridhar Mittal, GM of CA Technologies

Third is the automation of the testing itself. “If developers are doing a lot of manual, performance and integration testing, they need to look to continuous validation for improved quality and time to market. In these complex environments, testing is no longer an event,” says Mittal.

Finally, he says, is a feedback layer in which developers learn from production and bring a production-like environment to play earlier in the process.

Speaking on the sidelines of the event, Gary Lawrence, MD of CA Southern Africa, said while DevOps, mobility and security were key topics on the CIO agenda now, IT Management had to be approached in a comprehensive manner to keep up with change. “We see it as a supply chain of IT – all elements are important and the whole platform needs to be effective. Those who do it well will win market share.”

Marco Comastri, CA Technologies President & General Manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, added: “It has to be seen in its entirety. This is why CA delivers the breadth of solutions that it does. DevOps may be the most fashionable topic, and security is certainly crucial as the Internet of Things creates massive exposure, but all delivering IT with a focus on security, quality and continuity encompasses all elements of IT management.”