The needs of the enterprise sector when it comes to development, deployment, and operations has been advancing at a pace that only technology can sustain. In the early days of software, development was a question of producing a product in an office or garage, going “gold” and pressing it onto a disc–all that would go into a box. Now, the entire roadmap has changed, instead of a box that ends up on a shelf, most software is always-on and that box and shelf are sitting in the palm or on the desk of every client.

In the Internet era, software is released with an immediacy and this has thoroughly changed both development and operations and has given rise to the need for what is now known as DevOps.

CA Technologies has become the focus of DevOpsAngle in the past for standing at the forefront of DevOps tools and products and to get a look at the past, present, and future of those products, DevOpsAngle spoke with Shridhar Mittal, general manager of Application Delivery.

Mittal is a well-blooded veteran of the DevOps market and has been peering into the windows of development and delivery for many years. He started out his tour of duty at ITKO in 2005 when DevOps was just a twinkle in the software industry’s eye.

At the time, Mittal and ITKO saw the writing on the wall that software was already growing into something new, expanding to meet the boundaries of modern technology. Development and production had become a many-faceted, highly complex process that depended heavily on everything working properly in tandem; a single change to any one part of a client-facing data service could give rise to unexpected bugs.

To handle this ITKO produced a first product around testing–taking an approach to shaking out bugs in UIs by simulating the activity of customers. This concept of stress testing by recording and playing back customer activity is an important part of quality of assurance today.

“We were able to stay ahead of the DevOps innovation curve,” Mittal explained about ITKO and its position with respect to DevOps. “While many companies were focusing on user interface, we worked on testing because we realized that testing was the key to deploy higher quality applications and break the bottleneck of the development process. The ITKO team pioneered the concept of service virtualization, which allows customers to test new applications in simulated environments.

“During the past 10 years, we have seen IT and software industry’s pursuit of high quality and speed in the application space.  Agility seemed to be the answer to that at some point.  I always thought agility would not be enough to meet increasing demand.  DevOps is the transformation we need.”

During 2013, CA Technologies acquired ITKO and with it Mittal and the soul of his work in the industry for $330 million and with it Mittal himself.

“We are thrilled to join CA Technologies because it gives us a tremendous platform to take our growth to an entirely new level,” said Shridhar Mittal, at the time president and CEO of ITKO. “Combining LISA with CA Technologies world-class IT management will give our customers a solution that is ready for where they’re going, not limiting them to where they’ve been.”

The future of DevOps is about a cultural paradigm shift

Mittal believes that while the revolution of DevOps may be largely a cultural one, it’s impossible to make cultural changes without an underlying foundation of technology. It’s the technological infrastructure that has put the enterprise sector in this position–the rise of the Internet, mobile devices in every hand, giant data-driven services. And, with that in mind, it’s also a transformative effect that companies are using to give themselves the edge to stay competitive in an ever-expanding ecology and marketplace.

“It’s very difficult to bring about cultural change without technology to support it,” says Mittal about the necessity for potent tools and suits to support DevOps as a culture.

As a paradigm for the production and deployment of software and service, he explains, could could save companies hundreds of millions of dollars in the end run. CA Technologies and Mittal seek to underpin this cultural change with that foundation of technology of support it.

“Some say DevOps is a method while others say it is a culture.  I would have said DevOps was all of the above if someone asked me a few years ago.  Now that 2014 has begun.  I would say that DevOps has evolved into a transformational business strategy to win the competition,” says Mittal looking forward into 2014.

He continues, “DevOps also has a component of continuous feedback loop, which enables companies to analyze, adjust and improve quality accordingly.  We have helped our customers tackle such challenges as delivering higher quality applications faster and more cost efficiently than ever before.  It is clear that conventional methods are not good enough for the 21st century.  Companies that are willing to undergo an internal transformation can stay competitive.”