Theo Schlossnage, CEO at OmniTI, and frequent guest of theCUBE, discussed DevOps trends and new technology adoption in the enterprise with co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at the O’Reilly Velocity conference in Santa Clara.

Commenting on the current state of affairs, Schlossnage said IT was “still drowning in data, still getting smothered by the cloud. The industry has matured a lot, the conversation is better now, but a lot of the problems are the same.”

As far as the open source vs closed debate goes, he said it was an interesting convergence. “I guess I’ve been a fan of open source, but I’ve also been a fan of ‘shut the corks.'” He explained it was a question of providing real solutions to real problems. One out of a hundred solutions is commercial and that is because open source is “just better at providing a solutions,” and at coming with updates when things go wrong.

Talking about the changing roles within the IT world, Schlossnage pointed out that “when complexity gets very, very large, and your’re running things at scale, the person who can tackle with those things is a generalist.”

Stability in DevOps?

Asked if some stability  has been reached in DevOps, Schlossnage stated “the industry is coming to grips for more generalized talent, DevOps is not just a term that you here at conferences, I think the awareness has gone up.” You need some operational skills in your software team, although software engineering is important to operations, and engineers’ arguments were valid. He explained his role as “trying to be on the other side of the argument” to make everyone get along.

When it comes to new technology adoption, some of the bigger companies have good talent, progressive thinkers, who understand “technology is there to meet business needs”, so they advise their companies to evaluate new technologies. But there still are companies stuck with old school business processes which they are thoroughly familiar with, that “shouldn’t try everything. Someone has to tell them to kind of stop and reset” Schlossnage explained. “To deploy things quickly, you have to get rid of your workflows.”In the case of such companies, “it helps to be highly prescriptive, go in there and tell them what to do.”

“There’s no reason to have technology unless it enables a business process,” Theo Schlossnage said. Technology is not nearly as flexible as people think. It is good for some things, it works in a certain way, and being “willing to change business processes to adapt to the strengths of technology is key.”

Taking advantage of what Big Data can do depends on the questions being asked. “You have Big Data solutions that can answer crazy questions right now,” Schlossnage said, but you need to ask the right questions to get the answers that help improve business processes and increase efficiency.