As applications become the center of business, companies need to discover how to quickly interact with these applications to provide the solutions that customers expect. One way to achieve this speed is to get business, development and operations teams to work together, according to Danny Winokur (pictured), general manager at AppDynamics, a Cisco Systems Inc. company.

“The BizDevOps concept is really around getting those three teams working together with velocity in a new closed-loop operating model,” Winokur said. “That allows you to actually gain the competitive advantage that’s necessary in an experience-driven, application-centric world.”

Winokur spoke with John Furrier and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona. They discussed the BizDevOps model, problems companies may have if they don’t integrate teams, and the related challenges. (* Disclosure below.)

The difficulty of producing winning experiences

Companies that do not involve their business team in technology issues will have two major problems, according to Winokur. “One is that the business initiatives, which move very quickly, can’t get encoded quickly enough in the application,” he said. “So the application falls behind and the business suffers.”

The second problem is that organizations will find it difficult to produce winning experiences, given the way the experiences are developed. The usual approach is to gather user research and a hypothesis from it, introduce it into the application, and quickly get it in front of users with real-time measurement and telemetry, Winokur explained.

“Then you use that to inform yourself in real time around what is working and what is not,” he said. “So you reform your hypothesis, make that adjustment by re-implementing the code, get it back out, and iterate; the more shots on goal that you’re able to take with the velocity of iteration, the more likely you are to get to the winning experience.”

A challenge for the implementation of the BizDevOps concept is to connect the teams, which in traditional models of operation work in silos; the technologies they trust keep them in those silos. To allow them to work together, it is necessary to provide common tools and data sets, according to Winokur.

Cisco is solving this problem by connecting AppDynamics (application performance management) to the tools that are below it in the stack so that each team uses a tool that is comfortable but the data sets are connected. “Instead of finger-pointing when something goes wrong or [teams] need to optimize, they’re able to actually have a shared source of truth,” Winokur stated. “That makes it easier for them to collaborate in this closed-loop operating model.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE