In the classic business model, dating back decades, one group built the product, another marketed it, a third team sold it, and a separate department serviced it. However, in today’s software-defined era, those lines are blurring, and the product team has taken a more comprehensive role in the DevOps world.

This trend has increasingly been labeled as “build/run,” an approach where IT organizations provide the platform through which product teams drive the lifecycle from start to finish.

“The key unit is becoming the high-functioning product team, supported by a matrix of platform services,” said Chares Betz, lead DevOps analyst at Forrester Research Inc., in an interview with theCUBE. “In build/run, product teams are responsible for the business results of what they are doing. They’re not just taking orders and delivering software. They are increasingly responsible for business outcomes.”

The future of DevOps will be on display September 22, when Amazon Web Services Inc. and theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, welcome 14 companies within the cloud provider’s ecosystem during the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Migration and Management Tools. TheCUBE’s coverage of the event will run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. PDT. The Showcase will feature interviews with founders of fast-growing startups, AWS executives and noted technologist Emily Freeman, author of “DevOps for Dummies” and co-curator of “97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know.” (* Disclosure below.)

Growth of intrapreneurship

The rise of DevOps and spread of the build/run concept have been supported by a business trend known as “intrapreneurship,” a term previously captured in the writings of corporate executive Gifford Pinchot III. In an intrapreneurial model, employees act like entrepreneurs within the organizations in which they work.

Examples of intrapreneurship abound. Development of the first Sony PlayStation sprang from a junior employee’s curious experimenting with his daughter’s Nintendo. The founders of Google LLC created a “20% time” policy for employees to devote to projects outside of their normal work, and the concept has been ingrained in Amazon’s own culture.

“At the end state of product centricity is ‘intrapreneurship,’ acting as a business within a business,” Betz noted. “This is how Amazon works, and it is the end game of DevOps and IT transformation.”

Some industries lag

The transition to a product team-driven DevOps model has certainly not become a universal standard, and some industries continue to lag behind. Noteworthy among these are higher education and healthcare.

Although a global pandemic has hastened the broader adoption of new technologies in higher education and healthcare, such as use of video conferencing for remote learning and medical diagnosis, build/run in these sectors remains the exception rather than the rule.

A build/run culture is not as strong in the educational world, and in the healthcare arena IT teams are continuing to battle through tech challenges to embrace the DevOps movement.

“Higher education and healthcare are the last to the party,” Betz noted. “The more an organization chooses to buy software, the less likely they are to build it and therefore the less interest in DevOps.”

NOCs are likely to stay

Despite the rise of intrapreneurship and DevOps, one area of IT that is unlikely to be transformed anytime soon is the network operations center. This centralized location for an organization to monitor performance and overall health of a network is often the first line of defense against significant business disruption.

A unified operations center that includes application and cloud teams, network monitoring and security has become a de facto standard for many organizations. It is also currently at the core of a growth industry. A report released in August found that the global IT infrastructure monitoring market was expected to expand 3.6x over the next 10 years.

“A network operating center doesn’t necessarily go away,” Betz noted. “This is a bad idea. Incidents aren’t always well-behaved in terms of localizing themselves to one clear team.”

Livestream of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics & Cloud Management Tools

The AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics & Cloud Management Tools is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here on demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics & Cloud Management Tools, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests

Click here for a complete guest list of who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics & Cloud Management Tools.

Watch hosts John Furrier and Lisa Martin discuss the upcoming Showcase below.

(* Disclosure: This event is sponsored by participating companies in the AWS Startup Showcase. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE