Xebia Articles

Xebia instruqt provides a learning platform for DevOps tools. Last year we noticed a significant shortage in DevOps talent. DevOps concepts are often hard to master for organizations transitioning to DevOps. We have been using HashiCorp products in our customer projects for some time. Our observation is many organizations have a DevOps skill gaps. This becomes a showstopper for the innovation power and speed required to remain competitive in today's digital era. In our quest for an effective approach to transfer knowledge and skills we always focused on: coaching-on-the-job, forming specialized DevOps teams that include experts from the customer, and on-site classroom based training. These methods have merit but they are not the most effective or fun way to learn. We were on the search for an alternative way to spread the word about leading DevOps products.

Five years ago Marc Andreessen, a well-known American entrepreneur, investor and software engineer, coined the phrase "software is eating the world". The years that followed his statement became more and more reality. Companies like Uber, AirBNB, Apply Pay, Spotify, and Netflix have changed and are still changing entire industries by disrupting them with new business models and value-added services to customers. IT plays a crucial role in these startups and high-tech companies. In order to survive the digital age, you better look carefully at what these industry leaders are doing to make sure you make the right investments and to get rid of unnecessary waste.

On my first day as Xebia employee I immediately got involved in a very interesting project for a customer in the financial sector. In hindsight it had almost all ingredients to be a spot-on case for our New IT paradigm. Our audit of the IT department quickly brought to light a perfect storm of ‘impediments’ this organization faced: a depricated technology stack, a silo-based waterfall culture dominated by manual hand-offs, bureaucratic process steps and ivory tower behavior, an average release cycle of multiple months, customers walking away, investors being reluctant to keep investing in the company, and on top of it, an anxious workforce with low morale and only a few experts remaining who are willing and able to reverse a downward trend.