CIO DECISIONS • JUNE 2016 1 THE FIX 5 MINUTES WITH SUE TROY DEFINE THIS BY THE NUMBERS CIO INNOVATORS EVERYBODY'S TALKING DevOp Culture Hero To CIOs planning to go the DevOps route, put on your capes. It will require strong leadership, exceptional people skills—and a high tolerance for failure. CIO DECISIONS Guiding technology decision makers in the enterprise CIO INNOVATORS Hotel APIs Cut Out the Middleman 5 MINUTES WITH SUE TROY Mobility: Center of Innovation THE FIX The Language of Experimentation ALSO IN THIS ISSUE DEFINE THIS Fast Data/Palm Vein Recognition BY THE NUMBERS IoT and IT’s Role EVERYBODY’S TALKING Demystifying DevOps JUNE 2016 VOLUME 53
Transcript
CIO DECISIONS • JUNE 2016 1
EDITOR’S LETTER COVER STORY
THE FIX 5 MINUTES WITH SUE TROY
DEFINE THIS
BY THE NUMBERS
CIO INNOVATORS
EVERYBODY'S TALKING
HOME
DevOp Culture HeroTo CIOs planning to go the DevOps route, put
on your capes. It will require strong leadership, exceptional people skills—and a
high tolerance for failure.
CIOdecisions
Guiding technology decision makers in the enterprise
CIO INNOVATORS
Hotel APIs Cut Out the Middleman
5 MINUTES WITH SUE TROY
Mobility: Center of Innovation
THE FIX
The Language of Experimentation
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
DEFINE THIS
Fast Data/Palm Vein Recognition
BY THE NUMBERS
IoT and IT’s Role
EVERYBODY’S TALKING
Demystifying DevOps
JUNE 2016 VOLUME 53
CIO DECISIONS • JUNE 2016 2
EDITOR’S LETTER COVER STORY
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THE DEVOPS APPROACH, which puts software developers together with IT operations team members so that creat-ing, testing and releasing software can happen more rapidly, frequently and reliably, is gaining the attention of more and more organizations. According to recent research by 451 Research, 40% of the 568 infrastructure professionals the firm recently polled are using DevOps somewhere in their organizations.
The growing attention DevOps is garnering is warranted, Donnie Berkholz, a research director at 451, told Mary K. Pratt in the cover story of this month’s CIO Decisions. Not only does the DevOps approach yield faster delivery of features, more stable operating environments and better-quality products, but it also produces continuous software delivery and swifter problem resolutions—in turn leading to greater user satisfaction, said Berkholz and other DevOps proponents.
But DevOps isn’t only an approach; some also call it a culture or a movement, and transitioning to this model isn’t easy and in fact causes huge disruption. The movement
requires CIOs and other IT leaders not only to possess key leadership and change management skills, but also to be able to articulate and sell this major culture shift to their colleagues and staff.
Pratt learned this first-hand from Alexander Pluim, CTO of Amsterdam-based BVA Auctions. For Pluim, as for many other DevOps practitioners, the process didn’t happen over-night.
“Starting DevOps was a symbolic step. The real effort was the transformation from ‘sitting together’ to ‘working together.’ This took months. It’s not black and white; it has its ups and downs. It needs ongoing attention in aligning priorities, sharing information and open communication,” Pluim said.
Flip through our cover feature to learn about the three pillars IT executives need to focus on to successfully usher DevOps into their environment. Plus, discover why it’s cru-cial for CIOs to create a fail-safe environment so technolo-gists feel free to take on challenges.
CTO ALEXANDER PLUIM described his company’s situation as typical: An enterprise technology system has issues; no one is sure what is going wrong, but each worker is positive it isn’t his fault.
Fortunately for Pluim, CTO at Amsterdam-based BVA Auctions, he realized the reason for his team’s predicament.
“When I looked at people behind their desks, trying to guess on their own without communi-cating with the other disciplines, I was amazed,” he said.
The different disciplines—developers, DBAs,
C O V E R ST O R Y
ART: POHOSLAW/ISTOCK
Risks and Rewards Abound in
DevOpsThere are many benefits to this practice,
but launching it demands from CIOs a strong tolerance for failure—and more.
BY MARY K. PRATT
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IT operations folks—had no insight into what the others were doing.
To help remedy the problem, he physically relocated teams so they could work together on the issues. It was the start of his move to DevOps.
“Being able to see what the other was doing and being able to get new insights motivated the IT team, and they became more enthusiastic. Since we had such a good experience here, we became convinced that a DevOps model would help us a lot on a day-to-day basis,” Pluim said.
Proponents tout the many benefits of DevOps, the prac-tice of putting software developers and IT operations team members together so that building, testing and releasing software can happen quickly, frequently and more reliably.
They say this approach (or culture or movement, as some call it) pro-duces faster delivery of features, more stable operating environ-ments and better-quality products. They also say that the DevOps model means continuous software delivery and faster problem resolu-tion, which leads to more satisfied users.
Results like that get attention, said Donnie Berkholz, research
COVER STORY
ALEXANDER PLUIM says moving to DevOps took new resources.
director for the development, DevOps, and IT ops channel at 451 Research. In fact, he points out that 40% of the 568 infrastructure professionals his firm recently surveyed are using DevOps somewhere in their organizations.
However, moving to a DevOps culture doesn’t happen easily. It is almost always highly disruptive. And it won’t happen at all if the CIO, CTO and other IT executives don’t champion the cause, said analysts, advisers and tech leaders already experienced in DevOps.
IT leaders must be able to articulate why and how a Dev-Ops model of working will bring improvements, and they must be able to sell their vision to colleagues and staff alike.
CIOs also need to shepherd their teams through the changes—keeping workers on track and moving forward even though some will resist (as is typical anytime people are asked to do their jobs differently).
CIOs will likely need to juggle staff, too, hiring new talent, retraining others and developing new skills in some so that
DevOps produces faster delivery of features, more stable operating environments and better-quality products.
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those employees who once worked in isolated buckets can actually understand each other’s work and how each role contributes to the final product.
THE THREE PILLARS OF DEVOPSGiven all that, experts agree that bringing the DevOps ap-proach into an organization takes a serious amount of atten-tion and investment from the executive ranks right down to the rank-and-file IT staffers.
“It involves dedication, and you need to make sure every-one is involved. It will involve a lot of people management,” Pluim said.
Indeed, BVA Auctions didn’t move to DevOps over- night. Pluim said the process of moving from a traditional development process to the DevOps model took new re-sources.
“We got more Ops capacity to make sure we could cover every team. We focused more on teamwork, taking respon-sibility and finishing work,” he said, adding that the com-pany even hired a dedicated Agile coach.
Pluim noted that the process also took time. “Starting DevOps was a symbolic step. The real effort was the trans-formation from ‘sitting together’ to ‘working together.’ This took months. It’s not black and white; it has its ups and downs. It needs ongoing attention in aligning priorities,
sharing information and open communication.”Berkholz said IT executives looking to bring DevOps into
their environment need to focus on three pillars: culture, automation and measurement. But he also acknowledged that moving the dial in each of those areas is a challenge in and of itself.
For instance, leadership needs to break down siloes and foster communication among developers, operations people and quality assurance if they want to create the collabora-tive culture needed to make the DevOps model work, Berk-holz explained. That requires change management skills from management and executives, buy-in from everyone, and adjustments in workflow processes. It also requires supportive strategies, such as putting workers physically
together (when possible) and giv-ing them collaboration tools if they can’t be in one place.
Leadership also needs to imple-ment infrastructure and tools that will automate and monitor the delivery and deployment process, he added.
These challenges require CIOs to make haste slowly. As Berkholz said: “With any major changes, it’s better to build up support.”
COVER STORY
DONNIE BERKHOLZ urges CIOs to focus on culture, automation and measurement.
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A DEVOPS CULTURE SIX YEARS IN THE MAKING That’s the approach that leaders at Wix.com took when they moved to DevOps six years ago.
The company wanted to shed its IT development prob-lems—typical challenges like issues with product quality, too-long production times and inefficient use of workers’ time, said Aviran Mordo, the company’s head of engineering.
Champions of the DevOps approach convinced the CEO that it was the way to go, and he in turn convinced the board to OK a freeze on production for six months, as the company shifted everyone’s attention to learning and preparing for the move to DevOps.
Wix.com, a cloud-based development platform, flew its leaders to a Silicon Valley software company already us-
ing DevOps so they could study the process. Then Wix.com brought the Silicon Valley CEO to its own head-quarters for a few days so he could educate staff on the process.
Mordo said leadership then fo-cused on training staff, restructur-ing workflow processes, reorganiz-ing teams to have them physically meet and work together, and build-ing the infrastructure and automa-tion tools needed to support the new
development framework.“We changed the roles of every department. Whatever
they did before, we told them they were going to do it differ-ently,” Mordo said.
As it progressed, “everyone felt they were one team with one goal: to help the developer ship the product to produc-tion,” he said.
Today, six years later, the company deploys products about 100 times a day and is able to react to changes and requirements rapidly with extremely high-quality code in a culture where IT workers continually grow and improve their skills, Mordo adds.
FAIL-SAFE ENVIRONMENT IS CRITICAL Chris Corriere, a DevOps/software engineer at Autotrader.com Inc., a marketplace for car buyers and sellers, had a similar assessment of what it takes to bring a DevOps model into an existing IT operation. But he said there’s more, too.
Automation and automated feedback for better situ-ational awareness are essential, to be sure, as is breaking down those siloes between developers and operations. But Corriere, who joined the company in 2014 to move DevOps forward, said CIOs can’t just push for collaboration and au-tomation and leave it there. They need to push for a differ-ent mindset throughout the organization, too.
AVIRAN MORDO says the role of every department at Wix changed.
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He says it’s critical for CIOs to create a fail-safe environ-ment where technologists feel they can take on challenges and grow without worrying that missteps could be cata-strophic (or get them fired).
Corriere said leadership needs to “frame things as experi-ments instead of outcomes, because you’re not exactly sure it’s going to work out. That is a cultural change, and it’s a big one.”
The need for that kind of shift is one of the biggest rea-sons why CIOs and other IT leaders need to be champions of DevOps if they indeed want it to succeed in their orga-nization, said Rohit Antao, a PwC partner specializing in
technology-driven business innovation.Furthermore, IT executives must ensure that corporate
policies and procedures support the new approach, too, An-tao said. For example, CIOs need to align corporate financ-ing and the project funding process with the continuous deployment model. Otherwise, money becomes a bottleneck to rapid development and deployment.
“I know a lot has been said about DevOps being a grass-roots movement,” he added, but the IT leadership has a very crucial and pivotal role to play here. They need to change the conversation at the top if they want to enable DevOps.”•
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THE PROBLEM: Failing fast may work for Silicon Valley startup
companies, but for organizations such as SAP SE and the city govern-ment of Boston, the term doesn’t encourage confidence. “Running around saying ‘fail fast’ is a little like having an extra head on my body,” Jonathan Becher, chief digital of-ficer at SAP, said during the recent CDO Summit in New York City. Lauren Lockwood, Boston’s CDO, agreed, adding that the term is counterintui-tive to the city’s mission. “It’s not an option to fail as a government,” she explained. “If we fail, people don’t get their garbage picked up, and that’s a big problem.”
THE STRATEGY: Rather than fail-ing fast, Becher and Lockwood
have landed on a different language: the language of experimentation. “Instead of running 10 big bets a year, let’s figure out how we can run hundreds of little bets a week,” Becher said. Experimentation is a term rooted in science, which is more palatable to Becher and Lockwood’s respective communities, and yet it gets at the same iteration loop as failing fast—namely to test, gather re-sults, measure, repeat. As Becher put it, “Trying to set up experiments that can be created quickly and destroyed quickly—of course that’s failing. But don’t say that.”
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THE RESULTS: It may sound like semantics, but Lockwood
and Becher argue that the language tweak alone is powerful enough to change the employee—and customer —perspectives.
The city government of Boston is currently in the process of rolling out a new website. However, rather than building, developing and designing behind closed doors, Lockwood and her team launched a pilot site and rolled it out to the public to gather input. “That kind of experimentation allows us to introduce concepts or digital transformation in a really non-threatening way,” Lockwood said.
—NICOLE LASKOWSKI
Jonathan Becher Chief Digital OfficerSAP
Failing Fast: A Lesson in Semantics
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Mobile Cloud: Today’s Center of Innovation?Companies need to spend money on cloud-enabled
mobility, but not just because it’s beneficial to productivity.
BY SUE TROY
MOBILE DEVICES AND cloud computing have a symbiotic relationship: Cloud computing en-hances the use of mobile devices, and mobile devices have propelled greater use of the cloud. Together, the two technologies enable increased agility for consumers and for businesses, ac-cording to Bob Egan, chief research officer and founder of Sepharim Research Group. The real benefit of cloud-enhanced mobile technology is not about the device or the applications, Egan explained, but about the positive impact it has on the business.
In this Q&A, Egan explains why mobile devices
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represent such an important platform for businesses, why incumbent businesses can’t afford to fall behind in their use and support of mobile and cloud computing, why companies should strive to make it easier for customers and employees alike to use mobile devices, and what role mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) should play in IT strategy.
This interview has been edited for length.
Why should mobile cloud be of interest to CIOs and other senior IT people?I think that the primary reason that CIOs are propelled to invest in mobile [is] to generate business impact.
I say to people, ‘Measure the return on your investment by looking at two primary factors. One is the dollar return on revenue per employee that’s been mobile-enabled versus those who are not. And look at the dollar return on the base assets that you have. So, if you have $1 million in assets, take a look at you versus your competitors, or the new companies that are emerging [that] represent a threat.’
One of the examples I talk about is the U.S. Postal Service, which generates about $1.85 return on every asset that they own, compared with [a company] like Box, [which] is basi-cally in the same market. The U.S. post office’s value per asset is $2.80, whereas Box’s value per asset is $3,630. The post office’s value per employee is $113,000, whereas Box’s value per employee is $1.4 million. You can make the same
argument when you look at the incumbents in the automo-bile business: a GM versus a Tesla, [for example]. General Motors’ value per asset is $1.85, and Tesla’s value per asset is $11. GM’s value per employee is $240,000, whereas Tesla’s value per employee is $2.9 million.
You would look at the return rather than cost reductions enabled by mobile devices?Yes. One of the big mistakes that a lot of organizations have continued to be plagued by in terms of innovation invest-ment is that they still put IT on the expense side of the balance sheet, rather than as an organizational weapon on the revenue side. And mobility, in particular, really is much more suited to draw revenue in new and inventive ways. It’s about creating opportunity.
Can you give some examples of how that would be done?If you think about new-idea companies, their return on as-sets and return on revenue are far bigger than some of the old, stodgy incumbents. If you talk to a Ford or a General Motors, you see a huge disparity against a new-idea [com-pany] like Tesla, where the incumbents have now begun to think of themselves—and this is all the [auto] manufactur-ers—... as a transportation business. Old, incumbent com-panies tend to be very heavily loaded in the assets they own: a lot of middle management; management of networks that
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they own and operate; [and] the big-box, on-premises equip-ment that they own and operate.
New-idea companies are not overweighted with people; they’re not overweighted with a lot of on-premises hard-ware. But they do weigh themselves in distribution and analytics. They create ways to anticipate the needs of cus-tomers in more proactive ways.
What’s driving companies to invest in mobile and cloud computing?The biggest reason to invest in mobility for the enterprise is that you have a bunch of workers whose organizations are saying, ‘You need to be agile. You need to be fluid.’ And the consumers are saying, ‘Fine. But build the infrastruc-ture that’s at least as agile as you expect me to be.’ And that’s been the big disconnect.
And by that, you’re talking about apps that can be used to improve productivity?Yes. Help me save time; help me generate more money. If you’re saying to me, ‘You want to do more and do more in a quicker, simpler, more efficient [fashion],’ then what you’re describing is agility and driving increases in business velocity.
[Employees are saying that the] infrastructure still moves at largely a snail’s pace. It’s not very agile. It doesn’t meet the
needs and the expectations of the average worker who has come to appreciate the agility and the opportunity created on the phones through consumer-oriented applications.
So employees are saying things like, for instance, ‘Don’t make me log on to the VPN in order to get my work done’?I think it’s that. You raise a secondary problem. It’s ‘Hide the technology from me. And present content and services to me to get my job done. Don’t make me work harder because I have a new tool in my hand. Make it much easier for me.’
I think a lot of organizations ... have to really take a look at this portfolio of technologies that are emerging at various maturities. So you think about cloud computing. You think about enhancements in security. You think about mobility. You think about analytics. At some companies, they’re al-ready thinking real serious about Internet of Things, or how to apply that to the business. They’re also talking about big data and little data and all that.
And the new-idea companies are taking a portfolio ap-proach to all of those items [the portfolio approach consid-ers the use of the technology and all the issues that flow from it, such as measuring performance and productivity of that technology through analytics]. They’re looking at the incumbents in the market, and they’re picking them apart at the most strategic place where they see the weaknesses.
If you have a new-idea company that takes a look at a
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particular [incumbent] and says, ‘You know, they’re really not doing much with big data and analytics. They really haven’t made the move to the cloud. Let’s go attack them at that front with a suite of services, and go try and steal the customers.’
If you’re a CIO working for an incumbent, should you really be concerned about that?You should be really concerned. Because this really is about true digital transformation across the entire supply chain, whatever your market is. And too many companies are very risk-averse to take on that portfolio approach. So you have some people that are specializing in mobility and some people that are specializing in analytics. And the real lead-ers are going to emerge because they’ve taken a portfolio ap-proach across a couple little segments and the sections that may come along with those segments.
And some of that’s not very sexy. Just think about expense reports. That is not a very sexy application. If you’ve got 5,000 employees and half of them need to do two or three ex-pense reports a month, you can very easily add up the return on an employee if you’re able to streamline that through some digital transformation method.
What are the biggest headaches or challenges of mobile cloud?
I think the biggest headaches of mobile cloud range from worries about security to, in many cases, ease of use. [For instance], you actually have to manually, through a phone or a tablet or your laptop, for that matter, log in to a VPN and then log in to the cloud.
And then there’s also some performance issues, what’s known as latency issues. Because if you don’t orchestrate your cloud in a way to reduce latency, that ruins the user experience. So the good news about cloud is that it exists. The bad news about the mobile cloud is that the implemen-tations, in many cases, are pretty terrible.
Are they getting better?I think they are getting better. I think that we’ve seen a lot of companies blindly go down that path with the idea [of build-ing] a mobile app, but without the experience to actually understand what works for consumers and what doesn’t. And that gets back to some companies just not taking the portfolio approach to bolt on things like analytics, to effi-cient cloud use, and taking a look at big data and converting it to little data so that they can actually understand what’s going on.
Only after they fail the first two or three times do they start getting it right.
What else should CIOs be thinking about in relation to mobile
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and cloud computing?I think the big thing is that it’s really about cloud comput-ing, not necessarily mobile computing. But the whole thing around mobile cloud really is part and parcel with the big shift that CIOs need to consider as they move from an orga-nization that is very committed to the on-premises model. And take a look at how they create a back office that’s at least as agile as the consumers and the workers that expect to use it, while also guarding for security and privacy.
That’s a pretty big order to fulfill, it seems.Right. Coupled with that, there’s still a big [mistake] by a lot of organizations [that don’t consider] mobile [as] the center of innovation. And they still hold onto the desktop far too dearly. So just to put this in perspective, over the next four years, the Windows operating system [market] will cap out at about 2.2 billion or 2.3 billion units.
The smartphone industry is already, in total, about 4 billion units. Of that, something just less than 3 billion are smartphones. And you layer on top of that tablet adop-tion and then you layer on top of that the Internet of Things, which I call the sensorization of everything. You have to re-alize that 30 years ago, the center of development and there-fore innovation from an IT standpoint was mainframes, and then beginning some 20 or 25 years ago, it became the desk-top, primarily in Windows. ... It’s tough to [explain] why
mobile isn’t the new center of innovation. When you look at the number of [mobile] units today and the number of units that we predict—more than twice the desktops in 2020—[it seems clear that mobile is] the new center of innovation. We really have to put a lot of development dollars [into mobile]. And for a lot of organizations, that’s very tough because mo-bile started off in the land of voice.
And that also has big implications because mobile [is a much less] homogeneous environment [than] Windows [was]. Mobile is very heterogeneous. Since we have com-peting operating systems and [there are] competing cloud [environments], and the way people build applications and the development tools that they use are very diverse.
That’s a lot to take on, but you have to stand back and say that if 100,000 mainframes was where all the action was in terms of development and innovation 35 years ago, and beginning 25 years ago it was all about the desktop and Win-dows, then you have to conclude that a mobile environment, including the mobile cloud, is where you need to put your investment dollars today.
What about mobile backend as a service? How does that fit in with a company’s mobile cloud strategy?I think that the term mobile backend as a service is sort of foolish. It’s really backend as a service. In fact, if you made something specific to mobile, by definition, you’re putting
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limits on your opportunity. The desktop isn’t going to go away.But, the fact is that we spend more time on the ‘tradition-
al desktop.’ But what we do is actually a lot more complex, and it continues to consume more and more bandwidth, es-pecially with audio and video. And the growth rate, certainly around smartphones and tablets, is growing at a much more exponential rate, upward of 86% [in compound an-nual growth over the next four years]. Part of that has to do with [the fact] that it’s more of a continuous-use model. We always have our phones with us, even when we’re sitting at our desk. The CAGR for the desktop is projected to be 23%.
The point is, you’re not building a mobile backend as a service, you’re building a backend as a service to serve up a suite of services that are completely agnostic to the screen or the network that you’re connected to. And that’s abso-lutely key. I think there were [a lot of ] VC-vested companies that were trying to create some public relation messages and marketing messages out there to differentiate and frankly substantiate the funding they were getting. But I think even those companies are beginning to move away from this MBaaS—because it’s just too limiting. I don’t think there’s an audience for it. •
Digital User ExperienceDigital user experience is the feeling an end user has after an experience in a digital environment. Digital UX refers not only to elements such as colors, layout, navigability and webpage performance, but also to elements such as how intuitive a page or mobile app is, how efficiently users can complete actions or how well integrated an app or page is with other applica-tions.
Edge AnalyticsEdge analytics is an approach in which an automated analytical computation is performed on data at a sensor, network switch or other device instead of sending data back to a centralized data store. Edge analytics has gained attention as the Internet of Things has become more prevalent. By running the data through an analytics algorithm as it’s created, companies can set parameters on what data is worth sending to a cloud or on-premises data store.
CIO DECISIONS • june 2016 15
Fast DataFast data is the application of big data analytics to smaller data sets in real time or near-real time to solve a problem or create business value. The goal is to quickly gather and mine structured and unstruc-tured data so that action can be taken. As the flood of data from IoT continues to grow, it has become more important for organizations to identify what data is time-sensitive and should be acted upon right away and what data can sit in a database or data lake until there is a reason to mine it.
Palm Vein RecognitionPalm vein recognition is a biometric authentica-tion method based on the unique patterns of veins in people’s palms. Palm vein scanning systems, like those for finger vein ID, use a technology based on how hemoglobin in the veins reacts to near-infrared rays. The raw data for the reflection is processed and compared to a stored record. •
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BY THE NUMBERS
WHO WILL RUN IoT?
2/3Fraction of IOT projects
in both medium and large organizations that are managed outside of IT
SOURCE: TECHNALYSIS RESEARCH ENTERPRISE IoT SURVEY REPORT (620 PROFESSIONALS SURVEYED)
AS THE INTERNET of Things continues to evolve and gain new use cases, it also continues to have huge effects on businesses across multiple sectors, some of them un-foreseen. Find out how IoT has changed the role of IT departments in driving key technologies and more.
46 PERCENTEnterprises that expect
to have IoT deployed by the end of 2016
82%
50%
Businesses that saw an increase in efficiency after adopting IoT
Companies that saw an increase in product quality after deploying IoT
IoT BUSINESS EFFECTS
IoT and IT’s Role
2016 IOT PREVIEW REPORT, 451 RESEARCH
SOURCE: TECHNALYSIS RESEARCH ENTERPRISE IoT SURVEY REPORT (620 PROFESSIONALS SURVEYED)
SOURCE: “THE MARKET OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS,” HBR ANALYTIC SERVICES
42%33%
25%
say operations,
facilities and manufacturing
will run IoT projects
believe IT departments
will be responsible
for IoT initiatives
think line- of-business
and business strategy
groups will run IoT
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API STRATEGY SERVES THE DIGITAL CUSTOMERGLH saw the need to do better.
“If we were going to move into a digital space, we needed to take our data on our platform, easily take ownership of it and distribute it externally,” Hewertson said. Like the prob-lem, he said the solution was twofold: Build and deploy an API, and then layer on a management tool.
Randy Heffner, an analyst at Forrester Research, said organizations are smart to take such steps.
“Everybody needs APIs to play in an open economy,” he said. “The more you seek to optimize business with digital technology, the more you need to connect things, and there are more opportunities when you connect things directly.”
In fact, Heffner said APIs are so critical to growing busi-ness today that APIs “rise to the business strategy level.”
That’s how GLH leadership viewed it, Hewertson said.“We didn’t have APIs much on the radar [until 2013], but
the need for it emerged during our digital transformation, as we started to look at how we could create apps and ser-vices to give to our customer that would differentiate us,” he
GLH HOTELS LTD. gets plenty of bookings, but like most hotels, only about 10% to 20% of those reservations come through its own website. The rest come via other channels—particularly online travel sites, such as Expedia.
But there’s a glitch with that business model, said Chris Hewertson, CTO at London-based GLH. Many hotels rely on intermediaries to connect to those sites. That arrange-ment allows just one connection to the intermediary, which then handles the myriad technical connections that link up with the systems for the numerous online travel sites.
Sounds good, but there are additional costs and lost op-portunities in that approach, Hewertson said.
He explains: “You connect once to an intermediary and they handle connections to all the online travel sites, but they charge you to do that. ... There’s a huge amount of manual effort involved, because the intermediary doesn’t always pass all the information back and forth.”
As a result, the connecting hotel doesn’t always get cus-tomer data, such as emails, and the online sites don’t always have updated information, such as current room prices.
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explained, noting that the digital transformation effort was launched by new CEO Mike DeNoma. (The transformation, in addition to the API strategy, involved junking GLH’s lega-cy systems for modern, cloud-based services.)
Hewertson said GLH needed to build its hotel API so it could connect directly with multiple online travel sites without developers having to understand the complexities of GLH’s back-end hotel-booking system.
“We wanted to write an API for the system that we could give to third-party developers so they can focus on the busi-ness problem and not how to integrate it with our system,” he said, explaining that his team built a generic API that developers “then put facades over” to provide translation services to the many different online travel agencies, all of which have different ways of connecting.
SELECTING AN API MANAGEMENT TOOLGLH used outside contractors to build its first API, Hewert-son said; his team of 15 didn’t initially have the expertise to execute the hotel’s API strategy. He noted that he now has an in-house DevOps team capable of taking on this work.
Getting the API built and deployed is only part of the stra-tegic work for this part of the digital transformation, Hew-ertson said. He said while the API allows for the connection,
managing that connection—the security, data flow, analytics and so on—required an API management tool. For that, he selected Apigee Edge.
“Apigee fast-tracks you. They’ve done the hard work of figuring out security, volume management and how to integrate. We don’t want to have to do that; we just want a service,” he added.
Other vendors providing API management tools include 3scale, Akana, Axway, CA Technologies, IBM, Microsoft, MuleSoft, Oracle, SAP, Sensedia, Software AG, TIBCO, the open source Tyk and Torry Harris Business Solutions.
GLH tested its new API in February 2015 with a small travel agency that sells packaged tours.
With that successful pilot under its belt, GLH put the API to use again with the August 2015 launch of its Choose Your Own Room app, an award-winning app that allows custom-ers to see and then select the exact room they want.
And in February 2016, GLH used the API to connect directly to Booking.com—a connection that delivered an ROI on the API effort from Day 1, Hewertson said.
Hewertson said he expects more returns in the future. He said GLH’s API strategy allows it to gather more customer data, data that GLH can use to expand its offerings—digital or otherwise—to deliver the kind of services that will differ-entiate the company for customers in the market. •
Demystifying DevOps“ DevOps is not a replacement of Agile or Lean method-ologies so much as a supplement to them. It fills in the gaps to help tech companies break down functional stovepipes, automate as much as possible in the spirit of speed and quality, and refine operational process to allow for velocity that was unheard of ten years ago.” CHRIS CANCIALOSI, Partner and Founder, GothamCulture
“ DevOps is about getting the business to understand the value of systems and services, and to think more carefully about what activity is not creating benefits.”MARK RIDLEY, Director of Technology, Reed.co.uk
“ For government agencies focused on budget, probably the best place to start DevOps is to focus on the Lean elements that underpin much of the thinking. This involves agencies identifying all elements of ‘waste’ that incur greater cost and negatively impact delivery.”PETER WATERHOUSE, Senior Strategist, CA Technologies
“ Many execu-tives have the fear of being
‘Ubered.’ … DevOps capabilities and tools allow organizations to be agile and be able to do rapid iterations so they can react quickly to those kinds of problems.”—DAN BERG, DevOps Distinguished Engineer, IBM
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