DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2017 (DOES17) is a wrap! We (Catapult PR) were proud to partner with IT Revolution to help make the second year of the London conference come to life. DOES17 took place in the amazing Queen Elizabeth II Centre in the heart of London from June 5-6, 2017. Nearly 700 software delivery practitioners, business leaders and DevOps luminaries from around the world joined us for two jam-packed days of programmatic learning featuring keynotes, breakout sessions, networking events and workshops. Also, being tasked with live Tweeting the event, it’s safe to say that we learned more than we ever could have imagined about DevOps and other software delivery practices like Value Stream Mapping, Agile and ITIL.
Gene Kim, DevOps visionary and author, and Paul Mueller, VP of strategic marketing at HPE, kicked us off with their opening remarks Monday morning. Mueller even gave the crowd a bit of a laugh with his black and white butterfly covered suit and snakeskin boots! They went over some housekeeping items then shared what they were most looking forward to including the Ask the Speaker sessions, DevOps Workshops, and, of course, the networking happy hour!
The lineup of keynote and breakout session speakers that followed was truly a treat. Attendees heard from IT leaders from companies like Disney, Allianz, Barclay’s, Ericsson, the UK Ministry of Justice, the UK Department of Work and Pensions, and many more! It was especially interesting to hear from returning speakers, like Jonathan Fletcher, CTO of Hiscox, and Jonathan Smart, head of development services at Barclay’s, who shared the gains they have made in their DevOps transformations, as well as some challenges they would still like to overcome. This gave attendees who are in similar phases of their DevOps journeys encouragement that they are not the only ones stuck or struggling along the way. It was equally inspiring to hear from organizations that are just getting started with DevOps. For example, Robert Scherrer, head of application engineering at SIX, shared how they jumpstarted their DevOps transformation by putting on a department-wide play to help increase a sense of community and collaboration among teams. Many audience members mentioned after his presentation that they would also like to try doing an exercise like this which was really cool to hear!
Furthermore, it was great to see a number of women on the speaker lineup as well, including Andrea Hirzle-Yager, head of department, IT, Allianz Deutchland; Rosalind Radcliffe, distinguished engineer, chief architect for DevOps for Enterprise Systems, IBM; Alexa Alley, program manager, Hearst Business Media; Dominca DeGrandis, director, Learning & Development, Leankit; Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO, DORA; among other #WomenInTech! The conference ended with a presentation from the State of DevOps Report researchers Nigel Kersten, Jez Humble, Gene Kim and Nicole Forsgren. The statistics were staggering, including the fact that high-performing organizations are twice as likely to achieve or exceed their goals compared to low performers. Of course, culture and tools play a part in this statistic, but the report suggests that by and large these organizations are successful because they are automating.
Finally, we wanted to leave you with some of our own metrics from DOES17 London:
- 509 Tweets from the conference handle received more than 136,000 impressions over two days (there were thousands of tweets in all!)
- 60+ speakers representing 50 companies from around the world
- 33 sponsors helped make DOES17 London possible
- 7 media sponsors helped us spread the word
- 650 attendees made DOES17 London memorable
Thank you to everyone who attended and supported the show! Make sure to join us November 13-15, 2017 for DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco which is now in its fourth year!
