VSM predictive analytics move to the forefront in 2021

Progressive delivery is a unified lifecycle for improving products, encapsulating planning changes, writing and deploying code, testing safely, and releasing and measuring impact. Next year, the pieces will finally come together to make progressive feature delivery not just a reality, but commonplace throughout the enterprise market. In 2021, we will see several rising disciplines come together – for example, CI/CD has become ubiquitous across software companies of all sizes; service management software has grown rapidly to provide IT professionals with the tools to plan and manage production changes safely, and experimentation and measurement tools that enrich the entire process with understanding will drive success and provide direction for future iterations.

Patricio "Pato" Echagüe Bio

Patricio "Pato" Echagüe is the CTO and co-founder of Split Software, bringing over 13 years of software engineering experience to the company. Prior to Split, Pato was most recently at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce), which he had joined as one of the first three engineers, leading most of the data infrastructure efforts there. Before that, Pato was an early employee at DataStax (the creators of the Apache Cassandra project), where he was a lead committer for the open-source Java client Hector, creating the first enterprise offering and co-authoring the Cassandra Filesystem (CFS) used to replace the Hadoop (HDFS) layer. Other professional experiences include software engineering roles at IBM, VW, and Google. Pato holds a master's degree in information systems engineering from the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Argentina.

VSM predictive analytics move to the forefront in 2021

The further development of predictive analytics will shape the future for companies that adopt VSM. Over recent years, value stream management (VSM) platforms have improved the way organizations develop software, but what is going to really move to the forefront in 2021 is that VSM predictive analytics will shape organizations' knowledge and foresight of what their customers need. The need for visibility into the software delivery process will enhance the ability to make informed decisions based on that insight and become a differentiator for companies that rely on software. As we go forward, companies will have to embrace VSM platforms if they want to become a software player. But it will be the improved visibility and utilization of predictive analytics that VSM provides that will enable companies to understand what technology and products matter most to their customers so they can move in that direction. 

The importance of visibility also points to the vitality of gathering data.

While many companies talk about visibility, they don’t discuss what it takes from a data perspective. Collecting data requires a common data model across the value stream. If you want visibility, the ability to fix things fast, and measurement of the value you’re delivering, it’s always about proving you know how to do it and convincing the powers that be to invest in that vision. VSM platforms will provide clear advantages for those who choose to use them through the power of data-driven decisions.

Bob Davis Bio:

Bob brings to Plutora more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, and sales management experience with high technology organizations from emerging start-ups to global 500 corporations. Before joining Plutora, Bob was the Chief Marketing Officer at Atlantis Computing, a provider of Software-Defined and Hyper-Converged solutions for enterprise customers. Bob has a proven track record using analysis-driven and measurable revenue-based marketing. He has propelled company growth at data storage and IT management companies including Kaseya (co-founder, acquired by Insight Venture Partners), Sentilla, CA, Netreon (acquired by CA), Novell, and Intel. Bob earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from Santa Clara University. He holds a patent in data networking.

With the exponential increase in non-human identities, DevOps pipelines and machine identities will become the attack surfaces of choice.

As companies look to adopt new technologies, tools, and methodologies to enhance the DevOps process, security measures become increasingly complex. Human identities and now applications, virtual machines, microservices, and workloads (non-human identities) need to be protected as well as the APIs they interface with. Add in the challenge of development, operations, and security teams working remotely, and organizations are much more likely to experience a cyberattack.

With remote working expected to be a reality for some time and credential-based attacks on the rise, organizations need to adopt centralized privileged access management (PAM) solution architected in the cloud, for the cloud to minimize attack surfaces. PAM solutions that evolve modern application-to-application password management (AAPM) approaches can help DevOps teams secure all identities, even in distributed environments. Methods such as federation, ephemeral tokens, and delegated machine credentials can reduce the overall attack surface and seamlessly incorporate PAM into the DevOps pipeline. Combined with adopting the least privilege approach, these best practices, and modern solutions can improve an organization’s security posture without compromising the agility that DevOps relies on.

Flint Brenton Bio:

Flint Brenton is CEO at Centrify, where he leads the strategic direction and execution of the company’s vision drawing from an exceptional track record of accelerating growth through product innovation and sales execution. Most recently, he served as president and CEO of CollabNet VersionOne, which pioneered the Value Stream Management market. He previously held president and CEO positions at AccelOps and Tidal Software and has successfully led engineering teams at NetIQ, Compaq, BMC Software, IBM, and more.

In 2020, IT organizations began adopting containers at a rate we hadn’t seen before.

However, this adoption is just the first step. What we’ll see in 2021 will be a noticeable acceleration of how quickly containers are being put into production. This is supported by a recent study on container data protection by ESG in which 67% of respondents said they’re running containers for production applications with the remaining 33% planning to do so within the next 12 months. This ramp-up is happening quickly, especially when you consider that just a year ago many large enterprises weren’t doing anything with containers or they merely had a small stealth DevOps team. Container deployment has now become a strategic initiative for many enterprises with the focus shifting to how IT teams deliver containerized apps into production. Undoubtedly this shift will generate new data that needs governance, backup and data protection, and full disaster recovery like we use with VM-based applications. 

Ultimately, it will become clear in 2021 that containers are the fundamental technology that enables true hybrid multi-cloud deployments.

The data also needs to be portable, and persistent data within containers is the best solution for that. If things aren’t working properly or you aren’t getting the service levels you need, you can move apps back on-prem or to another cloud, and the data needs to move with it – easily and efficiently. This will drive more architectures that look at both the containers and their data as a single entity. In 2021 more and more organizations will realize that containers and public cloud remove and hide most of the infrastructure-layer complexity, freeing you up to focus on bringing applications to market quicker.

My advice for enterprises moving containers into production with specific SLAs is to understand that the solutions they’ll deploy to support containerized apps won’t be fulfilled by DIY approaches – the kind where you just download some open source code and write scripts around it. Containers in production at the enterprise level will need the same level of vendor support and expertise that VMs required when things go bump over the weekend - one throat to choke. IT organizations deploying containers are no longer waiting for future enhancements to ease their deployment, security, and governance challenges. In 2021 they will be ready to implement and will want to know how to design architectural patterns that align with the value of containers – agility and time to market – while still meeting governance requirements.

Deepak Verma Bio:

Deepak Verma is Director of Product Strategy at Zerto. He has 20 years of experience in the IT industry with a focus on disaster recovery and data protection. He has led product management teams responsible for building and delivering products for cloud platforms at multiple companies. He has also architected, deployed, and managed technologies for data protection and disaster recovery in various industry verticals during previous roles. Deepak holds a Master of Computer Science in Data Science and a Bachelor of Engineering. He is certified in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.