The Open Innovation Labs DevOps Experience

April 5, 2017Justin Holmes2-minute read

At the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, we’re excited about the theme for this year’s Red Hat Summit, the Power of the Individual. It’s a theme that drives us on the Labs team every day as we execute on our mission to accelerate the delivery of our customer’s innovative ideas. A key element of our success to date has been to build and maintain a DevOps culture, which is why we're presenting a session at Red Hat Summit called "The Open Innovation Labs DevOps Experience." We’ll discuss the key behaviors and processes we’ve put into place, how we’re using tools like Ansible and OpenShift, and ultimately how this leads to an immersive experience we can offer to your team.

In the Digital Age, successful organizations don’t dictate work from the top - they set goals and empower their employees to achieve them. For organizations that have long viewed IT as a cost center, this is a very disruptive operating model. But there is no more time to delay Digital Transformation. Forrester Research predicts that “By 2020 every business will become a digital predator or digital prey.” And even though 87% of the executives interviewed by MIT Sloan Management Review & Deloitte agreed that digital technologies will disrupt their industries, only 44% believed their organization was taking appropriate measures to avert disruption [2].

It’s against this backdrop that Red Hat decided to disrupt its own model for engaging our customers by launching Open Innovation Labs in April 2016. We wanted to build a place where customers could break out of their day to day routine and experience what is possible. A place where individual contributors could figure out how to power their organization’s Digital Transformation. And we knew that a DevOps culture would be key to our mission from day 1.

So now a year later, we’ve helped teams rapidly prototype new products and become a catalyst for change in their organization. But we didn’t get here overnight, and in the spirit of open source, we want to share lessons we’ve learned on our journey with you. So in our session we’ll dive into the decisions, challenges and innovations that helped us build a DevOps culture over the last year. In particular, we’ll highlight the behaviors and processes we changed, as well as the tools like Ansible and OpenShift that helped us automate and collaborate along the way. Come join us at Summit in Boston, May 4th and hear our about journey and how you can be part of it.

For more information on Open Innovation Labs, visit red.ht/labs.