With the start of the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 this morning IBM has made what they are touting as a major announcement. Drawing on their wide and deep experience in DevOps across multiple segments of the company, they have announced   Garage Method. What exactly is Bluemix Garage Method? Great question. I spoke today with Randy Newell, Director, DevOps Marketing at IBM about this. Below is a streaming audio of our conversation, followed by the transcript. I expect to follow up with Randy and other IBM folks this week on both DOES and Bluemix Garage Method, so look for a follow up shortly.

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Alan Shimel:                Hi, this is Alan Shimel of staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud and we are kicking off our coverage of the DevOps Enterprise 2015 Summit in San Francisco. And happy to be joined by Randy Newell of IBM. Randy, welcome to DOES 2015.

Randy Newell:             Hey, Alan. Thanks. It’s great to be here. This is exciting.

Alan Shimel:                Yep, there’s a lot of buzz going around, Randy. A lot of companies announcing exciting news around the event. And I think I’ve heard IBM has some announcements coming out.

Randy Newell:             We do. We are announcing today a set of practices designed to help enterprise organizations execute and scale innovation. It’s called IBM Bluemix Garage Method and it combines the best of design thinking, Lean Startup, agile development, DevOps and Cloud, and is specifically designed to help enterprise organizations accelerate all phases of the app design, development and delivery lifecycle.

Alan Shimel:                Very exciting. So Randy, for our audience who may not be familiar, let’s start with the basics. Bluemix Garage – it sounds like a startup, what exactly is Bluemix Garage?

Randy Newell:            So Bluemix Garage is actually a set of physical locations that IBM has opened around the world — including in San Francisco, located in the Galvanize facility, where IBM brings clients and provides a startup type of environment. It’s really designed to bring in enterprise clients and take them through a methodology, a process, by which they go from ideation right through to delivered application in an MVP-type of situation, and really learn how to accelerate innovation. And this has worked extremely well. Where the challenge has come is how do I take that success and bring it back to my enterprise? Especially since many of these organizations are building innovation centers, lofts, etc. How do I capture that culture, that startup mentality that happened back in the Garage and scale it? And that’s what’s behind the Bluemix Garage method. So we’ve specifically named it Garage to capture that startup culture that we are cultivating within the Garage environment, and put a lot of that into the methodology and the way that people interact with it.

Alan Shimel:                Excellent, excellent. So Randy, I’ve been lucky enough to attend other few DevOps-related events recently, and I’ve seen that as a theme from IBM, this concept of how do we bring that startup energy, that startup methodology and sort of grafted onto the enterprise tree. And this announcement today kind of sounds like maybe the culmination of that.

Randy Newell:             It is. IBM has gone through a major transformation that reaches back almost a decade – but a lot of activity over the past couple of years where we’ve rolled out DevOps transformation within IBM to thousands of developers. And then of course, we are actually delivering DevOps transformation capabilities with clients, both at Bluemix Garages as well as through various services organizations within IBM. And so what we’ve done is taken the best of from those various methodologies and integrated that into what we’ve now named Bluemix Garage Method.

Alan Shimel:                Got it. Now Randy, I think one of the special sauces that IBM brings to an announcement like this is the breadth of services and people that IBM brings to bear on this. Can you give me an idea of how the different segments if you will or the different parts of IBM are coming together on this into one cohesive strategy and offering?

Randy Newell:             Well, it’s what I’ve defined as the input to this process. So you have the genesis within IBM from internal organizations, the CIO office, across different parts of Cloud and Software groups; and then of course what’s come in from what we refer to as Global Business Services. So all these have played a role. And obviously best practices coming from interaction with clients and with different business partners, as well.

The method itself consists of a digital experience. So it is a site that you visit and on that site is a practice library of work product assets, of shared learning in the form of videos and case studies and blogs. It’s an open community where clients, business partners, IBMers and third-party tool vendors will continue to progress and advance this methodology.

And then kind of an interesting perspective are these prescriptive adoption paths for various use cases so you can engage with the method in a role context or in a particular use case context. Let’s say I’m building a cloud native mobile app, you basically have that as a track or adoption path through the methodology.

So we are starting off — this is delivery of version 1.0. It will progress extremely rapidly so we’ll see new tracks for these prescriptive adoption paths added on a regular basis. We are pretty excited about that and it’s a really high-value add with the methodology.

Alan Shimel:                Fantastic. Randy, for people who may be listening to this or reading it while they’re out in San Francisco this week for DOES, any IBM sessions that will be talking about this?

Randy Newell:             Absolutely. In addition to the IBM booth where we will be demonstrating the Garage Method there are a couple of key sessions that I would suggest people attend.

Specifically, Tuesday, tomorrow, there’s a session with Angel Diaz, Rachel Reinitz and one of our business partners, Kristal York from PointSource, will all be talking more deeply about the Method. We will also be talking about it at an event called Night at the Garage on Monday evening, tonight, starting at 7:00 PM after the networking session is completed here at DevOps Enterprise Summit. This is an invitation to all DevOps Enterprise Summit attendees to get on a trolley with us and head 7/10 of a mile down the street from the hotel to Galvanize which is where the IBM Bluemix Garage is located in San Francisco, and join us for some demo stations where they can see more on the Method but also enjoy the bar, entertainment, and dinner. So that’s an invitation; we’d love to see everyone from DevOps Enterprise Summit join us.

So a little bit of a plug, later this morning, Dibbe Edwards is co-presenting with USAA on DevOps Innovation. Rosalind Radcliffe is presenting on Wednesday on test automation for mainframe applications. And then our Services Line leader for North America, Mustafa Kapadia, is driving a session on differences between traditional and DevOps IT.

Alan Shimel:                Sure.

Randy Newell:             So there’s a lot of neat sessions and we’d love to see people of course join us in the booth as well. We can show off IBM Bluemix which is our PaaS platform; IBM UrbanCode for deployment automation and DevOps Services capabilities that are integrated  into IBM Bluemix. So lots going on within the booth in addition to the methodology that we are introducing.

Alan Shimel:                Fantastic. I’ve actually either interviewed or met many of the people you’re speaking about and they are all good presenters. So they should be good shows. Randy, what else? There’s a lot besides IBM going on at DOES. Non-IBM related, is there one particular thing that you are looking forward to?

Randy Newell:             I think back to last year’s event and Gene Kim set such a great tone, very collaborative; we saw otherwise competitors in the marketplace sitting together and talking about DevOps strategies. That was a great tone that seems to be persisting already at the conference this year. The conference was populated with a lot of sessions about initial successes within large enterprise. People telling their DevOps journey, initial successes. And if you remember at the time, one of the business reporters had written an article questioning whether DevOps could be applied to large enterprise. And here we are a year later and that question actually seems pretty comical now. So I think the observation, and I see Gene evolving the sessions to be this way, it’s about the “how”, right? So it’s not the proof points of DevOps so much anymore that it works and it delivers value — whether that’s measured as speed, improved quality or reduced risk. But that DevOps success is directly related to business outcomes and how you scale those successes at an enterprise level. So kind of bringing it back, this is timely for the introduction of the methodology that I described earlier.

Alan Shimel:                Absolutely. So Randy Newell, it sounds like IBM is on top of their game here at DOES. And a lot of exciting announcements and you guys are really integrated into this whole DevOps party going on here if you will, and how we continue to evolve to the next phases of DevOps adoption. Thanks very much for checking in with us today. Enjoy DOES and will check back with you maybe at the end of the show and get some thoughts.

Randy Newell:             Okay, great. Thank you very much, Alan.

URL:  IBM Bluemix Garage Method – www.ibm.com/devops/method