Because of T-Mobile’s position in the cutthroat US mobile telephony marketplace, business agility is unquestionably strategic for the company, and it looks to its IT organization in large part to drive the agility they need to remain competitive. (T-Mobile USA is publicly traded but Deutsche Telekom AG owns about two thirds of the company.)
In fact, improving the culture of IT, and with it the velocity of their business, has led T-Mobile to expound upon their approach on the conference circuit, both at the CA Technologies CA World customer event as well as at the more recent Sys-Con DevOps Summit.
“We can’t beat AT&T and Verizon on spending money,” explains Martin Krienke, Senior Manager, IT Development at T-Mobile USA, in his session as well as during a conversation afterward. “But we can be more agile and nimble.”
To that end, T-Mobile has undergone a transition to a popular new approach for building and running software: DevOps (see my recent article for a definition of DevOps). Right out of the gate, however, Krienke’s team had a problem.
“People had a hard time with the term ‘DevOps,’ because they thought it meant developers doing operations,” Krienke pointed out. “Instead, we focus our discussion on ‘continuous delivery’ and ‘Agile methodology.’”
Regardless of its name, T-Mobile’s emerging approach to building and delivering software rests on four pillars: standard, automated configuration of management processes, service virtualization, automated deployment environment management, and automated testing.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/06/18/devops-progress-at-t-mobile/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, CA Technologies is an Intellyx customer, but had no input into this article. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: T-Mobile. T-Mobile and the magenta color are registered trademarks of Deutsche Telekom AG, © 2014 T-Mobile USA Inc.
