Hugging DevOps at Huge Companies

This year, we’re launching a new program for All Day DevOps. If your company registers more than 20 people, we’ll add your corporate logo to our site under our new "Corporate Supporter" program. But wait, there's more. 

Two years ago, my friend Mark and I had the idea to build All Day DevOps. If everything went right, 1,000 people would show up online to hear the 57 DevOps practitioners we had gathered to speak over 15 hours of our first conference. A few more than planned have shown up and since then and 40,000 people have noe participated in our community.

Like all things All Day DevOps, I have another idea to share. Shared ideas have given birth to All Day DevOps, our viewing parties, the cultural transformations track, and our newest track for SRE. But I have a bigger idea to share.

Big Company, Small Tribes

Each year we’ve hosted All Day DevOps, we see tribes gathering from different companies around the world. A huge company like Adobe might have 8 people participate while another company like Ericsson has 94 people engaged. Starbucks had 20 people watch last year while Tata Consulting Services had 248. While it’s been incredibly humbling to be involved in a community that helps so many of these tribes, I always wonder how many folks from their tribes were not aware of All Day DevOps or unable to attend. My gut tells me that there are hundreds, if not thousands, out there in those organizations. How do I know?

Last week, I spoke to an executive friend in Dallas about his experience with the local DevOps Days event (an awesome conference). He generously purchased 30 tickets for people in his organization. It was so awesome to hear about his initiative, but he also discovered that it had a downside. Complaints started rolling his way about “why does that person get to attend and I don’t?”, “who’s playing favorites?”, and “didn’t that person get to go last year too?”. Tickets to a DevOps Days event in any city might start around $100, so it’s not always easy to find budget to send everyone. In fact, if his company could afford it, they might send 2,000 people to DevOps Days in Dallas and other cities. But we all realize that’s just not feasible.

Big Company, Big Tribes

On the flip side, last week, our community manager was contacted by a big bank in downtown Toronto. They were interested in hosting a private All Day DevOps viewing party for the employees in their DevOps practice -- all 1,400 of them. Whoa.

To do this, the guy who contacted us pulled in the head of his global DevOps practice and their head or Corporate Training. They had realized the strategic value of All Day DevOps to their corporate training initiative. Every single employee in their practice could attend, because All Day DevOps is free. It’s also online, so any employees in the corporate office or working remotely could attend. The format and cost are a great equalizer.

The bank has now blocked off conference rooms on several floors of their building for October 17th and they are encouraging everyone to attend. It’s not just about watching online sessions, it’s about participating. Employees can engage in our Slack channel with practitioners and speakers from all over the world. They can watch specific sessions of interest to them and then host local open space dialogues following that topic to understand how they might apply practices locally.

For organizations like this, All Day DevOps has become a platform they can trust for educating their employees. Because we don’t allow vendor pitches, they understand that the sessions they’ll engage in are authentic, practical and pitch-free. They are able to listen to their peers, ask questions openly, and learn from others who have taken on similar experiences. 

Big Companies, Big Idea

When we started All Day DevOps, our aim was to “bring DevOps to the world”. It was mission that seemed bigger than we could pull off (given any timeframe). But funny things happen along the way that make it feel more attainable with each new day. Ideas build. Our community grows. Tribes become more active. And like all things in the DevOps realm, people have an insatiable thirst to improve things that are already working. :)

For the past two years, we have celebrated initiatives of smaller organizations within our Supporter tribes. They’ve helped us spread the word to their communities while we have supported them with a massive platform for free education that is available to all of their members. 

This year, we’re launching a Corporate Supporter program. Rather than wait for a full 1.0 release of the idea, we’re launching over MVP (minimum viable product) with a simple rule: if your organization registers 20 or more people, we’ll add your corporate logo to our site. We’ll link the logo back to your company site, but if you prefer another URL, we’ll do our best to oblige. That might be a link to the public viewing party you are hosting, your DevOps hiring page, or the GitHub repos hosting your open source projects. The logo and links are our way of saying thank you for your participation.

For those wondering -- even though we still have a couple of months to go -- IBM is leading the way with 169 registered. Of course, there must be 10,000 people or more in their DevOps practice, so that number could grow considerably.

I’m sure there are 100 other ways to improve this program, so if you have any ideas, please post them in the comment section below. We’ll read them all, we promise.

Here is a link to our current leaderboard:

https://www.alldaydevops.com/club-20-all-day-devops