Growing up with "with the Yahoos and Facebooks of the world", Chef’s CEO Barry Crist sees every company in every industry embracing software, and IoT is one of the trends that is leading to wide spread software adoption.

A vision the CEO embraces, as CBR spoke to Crist in its first UK trip as Chef’s main man.

Crist said: "Chef is growing very quickly; it is a very good time for us from both a community stand point and from a commercial successful stand point."

Growing "somewhere around 200% year on year", the CEO presence in the UK marks the beginning of a stronger UK expansion.

The company has "lots of hiring going on" and it is planning to open a new office in London, doubling its British workforce.

He said: "We want to grow as quickly as we can, but we also want to be careful and thoughtful, and not do it too quickly so we don’t lose what is special to the company.

"What is really driving our business now is GE, Capital One, and other big brands."

The CEO added that this widespread software adoption is based on a pattern that emerged from web innovators including Facebook and Yahoo.

Crist said: "That pattern was cloud, meaning ‘I want to spend more energy on innovating and less on infrastructure’.

"What’s happening now with that pattern of cloud, plus automation and DevOps, is that the enterprises are borrowing the same practices. But behind all this is, they want to shorten the time it takes between the business having an idea, to be able to express that idea as software to the customers."

US quicker at adopting DevOps

A number of big web innovators responsible for the development of business model widely used now, are mostly located in North America, consequently having that effect in the rankings.

Crist said: "On one hand, while North America might be ahead of the UK and Europe, we see very rapid adoption right now of DevOps in the European marketplace.

"In a survey, we found that 70% of enterprises in EMEA in our sample group will embark on a DevOps project in the next 12 months. No one is resisting it."

The CEO added that if the European markets are behind, they "are not that far behind".

Universally, the benefits of DevOps is not just velocity, but "it turns out it can increase quality and security at the same time".

Following from this, Crist took on security, which he considers "super important and a fundamental thing".

He said: "Security teams within IT traditionally have been viewed sort of as the ‘no team’. They were a barrier to the organisation riding software, and we can now see a transition.

"At the most simple level, security teams have accepted bad things will happen, like HeartBleed for example."

If a version of OpenSSL turns out to be vulnerable, every organisation wants to update their version of OpenSSL very quickly.

The CEO explained that if a customer does this through automation, and using Chef to manage all their servers, it can do so faster.

Crist added: "If we have a high velocity foundation, we can fix things and remediate very quickly."

Markets need web scale education

Asked if he thinks markets need to be educated on web scale, the CEO said "certainly" as "it is messy how these technologies are coming in".

Crist said: "Every organisation is different on the entry point. Frequently, it is maybe a digital team that is doing the website, the mobile version, and they might be the ones bringing web scale or DevOps in. Although, this varies and as people start to succeed, it starts to grow organically inside the organisation.

"Everyone is moving at different paces."

Fast Movement

"In two years, the adoption rate will be very high, possibly in the 75%+ figures," Crist said.

"There will be legacy technologies around, but by then we will see DevOps be pervasive in the enterprise, including in Europe."

Customer case

American retailer Nordstrom, like many companies are under a lot of pressure to release to the market new lines in the fastest way possible. Crist said: "For example, Amazon releases software to its website every seven seconds, releasing a new feature to the website."

Nordstrom, which had a more traditional approach to IT, "was just being out passed on web innovation from the Amazons of the world".

The company started a project to increase development velocity, empowering the developers to take on ideas and take them out to the customer more quickly.

"Nordstrom worked very close with Chef" and explained that DevOps, "first of all have the culture and the human factors".

The tooling is where customers select what software to use to achieve the desired outcome. Workflow is the last part of the deployment, where customers understand how to define described work moving through their system.

"These things and how they do them reinforce each other and we worked with Nordstrom on all three," Crist said.

Nordstrom started with the web team, but as they were having success, webscale and DevOps ended up becoming pervasive across the company’s departments.

"The impact is actually deeper than just IT. It changes the relationship the business has with technology teams, they can partner much more closely."

People were "much more cynical in the past" when facing IT with the prevailing point of view being that big projects cost a lot of money were usuall overtime and over budget.

Crist said: "Now it is totally the opposite. IT is enabling the high velocity innovation in the connection with customers."

"We can feel this when we go to the IT team – which used to be dusty offices with people slow moving – now there is energy.

"Transformation is not just in IT, it is across the board."