John Pocknell discusses how DevOps helps deliver business agility

Yeah. So what we're seeing is a number of initiatives, big initiatives actually, being driven by market pressures for businesses to think about how they're going to modernize their IT in order to keep up. And there seems to be a consistent trend, which is businesses are looking to be more agile, looking to be able to add value to the market so they keep their customers and be more competitive, at the same time, lower risks, lower costs. And so there are a lot of different challenges that can be summed up in things like DevOps is one. Moving to the cloud, so spreading the risk out into cloud based platforms rather than having it all on premises. Moving to open source platforms, because a lot of commercial platforms tend to be very expensive, and a lot of companies feel like they're locked into a particular vendor. So they're trying to look at options for how do I spread the risk and not have all our eggs in one basket. So with that, we look to what we can do in Quest around our database solutions to help customers make easy decisions and help them along this road. And so when we think of our database tools, you may be just thinking about Toad is a very well known tool-- thinking about maybe SharePlex, thinking about Foglight-- what we're trying to do in Quest is how can we come up with solutions that enable companies to see that we have a suite of tools can help them with those initiatives. So take for example DevOps. So when we think about DevOps, we think about a changing culture and a change in the way that organizations work. But a lot of companies have been doing that for many years on their application side, but their database is always kind of like the bottleneck. And so we see big challenge around, how do companies bring their database operations into DevOps? And so we've got solutions on the Oracle side and Postgres, and the other My SQL databases out there, that help companies bring their database operations to DevOps. But one of the things that you might not realize is that we also have our monitoring solutions able to work within a DevOps pipeline. Now normally, you think of our monitoring tools as a tool that were used purely in a production environment to monitor your production databases, but actually, our monitorings can be used anywhere. So if you're in a DevOps pipeline and you've got database changes that are making way through the pipeline, one of the things you want to do is make sure that you mitigate the risk of any changes before they get to production. One of the common things we see that companies do is make database changes that go straight into production where they haven't assessed the risk. So they haven't looked to see whether there are any defects in any of their code changes. They haven't considered performance. They haven't considered the scalability of the database. And as you are moving these changes more rapidly through your DevOps pipeline, the propensity for something to go wrong is obviously much higher. So the ability to monitor and track the risk of these changes before we get to production is very important. One of the other aspects as well is you'll see a lot of migration to the cloud. Now the problem with that is, if you've got databases that are on premises in the cloud, and you've got, say, offline reporting databases for example in the cloud, now you've got-- you're following DevOps, now you've got database changes that are hitting production faster, how do you make sure that you're able to replicate those changes into your other databases that could be in the cloud in near real time? That's a challenge. And so in Quest, we have solutions that cover all of those different areas. So we have Toad solutions, which enable you to bring your database change management into a DevOps pipeline. We have Foglight like for database, which is going to enable you to monitor those changes throughout the DevOps pipeline, so things like change tracking to identify where there are potential risks. And then finally, SharePlex is going to help you replicate all the changes you make to your production database out to other databases that you might have in your environment, whether they're on premise or in the cloud. So for more information, if you got to Quest.com/database/solutions and look at DevOps, then you'll be able to see more information about how these solutions are going to help you bring your IT into the 21st century and provide that real value needed for your business.