By 2020 Every Company will be a DevOps Company

Condensed from the keynote speech presented at swampUP 2019.

I’m here to tell you that in the next year, by 2020, all companies will be DevOps companies. Now this is what you’re thinking: Here’s another cocky CEO talking on the keynote stage telling us the world is going to change in a few months. But I’m going to share with you, from what we see as part of the community, why we think this change is already happening.

DevOps Affects Everything

Because software is everywhere, DevOps tools & Processes are everywhere, and software updates are vital for our lives. You can’t eat a hamburger without software, win elections without software, or travel without software. 

A few months ago, the Bay Area was plunged into darkness after PG&E pushed a faulty software update. 

We also got an unfortunate reminder of how important software updates really are, when 170 people lost their lives on a Boeing 737. So when we say that software enables life, that’s what all of us are doing.

It’s Not a Trend. It’s a Business

The year since our last swampUP has shown that DevOps isn’t just hype: 

• IBM acquired Red Hat for $34b, and Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5b.
• Huge investments were made in DevOps companies with over $1b in valuation.
• New IPOs like PagerDuty and Elastic found great success.

What’s more, it’s become a hybrid world, where operating both on-prem and in the cloud — “amphibiously,” as we like to call it — is increasingly the norm.

Full-Stack Change is Happening Now

Companies have responded by changing the language, becoming “Developer First,” companies that speak to developer markets. At JFrog, we take that farther; a company where developers talk to their peers, and participate in a community.

You need to be ready. The developers of tomorrow are already practicing DevOps, at the top colleges and universities. Full-stack development is now the norm. You have to understand what it is to make software but also to release software and to secure software. This is the next generation of DevOps. Those are the people you will hire tomorrow, the people who will be managing ten years from now. 

Right now, there are more than 50,000 open positions on LinkedIn for DevOps engineers. Why? Because a huge amount of data is coming: 175 zetabytes globally by 2025, running in the software highway, ready to be managed, released, and secured.  

We’re all enabling this change. Everything needs to be fast and secure, and enterprises need to scale. That’s why all companies will be DevOps companies by 2020. But in an accelerated world of continuous updates, mistakes will happen — unless you get it right.