Agile Won
A few weeks ago I attended Amazon’s AWS Summit in NYC. It was staggeringly huge, with many thousands of people present. And this isn’t even their main yearly event, although it is free to go to. It’s also astonishing to me how big the AWS ecosystem has become. Amazon alone are earning more than $10 billion a year from their cloud services, but I can’t even begin to think what the total ‘GDP’ of the AWS-related industry must be.
The AWS summit kicked off with a keynote by Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO. You can watch the whole thing on Youtube here. It was your usual Jobs’ian style presentation — a mixture of updates, product announcements and guest speakers from outside of Amazon. Audience-wise it was extremely broad, speaking to developers, tech ops folk, technical executives, and possibly even accountants with the nod to CAPEX vs OPEX after only 2 minutes.
Towards the end of the session the final guest speaker came on stage — Sree Kotay, CTO of Comcast Cable. At this point the late-starting keynote was 90 minutes in, lunch was fast approaching, and a few slides of enterprise organization revenue (and a questionable choice of headwear) was enough to clear many of the seats in the auditorium. Which was a huge shame, because towards the end of this section Sree gave some wonderful quotes. You can read my picks of them below, or even better just go here and watch the next 4 minutes or so.
[Through Comcast’s use of the cloud, we get] agile development. And when I say agile development, I don’t mean .. burn downs and sprints, I mean ‘real agile’ — concept to customer — the time that you have an idea until the customer gets it in their hands …
We used to ship our product every 12–18 months, in a 3–5 year period we shipped 3 or 4 releases. Now we ship 3 releases every week.
A minute or so later, after some discussion about how some companies may need to think about ‘hybrid’ cloud he continued:
After going through this journey for the last 5 years we’ve realized benefits, and these benefits are around cost and scale. And they’re critical and important, but interestingly they’re not the compelling bit … The key part is this really changes your innovation cycle, it fundamentally shifts how you think about product development…
One of the classic project management time/space tradeoffs has always been ‘velocity’ or ‘quality’ and what we’ve found is that that’s no longer the case — you can have velocity and quality. If you look over the last 3 months we’ve shipped more features than we did in our old product over the course of 3 years. And at the same time we’ve dramatically increased the quality of the product .. we’ve reduced trouble tickets by 50% year over year.
[This agile / cloud approach] creates an opportunity for differentiation. We’ve seen this realized in the marketplace, this isn’t theoretical. Q1 of this year we had the best .. quarter we’ve had in 9 years, Q2 the best quarter we’ve had in 10 years, and we expect that pace to continue… It’s not just about the cost reduction, it’s about changing the innovation cycles.
Fundamentally the message I would say to you is that the cloud change is here — it’s not just an option, it’s the future. You can embrace it, or you can be obliterated by it.
Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a strong validation of an agile / lean software development approach. And let me repeat, this isn’t from some snake-oil agile consultant sensei — this is the CTO of an organization whose revenue is multiple tens of billions of dollars. I can’t believe I’m saying this, because, you know, this is Comcast, but congratulations to them on achieving such a huge, successful, change in how they think about technology.
Sure, this whole speech was in the context of cloud services, and the cloud has given a mighty fine assist, but I’m calling it — Agile won. It took 15 years, but really that isn’t too bad to transform an entire industry.
