thoughtworks brochure - january 2016

Project partner

Written by Nye Longman

Produced by Danielle Harris

Fresh thinking

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Software and consultancy company ThoughtWorks has long been a pioneer in its field, as Business Review reports

Key Personnel David WhalleyCIO

W hat is clear from speaking to ThoughtWorks’ CIO David Whalley is that the software and consultancy

company was pioneering everything that is now standard practice years before such operational trends became fashionable and commonplace. Having individuals who literally ‘wrote the book’ work for the company is a testament to the culture it embodies and representative of its ability to be the first in delivering fresh thinking using the latest technology.

ThoughtWorks provides software delivery, pioneering tools across 12 countries hailing from a variety of professional sectors including education, e-business, retail, healthcare, media, global development, along with government institutions. Examples of its innovations include assistance in building an interactive education program, creating a product management system, and developing the back-end mobile system for a major retailer.

ThoughtWorks’ offerings are structured to assist clients with a variety of different needs, every step of the way. The company has the capacity to experiment, design, and deliver – whether just in the office or across the globe. Its understanding of how technology enables businesses to compete more effectively is at the heart of its thinking, covering everything from making existing systems perform optimally to complete re-design.

Innovation is an idea that is often bandied

www.thoughtworks .com 5

Number of employees at ThoughtWorks

3,600 around business circles without any consideration given to its implications or even its meaning; ThoughtWorks has fearlessly swept aside this ambiguity with its own interpretation – nothing less than revolutionising software design, creation, and delivery while maintaining a strong commitment to using its scope to bring about positive social change.

Whalley explains that this approach has not only entrenched its founding vision of consistent, radical change but has empowered the company to share this approach with the rest of the industry, he says: “We are responsible for solving the industry’s hardest IT problems; we want to change the way people think about and do their IT. We are one of the pioneers of agile, continuous delivery, as well as lean enterprise development.

“We were driving things like agile and continuous delivery which are now mainstream and are continuing to think about how we build

Uncovering DevOps Challenges with Continuous IntelligenceAs organizations embrace the DevOps approach to application development they face new challenges that can’t be met with legacy monitoring tools. While continuous integration, automated testing and continuous delivery have greatly improved the quality of software, clean code doesn’t mean software always behaves as expected. A faulty algorithm or failure to account for unforeseen conditions can cause software to behave unpredictably. Within the CD pipeline, troubleshooting can be difficult, and in cases like debugging in a production environment it may not even be possible.

Adding to the challenge, DevOps teams are adopting container technologies like Docker as a way to localize and isolate software function, while running applications on hyper-lean OS environments. In a DevOps context, containers allow agile teams to templatize application execution environments that developers can use and operations teams can “bless” for production deployment.

DevOps teams are challenged with monitoring, tracking and troubleshooting issues in a context where each container emits its own logging data. Machine data can come from numerous sources, and containers may not agree on a common logging method. Once log data has been acquired, assembling meaningful real-time metrics such as the condition of your host environment, the number of running containers, CPU usage, memory consumption and network performance can be arduous.

Sumo Logic - Full Stack VisibilityDevOps requires a new breed of log analytics tools that runs at cloud-scale, employs predictive algorithms, and can be integrated with a host of DevOps tools across the entire continuous delivery pipeline, not just server data. Sumo Logic is an advanced log analytics tool that brings these unique capabilities to DevOps teams. Sumo Logic enables you to:

+ Increase availability and performance. Sumo Logic enables issues to be identified before they impact the application and customer. Precise, proactive analytics quickly uncover hidden root causes across all layers of the application and infrastructure stack.

+ Streamline continuous delivery. Easily identify application issues and configuration changes across development, test and deployment environments. Share the same truth about critical issues, trends and opportunities across DevOps tool chain and application stack.

+ Provide real-time insights. With Sumo Logic DevOps teams can easily extract machine data insights to provide greater intelligence around their customers, products, and application usage. These insights provide a more accurate and complete analysis for business users.

+ Monitor Docker infrastructure. Sumo Logic delivers a comprehensive strategy for monitoring Docker infrastructure with a native collection source for events, stats, configurations and logs. Sumo Logic’s advanced machine-learning and analytics capabilities along with the new Sumo Logic application for Docker enable DevOps teams to analyze, troubleshoot, and perform root cause analysis of issues surfacing from distributed container-based applications and Docker containers themselves.

+ Enforce compliance. Sumo Logic delivers a simple, proactive and automated process to audit and investigate operational, security and regulatory compliance incidents. All data is centralized, secured, and easily analyzed in real-time through a single, highly scalable solution.

Learn how Sumo Logic enables your DevOps team to streamline continuous delivery, automate monitoring and accelerate troubleshooting. Go to sumologic.com/devops.

http://www.sumologic.com

SUPPLIER PROFILE

SUMO LOGIC

Sumo Logic is a SaaS-based log analytics platform that leverages machine-generated big data to deliver real-time insights across your entire continuous delivery pipeline. Sumo Logic empowers DevOps teams with a simple and scalable solution for monitoring KPI’s and metrics across the entire stack to deliver quality software. Our purpose-built Cloud-native service has scaled to over 4 Petabytes of data, and our amazing team is focused on delivering data-driven insight to enterprises worldwide. Our mission is to enable businesses to harness the power of machine data to improve their operations and deliver outstanding customer experience at Enterprise scale.

Address: 305 Main Street, Redwood City, CA 94063

Tel: +1 650-8108700

Email: [email protected]

Visit our Website: www.sumologic.com

www.thoughtworks .com 9

“We are responsible for solving the industry’s hardest IT problems; we want to change the way people think about and do their IT. We are one of the pioneers of agile, continuous delivery, as well as lean enterprise development”

– David Whalley, Chief Information Officer

and run IT; we are constantly reinventing ourselves internally to achieve this. Our clients come to us because we can fix their hardest problems. My aim, as CIO, is to be able to point to our internal IT and say we are an exemplar of how to do this.”

Redefining boundaries One of the major facets of thinking that underpins ThoughtWorks’ ideology is its desire to remove as many boundaries as possible which is extended by its promotion of openness across all of its operations. An interesting manifestation of this has been the way in which it has approached the ongoing design and deployment of its new security model.

Whalley explains: “Clearly, everybody’s focused on security so I don’t think we’re different to anyone else in that respect but we are thinking about the security perimeter in a different way. The traditional way is to focus on firewalls and building controls around an

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THOUGHTWORKS

Is Recruiting Your Competitive Advantage?

Greenhouse has helped

us create alignment

among our hiring &

recruiting teams, and has

allowed us to make better

hiring decisions.

LO R I R U S S O,Head of Global Talent Aquisition &

Employer Brand

L E A R N M O R E AT G R E E N H O U S E . I O

Greenhouse helps companies like TripAdvisor

make recruiting a strategic advantage. We create

tools to optimize your entire recruiting process.

Find better candidates, conduct more focused

interviews, and make data-driven hiring decisions.

Is Recruiting Your Competitive Advantage?

Greenhouse has helped

us create alignment

among our hiring &

recruiting teams, and has

allowed us to make better

hiring decisions.

LO R I R U S S O,Head of Global Talent Aquisition &

Employer Brand

Is Recruiting YourCompetitive Advantage?

L E A R N M O R E AT G R E E N H O U S E . I O

Greenhouse helps companies like TripAdvisor

make recruiting a strategic advantage. We create

tools to optimize your entire recruiting process.

Find better candidates, conduct more focused

interviews, and make data-driven hiring decisions.

http://greenhouse.io

www.thoughtworks .com 1 1

T E C H N O L O G YTHOUGHTWORKS

Expected 2015 revenue

generated

$500 million

enterprise to stop people getting in. We have actually reached the stage where we are moving our remaining software to the cloud. So we can rethink our security model.

“We have 35 live offices and they’re spreading, literally, to pretty much every part of the world. We have people spanning from Ecuador, Brazil, London, and Singapore. We have to have a very flexible model of supporting how our people work.

“What we’re doing is thinking about the perimeter that we’re trying to secure and think about the trust levels that we enable, how people access our systems. The level of security will depend on who you are, where you are and what you’re doing.”

“If the device you’re working on is provided

Expected 2015 revenue

generated

$500 million

1 2

by the company then we’re confident that it’s encrypted and we’ll trust that device. If you’re in a ‘strange or new location’, then we’re going to be more suspicious and may ask you to authenticate through a more rigorous process. I think it is different than what 95 percent of companies are currently doing because they are reinforcing the boundaries and enclosing things. That won’t work in ThoughtWorks where we need to provide our consultants with the flexibility to help our clients in whatever location they are while still protecting sensitive data.

“It gives me as the CIO much more flexibility because once we’ve got that model, it’s much easier to maintain than having to think about firewalls and physical security in lots and lots of offices with people travelling around the world.”

“We are also embracing ‘Shadow IT’. Rather than control IT systems we actively encourage our employees to build and market their own applications that can, using the same security models, access our data. This will allow us to focus our internal IT on real core functionality and utilise the talent we have in the organisation to extend that core. Early days, but the results are so far encouraging.”

Whalley also explains how the company is a strong believer in the power of software and technology for social change. That ethos is embedded into the organisation and touches and influences everything we do. University graduates, for example, are sent to

‘Although having led in its field for so long, ThoughtWorks is certainly not about to become complacent, which is why the company is pioneering IT innovations internally and while working with its clients’

www.thoughtworks .com 1 3

India to attend a six-week orientation course, now known as ThoughtWorks University; alongside learning important skills, the newcomers also get their first taste of the company’s innovative culture and understand that its social mission is not a Corporate Social Responsibility add-on, but something integral to who it is and how it operates.

Although having led in its field for so long, ThoughtWorks is certainly not about to become complacent, which is why the company is pioneering IT innovation internally, as well as with its clients. Its mission to break down existing boundaries instead of erecting new ones resonates far beyond its industry and is a model for all companies to aspire to.

http://www.youtube.com/user/thoughtworks

http://www.facebook.com/ThoughtWorks

http://twitter.com/thoughtworks

http://www.linkedin.com/company/thoughtworks

http://plus.google.com/+thoughtworks/posts

THOUGHTWORKS

First Floor, 76-78 Wardour Street

London, United Kingdom, W1F 0UR

T +44 (0)20 3437 0990

[email protected] www.thoughtworks.com

thoughtworks brochure - january 2016

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