Sendachi Is The Latest Company Gearing Up To Sell You DevOps

The idea of DevOps, a buzzword-esque portmanteau of development and operations, has been picking up a lot of traction over the last couple of years, and for good reason too.

The basic premise of DevOps looks to make software development more agile by breaking down the walls between the development and operations departments in IT companies. CA Technologies has most recently revolved its entire strategy around selling DevOps, claiming that a majority of companies who have greater than average profit growth have already adopted DevOps.

So with that kind of carrot on a stick, explaining and teaching to growing companies how to utilise DevOps is surely a big business in itself.

Sendachi launches

Sendachi is just one of these companies looking to make a business out of bringing legacy IT systems and methods into the mobile and Internet age.

Established to “facilitate vibrant, modern software development cultures within corporate IT departments”, Sendachi has been forged out of a merger between “like-minded IT services companies” Seattle-based Clutch and London’s Contino, and has kicked off with a massive $30 million investment though venture financier Columbia Capital.

Sendachi claims that it is ready to tackle “one of the most vexing problems facing enterprise IT departments today”: the problem of how exactly to accelerate deployment of new services to gain the agility and velocity to let the company flourish. In one word, DevOps.

The company has brought in a raft of so-called experts to work alongside its clients so that they can experience working with DevOps in a “material” way.

But what makes Sendachi different? There are countless tools out in the wild that promise to help companies make the cultural shift to a more dynamic and agile way of working?

“Our biggest differentiator,” said CEO Steven Anderson, “is that we don’t train internal teams in an abstracted way, we participate with them, showing them how by executing their real-world work. It’s not academic; it’s absolutely practical. We show them how to use new stack technologies and work differently to achieve acceleration and quality.”

Ben Wootton, the vice president of technology for Europe, told TechWeekEurope: “Where we fit in is helping give customers context and guidance as they seek to introduce the “composable stack”, which may include Cloud, containers, virtualisation and automated build, configuration and deployment solutions.”

Sendachi said it is looking to pick up customers in the large enterprise groups across various industries. This makes sense, especially as CA Technologies’ made many remarks around the slower adoption of large companies embracing DevOps at its annual conference in Las Vegas last November. “DevOps practices are expanding beyond the realm of unicorn start-ups,” said CA, “making their way into the enterprise as large organisations look for faster, more efficient and reliable ways to get code from commit to customer.”

Wootton said: “Across industries, from banking to media and even taxis, the threat or pain of software-based disruption is being felt.”

True, you just have to look at startup giants such as Uber to see how much agile software development has turned entire industries on their heads.

Bold bets

“Enterprises have to make increasingly bold bets to stay ahead,” said Wootton. “Over the next two years we will see more reorganizations, more insourcing, more re-platforming and more re-architecture than we saw in the previous decade as companies race to move from software legacy, to software as a competitive advantage.”

Sendachi claims its staff have extensive experience in DevOps who have previously worked with Fortune 50 companies both in the US and Europe. But that alone is not enough. The $30 million will also go towards an “aggressive” hiring spree throughout 2016 across both continents, said the company.

Sendachi is launching out of Seattle, with its European head office in London. Contino cofounders Benjamin Wootton and Matt Farmer remain with the new company, Wootton as vice president of technology for Europe and Farmer as GM of Europe and former Clutch principal Jerome Gagner has been appointed vice president of technology for the Americas.

The company has even managed to recruit former CA Technologies global digital transformation lead Justin Vaughan-Brown as vice president of marketing.

Wootten told TechWeekEurope that the $30m commitment gives Sendachi “what we need to deliver the next stages of our planned organic growth and have the option of strategic acquisitions. Our immediate work is to continue to expand our resources to meet client needs and market dynamics.”

“We target the [companies] with the greatest level of pain from intense competition and business disruption from non-traditional sources,” said Wootton. “Right now banking, insurance, retail and telecommunications are feeling the pressure from agile competitors wielding new technology more effectively than they can.”

Indeed, CTOs, CIOs, and employees down the chain of command are increasingly ready to embrace agility and DevOps in theory, but with more and more companies setting up shop to sell DevOps as a necessary way of working, teaching the enterprise to embrace it looks to be ever more lucrative – now more so than ever as slow movers start to feel unicorns and startups biting at their heels.

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