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September 4, 2014

At A Glance: 2014 DevOps Enterprise Summit Speakers, Attendees and Submissions

By Gene Kim

I’m extremely excited to share with you some of the details on the selected speakers for the DevOps Enterprise Summit (https://devopsenterprise.io), as well as information of the attendees who have already registered.

In our call for speakers, we asked practitioners and leaders to submit their stories of how they’ve transformed how software and services are delivered in large, complex organizations using DevOps, Agile and Continuous Delivery principles and practices.

Our goal is to:

  • share the emerging and evolving experiences of Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps in the enterprises
  • accelerate enterprise IT transformations
  • create a community of practice of fellow travelers

By doing this, we wanted to create a broader DevOps narrative, to show that DevOps isn’t just for the unicorns (e.g., Flickr, Etsy, Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc.), but it’s also for the rest of us.

We were amazed at the response. We received over 170 speaker submissions. For our three-day conference, we had to pick 52 of them, and holy cow, it’s an amazing set of speakers and topics.

In this post, I will share with you some statistics of the selected speakers and attendees(e.g., job titles, Ops/Dev/Architecture/whatever, gender, etc.), as well as the submissions we received.

As many of you know, one of my favorite sayings is “you’re only as smart as the average of the top five people you hang out with.” I know I’ll be much smarter at the end of the three day conference, and if you have any interest in how large, complex organizations are adopting DevOps, I suspect you’ll love the program, too.

I’m so grateful for the help of everyone on the DevOps Enterprise Summit program committee (Adrian Cockcroft, Damon Edwards, Dominica DeGrandis, John Esser, John Willis, Jez Humble and Rohit Jainendra).

My Top Surprises

  • Accepted talks

    • I was startled by the seniority of job titles of the people who submitted, and who we ultimately accepted. The most common title was Director, followed by Chief Architect and Distinguished Engineer.

    • The most common background of the speakers is Operations, followed by Architecture and Development. Again, I was surprised by how many architects are speaking — maybe this makes sense, as it is the architects who see the end-to-end problems in the value stream that span Dev, Test and Ops.

  • Attendees

    • Although the speakers slanted towards an Ops background, attendees tend to be more Dev or Achitecture.

    • The most common attendee job titles are Director, Manager, Engineer, Architect and Vice President.

    • The top industry verticals represented are software and technology, followed by financial services, technology, consultants and manufacturing.

So, what is this conference shaping up to be? My fellow program committee member, Damon Edwards, said it best:

"The DevOps Enterprise Summit is really a conference for leaders of technology organizations."

Below, I present more specific data on speakers and attendees. I hope you find it interesting, and see you at the DevOps Enterprise Summit!

Accepted Talks: At A Glance

All the announced speakers are posted at https://devopsenterprise.io/speakers/. But here’s some "at a glance" information.

We’re also particularly interested in bringing in the perspectives of women and people of color who tend to be under-represented at technology conferences. Of the speakers, 41% are women.

The word cloud generated by all the abstracts is shown below. (Click here for full-size image. )

Attendees: At A Glance

And here’s some information on the attendees, based on information they provided when they registered for the conference.

All Submissions

The word cloud from all the submitted abstracts is shown below. (Click here for full-size image. )

In Closing…

Any questions about speakers and attendees that we didn’t cover? Let me know! Reply below or tweet to me (@realgenekim).

I hope to see y’all at the DevOps Enterprise Summit on October 21-23, 2014!

- About The Authors
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Gene Kim

Gene Kim is a best-selling author whose books have sold over 1 million copies. He authored the widely acclaimed book "The Unicorn Project," which became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Additionally, he co-authored several other influential works, including "The Phoenix Project," "The DevOps Handbook," and the award-winning "Accelerate," which received the prestigious Shingo Publication Award. His latest book, “Wiring the Winning Organization,” co-authored with Dr. Steven Spear, was released in November 2023.

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