DevOps is a Crowded Space

One of the biggest positioning challenges for companies in the cloud native ecosystem is a disconnect between how people on the cutting edge of technology think about how things should be versus how most buyers think about the actual state of affairs. I’m incredulous when someone claims that a new, bleeding edge software development technique is revolutionizing the Fortune 500 as we speak. It is entirely likely that a small team in each of the major enterprises really is experimenting with new technology, but the chances that they are widely using techniques that don’t even have a clearly accepted name to run mission-critical applications or even revenue-producing apps? Pretty unlikely.

Just because you met a couple engineers from American Airlines at KubeCon does not mean the company is all-in with a complete open source strategy and operating 100% in the cloud.

The problem when companies over-estimate the adoption curve of new technology or even processes like DevOps is that it gets in the way of identifying the competitive alternatives to a product in the prospect’s mind while also obscuring what the true pain points the product solves might be. It can also cause companies to over-focus on minor competitors while ignoring the real competitive alternatives in their prospects’ heads. Or, it can lead them to position their product to solve a problem that is not actually a problem for most people, writing themselves out of the market.