The rapid uptake of AWS has changed the landscape of IT management forever, forcing a collision or collaboration depending on your perspective between previously siloed functional areas such as operations and development. Even with all this change, many things remain just as relevant to IT operations as they did 10 or more years ago, albeit done slightly differently. Datacom is one of a handful of MSP competency partners in the region and the first to hold the competency. During this session, Datacom's national manager of hybrid cloud, Matthew Payton, will share some of those insights into what in Datacom's journey needed to change, what stayed the same and what had to go in terms of IT management practices. As well as sharing some of the most common challenges enterprise customers face in adopting cloud management. Speaker: Matthew Payton National Manager of Hybrid Cloud, Datacom

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Musings of a MSP
Why some things never change,
and others have to

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Datacom’s Performance FY16
BILLION
Total Operating Revenue – up 13%
$1.058
MILLION
Capital Expenditure
$40.6 MILLION
Operating Expenditure
$17.9 % INCREASE
Staff numbers up to 4661
13.8%
MILLION
Profit Before Tax
$41.2 MILLION
Profit After Tax
$27.2

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DATACOM
WORLDWIDE

4. What’s so different anyway?
The devil is in the detail:
• Static vs. Elastic
• Change resistant vs. Change enabled
• Process Driven vs. Outcome Driven
• Serialised process vs. Parallel tasking
• Bespoke vs. Standardised
But…
Not much, its about delivering a service to your customer as reliably and cost effectively as possible.
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5. What Ends Up Happening?
• Elastic: gets mistaken for unlimited and
unbound
• Change Enabled: becomes uncontrolled
• Outcome Driven: usually used to excuse
poor discipline in release / Quality
Assurance
• Parallel Tasking: actually means everyone
working on everything, all over the place
• Standardisation: simply disappears
Sound like your dev team?
The reality behind the jargon
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6. Why does it end this way?
• Elastic gets constrained by undue process
• Change Enablers are stifled by layers of
change bureaucracy
• Outcome Driven goals are lost in various
granular measures of achievement
• Parallel Tasking can’t occur because of
endless approval processes
• Standardisation is similarly not possible
because process must be unique
Sound like your Ops team?
The causes behind the chaos
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7. Wouldn’t It Be Good…
If someone wrote a book about how to avoid all of this?
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8. ITIL vs AGILE
• Not if it’s not used as a roadblock or way to
get to no
• Only if you’re excusing sloppy discipline in
development teams as Agile
• Not once you remember it’s DevOps not
just DevDev
• Not if you aren’t prepared to adapt to suit –
its not perfect, but its not a bad place to
start
Isn’t ITIL the enemy of AGILE?
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9. So why change?
• Not if it’s not used as a roadblock or way to
get to no
• Only if you’re excusing sloppy discipline in
development teams as Agile
• Not once you remember it’s DevOps not
just DevDev
• Not if you aren’t prepared to adapt to suit –
its not perfect, but its not a bad place to
start
Time to take your head out of the sand
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10. The ins and outs
Changes needed
• Speed to action requests
• Response to request / incident / problem
• Release management
• Capacity management
• Availability management
• Attitudes
• Commercial constructs
Stay the same
• Configuration
• Change
• Request / Problem
• Major Incident
What needs to change vs. what doesn’t
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11. What Datacom discovered
• Being a MSP isn’t about tools, toys or code. It’s about getting outcomes from the AWS platform in the
a way that serves the customer best.
• This approach is no different to what Datacom’s always done – putting our customers first.
• Many of the things we thought we’d need to completely change ended up being the things we only
needed to tweak a little.
• There’s a huge difference in approach and discipline when managing 10 vs. 1000 seat workloads or
services.
• ITIL provides a good starting point, but has an image problem - through no fault of its own.
• Change is always hard, people are always key. We look to build the right team with the right attitude.
• It’s about balance, playing to the strengths of both dev and ops teams.
• You can’t just magically move workloads to operating this way, the world is many shades of grey.
• The process is hard, and needs buy in and long term commitment from everyone in the business.
The winding road to becoming a major MSP
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12. Thank you!