This article is based on reporting originally published by SD Times (sdtimes.com) in 2017, drawing on commentary from Ashish Kuthiala, then Senior Director at Micro Focus.
Why Enterprise DevOps Is Harder Than It Looks
Cloud-native startups have a structural advantage when adopting DevOps: they can build practices, pipelines, and culture from scratch. Large enterprises have no such luxury. They inherit decades of purpose-specific tooling, established organizational hierarchies, and deeply embedded delivery processes that resist rapid change.
Micro Focus (formerly HPE Software) positioned itself as a guide for enterprises navigating exactly this challenge — helping organizations adopt DevOps and continuous delivery (CD) practices without discarding the investments they had already made in tools and infrastructure.
“It’s easier to build an effective DevOps practice when you’re starting with a blank slate. It’s harder for enterprises to change the way they operate so they can implement DevOps efficiently. To do that, they have to choose the right team members and the right toolsets, and stitch those toolsets together.”
— Ashish Kuthiala, Senior Director, Micro Focus
The Case for Transitioning Gradually
One of the most common failure modes in enterprise DevOps programs is moving too quickly. Teams under pressure to show results can adopt DevOps language and some tooling while still lacking the foundational processes and people to sustain the transformation. The result is fragile pipelines, unclear ownership, and eventual rollback to waterfall habits.
A more durable approach is iterative: treat each change — whether to executable code, configuration, infrastructure, data, or monitoring — as something that must be codified, version-controlled, and fed through the CD pipeline in an automated way.
“Every change needs to be codified and version-controlled… Any changes are fed into the CD pipeline so it goes through the entire cycle until it’s production ready. Then the business can make the decision of when to introduce it to production environments.”
— Ashish Kuthiala, Micro Focus
This approach separates technical readiness from business release decisions — a distinction that matters enormously in regulated industries or complex deployment environments.
Automated Gates: Keeping Defects Out of Production
A core element of a mature CD pipeline is the automated quality gate. Rather than relying on manual checkpoints or end-of-cycle testing, automated gates enforce quality at every stage. If a change fails any gate condition — a failed unit test, a configuration drift check, a failed security scan — it is immediately rejected and returned to its source for remediation before it can progress further.
Micro Focus applied this principle to its own internal delivery pipeline, which combined open-source tools, third-party tooling, and its own products on a hybrid delivery platform. Kuthiala described the goal plainly:
“Technically, nothing defective ever reaches the production environment.”
— Ashish Kuthiala, Micro Focus
Achieving that outcome in practice requires standardized development, testing, and production environments that can be provisioned on demand. Micro Focus addressed this by containerizing its environments — a move it reported accelerated changes to its own CD pipeline.
Integrating Existing Tools Instead of Replacing Them
A common anxiety among enterprise teams approaching DevOps is that modernizing delivery will require a wholesale replacement of existing tooling. Kuthiala argued the opposite: the right approach is to integrate and orchestrate what you already have, not discard it.
Micro Focus’s ALM Octane product was designed with this in mind, offering integrations with a wide range of third-party open-source and commercial tools. The value proposition was not that Micro Focus tools were superior to all alternatives, but that they could act as connective tissue — stitching disparate tools into a coherent, automated pipeline.
- Enterprises increasingly mix open-source tools (Jenkins, Git, Docker, etc.) with commercial products
- Forcing a single-vendor stack often creates more disruption than it resolves
- Integration-first strategies let teams experiment and improve pipelines incrementally
“We advise customers to take a very experimental, iterative approach so they can continuously improve their pipelines. Try things out, measure them, improve them and do it all very quickly.”
— Ashish Kuthiala, Micro Focus
Culture Change: The Harder Problem
No amount of tooling solves a cultural problem. Enterprise DevOps transformations that focus exclusively on pipelines and automation often stall because the underlying organizational dynamics — siloed teams, misaligned incentives, risk-averse management — remain unchanged.
Three cultural shifts that consistently matter in enterprise DevOps transitions:
- Psychological safety to experiment and fail fast. Teams need explicit permission — and ideally encouragement — to try approaches that might not work, learn from the outcome, and iterate quickly.
- Shared goals across functional teams. Development, QA, operations, and security teams historically optimize for different, sometimes conflicting metrics. Effective DevOps requires incentive alignment around shared outcomes like deployment frequency and mean time to recovery.
- Visible leadership commitment. Cultural change at enterprise scale does not happen bottom-up alone. Senior leadership must model and reinforce the behaviors they want to see.
“There’s a lot of leadership change and encouragement that’s needed to make this work at an enterprise scale. Your first pipeline serves as a proof point and then you have the best practices in place to build successive pipelines.”
— Ashish Kuthiala, Micro Focus
A Practical Framework for Enterprise DevOps Adoption
Drawing on the principles described above, enterprise teams can structure their DevOps transitions around the following sequence:
- Assess current state. Audit your existing tool portfolio, team structures, and delivery processes before making changes. Understand what you have before deciding what to change.
- Build a pilot pipeline. Select one product or service team and build a fully automated CD pipeline for it. Use this as a proof of concept to demonstrate value and surface blockers.
- Codify everything. Infrastructure, configuration, and monitoring must all be version-controlled and pipeline-managed — not just application code.
- Automate quality gates. Embed automated testing, security scanning, and compliance checks into the pipeline at every stage. Make failure fast and visible.
- Containerize environments. Standardize development, test, and production environments so they can be provisioned on demand and behave consistently.
- Scale using the pilot as a template. Once the first pipeline is stable and producing good outcomes, replicate and adapt the pattern for additional teams and products.
- Invest in culture continuously. Treat cultural change as an ongoing workstream, not a one-time training event.
Key Takeaways
Enterprise DevOps adoption is a multi-year, iterative journey that requires careful integration of people, process, and technology. The practical lessons from Micro Focus’s approach in 2017 remain relevant today:
- Move deliberately — rushing DevOps adoption without the right foundations causes more harm than good
- Integrate existing tools before replacing them
- Automate quality gates so defects cannot reach production
- Standardize and containerize environments to enable on-demand provisioning
- Treat cultural transformation as equally important as technical change
- Use your first successful pipeline as a repeatable template for scaling