An evening thought-leadership event focussing on how to control performance whilst delivering faster and implementing rapid change.

The drive to release products faster and more often has fundamentally changed the way we build software, and has led to widespread adoption of Cloud, CI, Microservices, automation etc. These technologies and methodologies, combined with increasing demands for greater velocity in delivery are causing a perfect storm for performance, availability and capacity management: as the pace of change increases and businesses demand ever greater agility and better cost control it's almost always the non-functional aspects that end up being 2nd class citizens, or simply not addressed at all.

At the event we will explore the key challenges and possible solutions, bringing together IT professionals to debate, share experiences and learn from their peers and industry experts.

This is an invitation-only and free to attend event aimed at enterprise IT professionals. It is a genuine thought-leadership event (robustly not a sales pitch!) and will be run according to Chatham House rules to ensure open discussion.

Speakers and Abstracts

Keynote: Andy Caddy (Group CIO, Virgin Active)

Andy is Group CIO at Virgin Active where he gets to combine a passion for health and fitness with a mission to make people’s lives easier through the use of technology. He is currently 15th in the CIO 100 and is a regular speaker on the changing role of the CIO, IoT and big data.

Andy’s keynote presentation will look at how customer expectations and market forces are driving IT departments to release code and deliver products faster. Technologies and methodologies such as Cloud, Agile, CI, DevOps, containers and microservices are all enabling this increased demand for velocity of throughput, but in turn they create a perfect storm for performance and capacity management, putting application speed and stability at risk and driving up OPEX costs.

Case Study: Kim Edwards (Senior Delivery Manager, easyJet)

Kim Edwards is responsible for the performance and capacity management of easyJet's commercial IT systems. easyJet has annual revenues of over £4billion and are Europe's leading airline: more than 73m passengers fly with easyJet annually, on over 800 routes across 31 countries. On a single day in October 2015 easyJet.com had 2.6million visits, selling around 800 seats per minute rising to a peak of sales equivalent to filling an Airbus A320 every seven seconds.

Kim will take us through his experiences from the last ten years of managing performance and capacity challenges in an environment of rapid business growth in a highly competitive market; ongoing technology change; tight cost control; and extraordinarily spiky demand on peak sales days throughout the year.

Best practice showcase: Danny Quilton (Director, Capacitas)

Danny is a highly regarded thought-leader and practitioner within the field of performance and capacity management. He co-founded Capacitas just over 15 years ago to help enterprise organisations solve performance and capacity challenges, and during this time has worked with the likes of easyJet, BP, Arcadia, RS Components and Nomura Investment Bank.

Danny will take us through the role Capacitas have played in easyJet’s journey. His talk will cover strategies for shifting performance left in the product lifecycle and will go into detail on Capacitas' innovative approach to automated performance test execution and analysis within CI.

Agenda

18.00 - 18.20: Arrival, drinks and networking

18.30 - 18.40: Introduction and welcome

18.40 - 19.00: Keynote - Andy Caddy (Group CIO, Virgin Active)

19.00 - 19.20: Case Study - Kim Edwards (Senior Delivery Manager, Easyjet)

19.20 - 19.40: Break: drinks, canapes, networking

19.40 - 20.00: Best practice showcase - Danny Quilton (Director, Capacitas)

20.00 - 20.30: Q&A and group discussion

20.30 - 21.00: Break: drinks, canapes, networking

How to Control (Enterprise IT) Performance...