The Art of the Possible Transformation at Comcast - Ranga Muvavarirwa and Jessica Sant

November 2, 2019

DOES19 Las Vegas — How does a large 50-year-old company go from purchasing much of its technology and working with yearlong release cycles to building multiple products in-house and releasing daily? We'll trace the changing set of tools, techniques, and attitudes that have powered (and still power) this transformation at Comcast over the last decade, tracing a path that has some steps you may want to borrow for your own company's journey. We'll start by describing the monolithic waterfall projects delivered by separate development, QA, and operations teams before exploring continuous delivery of service-oriented architectures by independent DevOps teams. Technology-wise, we'll cover everything from bare metal servers in private data centers to VMs in private and public clouds to container orchestration systems and platforms as a service. As our technical practices and tools evolved, our business and product processes had to change as well, from the way we work in partnership with field operations, how we launch projects, how we plan work, and how we measure success. Due to the ever-changing business and technology landscape and the length of time this journey has covered, you’ll likely recognize your company’s situation at some point in this story; you can use this understanding to map your own path forward. More importantly, we'll describe some of the important cultural and leadership catalysts that have made a transformation of this magnitude possible. The Art of the Possible Transformation at Comcast - Ranga Muvavarirwa and Jessica Sant Ranga Muvavarirwa, VP, Entertainment Technology, Comcast Jessica Sant, VP of Discovery Engineering, Comcast Ranga is the VP Entertainment Technology at Comcast where he leads the technology teams who create, deliver and operate our video, OTT & App experiences, including the flagship X1 experience for set-top boxes and the Stream applications for consumer devices. Ranga focuses on driving innovation in Entertainment, refining the ‘way we work’ across our technology teams and focusing our priority and investments as we address a rapidly changing content landscape. Ranga received his BSEE and MS Data Science from Brown University and UC Berkeley respectively; as well as an MBA from the Wharton School. Although Ranga enjoys running, cycling, swimming and reading poetry; he is most gleeful when writing code. Jess is the VP of Discovery Engineering at Comcast. Her teams provide many of the APIs and back-end services for Xfinity products including metadata, search, voice search, and device details. Jess is passionate about creating a diverse and inclusive workplace and in 2015, she co-founded a local chapter of Comcast NBCU TECHWomen. In doing so, she helped to create a thriving community for women in tech and their allies in the Comcast Philadelphia offices. Jess is a software engineer by trade, having an MSSE from Drexel University, and a BCPE from Villanova University. She loves spending time with her family, especially with her 11-year old daughter whose favorite things are art, animals, and reading. When on her own, Jess can be found elbow-deep in clay making mugs and bowls for her friends and family. DOES19 Las Vegas DOES 2019 US DevOps Enterprise Summit https://events.itrevolution.com/us/

Previous
Monolithic Transformation: Using DevOps, Agile, and Cloud Platforms to Execute a Digital Transformation Strategy
Monolithic Transformation: Using DevOps, Agile, and Cloud Platforms to Execute a Digital Transformation Strategy

This practical ebook will help get you started creating new business models through digital transformation.

Next Video
How People and Data are Driving Digital Transformation at Discover Financial
How People and Data are Driving Digital Transformation at Discover Financial

Digital transformation is a people story. But you can't tell a digital transformation story without data. W...