Delphix Partner Spotlight on EVOTEK

Tell us a bit about EVOTEK and the broad range of services you bring to enterprise customers.

The key for us is in our understanding of how our customers consume technology resources.  In order to provide strategic value in supplying infrastructure, we have to better understand how they are consumed. EVOTEK’s unique, consultative approach enables us to better understand how an organization is developing and delivering modern platforms. From this insight, we help customers implement the practices required to transform their data centers, adopt modern software development methods, and build out initiatives like AI.

The EVOTEK Platform Engineering practice focuses on four key disciplines:

• Building CI/CD pipelines by identifying the people, processes, and tools needed to deliver software in an automated workflow.

• Refactoring existing software into a modern microservices-based architecture, enabling the optimization of workloads at scale.

• Through containerization and orchestration, we enable organizations to make services immutable, workloads ephemeral, and the consumption of infrastructure ubiquitous.

• Embedding security by design into software development practices results in more secure platforms. With automation, everything is code. Companies must ensure their  software design, development, and delivery is secure via  a platform that is not only built for scalability but also for traceability.

Our customers are primarily based in the U.S. across a variety of markets, including healthcare, finserv, technology, and more. We focus on solving the larger problem of building a scalable platform infrastructure which is a ubiquitous challenge, so our four key disciplines are applicable to any industry.

How would you describe your typical planning process with customers as you help them transition a holistic platform approach through automation?

No two organizations are the same. Deep understanding of the environment is critical to presenting strategic solutions. We analyze both the application and platform architecture to understand what customers are doing today, where they want to be, and what the barriers and blockers are. Based on that analysis, we are able to advise and architect scalable solutions tailored to meet each customers’ unique needs. The end goal is to ensure their platform can scale more effectively—no matter where their infrastructure lives.

We’re really focused on understanding and implementing the entire process. Most organizations have technical debt to deal with, and they also have process problems that need to be streamlined. We analyze the software delivery lifecycle from ideation to implementation with a fresh set of eyes and determine how to not only optimize but do it securely.

With large-scale transformations, you must find customers at different levels of maturity.  What do you see in terms of the  customer journey?

About 20 percent of our customers are very mature and as a result need help with a discrete problem. On the flip side, another 20 percent is far behind the curve, so there’s a lot of education necessary when creating a comprehensive plan. The remaining  60 percent is an interesting mix. Many IT leaders believe they can develop a data delivery and security solution themselves, so they spend six to nine months trying to build one in-house. But it turns out that solving their pain points in-house is much more difficult than many organizations understand and can realistically undertake. More often than not, they come to the realization that partnering with organizations, like Delphix—who have years of experience solving these specific challenges— deliver a higher value service in a shorter period of time than executing internally.

In what ways does our partnership benefit customers?

As we distill the customer’s architecture and develop a plan to transform and enable it in a secure way, data management and data security play key roles.

We embed the Delphix platform into the CI/CD pipeline, automating the delivery of data for dev and test teams, so they can spin up ephemeral workloads on demand. With easy access, they can leverage data that mimics production, so shift-left testing finds data-related defects earlier.

We also help our customers establish a cloud strategy that optimizes spend and creates a more secure platform. Sound security practices include securing the data delivered to data consumers, and Delphix masks data delivered to dev and test teams to ensure our customers maintain regulatory compliance.

All of our customers are regulated in some way for data privacy. To comply with these regulations, application security is important, but it’s ultimately the data that needs to be secure.  Data masking gives them the ability to do that.

Through our partnership, we can offer our customers the ability to ensure data is usable, and secured, in any environment.

With your comprehensive, end to end focus, you must work with a range of people…from dev to ops, and from practitioners to execs.

Yes, that’s true. Given our four primary disciplines, the CIO and CTO are involved in every aspect of the process. The CSO is brought in to the process as we refactor applications and redesign the software delivery pipeline. DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers, DBAs, or data engineers are all engaged in designing and implementing the transformation. By taking a DevOps approach, our team is able to remove silos from workflows and decision making while establishing visibility and collaboration to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

What do you think has been the secret to your success?

Many systems integrators today sell infrastructure but don’t offer consulting services or the depth of expertise required to create a long term plan. At EVOTEK, we truly provide a holistic approach to digital transformation. We look at every aspect, including people, processes as well as the technology to provide solutions for the entire platform. If we’re the tool belt so to speak, Delphix gives us the best tool for fast and secure data delivery.

About Dustin Milberg
Dustin is a seasoned enterprise technology executive who has served as a CTO/CIO and VP of Engineering. He leads EVOTEK’s Labs and Platform Engineering practice, helping customers adopt a holistic approach to developing and delivering sustainable platforms and solutions, while enabling technology organizations to optimize the entire operation: people, process, infrastructure, operations, development, quality, and security. Many of EVOTEK’s customers are in the process of investigating the cloud and trying to determine right the consumption models to fit their needs. Dustin is working with technology leaders and engineering teams to develop and execute on sound, scalable technical strategies providing the best performance and cost. His broad and deep experience uniquely position Dustin to provide value at all levels within technology organizations, with heavy emphasis on helping leaders navigate and transform the ever-changing technical landscape.

About EVOTEK
EVOTEK was founded to pursue a disruptive new vision: to provide technology leadership on innovative ways to safely thrive in a digital world. With technology offerings from data center to cloud, EVOTEK is uniquely equipped to enable customers with the industry shift from traditional IT computing to secure multicloud. With services practices in cybersecurity, mobility, platform engineering and artificial intelligence, EVOTEK is moving up the value chain, closer to the part of digital business that matters most. EVOTEK was named to Inc Magazine’s Best Places to work in 2018. In 2016, 2017 and 2018, EVOTEK was named to The San Diego Business Journal's Best Places to work and recognized in CRN's Solution Provider 500 list, CRN's Next-Generation 250 list, CRN’s Triple Crown and highlighted as CRN's Top 150 Growth Companies, holding the #1 spot in 2017, as the fastest growing system integrator in the country.