Blog

December 14, 2023

Revolutionizing DevOps at Dell: Developer Experience & Productivity at Its Best

Ann Rosen
Ann Rosen

DevOps,

Data Management

In this blog, we share an example from a recent webinar on how Dell flipped developer productivity from 20/80 to 80/20. Keep reading to discover the methods you can use and results you can gain by doing the same thing.

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Why Dell Needed to Flip the Developer Productivity Script

If I told you that your manufacturing plant was only producing at 20% capacity, would you close down the plant? Or at least call a search party to investigate? I am willing to bet that you would. 

But why is it that we are willing to accept any less when it comes to some of our most valuable resources, who are so vital to our digital transformation? Why would any organization allow their business-critical software development team to operate at sub-par productivity? And yet, we see this every day. 

The team at Dell decided: no more. As Dell was embarking on a large-scale digital transformation, the IT executive team knew that they must adopt DevOps practices at scale. 

But they were in for a surprise. They discovered that their developer productivity was blocked by tedious administrative and manual tasks and processes. So much so, that Dell developers were only spending 20% of their time actually writing functional code! 

This isn't an isolated case — the Perforce Delphix 2026 Test Data Management Report for AI-Ready Enterprises found that 98% of enterprises still have some sort of manual aspect in their workflows. That means there's untapped potential for organizations to leverage automation to increase developer productivity.

The Dell software development leadership team made it their mission to dramatically accelerate developer productivity by reimagining the developer experience. At our webinar, we had the pleasure of hosting Cody Taylor, the driving force behind the DevOps transformation at Dell. This conversation with Cody offers a firsthand account of how Cody and team re-engineered the developer experience at the heart of an epic DevOps journey at Dell. 

The organization needed to transform while continuously supporting over 2700 software applications with more than 420 PB of data, processing 63 million orders and 84 thousand shipments while empowering 130 thousand Dell team-members, working flexibly. 

 

Try Free 

Take Advantage of New Developer Efficiencies

Interested in seeing how you could reclaim 40% more developer time? Watch our webinar from Delphix experts Cwyn Weldy and Woody Evans. 

 

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5 Ways Dell Flipped Developer Productivity

Here are five of the many DevOps learnings that Cody shares in this webinar: 

  1. Automate, automate, automate: Foster an ‘automate first’ mentality and culture. Deliver "everything as code," not just the software but also infrastructure and data.
  2. API-first developer self-service: Give developers self-service access to systems and tools using APIs only. Manual dependencies and development bottlenecks are eliminated.
  3. Integrate pipeline toolchain: Streamline end-to-end pipelines by integrating tools, all the way from requirements management to observability and data automation across.
  4. Offer a developer marketplace: Build a rich internal marketplace offering developers standardized UX components and self-service APIs as well as cloud services.
  5. Remove data friction: Eliminate manual and painstaking steps related to test data by automating the provisioning and management of data and integrating TDM into pipelines.
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The Results of Improving Dell's Developer Productivity?

By following these best practices and others, Cody and team have reached phenomenal results using Perforce Delphix solutions for test data management. Five of the key metrics realized by the team at Dell include: 

  1. 17 minutes to create a pipeline.
  2. 6000 self-service data access requests and 80% of provisioning done by developers.
  3. Improved provisioning time from months to minutes.
  4. Developers spend over 75% of their time writing functional code.
  5. 50 Million CI/CD pipeline job runs to date.

To learn more from the experts at Dell about how you too, can accelerate your DevOps journey, please check out the full on-demand webinar with Dell. 

Ready to dive deeper into the results you could be achieving:

Get Demo 

Transform Developer Productivity with Perforce Delphix Data Delivery

Like Dell's transformation from 20/80 to 80/20 productivity ratios, your development teams can achieve dramatic efficiency gains through better, faster data management. Perforce Delphix eliminates data bottlenecks that keep developers waiting by delivering production-like datasets in minutes instead of days or weeks.

 A recent IDC study of Delphix customers found that teams using Delphix: 

  • Achieved 58% faster application development.*

  • Protected 77.2% more environments.* 

  • Realized a 408% ROI with payback in under six months.* 

Related blog >> What is Delphix?

Data Virtualization Maximizes Development Time

Delphix addresses the core data virtualization challenges — such as long wait times for test data — that impact enterprise development teams. Our 2026 Test Data Management Report for AI-Ready Enterprises found that 99% of respondents are waiting longer than one business day for a fresh full production copy of test data, with 42% waiting weeks or months. Delphix provides instant access to refreshed, consistent test data, so developers spend more time coding and less time waiting for manual processes that slow innovation.

Self-Service Data Access Eliminates Dependencies

Virtual data copies enable developers to provision, refresh, and manage their own test environments without IT bottlenecks. This self-service approach removes the administrative bottlenecks that prevent teams from focusing on writing functional code.

Achieve Your Own 80/20 Developer Productivity Transformation

Discover how Delphix test data management solutions can replicate Dell's developer productivity success in your organization. Request a demo to see how automated data delivery transforms development workflows and maximizes your team's productive coding time.

Unlock Developer Productivity [Demo]

*IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Delphix, by Perforce, The Business Value of Delphix, #US52560824, December 2024

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