Sign In

Gary Olliffe

Distinguished VP, Analyst at Gartner

Gary Olliffe is a Distinguished Vice President and Analyst at Gartner, working in the Software Engineering and Application Platform team within Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP).1 With the LinkedIn username "garyo", he is a prominent figure in the technology research and advisory field.

Areas of Expertise

Gary's work at Gartner focuses on several key areas:

  1. Cloud-native Application Platforms: He advises leadership clients on this topic, indicating his expertise in modern software development and deployment strategies.3

  2. APIs and Microservices: Gary frequently discusses these topics, suggesting a deep understanding of modern software architecture and integration patterns.6

  3. AI Code Assistants: He has been involved in creating Gartner's Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants, demonstrating his knowledge of emerging technologies in software development.2

  4. Internal Developer Portals: Gary has published research on delivering successful internal developer portals, highlighting his interest in developer experience and productivity.5

Contributions and Engagements

Gary is actively involved in various aspects of Gartner's research and events:

  • He contributes to Gartner's annual Top Strategic Trends report, which provides insights into future technology directions.4
  • Gary participates in Gartner events, delivering breakout sessions on topics such as APIs and microservices.6
  • He engages with the tech community through conferences like KubeCon and BackstageCon, sharing knowledge on developer portals and related technologies.5

Gary Olliffe's role at Gartner positions him as a thought leader in software engineering and application platforms, with a particular focus on cloud-native technologies, APIs, and developer experience.

Highlights

Aug 27 · linkedin

#Backstage has become one of the most mentioned technologies in my client calls with platform teams over the last 18 months and I decided we needed some dedicated advice for Gartner clients evaluating, using and (in some cases) abusing the technology.

"Assessing Backstage for Your Internal Developer Portal" (https://lnkd.in/dBwHftcw) is now available to Gartner for Tech Pro's subscribers.

If you haven't heard of Backstage, firstly where have you been😁, but more importantly, Backstage is an open-source framework developed by Spotify (Backstage from Spotify) for building internal developer portals (IDP) with one of the healthiest contributor communities of all Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects.

Platform teams implementing developer portals and software catalogs have found it a source of inspiration, innovation, and frustration—the reasons for which are covered in the research.

The super-short summary is "do your homework"... evaluate the upfront and ongoing development effort to use the OSS framework, do a detailed analysis of the status and capability of the plug-ins you care most about for your portal, and know the alternatives, whether commercially supported products based on Backstage or other IDP products. Lots more details and guidance in the published research.

And, if you're looking for more general advice for implementing internal developer portals look no further than "How to Implement Internal Developer Portals" (https://lnkd.in/dnjR25Gg) or come along to #GartnerApps (https://lnkd.in/dHk_H93x) Summit in London on September 9-10 where I'll be presenting on the topic.

#platformengineering #developerexperience, #dx #internaldeveloperportals #internaldeveloperplatforms

Jun 27 · linkedin

I'm doing some research into #DeveloperPortals the most popular #Backstage plugins and after a few minutes with the NPM registry API, some AI magic and Jupyter I came up with these charts (top 20 for readability and the full 105 current plugins) ordered on NPM Package Popularity (which is a normalized value between 0-1)

If you've deployed Backstage, I'm curious how this correlates with your implementations... and what are the plugins from outside the Backstage community-plugins repo (i.e. not listed) that have have had the highest value? Please share in the comments.

I would share a link to the Jupyter notebook, but the links are not working... so here is the prompt. I used with GPT4-Turbo... #AICodeGen

"Create a python script that search the NPM registry using the API with a provided query string then Sorts the results based on the "popularity" property and generates a bar graph. The script will be run from a Jupyter notebook"

The API is unauthenticated, and the resulting code "just worked" (for the top 20 with the query = "scope:backstage-community%20plugin") which is incredible considering how little context I provided. I had to give it a tiny nudge to enumerate the resultset pagination for the full list.

Backstage from Spotify #BuildWithGartner hashtag #developerexperience hashtag #DX hashtag #IDP hashtag #platformengineering

Related Questions

What are Gary Olliffe's main areas of expertise?
How long has Gary Olliffe been with Gartner?
What projects has Gary Olliffe led at Gartner?
What is Gary Olliffe's educational background?
How can I connect with Gary Olliffe on LinkedIn?
Gary Olliffe
Gary Olliffe, photo 1
Gary Olliffe, photo 2
Add to my network

Experience

Distinguished Vice President, Analyst at Gartner (April 2020 - Present)
Head of Enterprise Architecture at Mercer

Location

United Kingdom