Eficode's 20th Anniversary Episode

Celebrating the 200th episode of the DevOps Sauna podcast, Darren and Pinja are joined by longtime Eficodeans, Ilari Nurmi, Henri Hamalainen, and Marko Klemetti, to reminisce and celebrate the history of Eficode and the company's 20th anniversary.

[Marko] (0:03 - 0:11)

That way, we grow the knowledge within the organization by sharing and working together at the customers across borders.

[Darren] (0:14 - 0:22)

Welcome to the DevOps Sauna, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of DevOps, platform engineering, security, and more as we explore the future of development.

[Pinja] (0:22 - 0:32)

Join us as we dive into the heart of DevOps, one story at a time. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or only starting your DevOps journey, we're happy to welcome you into the DevOps Sauna.

[Darren] (0:38 - 0:46)

This episode was recorded to celebrate Eficode's 20th anniversary and features a conversation with Ilari, who at the time was serving as our CEO.

[Pinja] (0:46 - 0:56)

Since then, Ilari has moved on from the company. We want to take a moment to thank him for his incredible leadership over the past six years, a period noted for its remarkable growth.

[Darren] (0:56 - 1:02)

His impact on our journey will be lasting, and we're grateful to have captured his reflections during such a meaningful milestone.

[Pinja] (1:02 - 1:04)

Now onto the episode.

[Darren] (1:06 - 1:35)

Welcome back to the DevOps Sauna. We're having a bit of a celebratory episode today. Not only have we hit a small milestone recording our 200th podcast episode, but we're actually celebrating Eficode's 20th birthday.

So I'm joined by some special guests. We have Ilari Nurmi, CEO, Marko Klemetti, our CTO, and Heikki Hämmäläinen, the Head of GitHub and Microsoft business. Hey guys.

Hello. Hello. 

And of course, I'm joined by Pinja.

[Pinja] (1:35 - 2:18)

Hello. Fellas, welcome so much to the episode today. And as Darren said, this is a very special episode for us in many ways.

And we thought that we're going to invite some of the key people in the company, and all of you have been along on this journey for quite some time. So we thought, well, let's talk about the company's evolution and where did we start from? Because nowadays we say that Eficode is a company that wants to solve problems around DevOps.

We want to help our customers. But if we think about the origins, how did we get here? For example, the term DevOps was not coined 20 years ago in 2005.

I think it was 2009 when that was introduced. But what did we start with? What was the problem that we originally wanted to solve?

[Marko] (2:18 - 3:21)

I think I'm the oldest from the Eficode age, just turned 18, which means almost from the very beginning. And when Risto hired me into the company, our mission was pretty clear. We had been working with software engineering before, and we realized that there are these new practices, new methods coming in that reduce the feedback loop from the development to production all the way through all of the different phases, testing, and security.

And DevOps, as you said, hadn't been coined yet. So we called it SPI or Software Production Improvement, which we did alongside with developing software for our customers. We also improved the way that they developed software.

One of the metaphors or ideas we were using in the background back then was all of the developers, when they commit code, they should be able to get the feedback, which is either green, move forward, or red, go back and fix something that you did within the time they go and pick a cup of coffee. So roughly five minutes, and naturally.

[Darren] (3:22 - 3:31)

So even 20 years ago, it was all about the Developer Experience and getting that fast feedback loop. We didn't have the labeling for it. We do now.

[Heikki] (3:31 - 4:02)

No, no, no. So that was really interesting. And thanks, Marko, pitching that out.

I remember when I joined 17 years ago, so that was one of the first trips that we did in a boat. I asked this question from one of our consultants, so why is it actually these five minutes or a cup of coffee to get this feedback? Some companies were still getting the feedback loop for months at that time.

And now we are in the age of AI, we are in immediate feedback. So it was a really awesome way of thinking already at that time.

[Marko] (4:02 - 4:28)

Yeah. But 2007, 2008, I was still working pretty heavily, especially in the telecommunications sector. Well, we were a Finnish organization, so naturally.

And back there, we had organizations that had feedback loops of more than two weeks. So from a single comment, it really took two weeks for them to know if what they did actually worked or not. And kind of getting a cup of coffee, which was revolutionary back then.

[Ilari] (4:30 - 5:00)

Overall, I think we always say that Eficode's mission is to build the future of software development. And obviously, along the way, the goalposts have changed, the technologies have changed, the buzzwords are changing, the industry is changing. But still, our mission remains the same as it was 20 years back, building the future of software development.

So, help our customers become better in software development, looking at their software engineering courses, practices, and tools, and enabling them to be better.

[Pinja] (5:00 - 5:34)

It's quite impressive. So we're now talking about two decades or 20 years, and we've been building this road to 2025 for that whole time. And if we're thinking about how impressive it is to actually build a company within the tech industry to last for this long, we've been actually on this journey to become a global market leader since the beginning of the time.

So if we talk a little bit about the timeframe and some of the goalposts that we've been through, I think we call them phases when we internally talk about what Eficode has come through. So we started with trying to be the Finnish DevOps pioneers, wasn't it?

[Marko] (5:35 - 6:52)

Yeah. So, Software Production Improvement, or SPI, as we called it back then, we actually had an assessment product, which we sold to our customers. And with interviews and architectural inspections and similar, we created roadmaps for our customers.

And when the DevOps term was eventually coined in 2009, it took us maybe a year or max two to implement it into our business. And we realized that we could actually become the DevOps leaders first in Finland and then later, of course, in Europe. And the journey has been interesting in the beginning, because I remember we did an assessment for a quite big Finnish organization.

And I remember the CIO shouting at us after reading the assessment report, saying that we will never implement a cloud native way of working. Our teams will never be value stream driven. They will not be delivering value directly to the customer because we need the operations there.

We will not extract the testing into the development phases. And we realized back then that we're revolutionary in the organizations who have been looking for something somewhere between waterfall and agile format in their organizations. And that started in Finland, the movement for DevOps.

And we took the term in Finland, and we realized that the whole Europe is something where we should be expanding to.

[Heikki] (6:53 - 7:31)

Yeah. And it was, I think, a very natural moment, when we are thinking about the term DevOps and what it actually represents. So we started as an agile software development company.

And we were one of the first ones to do that to Finland. So then when we found out and studied what DevOps actually means, it was very natural to us, okay, so this is something that we are thinking to do with our customers. And now there's actually a framework which helps us to define what is the way and how we want to communicate to customers and build like best software organizations and practices and so forth.

So it was very natural, I think, for us to take that term and start to build on top of that.

[Marko] (7:32 - 8:09)

Yeah. Back then, I think one of the things that we did was we built kind of the first DevOps tool on the platform, which we call Eficode ROOT. It initiated with a Finnish banking customer back in 2012 already.

Of course, it evolved quite a bit back then. But then having kind of this understanding of the platform and the tooling involved in DevOps led us to also do contributions for tools like Docker or Kubernetes that were really fresh back then, and kind of with that heavy background, then moving into Europe and kind of starting the market in Denmark, for example.

[Ilari] (8:09 - 9:19)

Yeah, that's when I joined Eficode as well. So while you know, Marko and Heikki have been here forever, so their Eficode careers are already, you know, like starting to get to adult age or at least being teenagers, you know, teenagers. But I've been here for the last six years.

And basically, I joined with this kind of like big inspiration that then the owners had that, hey, let's build this unique, you know, DevOps pioneer that we built in Finland. You know, let's build it into a really European leader in the DevOps space. And it's been, you know, a fantastic ride.

Obviously, we've been in the right place at the right time and joined forces with a lot of similar-minded companies that basically became, you know, like part of Eficode. We've been, you know, opening up offices across Europe and now operating in 10 countries, nine countries in Europe and the United States. And we've been kind of spreading our wings nicely in Northern and Western and Central Europe and, you know, bringing the same expertise and knowledge that we've had in originally building the, you know, companies here in Finland, you know, taking that same thing into the other markets.

Super exciting journey.

[Marko] (9:19 - 9:58)

Yeah. And I think for us also, it's been a big learning having started in a Finnish boutique software organization. I think I'm employee number 13 or somewhere around there.

I kind of understand that what we did back then, here in the cold North, is actually very valuable across all of the industries across Europe and now across the world. And now we're working together with Fortune 500, Fortune 2000 companies, and realizing that the foundation that we built on and the strong engineering skill sets and understanding of the future is something that is valid and valuable for all of the organizations.

[Heikki] (9:58 - 10:56)

Yeah. I think this international aspect what Ilaria and Marko was like to talk in, so I think that has been always, you know, sort of a DNA in Eficode so that we always wanted to be like an international company, of course, from the customer point of view, but also I think from the cultural point of view so that we wanted to have like a built a company that is able to work in multiple countries in the multiple, you know, cultures and so forth. And I think it's like from the, it's always like a big decision when you move away from your home country and move to another country. Maybe it's not that big a decision anymore when you have done it a couple of times, but the first time.

So I think this is very important for everybody who's listening so that they be brave and go international. So that's super, it will be rewarding in the end. So, but of course it's sometimes a bit more difficult as well.

So I used to say that you need to use like a multiplier of pi in a way so that when you go to the other countries for all the resourcing and the like, energy and so forth, what you need to need to push. So that's, but it's rewarding. It's super fun.

[Ilari] (10:56 - 11:25)

One of the things that Heikki mentioned there is that it is part of the DNA. And we always talk about, you know, our values. And one of our values in Eficode is that we want to change the world.

And we said that we want to change the world and change the world of software at medium. And that's basically one of those things that there are, you know, a whole bunch of aspirational people who actually want to get the knowledge and expertise that we have built inside the company and get that out to our customers and, you know, just the world of software, one, at least one customer at the time.

[Darren] (11:26 - 11:50)

There have been some discussions about the internationality and building this strong engineering base. And I think we can't really talk about 20 years of Eficode without diving a little bit more into the acquisitions, because we've had kind of a maybe acquisition-forward thinking method of growth. And I think that started mostly with Finnish companies, but I believe that's also how we started strengthening our presence internationally.

[Ilari] (11:50 - 12:59)

Yeah, that is very much true. So if you look at today, you know, like our operations that has been clearly one of the vehicles of, you know, our growth, like I said, you know, finding the like-minded companies, the best DevOps experts, best, you know, Atlassian tooling experts, you know, people who are really specialists in the same domain where we operate and joining forces with them. The first international acquisition that we did was in 2019 in Denmark, a company called Praqma.

But after that, we've actually executed several. I think over the last six years, it's been eight acquisitions. One of the last ones was only a month ago in Sweden.

And overall, the amount of expertise and knowledge that we built, you know, like with those acquisitions, you know, the colleagues that we have gained as part of it, you know, and created this sort of like true international footprint for Eficode has been absolutely fantastic. We learn, you know, like new, you know, tricks with every single one of these acquisitions. There are new, you know, skills that we bring into the companies.

And at the end, I think we could become much, much stronger and richer as an organization due to these moves.

[Marko] (12:59 - 13:56)

I think like-minded is a thing I pick from what Ilari said is the people from the new companies have also been very similar in kind of the way of thinking and from the DNA of the organizations, whether it was at this Atlassian side, kind of the more business thinking side of the software development and organizations, or then on the other end of spectrum, service management and kind of understanding the customers better.

It's always been this like-mindedness and being able to build an organization where everybody is, as I said, a Slack message away, including everybody within the organization, kind of trying to keep the organization still, you know, very flat in the communications point of view. Or if you, even if you were in a different country organization, you would be able to contact anyone and ask for knowledge or help from anyone from the whole network of EFIC audience across the 10 countries that we operate in.

[Heikki] (13:57 - 15:04)

We have done quite many of these acquisitions, and I think maybe one of the elements, at least what is super important, is that we are not trying to say that we know everything so that there's always a lot of things that we can learn from these companies we have acquired. And this is something that I think we are telling very constantly during this acquisition process is that we really want to learn what you have been doing well. Hopefully, you can learn something that we have done well as well in the journey.

And also that it's also from the cultural point of view, so that it's like-minded, but it's also that the culture is built on top of being older, that we also get people who are able to add something to our culture when they are joining in. And so it's like you reach the culture of multiple companies for this in Eficode, but the base values are the same. And I think this is very important when we are making these acquisitions, so that we really are in a learning mode all the time.

And that's super fun to learn from all of these different companies we have been acquiring. So maybe question back to Ilari, so if you want to make some nice stories of some of the acquisitions from the years so what comes first to your mind? Oh boy, throw you under the bus immediately.

[Ilari] (15:05 - 16:13)

Yeah. So I basically say that, like Heikki said, I think a large part of the entire process, like when we look at both the organic growth and then the inorganic growth motions, what we do is that we talk a lot with the people on the other side. And I think sometimes these journeys are really lengthy.

So for example, with the latest acquisition that we did, we basically acquired a company called Solidify that is operating in Scandinavia. As part of that acquisition, we're now the largest GitHub partner in Europe, which is a super great, great place to be and something that we can be really, really happy about. But I think overall, that particular thing as well was a long, long journey.

So I think we had the first discussions two and a half years ago with the company. So we really want to make, and typically on both sides, we want to make sure that the cultures are really, really fitting. And we spent the time then to actually make sure that there are good opportunities then for both parties in the mix.

So cultural fit overall is super, super important.

[Darren] (16:14 - 17:00)

There is actually a thing here that I witnessed because when we did the merger with the British company, and I was working closely with the security team at the time and the IT team. So it was kind of interesting to see the new people kind of just slot in and nothing really changed except for the number of British accents. Everything went smoothly.

We started cannibalizing the parts of their process that were great. They started adopting the processes of ours that they liked. And it's kind of easy to say this sort of language is marketing hype for acquisitions.

But in my experience, it's been exactly the case that the teams just come together. So I think the culture and the people is really the focus we have here. And we have this company value.

We value openness, trust, and craftsmanship.

[Ilari] (17:01 - 18:15)

Yeah, correct. And I think one of the items, which is, like you said, there is a value-based leadership, is obviously super important. I mean, we are an expert organization.

And if you look at it, the people are the most important asset that the company has. And how do we basically cultivate the environment where the employees are really comfortable, that they are able to spend enough time learning the tricks, learning every day, like we said, from inside the company. I think that goes a long, long way.

And I think, like I said, in many cases now, people have quite a lot of colleagues in the same technology practice areas working across the borders. So the Finns working with the Brits or the Swedes work with the Germans. And overall, that one, I think, is a super nice environment for many experts to actually grow.

Growing international projects, and finding colleagues, very smart colleagues across the borders, who have actually fixed or already been able to find solutions for some of the customer problems that you might be pondering day in, day out.

[Heikki] (18:15 - 18:58)

Yeah, I remember something related to acquisition. So when there was a pandemic, and we made quite many acquisitions during the pandemic times, literally in a fashion that we were not able to meet the people in person. I think that was quite an interesting journey as well.

And especially after this time, when there was the possibility to actually meet the people, so what kind of company are these, and what are the premises, and so forth. And I think before the COVID, we thought that never this kind of thing could happen remotely or anything in that nature. So that was a truly digital experience.

And I think we were able to cope with that as well as part of the business. But it was very fun to see the people for the first time in all of those countries as well.

[Marko] (18:58 - 20:02)

Yeah, but also looking at all of the expertise. So Darren mentioned craftsmanship. It's also something that we've always had in our DNA, whether it's us or any of us from the kind of mothership of every code or the companies that have joined in.

The expertise is something that I've always been the proudest of. It's something that's taken us into new places, understanding also what's happening in the future. But as I said, we are working across countries.

So today we have consultants working from one country to another country, whether it was, as Ilari said, someone from Germany working in Denmark or from Finland working in the UK. But it's always been this deep expertise that's shared across the organization. If I have a question or someone else has a question, they have the whole network of Epic audience that will answer these questions.

And on the other hand, then kind of that way we grow the knowledge within the organization by sharing and working together with the customers across borders.

[Heikki] (20:03 - 20:27)

Yeah, and I guess one of the advice on this is that in the acquisition is that as quickly as possible to get the people into the same platform and to be able to share and communicate and Slack and so forth. And I think in the Solidify acquisition, this was the quickest one that we have been able to do. Recently, it was sort of fun after a few days, so that's okay, so now we have all the people in the same environment, that they start to talk to each other.

So that was super fun.

[Pinja] (20:27 - 21:04)

That was really fast. I was really happy to see all the massage rooms from people at Solidify sending messages on our Slack saying, Hi, we're here. And everybody on the, let's say the already Eficodeans said like, well, welcome and taking these people into the discussions, for example, in our practice channels and everything.

And that's always been nice to see when we've gotten new people to join us, like big bunches like Solidify right now. But if we think a little bit about the past 20 years from the perspective of how DevOps and software engineering changed a little bit, we've also taken pride in providing thought leadership in this industry. So, what kind of changes in that sense have we seen now?

[Marko] (21:04 - 23:09)

I would say that the biggest two changes in history. So we started from getting a cup of coffee to get feedback, if your code or what you've created actually works or not. So kind of the cup of coffee has worked as a mental way of thinking up until maybe two and a half years ago, when ChatGPT was released.

And kind of looking back at those times, there are lots of things that happened for organizations, the Agile movement, and DevOps was introduced. Now, today we're talking about platform engineering, which is kind of a continuation, like an organizational way of organizing the way people interact on the Agile and DevOps principles, kind of paving the way for even faster feedback loops and even faster way of delivering software to customers, creating more value through software. And I will have to say that looking forward, we are now in a paradigm shift.

And I think we cannot talk about the future without mentioning AI. Many organizations just think that by implementing AI-driven tooling, like GitHub Copilot, they would automatically be faster. But actually now looking forward at the Eficode's journey, we can clearly see that not only implementing these AI-driven tools, organizations will not only see that they have problems in their value chains or software development life cycle, they will actually become big bottlenecks unless they've taken the practices in place from the journey that Eficode also has done with our customers.

And as we look forward, we already see that we have to put even more emphasis on kind of this DevOps/Agile moment, but also looking at the value stream, shift left, or as Andy, one of the podcast guests says, start left mentality in such a way that organizations are able to deliver value faster. And as AI is introduced into various parts of software development life cycle, they will be able to also get the benefits from each of these tools and new ways of working.

[Heikki] (23:09 - 24:29)

Yeah. And I think it's really important for the organization so that everything what we have been like doing in a DevOps, so it's like the basement for this AI-driven world, as well as if you have been creating software engineering in the era of DevOps, so you have much better possibility to create software engineering in the era of AI. So maybe one thing which I think will probably change quite a lot is the software, so everybody who's developing software is like one individual person, so you need to be a little bit of a manager yourself in the future as well.

So when you start to actually collaborate with multiple agents at the same time, you need to be able to manage those agents. So you need to be able to delegate and actually supervise as well. So these kinds of things, so new skills are needed.

They're not just the technical skills, but they're actually for like this kind of managerial skills so that you can get the full out of the era of the agentic software development, but super interesting times. But the basement that we have been building to the customers, they are still there and they are really interested, excited about what comes next. And I think it's following like a week-by-week or day-by-day, it's almost a full-time job.

So try to, like Marko, say, just keep track of what is happening and try to implement something that is really useful to customers as well. It's important. What do you say?

[Marko] (24:29 - 26:10)

Yeah, it's crazy. Last year was Microsoft Build. And so Microsoft has somewhere in the beginning of February, midway through February, Microsoft released a tool called Workspace, which is kind of a continuation to the Copilot AI-driven development, helping the developers to better have a conversation over the features that they are developing and conversationally do the coding instead of writing code.

Now, last week in Microsoft Build, they released this Copilot coding agent, which is exactly the conversational way of creating new features. And by creating a new issue in GitHub, you actually get a pull request ready-made from Copilot to match that issue description as a change in the code. And if we look back now, four years from the first version of Copilot, two and a half years from the first version of ChatGPT, the tooling has evolved a lot and even more in the last three months.

And the tooling that has been introduced, it's clear that it will increase our velocity quite a bit. It will make us faster in development as individuals and as organizations. And now there are these two new big movements that have to happen within the organization.

Now is the time to really collaborate across the whole value stream, like more than ever before. And then the second movement is that, of course, nations, for example, the EU, have to put regulations on the safe use, kind of compliant use of both kinds of the cybersecurity and the safe use of AI.

[Ilari] (26:10 - 27:05)

Maybe it's no wonder that in the last 12 months, we've done over a hundred different customer projects on taking AI into use in software development, and it just continues to be bigger and bigger. Most of the customers still have only scratched the surface, did a little bit of like, hey, let's try to use the AI assistance a little bit on it. But the fundamental shift is only coming.

And that's basically something where when we talk about building the future of software development, quite a lot of the energy now in front of the customers are then going into that, those transition programs, how we transform the customers to really take the use of AI in their software engineering processes, whether it is, you know, from product development or product management, product definition, all the way to the development and testing, releasing all of that stuff, the entire chain and how they are able to get more mileage with AI.

[Pinja] (27:05 - 27:30)

We've been covering Eficode at the moment, we cover everything basically in a software development cycle from the idea creation all the way to our customers creating value. And Ilaria, you covered a couple of things here where you see as Eficode's role now as we move into the, or have already moved into the era of AI, but maybe a question for all three of you, what else do you see in the future for the next 20 years for Eficode? Where do we play a role?

[Ilari] (27:31 - 28:25)

Next 20 years, oh gosh, that's a long way out. I mean, we obviously know that, like I said, our mission is to build the future of software development, but that's where we are. That's where we are good at, that's where we are focusing.

So, you know, like turning really our customers into this operator and organizations. And there's, you know, as a CEO of the company, I acknowledge that there's lots of world to conquer still in this field. We've, you know, in the past 20 years, have had a fantastic track record and, you know, nowadays, you know, serving lots of good customers, brand names that we can be super proud about.

And we've been establishing this, you know, position as a leader in Europe on DevOps and kind of like AI services, but there's lots of work to conquer. So I think in the longer term, we will definitely, from a company perspective, want to be the global leader in space. And that's where then from a leadership perspective, the focus is in building the business further.

[Marko] (28:26 - 29:29)

And I believe that as the same way as we've done so far, growing the community of experts and growing the community across countries, building the culture of the future of software development, understanding what's going to happen in the future, employing and understanding the best tools that are in the market to create value for our customers and users is something that we will be continuing to do. And I could already say that the communities, it's going to be people building services and building value for other people, even while we now have AI as the helping tool and the device that takes over some of the repetitive tasks that we do, the way that we create digital services and consume them will remain more or less similar in the upcoming future.

The pace of change will, of course, accelerate and the way that we develop these services will change fundamentally. But that said, we've seen that across the last 20 years, we've been able to be the front runners. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't be front runners in the future.

[Darren] (29:30 - 29:43)

Okay. I think that's all we have time for, and a good place to end thinking about the next 20 years. Let's hope they go as well as the first 20.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you.

And thank you, Pinja, again for being here.

[Pinja] (29:43 - 29:45)

Thank you, fellows. Thank you so much for joining us.

[Darren] (29:45 - 29:47)

And we hope you tune in next time.

[Pinja] (29:51 - 29:56)

We'll now give our guests a chance to introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about who we are.

[Marko] (29:57 - 30:11)

Hi, I'm Marko. I'm the CTO of Eficode. I'm still an active programmer working with the new technologies with AI and also sharing it as keynotes across Europe and world as part of my profession.

[Heikki] (30:11 - 30:25)

I'm Heikki, running Eficode's GitHub and Microsoft business. I have been a company for the last 17 years, and I'm very inspired by the state where we are building the future of agentic software development for our customers.

[Ilari] (30:25 - 30:38)

Hello, my name is Ilari. I'm the CEO of Eficode Group. I'm driving the future of software development across Europe and beyond.

I'm an avid sailor and a basketball fan.

[Darren] (30:38 - 30:41)

I'm Darren Richardson, Security Consultant at Eficode.

[Pinja] (30:41 - 30:46)

I'm Pinja Kujala. I specialize in Agile and portfolio management topics at Eficode.

[Darren] (30:46 - 30:48)

Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you next time.

[Pinja] (30:49 - 30:57)

And remember, if you like what you hear, please like, rate, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. It means the world to us.