DevOps Meets The Sporting Goods Industry

Adidas is a huge company, bringing home about 2.3 billion annually in operating profit, with the help of its almost 60,000 employees around the world, of which 51% are men and 49% are women. Adidas believes that, through sport, we have the power to change lives, by improving health and improving people’s life prospects.

Currently, software is changing sports. Not only how we practice sports but also how we consume sports. Is Adidas a software company? Definitely not, since all of its revenue comes from selling physical products. But it needs to start behaving like a software company. Why? There are studies that show that, in the next 10 years, 50% of companies are going to be displaced by new companies. And if you take a look at the trends, you’ll see that most of these new companies are either technology companies or traditional companies that have mastered software development and delivery.

Even though Adidas isn’t a software company in the traditional sense, it already employs advanced techniques in software delivery since it builds different applications more than ten thousand times a day.

The Role of IT

What is the role of IT in all of this? In short, to provide speed and quality. In other words, technology should allow our teams to get closer to the business and provide value for the company, delivering value faster, at what we call “sustainable speed.”

All of this is particularly important for Adidas because of the industry in which it operates—retail—which is particularly competitive. In fact, if you look at the results from the “State of DevOps” report, you can see that the only industry where there is a correlation between software performance and business results is retail. In retail, you’d better be good at software or you’re dead.

Sponsorships Available

Sponsorships Available

Sponsorships Available

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