The enterprise is not ready for "the rise of the developer"
Sean O’Dell of Dynatrace argues that enterprises are unprepared for a major shift brought on by AI: the rise of the developer. Speaking at Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, O’Dell explains that AI-assisted and “vibe” coding are collapsing traditional boundaries in software development. Developers, once insulated from production by layers of operations and governance, are now regaining end-to-end ownership of the entire software lifecycle — from development and testing to deployment and security. This shift challenges long-standing enterprise structures built around separation of duties and risk mitigation.
At the same time, the definition of “developer” is expanding. With AI lowering technical barriers, software creation is becoming more about creative intent than mastery of specialized tools, opening the door to nontraditional developers. Experimentation is also moving into production environments, a change that would have seemed reckless just 18 months ago. According to O’Dell, enterprises now understand AI well enough to experiment confidently, but many are not ready for the cultural, operational, and security implications of developers — broadly defined — taking full control again.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around enterprise developers and AI:
Retool’s New AI-Powered App Builder Lets Non-Developers Build Enterprise Apps
Solving 3 Enterprise AI Problems Developers Face
Enterprise Platform Teams Are Stuck in Day 2 Hell
Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.
From Cloud Native to AI Native: Where Are We Going?
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2025 in Atlanta, the panel of experts - Kate Goldenring of Fermyon Technologies, Idit Levine of Solo.io, Shaun O'Meara of Mirantis, Sean O'Dell of Dynatrace and James Harmison of Red Hat - explored whether the cloud native era has evolved into an AI native era — and what that shift means for infrastructure, security and development practices. Jonathan Bryce of the CNCF argued that true AI-native systems depend on robust inference layers, which have been overshadowed by the hype around chatbots and agents. As organizations push AI to the edge and demand faster, more personalized experiences, Fermyon’s Kate Goldenring highlighted WebAssembly as a way to bundle and securely deploy models directly to GPU-equipped hardware, reducing latency while adding sandboxed security.
Dynatrace’s Sean O’Dell noted that AI dramatically increases observability needs: integrating LLM-based intelligence adds value but also expands the challenge of filtering massive data streams to understand user behavior. Meanwhile, Mirantis CTO Shaun O’Meara emphasized a return to deeper infrastructure awareness. Unlike abstracted cloud native workloads, AI workloads running on GPUs require careful attention to hardware performance, orchestration, and energy constraints. Managing power-hungry data centers efficiently, he argued, will be a defining challenge of the AI native era.
Learn more from The New Stack about evolving cloud native ecosystem to an AI native era
Cloud Native and AI: Why Open Source Needs Standards Like MCP
A Decade of Cloud Native: From CNCF, to the Pandemic, to AI
Crossing the AI Chasm: Lessons From the Early Days of Cloud
Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.
Episode 66: VMware? VMhere with Sean O’Dell
About Sean O'Dell
Sean is a troublemaker living on the bleeding edge of technology and innovation. As a member of the VMware Cloud Services - Solution and Technology team, Sean is responsible for Evangelism, Developer Relations and assists in many GTM functions. Sean joined VCS in February of 2017 and helped shape and launch the set of SaaS solutions at VMworld 2017. Prior roles include Global Technical Lead for Network Insight (vRNI), Sales Engineer Leader for Arkin, VMware Cloud Management SE and CUSTOMER.
Links Referenced:
Twitter: @theseanodell
VMware