When we launched IDPCON in 2024, the internal developer portal was the conversation. Engineering teams were drowning in spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, and the eternal question: "who owns this service?" The IDP was the answer. And for a while, it was enough.
It's not enough anymore.
The problem got bigger
We're now in the era of infinite code. AI coding agents have made writing software nearly free, but they've also amplified every operational challenge that existed before them. Ownership gaps, standards drift, incident response chaos, security blind spots. The cost of writing code tends to zero. The cost of everything else is going up.
The IDP was built to solve the chaos of microservices, and it worked. But the chaos has evolved. Engineering teams don’t just need a portal anymore. Platform engineering, SRE, DevEx, DevOps, security: these disciplines each have their own mandate, but the organizations that win are the ones that get them all pulling in the same direction. That takes more than visibility. It takes a new operational mindset.
We're calling it Engineering Operations.
What IDPCON meant and why it still matters
Let's be clear: we're not walking away from our roots. IDPCON brought together the community that proved a software catalog and developer portal could change how engineering organizations operate. Service ownership went from a spreadsheet problem to a solved problem. Production readiness went from a hope to a measurable standard. Self-service went from a nice-to-have to the way developers actually work.
That community - platform engineers, SREs, DevEx teams - built something real. And every one of those people belongs at EVOLVE.
But we kept hearing the same thing from attendees and from our own customers: the conversation had gotten bigger than portals. CTOs wanted to talk about org-wide maturity. TPMs wanted to talk about driving cross-cutting initiatives with data. Security leads wanted in on the standards conversation. And the way teams were using Cortex had already evolved past the IDP framing. They weren't just cataloging services, they were driving engineering excellence across their entire organization. The conference had outgrown its name. So had we.
More than a name change
EVOLVE reflects what's actually happening inside the engineering organizations we work with every day.
The best teams we see aren't just using a portal to drive engineering excellence. They're running an operational discipline, using data and automation to continuously improve how their entire engineering org ships software. They're measuring production readiness across every service. They're enforcing security and compliance standards automatically. They're building golden paths that make it easy to do the right thing by default. They're connecting engineering health to business outcomes in a way that CTOs can take to the board.
Cortex still does everything an IDP does. The catalog, the scorecards, the self-service workflows, that's table stakes for us now. But the platform has grown into something broader: an Engineering Operations Platform that helps the whole organization operate as one.
The conference should match.
EVOLVE is for the people building this muscle at their companies. The VP of Engineering who needs to drive a reliability initiative across 40 teams. The platform engineer who's tired of building on top of tribal knowledge. The SRE who wants to kill the 3 AM page. The TPM who's coordinating a migration and reporting progress to leadership with actual data instead of gut feel.
If you're in the business of making your engineering organization a better version of itself, this is your event.
Join us at EVOLVE 2026
SEPTEMBER 24, 2026 · NEW YORK CITY
The same community that made IDPCON what it was, with expanded scope for where engineering operations is headed. Talks, workshops, and conversations with the teams building this discipline at world-class organizations
The conversation has evolved. Don't miss it.
