UPDATED 15:31 EDT / NOVEMBER 19 2014

Rackspace survey spotlights DevOps as an emerging force in IT today

devops-keyboardHow often do dev teams go through the motions to manually create an infrastructure or lean on another team to spin up that environment for them? Rapid application development is requisite now and automation is becoming key and the DevOps paradigm appears to be leading the way.

New survey results released by Rackspace Inc. found that DevOps is increasingly making inroads as an established industry practice and enterprises are adopting it faster than ever.

The findings of a global Vanson Bourne study on the adoption of DevOps initiatives for Rapid Application Delivery (RAD) commissioned by Rackspace shows that almost 77 percent of the respondents were familiar with the term DevOps, nearly 55 percent already implemented DevOps practices, while 31 percent said they were planning to implement it in couple of years time.

According to the report, “the guiding principle in DevOps is to help a business see the end-to-end process path in terms of increasing the delivery of value to customers through technology. Potentially this enables a business to identify areas of waste and inefficiency to decrease delivery time.”

On the technology side, nearly half of the respondents have already integrated their development team with their operations team while 38 percent say that DevOps is in effect for all of their applications.

Many organizations have tackled the issues associated with running internal development teams by outsourcing software development. Almost 70 percent of respondents currently using DevOps also said that they are working with third parties to outsource DevOps automation services. 59 percent said that is more cost effective for them to do so, 50 percent said outsource allow them to focus more on their business to improve innovation while 48 percent said it increases productivity.

“This survey shows a real appetite for the kind of development and operational processes today’s digitally-focused businesses need,” said Chris Jackson, CTO of DevOps Services at Rackspace.

Organizational drivers for DevOps

In terms of business goals, 63 percent said DevOps improved their business efficiency, 66 percent increased customer satisfaction, 63 percent increased application uptime, 55 percent improved their business agility, 49 percent increased value to the business through introducing new capabilities, 47 percent reduced the overall IT cost, 59 percent increased customer conversions, 39 percent increased employee productivity and 23 percent said DevOps increased employee satisfaction.

Among organizations implementing DevOps, 43 percent said operations led the move, while 17 percent said the enterprise application development team led the change. Nearly 57 percent have already experienced faster delivery of new features, 46 percent have a more stable operating environment, 44 percent have improved stability, 44 percent have now faster time to market new software releases and 17 percent recognize how DevOps can add value to IT operation.

The speed and innovation seems to have directly translated to improvements in the business as a whole. Over half of companies that have implemented DevOps report an increase in customer conversion, 46 percent say they’ve seen an improvement in customer engagement, 49 percent said reduction in application downtime and failure rates, and 46 percent say they’ve seen an improvement in sales.

“DevOps is empowering IT functions to make a real impact on the business. It is also finally an opportunity for IT to be recognized for having a central part to play in delivering great customer experiences and ultimately increasing sales,” Jackson said. “DevOps is all about encouraging innovation and streamlining processes to help ensure development and operations are working hand in hand to deliver business objectives.”

The results of the DevOps Adoption Study validate that there is significant recognition among global businesses that DevOps is fundamental to fully exploiting the cloud in the pursuit of driving rapid innovation. Through cultural alignment, automated deployments, and agile infrastructure, businesses are using DevOps methodologies to reduce time to market by responding rapidly to customer feedback — ultimately driving significant business value and efficiency.


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