A global Vanson Bourne study on the adoption of DevOps, commissioned by cloud hosting provider Rackspace, has revealed that over half (55 percent) of surveyed businesses have already implemented DevOps practices. A further 31 percent said they were planning to implement DevOps by the end of 2017.
In addition, the poll of 700 technology decision-makers across the UK, US and Australia would show the clear business value of implementing DevOps. Over half of the companies with a DevOps program reported seeing an increase in customer conversion and satisfaction (52 percent) as well as an improvement in customer engagement (43 percent). Over a third (38 percent) also experienced an increase in sales.
On the technology side, of those that have deployed a DevOps program, over half (57 percent) experienced faster delivery of new features, while 46 percent had a more stable operating environment. Increased innovation was also a benefit for 43 percent while 32 percent said they have reduced their IT costs.
Despite the clear benefits of DevOps to speed up the process of application development, deployment and operations management, many businesses still need to address the cultural change DevOps introduces. Roughly a third of those who have gone down the DevOps route said internal resistance from both operations teams (37%) and developers (32%) was a challenge, while nearly a quarter (24 percent) had issues from the wider business not buying into the change.
Organizational Drivers
In the majority of the cases where DevOps had already been implemented, the Operations team was the primary driving force behind the change (43 percent). For those businesses still in the planning stages for their DevOps programs, the Operations team was again key to the process (43 percent). Chief Information Officers were also key facilitators, with 25 percent having driven the adoption of DevOps within their organizations.
With 59 percent of respondents agreeing that DevOps is “a software development process that brings developers and IT operations closer together”, the primary DevOps practice implemented by survey respondents was to fully integrate development and operations teams (49 percent). Successful DevOps teams also aligned DevOps goals with business goals (47 percent).
Following the clear team integration and business goal setting priorities, other popular DevOps initiatives included introducing Continuous Integration (42 percent), Automated Testing (40 percent) and Application Monitoring (38 percent).
About the Study
Rackspace commissioned independent technology market research specialist Vanson Bourne to undertake this piece of research. 700 IT decision makers from organizations with more than 250 employees were interviewed throughout September 2014. Respondents came from an even distribution of sizes/sectors and were from the following countries: US (350), UK (250) and Australia (100). These interviews were conducted online using a multi-level screening process to ensure only suitable candidates were given the opportunity to participate.
