A new market study by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) examined the commercial software environment and summarized the findings, assessing the IT DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CD) practices and related tools most relevant to managing online business services.
"As the pace of business continues to accelerate, coordination across DevOps processes, practices, and tools becomes increasingly important," said Julie Craig, research director at EMA.
DevOps and CD Tools Market Development
This research provided insights into the ways in which high performing IT organizations are accelerating delivery of key business services and, in doing so, impacting the business bottom line.
Research on these topics is particularly critical at this point in time. EMA is actively tracking what has amounted to a digital transformation movement -- and an accompanying revolution in software delivery -- that has occurred over the past five years.
Today's rapidly changing and fast-moving business climate is the prime mover for a vastly changed IT landscape. IT organizations have evolved from being a cost center to a revenue generator, as software becomes the core around which digital businesses operate.
According to the EMA assessment, legacy tool-sets and developer support practices -- in which tools relied heavily on human expertise and manual processes -- are no longer viable.
At the same time, designing, developing, deploying and supporting complex modern application environments requires collaborative decision-making, supported by a new level of cross-functional skills, knowledge and judgment.
Surmounting these challenges to embrace the requirements of a new era requires changes to mind-sets, skill-sets and tooling.
Key data points from the market study include:
"As the pace of business continues to accelerate, coordination across DevOps processes, practices, and tools becomes increasingly important," said Julie Craig, research director at EMA.
DevOps and CD Tools Market Development
This research provided insights into the ways in which high performing IT organizations are accelerating delivery of key business services and, in doing so, impacting the business bottom line.
Research on these topics is particularly critical at this point in time. EMA is actively tracking what has amounted to a digital transformation movement -- and an accompanying revolution in software delivery -- that has occurred over the past five years.
Today's rapidly changing and fast-moving business climate is the prime mover for a vastly changed IT landscape. IT organizations have evolved from being a cost center to a revenue generator, as software becomes the core around which digital businesses operate.
According to the EMA assessment, legacy tool-sets and developer support practices -- in which tools relied heavily on human expertise and manual processes -- are no longer viable.
At the same time, designing, developing, deploying and supporting complex modern application environments requires collaborative decision-making, supported by a new level of cross-functional skills, knowledge and judgment.
Surmounting these challenges to embrace the requirements of a new era requires changes to mind-sets, skill-sets and tooling.
Key data points from the market study include:
- It is becoming increasingly apparent that both DevOps and Continuous Delivery require an ability to share information across the staff, tools, and processes supporting diverse life-cycle stages and functions.
- Integrating and sharing metrics and data between diverse tool-sets -- via APIs, integration hubs, or both -- should be central to making product selections.
- Top focus areas for digital business initiatives include customer satisfaction (external customers), using technology to match competitors digital presence, and faster time to innovation.
- There were, however, significant differences in responses among small, medium, and enterprise-sized businesses.
- More than 90 percent of companies are utilizing DevOps teams or processes, at least to some degree. However, these teams support production applications only about 30 percent of the time.
- Given the complexity of modern applications, an ongoing requirement for cross-functional skills supporting troubleshooting and root-cause determination of production problems is almost a certainty.
- However, the focus is primarily on pre-deployment versus production in the majority of the companies, which likely means that much of the onus for supporting custom applications, in particular, falls on Development.