How well your DevOps teams collaborate can make a big impact on digital business and your company’s bottom line. In fact, according to research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), companies that rated their DevOps interactions as excellent or above average were more than 10 times as likely to have experienced double-digit revenue growth during the prior 12 months than those reporting average or below interactions. Intrigued? You should be!
According to the report by EMA, to meet the rapidly changing demands of digital business, the processes and tools DevOps teams use must support accelerated continuous delivery lifecycles. Companies that follow continuous software delivery practices commonly deliver code multiple times a week – and more than 20% report delivering it daily or more often. The challenge is how do you ensure quality and keep up with the demands of your business – regardless of the platform?
Here are a just a few of the trends and insights that were revealed in the recent report by EMA entitled, “DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and the Cloud Journey: An Evolutionary Model”:
- The top drivers of continuous delivery include business and customer demands for new products and services, customer demands for better application quality, and business demands for products that improve competitive positioning.
- The interplay between DevOps initiatives and continuous delivery is essential for business agility and revenue growth but there are many challenges associated with streamlining collaboration across the teams and lifecycle stages. Automation needs to support this collaboration and requires production-grade capabilities across all environments. This applies to on-premises, cloud, hybrid and deployment models that can meet requirements for high levels of speed, consistency, and quality.
- Custom applications are the most common type of production application. The challenge is that developers spend as much time supporting applications in production as they spend developing new applications and features – at a time when accelerated software delivery is increasingly business critical. They need tools to support these apps.
- High-quality DevOps and continuous delivery practices, along with good software design and coding can be what separates high-performing businesses from their peers.
- Release management, planning and release automation tools can help make it easier for DevOps to deploy software to public or private clouds, while also providing continuous delivery. Release automation tools, for example, can save time by easily enabling staff to set up deployment configurations as templates.
Focusing on the speed of delivering new products is necessary but not sufficient if you want to tackle the challenges of digital transformation. DevOps teams need the right tools to manage these environments. They also need comprehensive release lifecycle management capabilities to keep up with the cadence of agile and continuous delivery work streams.
