Rackspace announces findings on adoption of DevOps initiatives

Rackspace has announced the findings of a global Vanson Bourne study on the adoption of DevOps initiatives for Rapid Application Delivery (RAD). The study, which was commissioned by Rackspace, found that DevOps is becoming increasingly recognized as an established industry practice and the rate of adoption is remarkable given its relative infancy. Over three quarters (77 percent) of the respondents said they were familiar with term DevOps, with 55 percent having already implemented DevOps practices. A further 31 percent said they were planning to implement it by the end of 2017.

In addition, the poll of 700 technology decision-makers across the UK, US and Australia, showed clear business value of implementing DevOps. Over half of the companies with a DevOps programme reported seeing an increase in customer conversion and satisfaction (52 percent) as well as an improvement in customer engagement (43 percent).  Strikingly, over a third (38 percent) also experienced an increase in sales.

On the technology side, of those that have deployed a DevOps programme, 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 for43 percentwhile32 percent have reduced their IT costs.

Chris Jackson, CTO of DevOps Practice Area at Rackspace, 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. While, the findings suggest that the DevOps journey is already becoming well established in many organizations, there is still a job to do in articulating the benefits to all groups involved for them to accept and drive through this change. This becomes especially important when you see the real commercial benefits DevOps teams are delivering.”

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 and developers was a challenge, while nearly a quarter (24 percent) had issues from the wider business not buying into the change. Additionally, of the 14 percent not planning to implement DevOps at all, 41 percent said they had other more urgent IT priorities.