CA Technologies, an IT giant, recently published a study on the perceptions of 1,425 IT and line of business (LOB) executives on DevOps. Compared with a year before, there was an increase from 66% to 88% of respondents that have adopted (24%) or are considering adopting (64%) DevOps.
The study, commissioned to Vason Bourne, focuses on the views of executives (e.g.: C-level, VPs, Directors) at organizations with revenues of at least $500M, bringing a different perspective on DevOps.
Of those that claim to have adopted or are in the process of adopting DevOps, 46% report an increase in the frequency of deployments. Other perceived benefits, such as increased application quality or reduced time-to-market, are in the 30-40% range. This discrepancy suggests that more deployments do not automatically translate to more business-oriented benefits. Also of interest, 32% of the respondents say that with DevOps they can build new software and services that were not before possible.
When it comes to the DevOps adoption drivers, the most cited were the need to improve quality and performance (42%), improve the end costumer experience (34%) and the need to deploy simultaneously across different platforms (29%). The need for greater collaboration between dev and ops teams dropped to 6th place (25%) after coming number 1 in 2013 with 47%.
DevOps adoption isn't straightforward, more so in large enterprises. The bigger obstacles seem to be security and compliance concerns (28%), difficulty in calculating ROI (27%) and organisational complexity (27%). Finding the right consulting firm to help in the adoption process is also a major concern (26%). It's interesting to see, though not surprising, that large enterprises look for specialised support to adopt DevOps. The 2013 study reported that the biggest obstacle, by a fair margin, was organisational complexity, with 35%.
Large enterprises seem to have concluded that they need to hire new resources with the relevant skills. 63% of the 2014 respondents see this need, compared to 53% in 2013. This shift is inversely correlated with investment in training, which dropped from 73% to 46%. 51% of the surveyed expect to invest in redesigning processes, in line with a core tenet of DevOps. Buying new tools merits the attention of only 30% of the respondents.
Finally, when asked to rank the most critical DevOps tools, release automation tools (28%) came behind enterprise security (30%), functional testing (33%) and performance testing (37%). Application performance monitoring took the top spot, with 38%.