DevOps will be adopted by a quarter of businesses by 2016, claims Gartner
While DevOps began as a philosophy adopted by many large cloud providers to improve IT service delivery agility - aiming to improve collaboration between development and operations team - it is increasingly gaining traction with more traditional enterprise firms. Companies across a range of sectors in the UK have started with DevOps, such as Ocado, Lotus F1 and Lloyds Bank.
"In response to the rapid change in business today, DevOps can help organisations that are pushing to implement a bimodal strategy to support their digitisation efforts," said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.
"Digital business is essentially software, which means that organisations that expect to thrive in a digital environment must have an improved competence in software delivery."
While DevOps predominantly places focus on people and culture, it is also involves the use of software tools to support collaborative change.
Gartner believes that, as it moves from being a niche practice, the market for related tools will grow to $2.3 billion in 2015, up from $1.9 billion last year.
Popular tools used to support DevOps include automation software from the likes of Puppet and Opscode's Chef, while Docker's container technology has gathered significant attention in recent months.
However, Wurster points out that while the DevOps messages is "compelling" for many businesses seeking the scale-out capabilities and economies of scale achieved by large cloud providers, there a number of gaps that prevent successful deployment. This includes cultural resistance to change within an organisation.
"Enterprises have acknowledged these gaps and have begun assessing how the DevOps mindset might apply to their own environments," said Wurster.
"However, culture is not easily or quickly changed. And key to the culture within DevOps is the notion of becoming more agile and changing behavior to support it a perspective that has not been widely pursued within classical IT operations."
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