The highest performing organizations will have already automated the majority of their business, according to the results of a new report by US-based automation software provider Puppet.
Its “State of DevOps” report, conducted in partnership with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), and co-sponsored by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Deloitte, Australian software development firm Atlassian, US-based DevOps company Electric Cloud, intelligent data analysis corporation Splunk, and Canadian IoT innovator Wavefront, found that successful businesses have automated 72 per cent of all configuration management processes, which means they spend much less time manually configuring, delivering, and operating software than their low performer counterparts, who spend almost half their time (46 per cent) doing such activities.
“Every company relies on software to make its business more powerful, forcing IT organizations to evolve and ship software on demand,” says Nigel Kersten, chief technical strategist at Puppet, in the report. “The results of the 2017 State of DevOps Report show that high-performing IT teams are deploying more frequently and recovering faster than ever before, yet the automation gap between high and low performing teams continues to grow. The report will help organizations understand how to identify their own inhibitors and embrace change on their DevOps journey.”
The report also proves that leadership is incredibly important for a business’ digital transformation journey. It found that out of the 3,200 respondents, high performing organizations have leaders with “strong vision, inspirational communication, intellectual stimulation, supportive leadership, and personal recognition” characteristics, while those with a lower percentage of these traits tend to be less successful.
“Speed, accuracy, precision and leadership rule business today. Companies with leaders who give their teams the power to deploy and upgrade great software the fastest, have an inside track to larger shares of the markets they compete within,” adds Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO of Puppet. “By adopting automation and DevOps, our customers have cut software deployment times from months to days, eliminated virtually all configuration errors and most importantly, helped their businesses to become top performers.”
And for the second year in a row, the report examined product management practices to see how changes upstream in the management process affect business outcomes downstream. It confirmed that “lean product management practices help teams ship features that customers want, more frequently,” and that this faster delivery cycle can benefit the entire organization by accelerating customer feedback.
Steve Brodie, CEO of Electric Cloud says that the key takeaway of the report is not only the power of automation and transformational leadership, but also how critical it is to connect business metrics with the underlying tools and processes driving product innovation.
“As proud supporters of the research report, founding partners of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, and stewards for industry best practices surrounding modern software delivery, Electric Cloud’s goal is to enhance visibility and collaboration across DevOps initiatives by helping to automate, orchestrate and analyze all the tools and data sources associated with software pipelines and application releases,” he says.
When it comes to DevOps success, the report also highlights the fact that velocity is still a key metric for this. High performing organizations do less manual work than their peers, and the faster work is completed, the faster revenue can be made.
“In 2017, high-performing DevOps teams deploy 46x faster, enjoy 440x faster lead time for changes, recover on average 96x faster, and suffer 5x fewer change failures,” it says, adding that these organizations were “more than twice as likely to benefit from higher quality and quantity of products and services, better operating efficiency and higher customer satisfaction, among other business impact goals.”
Ashish Kuthiala, senior director for DevOps and agile and portfolio offerings at HPE, adds that the report confirms the crucial areas organizations need to consider when adopting DevOPs.
“At the heart of successful businesses are high-performing teams that evolve and incorporate modern, high-performing applications and processes to drive consistent growth,” he says. “As this shift intensifies, companies will continue to turn to the State of DevOps report and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Software solutions that unify development and operations to accelerate business innovation.”
