The IT industry was – and arguably still is – in a critical phase. Organizations have identified a need to develop more reliable applications faster, and more frequently, to support the dynamic business demands and react to industry changes faster.
To achieve this, software organizations need strong, well-defined practices that enable more effective management of the application lifecycle, enabling collaboration across cross functional teams to accelerate innovation and meet those demands. That’s a big challenge.
DevOps evolved primarily because of the increasing demand for the Agile methodology that, when executed properly, enables multiple releases and other software projects to be delivered faster on an Enterprise scale.
What DevOps looks like
Successful DevOps requires the collaboration, communication and integration of developers, testers and operations engineers. It needs to happen throughout the entire lifecycle, starting from requirement definition and management, through design and development and on to testing and production support.
The benefits make a compelling case for IT organizations yet to embark on the DevOps journey to do so:
- Faster time to market
- Lower failure rate of new releases
- Shortened lead time between fixes
- Faster mean time to recovery
Because India has a services-driven economy, development and testing are usually outsourced to third parties. More often than not, enterprises only manage production support, and in some cases even that is delegated to service providers.
So if third party service providers are managing the entire software development lifecycle, how relevant is DevOps to the enterprise, and organizations in the Digital India wave? Should service providers or software vendors be creating this practice for their clients? A recent Vanson Bourne survey highlighted that while 52% of CIOs in India have DevOps on their tech agenda in the next two years, only 26% have taken the first steps to implementing it. And as it combines technology with a change in philosophy and requires significant changes in process, the answer is not yet clear.
Does DevOps work?
In the application economy, there are many ways to measure the success of a DevOps strategy – revenue, time to market, the customer experience and/or satisfaction, and improved competitive positioning. Clients in BFSI, e-Commerce, retail, FMCG and consumer durables, where success is defined by the above parameters, make a good target market for anyone driving the DevOps agenda.
That said, the IT environments, methodologies, as well as the teams both within the organization itself and the third party vendors could be disparate and siloed. Therefore the biggest challenge for any CIO, either in India or beyond, is to redefine the processes and make the changes that enable inter-team collaboration. Without these fundamental changes, DevOps success is not possible to achieve – and neither are the faster reaction times and competitive advantage that enterprise agility is supposed to represent.
The recent Micro Focus #DevOps #APACRoadshow17 has made it abundantly clear that DevOps is a red hot topic in India. We filled venues both Pune and Hyderabad and the rest of the tour is proving extremely popular in terms of registrations and Social Media. While India ponders the implications of DevOps and whether it fits with the enterprise profiles of some of the sub-continent’s biggest companies, competitors elsewhere are taking their DevOps story forwards. Fast.
In conclusion
Micro Focus can help you on your way. Our APAC DevOps Roadshow journey covers 18969 kilometers according to Google Maps; yours can start with a single click. Whatever DevOps looks like to your organization and whatever your organization needs from DevOps – there is a way of achieving it. From business agility, achieving a more Agile development process, or even the holy grail of Continuous Delivery, it’s all here.
