Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Mark Levy, Director of Strategy, Micro Focus
2019 DevOps Goes Mainstream in the Enterprise
Bill Gates said, "we
always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and
underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be
lulled into inaction." As DevOps approaches its ten year anniversary in 2019,
there has been tremendous progress. Today, DevOps represents one of the biggest
IT transformation initiatives of the past 30 years.
However, despite
predictions of rapid adoption, the spread of DevOps in the enterprise has been
slower than expected. Early adopters
have proven that DevOps in the enterprise accelerates the companies'
transformation to digital, but due to the conservative nature of Enterprise IT,
many organizations are awaiting a push from the executive team before crossing
the DevOps chasm. Starting in 2019, this will change as the mainstream majority
start to implement their DevOps pilot programs and scale their team implementations
across the enterprise.
Last year I
predicted that 2018 will be the year that DevOps
shifts its focus from Dev to Ops. In 2018, we saw
many examples of this focus shift removing several of the last major hurdles in
scaling DevOps across the enterprise.
The State of DevOps 2018 survey
by DORA highlights this
shift. In 2018, for the first time, DORA began capturing and measuring
operational performance in their industry-leading DevOps survey of nearly 1,900
IT professionals worldwide. Analysis of survey data showed that availability
measures and Ops are significantly correlated with software delivery
performance.
As the economy
accelerates, competitive pressures in the market are forcing enterprises to
accelerate their digital transformation projects which is driving large
enterprises to adopt DevOps practices. For example, Lloyds Banking Group is
rapidly "digitizing" ops as part of a plan to
invest £3bn on IT over the next three years. They are creating 2000 additional roles to
beef up their "leading edge digital banking" services. Under this plan, the Group said it will
"deploy new tech" that will reduce costs and "make banking simple and easier
for customers". The cash will also be used for a "modernization" of their
data and IT infrastructure.
The current
economic conditions are also creating a very tight job market forcing
enterprise IT organizations to seek ways to optimize and to do more with less.
Few knew the term "DevOps" five years ago-today, DevOps Engineer is the most
recruited job on LinkedIn.
There are many
other signs that Enterprise DevOps is going mainstream and transitioning from
pilots to full scale implementations. According to the 2018-19 World Quality Report,
DevOps seems to have reached a tipping point, with 99% of the respondents
saying they use DevOps in at least some of their projects.
While we may
overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years, DevOps will
usher in its second decade with large enterprises fully on board. CIOs and
senior IT executives will support DevOps initiatives and enterprises will begin
to standardize on DevOps practices. A lot has changed in the last ten years. For
large enterprises, the stakes are high and the time is now. It's either disrupt
or be disrupted.
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About the Author
Mark Levy is Director of Strategy at Micro
Focus, providing insight into how modern software practices such as Agile and
DevOps enable large enterprise IT organizations to build and deliver software
faster and with less risk. Over the last 25 years, Mark has held marketing,
product management, product development positions focusing application
development, service, availability and performance management.