Member Article

Rackspace Study: UK businesses need to join the DevOps revolution or risk ability to compete globally

London – 30th October 2014 - Rackspace®, the managed cloud company, today announced the findings of a global study into the uptake of DevOps[1] programmes for application delivery within businesses of over 250 employees.

The study, which polled 700 IT decision-makers across the UK, US and Australia, reveals that the UK is significantly behind the other markets in terms of DevOps adoption.

Nearly a third (32%) of the 250 UK respondents surveyed was not familiar with the concept of DevOps. Of those that were familiar with it, only four in ten have actually implemented DevOps practices. These businesses are reaping commercial gains from their DevOps implementations, including a reduction in application downtime (41%), increased customer conversion (40%) & customer engagement (34%) and reduced IT infrastructure spend (32%).

“With 66% of US businesses and 50% of Australian businesses having already implemented DevOps practices; UK companies are compromising the ability to compete on a global level by not acknowledging the latest approaches to developing and deploying software,” says Chris Jackson, CTO of DevOps Services, Rackspace. “By reacting slowly to new methods which can significantly reduce IT costs, British businesses may find themselves unable to operate as efficiently as other regions. This is a big problem considering the IT sector is regarded as being key to the UK’s future economic success.”

The need for DevOps

The UK businesses surveyed build and release an average of 17 new applications every year, and upgrade or release new features to existing apps 77 times per year.

With such a significant number of releases each year, DevOps is an opportunity for UK businesses to increase speed, improve stability and make cost-savings in their software application development process. This is highlighted by those already implementing DevOps boasting faster time to market for new features (49%), more stable operating environments (45%) and improved collaboration of project teams (38%).

Setting DevOps goals around the business

Drilling down into the key differences between the three countries sheds light on some key pointers that UK businesses could take from their international counterparts:

US and Australian businesses showed they worked on the more cultural aspects of DevOps practices as a priority: fully integrating the development team and the operations team (53% and 56% respectively) and aligning DevOps goals to business goals (56% and 38% respectively). In contrast, 36% of UK respondents have fully integrated development and operations teams and 31% have aligned DevOps and business goals. UK respondents were more likely to focus on technical DevOps practices as a priority – 41 per cent had implemented application monitoring and 39% automated testing.

Finding DevOps leaders

The results around ownership and objective-setting for DevOps programmes provides further insight as to the UK’s slow adoption rate:

US and Australian companies planning to implement DevOps overwhelmingly see it as being peer-led by the operations team (56% and 47% respectively). UK firms are more unsure of who should own the process, with 28% saying the operations team, 24% the development team and 20% CIO. UK operations teams were far less resistant to the cultural change of DevOps (24%) than operations teams in the US (42%) and Australia (40%). Developers in the UK (31%) showed the most resistance to change. Of the firms that have implemented DevOps, over a third of UK businesses (36 per cent) said they did not have any DevOps specific roles.

Jackson adds: “DevOps is essentially a process that unites around serving the customer. In an ideal world that’s more than just developers and operators, but that is where it starts. The research shows that UK businesses need to do more to instil core DevOps principles of breaking down traditional team siloes and aligning development and deployment goals around the wider business’ commercial objectives. The benefits have come across loud and clear in this study so it is time for UK businesses to consider DevOps as a core high-tech business differentiator.”

Rackspace Customer Quote:

A UK business that has implemented DevOps is the new media company, Ceem Technology, a long-time user of the Rackspace cloud. DevOps has emerged at just the right time to support Ceem’s growing needs.

Ceem CEO, Simon Mellamphy, said, “When we first began working with Rackspace using its cloud services to support our personalised video messaging platform and content, DevOps was unheard of. Since then our needs have increased dramatically and DevOps has been a real benefit. Our team works closely with the Rackspace DevOps team, providing them with very specific requirements so they understand precisely what it is our servers must deliver, and when. They, in turn, have thought outside the box and have come up with a cost-efficient solution that intelligently scales up our server resource when it’s needed and scales it down when it’s not.”

[1] DevOps integrates developers and operations teams in order to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, automating workflows and continuously measuring application performance.

Ends

About the research

Rackspace commissioned independent technology market research specialist Vanson Bourne to undertake this piece of research. 700 IT decision makers from organisations with more than 250 employees were interviewed throughout September 2014. Respondents came from an even distribution of sizes/sectors and were from the following countries: US (350), UK (250) and Australia (100). These interviews were conducted online using a rigorous multi-level screening process to ensure only suitable candidates were given the opportunity to participate.

About Rackspace

Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) is the #1 managed cloud company. Its technical expertise and Fanatical Support® allow companies to tap the power of the cloud without the pain of hiring experts in dozens of complex technologies. Rackspace is also the leader in hybrid cloud, giving each company the best fit for its unique needs — whether on single - or multi-tenant servers, or a combination of those platforms. Rackspace is the founder of OpenStack®, the open-source operating system for the cloud. Headquartered in San Antonio, Rackspace serves more than 200,000 business customers from data centres on four continents. It ranks #29 on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For and #26 in the Sunday Times Best Companies. For more information, visit http://www.rackspace.co.uk/

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rackspace UK .