DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry for their opinions on the most significant advantages of DevOps. Part 2 covers agility and velocity.

Start with 25 Advantages of DevOps - Part 1

6. AGILITY

The most important reason the most successful companies have adopted DevOps is they share a need to operate like small companies while delivering large company results. In an age where the distance between disruption and demise (think PayPal vs. Lehman Brothers) may be as small as a few features released a few weeks earlier, innovation driven by agility and velocity have become business - not technical – imperatives.
Dan Turchin
VP of Product, BigPanda(link is external)

Read Dan Turchin's blog: 1,700 Monitoring Experts Agree - Too Many Alerts from Too Many Tools Put Customers at Risk(link is external)

The key advantage for adopting DevOps in the current business environment is business agility. As the rate of change for business accelerates, companies are less able to predict where business is heading. The top strategic imperative becomes responding rapidly via agility and modularity through DevOps and adaptive IT. When you don't know what the future holds, it's important to have the infrastructure in place that can respond to business needs on the fly.
Paola Moretto
Founder and CEO, Nouvola(link is external)

Agility is the most important reason to adopt DevOps. Speed to market and quick iteration is critical in competing in software, otherwise competitors will outpace your product development and win the market. To compete, engineering teams should adopt DevOps to enable teams and break down friction in order to increase agility and speed to market.
Kevin Fishner
Head of Business Operations, HashiCorp(link is external)

Business agility is the most important reason to adopt DevOps. Embracing DevOps allows digital businesses to accelerate Go-to-Market, enabling them to rollout new features to customers at much higher frequencies. Additionally, it drastically lowers the time it takes businesses to respond to failures. The overall impact of DevOps to business is tremendous, and can be all summed up as increasing agility and efficiency in both proactively and reactively responding to their customer needs.
Sid Choudhury
VP of Product Management, OpsClarity(link is external)

7. VELOCITY: FAST TIME TO PRODUCTION

When you use the DevOps agile methodology, IT works directly with the business users and delivers exactly what they need – and nothing more. By focusing on business needs first we see that projects get finished and move into production fast.
Kent Erickson
Alliance Strategist, Zenoss(link is external)

The reason for DevOps adoption is hitting the scalability limit in human-driven integration and release process. We all did just fine without DevOps with quarterly releases. We can't release to production multiple times a day with manual procedures.
Baruch Sadogursky
Developer Advocate, JFrog(link is external)

Read Baruch Sadogursky's blog: The Latest Trends in Developer Productivity

In order to provide service delivery at unprecedented speed, organizations need to incorporate DevOps practices. The biggest value DevOps offers is velocity, ensuring faster delivery of features. Key aspects are automated deployments and continuous integration, ensuring that fewer mistakes are made and productivity is increased.
Richard Whitehead
Chief Evangelist, Moogsoft(link is external)

Ultimately DevOps allows companies to deliver software that is mission critical to production much faster – sometimes 10X to 100X faster. For any business that captures advantage through any type of software, this kind of improvement could mean success or failure. In the future, when more companies are successfully deploying DevOps, there will no longer be any room for failure to adopt DevOps. While there are other advantages to DevOps, a 10x to 100x speed advantage is the only one that counts.
Joan Wrabetz
CTO, QualiSystems(link is external)

Read Joan Wrabetz's blog: Sandboxes - Uber Containers for Enterprise DevOps

8. VELOCITY: FAST TIME TO MARKET

Members of the IT Central Station community say that the #1 most important advantage is time-to-market. The ability to bring new revenue-generating services online faster is a key theme included in product reviews written by DevOps professionals in their reviews of APM, build automation, configuration management, release automation, service virtualization, and other DevOps tools.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station(link is external)

Read Russell Rothstein's latest blog on DEVOPSdigest: DevOps RoundUp from Real Users of CA, HPE and IBM

DevOps enables Continuous Delivery which can make teams 10x faster at shipping software. As software increasingly defines phones, cars and all industries, organizations who cannot compete at this will die.
Miko Matsumura
CMO, Gradle(link is external)

When someone asks the question “Why DevOps?” the right answer is Velocity. Companies, especially enterprises, take on the changes that come with a DevOps mindset only because they have to increase the speed by which they bring technology to their market. If they don't, someone else will, and they will become The Disrupted. Speed = Survival and DevOps is one of they key bits of the training regimen.
Abbas Haider Ali
CTO, xMatters(link is external)

Consider the trend "every company is a software company" in the context of time-to-market opportunities. The company that releases their software the fastest wins – not only in the software market, but in retail, financial, and other industries as well. We call it "release fast or die," as the only way to accelerate speed of software delivery is by end-to-end automation that allows a delivery process from the developer machine to the production server without human intervention. DevOps culture is the enabler of such automation process.
Baruch Sadogursky
Developer Advocate, JFrog(link is external)

With DevOps practices, high quality software (including full applications and features within those applications) is delivered to market faster. If the software gives businesses a competitive advantage, then DevOps practices directly impact business goals. When adopting DevOps into your business, remember to consider the speed it provides. Today, businesses are completely dependent on applications because they optimize internal business processes, support data-driven analysis and decision-making, and enable customer-facing products and services. DevOps allows businesses to deliver applications and features into user' hands quickly, and, in turn, allows businesses to capitalize on the value of the application.
Kurt Milne
VP of Product Marketing, CliQr(link is external)

One of the major benefits a DevOps approach brings to organizations is the improved time to market. The technology space has evolved. More and more companies are relying on web-based models to deliver their products and services, which bring a set of different challenges to IT operations. As business models shift, so should the processes around them in order to optimize for new workflows. This will put IT groups, and companies as a whole, in the best position to respond to new challenges. Traditional software development lifecycles cannot satisfy the response and flexibility demands of the online business, forcing organizations to evaluate their internal processes and workflows. The DevOps philosophy and associated toolchains provide a platform for greatly improving both software delivery and alignment to business processes to support a more dynamic business model.
Leon Fayer
VP, OmniTI(link is external)

9. VELOCITY: RESPONDING TO CHANGING MARKET AND CUSTOMER DEMANDS

Organizations can overcome the overhead of internal processes in launching and updating new services or features by applying DevOps methodology, allowing them to respond quickly to market demands.
Kamalina Srikant
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Zenoss(link is external)

DevOps enables a culture of resiliency and agility. As a practice, DevOps empowers a more collaborative workforce that can easily and quickly address changing customer demands. Rapid velocity and happy customers are the ultimate business goal.
Tim Armandpour
VP of Engineering, PagerDuty(link is external)

The most important reason to adopt DevOps is customer focus: the tools and practices that DevOps introduces allow you to reduce the whiteboard-to-production time to the point where you can engage with and respond to customers, rather than try to second-guess them
Andrew Phillips
VP of DevOps Strategy, XebiaLabs(link is external)

10. VELOCITY: INCORPORATING FEEDBACK

The most important bottom-line advantage is the ability to obtain continuous feedback and incorporate it more expeditiously into application development. This leads to increased revenue and customer satisfaction. In the digital business era, customers' needs are evolving so rapidly that their needs can no longer wait a year or more to incorporate suggestions. The turnaround needs to be much more quick and seamless, which requires many organizations to change their tools, processes and culture.
David Rizzo
VP of Product Development, Compuware(link is external)

Read 25 Advantages of DevOps - Part 3, covering innovation and quality.