DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry for their opinions on the most significant advantages of DevOps. Part 3 covers innovation and quality.

Start with 25 Advantages of DevOps - Part 1

Start with 25 Advantages of DevOps - Part 2

11. VISIBILITY TO BUILD, RUN AND SECURE MODERN APPLICATIONS

Surveys have shown that organizations successfully implementing DevOps tools and practices are likely to experience high growth in profitability, market share, and productivity goals. If I had to highlight the single most important reason to adopt DevOps, it would be to gain the visibility to build, run and secure modern applications. More and more demands are being placed on application teams. They are being asked to get to market quicker by driving faster delivery of software. The quickest way to get there is by leveraging centralized log management and real-time machine analytics throughout the software delivery lifecycle to enable real-time application and business insights. This in turn, helps organizations transform their business and derive more value faster.
Ramin Sayar
CEO, Sumo Logic(link is external)

12. INNOVATION

DevOps provides the ability for teams to deliver innovation rapidly (multiple times a day).
Payal Chakravarty
Sr. Product Manager - APM, IBM(link is external)

Innovation is the key to digital transformation. In today's world, that manifests itself in software. Organizations need to remove obstacles that impede developer productivity and streamline processes that artificially delay time to market. The bottom line is DevOps helps organizations accelerate the delivery of quality software to better address customer needs.
Bill Berutti
President of the Cloud, Data Center and Performance Businesses at BMC Software(link is external)

If DevOps is adopted properly by the organization, IT's role changes from being a business cost center to being that of one that leads the innovation for the business. Product and service offerings can be introduced, tested, and rolled out much more quickly to the market place keeping up with the pace of change in the market place. The principles of DevOps allow IT teams to produce and deliver value quickly, test out hypotheses with real users, and roll out actual services and products that bring in revenue to help grow the business and make an impact to the top line.
Ashish Kuthiala
Senior Director, Strategy & Marketing, DevOps, Hewlett Packard Enterprise(link is external)

Read Ashish Kuthiala's blog: DevOps Must-Have Tool - Continuous Delivery

These days, every company is a tech company. Either technology is used to grow the business (think Wal-Mart and e-tail or General Motors and driverless cars) or accelerate its sprint to obsolescence (think Polaroid or Atari). Progressive companies realize technology innovation is no longer optional: innovate and grow… or the competition will. DevOps adoption is accelerating because those companies realize the operational changes it enables – agility and velocity – are required to create a culture of innovation. The business impact of DevOps relates directly to the technical benefits. Agile organizations collaborate across orgs more effectively and more collaboration leads to better ideas.
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)

DevOps impacts a business in stages. It surfaces the problems that prevent the smooth delivery of IT-driven business value. At first, DevOps unleashes the change agents already latent in your organization. Later on it gives leaders a chance to align the org to a DevOps-driven strategy. The final stage is going wide across the enterprise and maximizing innovation as a percentage of your overall work. With DevOps, businesses can harness the full potential of IT and software to drive innovation.
David Seuss
Senior Content Marketing Manager, Ipswitch(link is external)

13. DIFFERENTIATION VIA EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

The implementation of DevOps can take on many forms but it is most often recognized through implementation of continuous delivery practices. When implementing continuous delivery the activities of build, test, and deploy are automated such that it ensures that your software is always in a release ready state. Successfully adopting DevOps through Continuous Delivery provides many business and technical advantages including the ability to adopt and delivery emerging technologies. This provides competitive advantage by ensuring the business can be first to market or early to market with differentiating capabilities.
Brian Dawson
DevOps Practitioner, CloudBees(link is external)

Read Brian Dawson's blog: 5 Advantages of Adopting DevOps Through Continuous Delivery

14. SOFTWARE STABILITY AND QUALITY

For IT organizations that have embraced DEVOPS, everyone is accountable for building and running an application that works as expected. The entire team shares the same goals around quality: performance, user experience, stability, security and even time to market. The DEVOPS principles ensure everything is monitored, every change is known and everyone understands how each release impacts quality.
Gerardo Dada
VP, Product Marketing and Strategy, SolarWinds(link is external)

DevOps provides a somewhat unprecedented twofer: not only does it tend to deliver software faster, it also almost invariably leads to better stability and overall quality as well. Whether this is a matter of DevOps being so very good, or the organizations and processes we have ended with being very bad, is hard to say.
Kelly Looney
Regional Consulting Manager, DevOps Strategy, Skytap(link is external)

DevOps yields greater stability and reliability because faster and more frequent release cycles allows us to identify and resolve issues immediately. This means that developers and others throughout the company have more time to focus on improvements and innovations that contribute to the bottom line.
Joe Alfaro
VP of Engineering, Sauce Labs(link is external)

The strongest argument for DevOps is that it makes people do better work by making them wear different hats. Developers who are pulled into operating the software they write will create software that is easier to operate, more reliable, and ultimately better for customers and for the success of the business.
Sven Dummer
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Loggly(link is external)

Read Sven Dummer's blog: Cloud Cuckoo Land - When Cloud Customers Get Locked In

As automated release management and QA processes are more and more frequently deployed, organizations discover a different way of planning & prioritizing backlogs. Business side is no longer forced to wait for quarterly release windows and can expect weekly-daily-hourly changes. This removes pressure from the releases in regards of “release stuffing”, allowing to apply more cautious quality control measures resulting in improved user experience.
Ivo Mägi
Co-founder and Head of Product, Plumbr(link is external)

15. REDUCED RISK OF CHANGE

Driving Change Safely – Traditional IT have always feared change, which is the main root cause for most of operational issues. A way to minimize change was to slow down the delivery processes with numerous review, assessment, and approval workflows. However, today change is not only inevitable but necessary in order to deliver the speed and agility expected from IT by business. Transition to DevOps and automation of the entire change lifecycle from build to run as a single integrated end-to-end process should minimize the risk of introduced changes while accelerating pace of changes. DevOps is frequently viewed as a synonym to speed but like in racing, higher speed should come with greater safety.
Sasha Gilenson
CEO, Evolven(link is external)

Read 25 Advantages of DevOps - Part 4, covering processes and productivity.