Consumers, empowered by rich software interactions with access to Internet resources, have never had more power or choices.
DevOps provides a set of practices and cultural changes—supported by complementary tools—that automates the software delivery pipeline, enabling organizations to win, serve, and retain these consumers better and faster than ever before.
(Related: Testing catches up to DevOps)
Yet not everyone is ready for application delivery rates measured in minutes rather than hours, days or weeks. To understand DevOps adoption trends by industry and application type, Forrester looked at data from three distinct sources.
Developer data reflects adoption of Continuous Delivery practices. Using data from Forrester’s Business Technographics Global Developer Survey, 2015, we looked at how frequently organizations deliver new or modified applications, and then applied multipliers to the faster delivery cadences to reflect the greater adoption of DevOps practices that these cadences require. Our inquiry and advisory work have shown a strong correlation between rapid delivery cadences and DevOps practice adoption. For example, most organizations can reach quarterly release cadence without adopting DevOps practices, but struggle getting to monthly or faster releases, and weekly or daily releases are simply beyond their comprehension.
Infrastructure data reflects the demand for faster rates of change in environments. Using data from Forrester’s Global Business Technographics Infrastructure Survey, 2015, we looked at public cloud, hosted private cloud, and private cloud environments that were used for faster and easier development and testing, faster time-to-market, and providing on-demand capacity. Leveraging cloud in this manner tends to highly correlate with DevOps practices.
DevOps survey data reflects delivery cadence. We looked at respondents who participated in Forrester’s Q4 2014 Global Modern Service Delivery Benchmark Online Survey and indicated that they were working on end-customer applications.
Based on the data, Forrester found that DevOps adoption varies greatly by industry and application type due to varying customer sophistication, regulatory constraints, and competitor-savvy factors. Highly competitive industries ruled by empowered consumers with low costs of switching have the highest levels of DevOps adoption.
Forrester’s DevOps heat map reveals that DevOps is hottest in the services and other manufacturing and pharmaceutical industries. Service organizations are feeling the heat because they must differentiate their customer experience against their competitors, such as through the services and corresponding applications they provide. The “other manufacturing and pharma” industry category, which includes industries like pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing, agriculture, and aerospace manufacturing, jumped from 2014. Forrester believes that this is due to the increasing importance of software in all products. To stay ahead, these organizations are using DevOps to release software-based applications faster.
Financial services, high-tech manufacturing, and retail are all feeling the heat. The most competitive industries and the most demanding consumers are driving demand for faster application delivery, again driving adoption of DevOps practices. These three industries need DevOps’ rapid delivery capabilities. In industries characterized by commodity products, speed-to-market is often the competitive differentiator.
E-Commerce websites rise to outshine mobile applications. Retail isn’t the only hotspot for e-commerce websites that can be accessed on a desktop or mobile browser. DevOps teams are now focused on creating compelling e-commerce experiences to match their mobile counterparts. While mobile applications strive to create convenient experiences that meet immediacy, simplicity, and context needs, e-commerce websites drive a richer, more interactive experience in industries that are not only business-to-consumer in context, but also business-to-business.
DevOps adoption in the public sector is heating up. As in 2014, government and education are following the lead of the hottest public industries. Those same consumers who are driving DevOps adoption in the private sector also have the same increasing expectations for their interactions with government agencies. Both cloud and mobile release frequencies are rising, requiring increasing adoption of DevOps practices.
All industry and application pairs have at least some DevOps activity. Last year, our data on the pairing between the media, entertainment, and leisure industries and e-commerce websites and PC applications did not show any statistical significance. This year, the data shows that all industries and application pairs have DevOps participation.
