ECS Digital: DevOps growth is leading to a skills shortage

Now that pilot projects are complete, DevOps demand is outstripping talent availability

Andy Cureton, Founder and Managing Director of ECS Digital - winner of the 2018 Best DevOps Consulting Firm award - thinks that the DevOps industry is struggling to meet demand, and will continue to do so in the future as enterprise-scale transformation begins.

Many organisations have now completed their pilot DevOps projects successfully, which are now being or have been replaced by larger transformation programmes across the organisation.

"This is driving a sharp increase in demand for support from partners and a challenge to the industry as a whole to satisfy," said Cureton. "The larger consultancies and outsourcers are struggling to transform themselves and develop DevOps or agile capabilities at scale, and we predict that this will lead to consolidation in the sector as demand outstrips talent availability."

ECS is leading some of these enterprise-wide transformation programmes itself, and is rolling out a new as-a-service concept that it calls ‘enablement pods', combining DevOps, agile testing and automation. Cureton added:

"Whilst all of our transformation programmes leverage enablement rather than long term staff augmentation, we will be actively pursuing ‘Innovation Pods' going forward. These are in effect full-stack teams: from product owner through to architect, developer, QA and DevOps. This is a key strategic area where we feel we can bring additional benefit to our clients."

The adoption of DevOps practices will differ from organisation to organisation, and that is where DevOps consultancies like ECS come in. These business can provide advice on tools, methodologies and people.

ECS Digital's office is based in central London

Cureton thinks that these are some of the most important traits to have in employees and partners when it comes to DevOps:

On the win itself, Cureton said that he and his team were "extremely proud" to have secured the top spot, along with ECS Digital's Michel Lebeau, who was announced as the Young DevOps Engineer of the Year.

"We've continually innovated and evolved our services over the past 15 years to help organisations realise the benefits of adopting DevOps and are proud to be the only DevOps consultancy to offer specialist testing expertise as a foundation element of our offerings."

He added, "Recognising the work of the team and making them feel part of something bigger has also seen a boost in team morale which is extremely important for our culture - and a good excuse to celebrate!"