Nearly a quarter of IT leaders are unfamiliar with the term 'DevOps'

Despite businesses who have deployed DevOps seeing a whole host of benefits, many of their peers are unaware of what the term means

Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of IT decision makers claim that they are not familiar with the term "DevOps", according to a study by research firm Vanson Bourne.

The study, commissioned by Rackspace, sought the views of 700 IT decision-makers from organisations with more than 250 employees. The respondents were interviewed in September 2014, with 350 from the US, 250 from the UK and 100 from Australia.

The survey found that over half (55 per cent) of businesses surveyed had implemented DevOps practices, and in the majority of cases where DevOps had already been implemented, the operations team was the main driving force behind the change (43 per cent). CIOs were also drivers for DevOps, with a quarter of the CIOs interviewed having driven the adoption of DevOps within their organisation.

The research found that of those businesses that had implemented DevOps practices, over half said that they had increased customer conversion and satisfaction. Businesses also saw an improvement in customer engagement (43 per cent) and over a third (38 per cent) also experienced an increase in sales. Over half of those that had deployed a DevOps programme experienced faster delivery of new features, and just less than half (46 per cent) claimed that they had a more stable operating environment. Other benefits for these businesses included increased innovation (43 per cent) and reduced IT costs (32 per cent).

But despite many of the companies claiming that they are seeing the benefits of deploying a DevOps environment, the research found that only 77 per cent of the respondents said they were familiar with the term 'DevOps', suggesting that many organisations, and IT leaders are still unaware of what the term refers to.

This chimes with a 2013 CA Technologies poll that found that 45 per cent of respondents did not know what DevOps was, and another 17 per cent thought it was hype.

Meanwhile, for those that have implemented DevOps, many still need to address the cultural change that DevOps introduces. About a third of organisations that opted to go through the DevOps route said internal resistance from both operations teams (37 per cent) and developers (32 per cent) was a challenge, while nearly a quarter of businesses had issues with the wider business not accepting the change.

Not all businesses are planning to implement DevOps at all, many may be deterred by the struggle with employees and the wider business, while others may not understand the term, but 41 per cent of those businesses that aren't going ahead with DevOps said that they had other more urgent IT priorities.

However, overall the survey suggests that the vast majority of businesses have either implemented DevOps practices (55 per cent) or are planning on doing so by 2017 (31 per cent).

Computing recently investigated how crucial a DevOps function is for enterprises.