DevOps to become mainstream by next year, predicts Gartner

Analyst prediction comes as Computing prepares to host its first ever DevOps Summit

DevOps, the practice that refers to the integration of the roles of developers who build and test IT services and the teams that are responsible for deploying and maintaining IT operations, will grow from its current niche to a mainstream area of IT strategy by 2016, according to analyst firm Gartner.

The company believes that DevOps will be deployed by 500 of the world's leading companies by next year, with the DevOps tools market set to reach $2.3bn by that time. It represents a rise of over 20 per cent compared with the $1.9bn spent in the area during 2014.

The Gartner announcement comes ahead of Computing's first ever DevOps Summit, which takes place in July this year.

"In response to the rapid change in business today, DevOps can help organisations that are pushing to implement a bimodal strategy to support their digitalisation efforts," said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.

"Digital business is essentially software, which means that organisations that expect to thrive in a digital environment must have an improved competence in software delivery," she added.

Wurster went on to describe DevOps as something that "seeks to change the dynamics in which operations and development teams interact" with a goal of enabling "each organisation to see the perspective of the other and to modify behaviour accordingly, while motivating autonomy".

Large organisations that already have dedicated DevOps teams include BSkyB and Domino's Pizza.

According to Gartner, DevOps-ready tools have seen, and will continue to see, the largest growth potential. These tools are designed to support DevOps characteristics and traits, helping organisations to focus on people, processes, technology and information.

It's a transformation that Wurster described as "compelling" because "many enterprise IT organisations want to achieve the scale-out and economies of scale achieved by world-class cloud providers".

"Nevertheless, there are still several gaps that prevent implementation of DevOps as a comprehensive methodology," she warned. These include a skills gap that Computing looked into last October.

"Enterprises have acknowledged these gaps and have begun assessing how the DevOps mindset might apply to their own environments. However, culture is not easily or quickly changed," Wurster continued.

"And key to the culture within DevOps is the notion of becoming more agile and changing behaviour to support it - a perspective that has not been widely pursued within classical IT operations," she concluded.