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South African companies wake up to DevOps

Ninety-four percent of organisations believe there is a greater need for DevOps than ever before, but only 44% have a DevOps strategy in place, a new CA Southern Africa survey reveals.


Johannesburg, 23 Jul 2014

According to a new study conducted on behalf of CA Southern Africa, demand for DevOps is rising fast among South African organisations. The study, one of the first in South Africa to focus on DevOps, reveals that although 94% of South African respondents believe there is a greater need for DevOps than ever before, only 44% already have a DevOps strategy in place.

"DevOps is a methodology which helps foster collaboration between the teams that create and test applications (Dev) with those that maintain them in production environments (Ops)," says Jaco Greyling, pre-sales manager at CA Southern Africa. "The real benefit for South African organisations is in the ability to develop, test and deploy high-quality applications faster, thus increasing competitive advantage and enhancing customer satisfaction."

DevOps is also a powerful business enabler that helps enterprises to eliminate development and delivery constraints and successfully contain cost, mitigate risk and reduce delivery cycles.

The study reinforces the argument that the collaboration, automation and measurement of application-related data, brought about by DevOps, accelerates development and enhances quality. Respondents with a DevOps strategy in place report an increased frequency of deployment (73%) and improved quality of deployed applications (67%).

South African IT decision-makers believe the most important attributes of a DevOps strategy are IT automation (cited by 63%) and continuous release cycles (cited by 42%). All respondents who have adopted, or plan to adopt, a DevOps methodology are likely to make new investments as part of their DevOps implementation. These include investment in more training (cited by 79%), investment in new tools (58%) and hiring new resources with necessary skills (48%).

"These results demonstrate that while awareness of DevOps has grown rapidly in South Africa, local companies still lack guidance and best practices on implementing it," says Greyling. "IT consultants and vendors have a clear role to play in educating clients to create strategies and road maps for successful DevOps initiatives. They also need to take action now, given that DevOps is rapidly evolving from the theoretical into an essential strategic approach for all businesses."

South Africa's relative lack of DevOps maturity is further demonstrated by the finding that 65% of local companies measure DevOps success by internal factors such as reduced costs and improved efficiencies, while only 33% use external factors. Internationally, this ratio is reversed, with 38% measuring success by internal factors and 49% by external factors.

Moreover, international trends reveal that 66% of organisations either have a DevOps strategy, or are planning to implement one, and more than 90% have seen, or expect to see, significant benefits from their DevOps initiatives. The study further reveals that results from DevOps are real and quantifiable. International respondents have experienced anywhere from a 17% to 23% improvement in key business metrics such as increased revenue, faster time-to-market, improved competitive positioning and enhanced customer experience.

These international results were gleaned from the study: "TechInsights Report: What Smart Businesses Know about DevOps", commissioned by CA Technologies and conducted by Vanson Bourne, which surveyed 1 300 IT executives from large organisations in 21 countries across the globe*.

According to Greyling, two factors determine the success of a DevOps deployment: tools and culture. "People do need to invest in tools, but the biggest obstacle to successful DevOps is culture, and specifically, resistance to change. So companies are hiring people with these skills or upskilling where it makes sense to drive change in their organisations, and put new processes in place to ensure DevOps succeeds."

*https://www.ca.com/us/register/forms/collateral/techinsights-report-what-smart-businesses-know-about-devops.aspx

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Research

The research was conducted by Vanson Bourne, with respondents drawn from 50 South African companies across the financial services, IT, retail, education, manufacturing, telecommunications, construction, mining, utilities and healthcare sectors, as well as the public sector. The majority of respondents (62%) were senior IT decision-makers (CIOs or CTOs); while 22% were senior managers and 10% managers.

Additional resources:
* Read the eBooklet "DevOps Perspectives, IT luminaries discuss the major issues impacting DevOps today".

* Get the eBook "Dysfunction Junction: A Pragmatic Guide to Getting Started with DevOps".
* Get the Analyst Report "The Forrester Wave: Service Virtualization And Testing Solutions, Q1 2014".

CA Southern Africa

CA Southern Africa is the leading provider of IT management solutions in sub-Saharan Africa. It is an IT management expert. CA Southern Africa provides solutions and services that cover the entire IT management life cycle encompassing all areas of IT and security from distributed to mainframe, mobility and cloud.

Through the use of technology, CA Southern Africa assists its customers to transform the economics of IT by: controlling complexity; assuring the quality of IT services; reducing costs and risk; and providing information to make the right strategic decisions.

CA Southern Africa is the sole representative of CA Technologies in sub-Saharan Africa and is a member of the JSE listed EOH group of companies.

For further information, log on to: www.ca.com/za.

Editorial contacts

Deirdre Blain
Blain Communications
(+27) 11 462 4974
blain@iafrica.com
Joanne Cawrse
CA Southern Africa
(+27) 11 417 8645
joanne.cawrse@caafrica.co.za