"Clients from All Verticals are showing Inclination towards exploring DevOps"- Chief Technologist, HCL Technologies

In an interaction with Dataquest, Kalyan Kumar B, SVP & Chief Technologist, HCL Technologies, reveals how client expectations from their service providers are changing fast with DevOps and what does it take for IT services companies to stay on top of this growing trend

How is devOps transforming the way enterprises do IT?



CXOs are constantly in pressure to deliver in the competitive market and to support their operations they have to adopt newer products or innovative ways of services, often this leads to adding more resources like skilled manpower& newer technologies into the execution, somehow this creates more complex environment which again becomes a problem area to manage and also it shoots up the cost of operations.

DevOps integrates developers and operation teams in order to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infra, automating workflows, automating release process and continuously measuring application performance.

What is the DevOps impact on IT outsourcing? How is the IT services industry affected by growing interest in DevOps?



DevOps is fueling Gen 3 outsourcing model today, concepts like DevOps, application modernization and digitization are paving ways into transformation IT App Dev and IT APP Support methodologies. Sourcing decisions are being affected service provider transformation based solution approach. As the traditional IT moves more closer to IT as service model, any development / enhancement services being provided by vendors would only fit the action if they work on the DevOps conveyor belt model and have rapid provision capabilities.

Hence IT service industry will see increase in demands in areas like DevOps and service providers will have develop capabilities to deliver on these growing demands. Service providers may focus on methodologies like DevOps to positions themselves as an ADM vendors to compete in current sourcing situation.

How are your clients responding to this trend? How are expectations and demands changing in the light of DevOps adoption?



Clients from almost all verticals are showing inclination towards exploring DevOps benefits for their organization. Classification of Clients mostly looking for adopting DevOps:

• Ecommerce & social media companies who have very high frequency of product release.

• Banks with large non-prod environments and huge amount of development & testing activities.

• Organization which has most of the workflows operated manually

As clients are looking to adopt DevOps, they are expecting agility, speed, stability, innovation and high quality of service. In traditional way of working they have actually been getting slower time to market, low CSAT, low efficiency and high cost of operation.

The pattern followed by organization looking to adopt DevOps is:

1. They need to understand their requirement for DevOps adoption, for which they go for DevOps maturity assessment by HCL

2. Most of the org has a manual way of Release & Deployment and hence looking for the fixing the issue by setting up Release Management Office – comprising of Automated Release 7 Deployment solution

3. Collaboration platform for the Dev & Ops team

4. Continuous journey towards achieving higher DevOps maturity for reaping higher benefits

DevOps adoption is bringing changes in expectations of the organization in terms of people and culture. Cross skilled people will lead to the lean IT org with adoption of self-service solution the approach & ways of working of the development community will change drastically as it will reduce their dependency on other teams.

Agility and collaboration forms the foundation for DevOps. How can IT service providers partner with clients to achieve these and help them succeed in their DevOps journey?



DevOps concept has evolved primarily to bridge the gap between the Dev & Ops team with a continuous integration in order to achieve efficient delivery of new IT systems.

DevOps is based on a Continuous Journey theme driven by two key objectives that are Faster time to market & Lower Cost of operations.

DevOps solution should talk about continuous journey and should cover end-to-end SDLC. It brings synergy among various teams to collaborate and work towards a unified goal therefore it’s important to map the four fundamental pillars of IT life cycle journey: Plan, Develop and Test, Deploy and Release and finally Operate.

Service providers today encourage clients to take a phase wise approach for the DevOps adoption. Few best practices that should be followed include - assessment of AS IS environment of the customer, identifying customer maturity, appetite for the DevOps adoption based on the certain defined parameters followed by a Pilot approach for the realizing the value of DevOps Adoption.