"There is no one size fits all solution for DevOps" : Infosys Spokesperson

In an interaction with Dataquest, Rahul Madhusudan Joshi, Industry Principal, Infosys, sheds light on the long term impact of DevOps on IT outsourcing and what service providers can do to grab the opportunity

How is DevOps transforming the way enterprises do IT?
Devops – a portmanteau of Development and Operations, is addressing a key challenge of today’s IT enterprise – Agility. Devops stresses the need for automation, communication and collaboration between application development, application testing and infrastructure teams.
The IT development lifecycle, typically, can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to develop, test and deploy an application release. In a traditional setup, IT relies on manual and complex interactions between siloed teams to complete the rollout, leading to a long process and inevitable delays. End-user feedback is often lost in internal interactions.
By leveraging Devops principles, enterprises can achieve faster-time-to-market by being able to roll out consistent, rapid application deployments. Devops has exposed the duality of enterprise IT by highlighting the differences between conventional IT which is based on strong governance, minimized risk, waterfall development, technical teams and Devops methods that are based on light weight governance, risk management, agile development across multidisciplinary teams.
Both are equally important today with conventional IT focusing on big systems/projects ensuring that these are performing smoothly. Devops is used for disruptive innovation with marketing and customer, to exploit the digital phenomenon.

What is the impact of DevOps on IT outsourcing? How will IT services industry be affected by growing interest in DevOps?
In the near term, we believe that the Devops will have a limited impact on IT outsourcing. However, in the medium to long term, we believe that outsourcing contracts will change significantly on account of devops and associated technology innovations like application containers, configuration management and data management solutions. Devops is part of a clutch of new technology services powering cloud, mobility and social applications.
The IT Services industry will have to invest in developing a large cross functional resource pool (across technologies, interpersonal skills) over the coming years. We are also likely to see consolidation of boutique firms that are currently offering Devops solutions to enterprises.

How can IT service providers transform DevOps into a big opportunity? What are the structural changes that it entails for service providers?
We believe there is definitely a major opportunity with Devops. IT Service providers have an opportunity to provide complete life cycle services from requirements gathering to support. They must make significant investments in areas like agile development, business driven development testing, automated testing, automated code promotion across environments, automated security testing and enforcing change control procedures. These capabilities exist in isolation in most service providers today. But the need of the hour is to merge these capabilities to create a multi-disciplined/cross skilled workforce.
We believe service providers that have large reusable code/test repositories aligned to business functions and deep automation capabilities across functional areas will be able to grab the opportunity of Devops.

Do existing outsourcing models deter DevOps adoption in some way?
We see trends indicating that as contract duration decreases, modular sourcing is gaining momentum. The current trends suggest that there is a tendency to award technology ‘bundles’ to vendors – for instance, service provider 1 gets Wintel, service provider 2 gets Unix, 3rd gets storage and so on. These contracts will be a deterrent to Devops adoption as Devops by its very nature is cross functional and collaborative. We believe that due to increased Devops adoption, the service provider will be awarded contracts based on either lines of business (LOB) (Finance, HR, Procurement and others) or ERPs (SAP, EBS, and others). The outsourcing models will likely evolve to support end-to-end business outcomes (e.g. one service provider providing App+Infra services for an LOB)

How are your clients responding to this trend? How are expectations and demands changing in the light of DevOps adoption?
The client adoption so far has been varying based on maturity of the client processes. The adoption is fairly high in verticals like retail, manufacturing and financial services. The adoption is lagging in old economy verticals such as utilities, communications and others. In early adopters, one consistent expectation is the ability to manage non-production environments efficiently, ensure faster release cycles and provide Infrastructure on demand with data virtualization. While clients are aware of the benefits, they are also closely monitoring the costs of implementation (not just tools but also the impact of the change on the organization).

Agility and collaboration forms the foundation for DevOps. How can IT service provider’s partner with clients to achieve these and help them succeed in their DevOps journey?
Most Devops implementations fail today due to excessive focus on building technology solutions and not enough focus on organization change management. There is no “one size fits all” solution for Devops. IT service providers can help the clients achieve the benefits of Devops by showing the real business value, a concrete actionable roadmap with milestones with improve maturity and capability over time.