UK lagging France and Spain on DevOps

UK firms' focus on keeping the lights on is hampering change, according to MSP Claranet

The UK is lagging behind other European countries on DevOps adoption, with firms here also more likely to see IT as a cost centre than their counterparts on the continent, according to pan-European managed service provider Claranet.

Claranet's survey of 900 leaders at mid-market firms across Europe found that 26 per cent of UK companies have adopted a DevOps approach, compared with 28 per cent in Germany, 31 per cent in Spain, 38 per cent in France and 44 per cent in the Benelux.

The percentage of time spent on IT innovation in the UK and Germany also tends to be lower, Claranet found.

Claranet product director Neil Thomas said the UK and Germany might have a reputation for leading the way in technology adoption but they are not always as fast at adopting business change, which he said was central to DevOps.

"France and Spain are showing a greater level of innovation and business change and are putting their IT departments more as strategic enablers of the business," he said. "In the UK, we have a more traditional approach to IT and spend more time keeping the lights on, which is hampering business change. With software becoming so essential in the way businesses work nowadays, IT is not now and should not be a function of keeping the lights on."

Christened in 2009, the concept of DevOps is the brainchild of Belgian system administrator Patrick Debois, who had grown frustrated by conflicts between developers and system administrators.

The movement boils down to one thing, Thomas said, and that is helping organisations respond to market demand by speeding up the process of developing, releasing and updating software.

"I heard a great quote the other day that described DevOps as the Industrial Revolution of IT," Thomas said.

"The end result of applying a DevOps methodology is the ability to develop and release applications in a far faster way; we're talking about making changes to an application many times a day, rather than the old way of developing applications where you would release an update every few months."

UK companies will get left behind if they fail to embrace DevOps, Thomas claimed.

"What we're seeing across every industry and size of company is software becoming more and more important, both in terms of how they interact with their customers - be that B2B or B2C - and how they operate their business," he said.

"The companies that are winning in their sectors tend to be the ones using software to the greatest effect."