DevOps not a silver bullet, but does have some merit, says Specsavers global CIO

Phil Pavitt was sceptical that DevOps was "just another Gartner gimmick"

DevOps, the integration of developers who build and test IT services, and the teams that are responsible for deploying and maintaining IT operations, is not a "silver bullet" approach but does have some merit, according to Specsavers global CIO Phil Pavitt.

Pavitt told Computing that he was "suspicious" when he first heard of the term, believing it to be "just another Gartner gimmick".

"Was there any really heavy DevOps usage? There wasn't really. I mean it was just the next generation of agile, because companies who were selling stuff had run out of things to sell and were repackaging the same products," he said.

But after the initial scepticism, Pavitt admitted that he now does see some merit in the approach.

"Is it a silver bullet? Absolutely not. Does it improve margin? Marginally. We're dramatically increasing the amount of agile delivery that we do; we have organisations that have been training our staff and we have four or five hour projects which are agile that we have just commissioned and they'll be ready very soon," he explained.

Specsavers has also put together small, agile project stand-up spaces and 'Kanban boards', all of which are contributing to the company becoming increasingly agile, said Pavitt.

"I think in one or two cases we may have what people would call DevOps, but I don't think we do [just] because it's called DevOps, but because it makes some sense there," he said.

"I think it's a bit of a fashion statement. I haven't seen many organisations taking it so seriously as if it is the only way to go, but [I am] certainly seeing some cases where it can enhance how agile teams can deliver," he added.

Pavitt is not the only IT leader to have previously been sceptical about DevOps. In 2013, a CA Technologies poll found that 45 per cent of respondents didn't even know what DevOps was, and another 17 per cent thought it was all hype. While in 2014, nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of IT decision-makers claimed that they were not familiar with the term.

But last year, a 2015 State of DevOps Report, conducted by Vanson Bourne for "data-as-a-service" company Delphix, found that DevOps was becoming increasingly prevalent in UK organisations, with 77 per cent having introduced dedicated budgets and support teams for DevOps, and more than a third (35 per cent) spending £1m or more on DevOps per year.

However, on a live Computing webcast, Puppet Labs founder and CEO Luke Kanies has warned many organisations not to approach DevOps in the same way they had approached cloud computing just a couple of years ago.

A couple of years ago, he said "every company had to have a cloud strategy. What we found was that most organisations' private cloud strategies was to rename their VMware vSphere infrastructure to be their private cloud.

"In the same way, a lot of organisations have been implementing DevOps by taking all their ops teams and just calling them DevOps engineers. Or, hiring a slightly more senior ops engineer and giving them a different title, but with fundamentally the same role and the same dynamic - that's not the right way to implement DevOps," he said.

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