Source: benzinga.com. Original report published by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), May 2017.
EMA Publishes DevOps and Continuous Delivery Tooling Research
Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), an IT and data management research and consulting firm founded in 1996, released a research report titled “DevOps/Continuous Delivery Tooling: Launchpad for the Digital Enterprise.” The report was authored by Julie Craig, Research Director of Application Management at EMA, and examines the state of software delivery practices and tooling as organizations faced accelerating digital transformation pressures in 2017.
The research synthesizes findings from a broad survey of IT organizations, tracing which DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices and tools were most relevant to managing the delivery of business services at that point in time.
Why This Research Mattered in 2017
EMA positioned this report against a backdrop of rapid change in both business and IT. Over the preceding five years, software had shifted from a supporting function to the core operational layer of modern enterprises. As a result, IT had evolved from being viewed as a cost center to being recognized as a direct driver of revenue and competitive differentiation.
Legacy toolsets designed around heavy manual intervention and siloed human expertise were increasingly inadequate. Designing, developing, deploying, and supporting complex modern applications demanded a new level of cross-functional collaboration — across skills, teams, and tooling — that older operating models simply could not provide.
“As the pace of business continues to accelerate, coordination across DevOps processes, practices, and tools becomes increasingly important. This research provides valuable insights into the ways in which high-performing IT organizations are accelerating delivery of key business services and, in doing so, impacting the business bottom line.”
— Julie Craig, Research Director of Application Management, EMA
Key Findings from the Survey
The report surfaces several notable data points from the underlying survey research:
1. Toolchain Integration Is a Critical Selection Criterion
Both DevOps and Continuous Delivery depend on the ability to share information across staff, tools, and processes that span multiple lifecycle stages. The research found that integrating and sharing metrics between diverse toolsets — whether through APIs, integration hubs, or a combination of both — should be a primary factor when evaluating and selecting tooling. Fragmented, siloed tool ecosystems create friction that undermines the goals of faster, more reliable delivery.
2. Digital Business Priorities Vary by Organization Size
The top strategic focus areas for digital business initiatives identified in the survey included:
- Customer satisfaction (external customers)
- Matching competitors’ digital presence through technology adoption
- Faster time to innovation
Importantly, the report noted significant variation in how these priorities ranked among small, medium, and enterprise-sized businesses — underscoring that a one-size-fits-all approach to DevOps tooling and strategy is unlikely to succeed across different organizational contexts.
3. DevOps Adoption Is Broad but Shallow in Production
One of the more striking findings: more than 90% of surveyed companies reported utilizing DevOps teams or processes to at least some degree. However, those teams supported production applications only approximately 30% of the time.
This gap suggests that DevOps practices in 2017 were concentrated primarily in pre-deployment stages — development, testing, and release pipelines — rather than extending into production operations. The practical consequence is that troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and support of custom applications in production often fell back on development teams, creating a persistent gap between development velocity and operational reliability.
EMA framed this as an ongoing challenge: given the complexity of modern applications, robust cross-functional skills for diagnosing and resolving production issues are not optional — they are a certainty requirement for sustainable DevOps maturity.
What High-Performing Organizations Do Differently
The broader thesis of the report is that surmounting these challenges requires changes at three levels simultaneously:
- Mindsets: Embracing shared ownership of delivery outcomes across development, operations, and the business.
- Skillsets: Building cross-functional capabilities that span the full application lifecycle, including production.
- Tooling: Selecting and integrating tools that support collaboration and data sharing rather than reinforcing silos.
High-performing IT organizations, per EMA’s analysis, were those investing in all three dimensions rather than treating DevOps as a purely tooling or process initiative.
Accessing the Full Research
EMA made the research available in three formats at the time of publication:
- Full report: “DevOps/Continuous Delivery Tooling: Launchpad for the Digital Enterprise” — detailed analysis of all research findings.
- Report summary: “Report Summary — DevOps/Continuous Delivery Tooling: Launchpad for the Digital Enterprise” — condensed version of key findings.
- On-demand webinar: “DevOps/Continuous Delivery Tooling: Launchpad for the Digital Business” — video highlights from the research.
Readers interested in accessing these resources should search the EMA website directly, as specific URLs may have changed since the original publication date.
About Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
Founded in 1996, EMA is an industry analyst firm specializing in IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts combine practical experience, knowledge of industry best practices, and awareness of current and planned vendor solutions to advise enterprise IT professionals, line-of-business users, and technology vendors.