Devops — the pushing together of enterprise application development and the IT operations, mainly by cloud computing, collaboration and automation — continues to come up in conversations with large enterprise IT vendors and customers.

When we began covering devops, we saw it focused mainly on the software developers and IT administrators who were, themselves, devops, that is they worked in software development with previous or current experience in IT administration, or vice-versa, with IT admins that were software developers in previous lives. As our coverage of devops continued, it became clear that these groups were perhaps the main practitioners of devops, but certainly not the only ones that came into play, with business requirements, customer service, security and other stakeholders considered.

With our most recent and extensive research on the topic, our special report ‘Rise of the Devops,’ we considered these many stakeholders, as well as the drivers of devops, which include cloud computing, agile software development, automation and open source software. In addition, through our discussions with several devops end users that served as our case studies in the report, we came to the conclusion that devops was poised to move beyond Web 2.0, media and SaaS companies to more mainstream, enterprise IT, where in many ways, devops embodies effective, efficient use of cloud computing, whether for a cloud computing service provider or for a consumer of those services.

Since our report was published, the topic of devops continues to come up, often when talking with software development, ALM, cloud computing and other players. However, there are two areas that stand out: devops among database administrators and devops for mobile software development.

In terms of DBAs, they are clearly among the key stakeholders in a devops implementation, given the importance of data, its security and its place in today’s enterprise applications. We saw from another special report Seeding the Clouds, that the data layer was one place where we saw a heavy prevalence of open source software, including Apache Hadoop, NoSQL and other technologies. Data and the people who manage it have an equally significant role in devops.

As for mobile software and mobile application development, the main connection to devops seems to be the idea that organizations must get going right away on whatever projects, teams, products and objectives they can to begin the process of iterating, refining, repeating and succeeding. One of the key themes and best practices in the devops report is to begin the process of joining teams on software releases and updates understanding that the objective is not perfection, but rather, improvement. The better the start, the faster and greater the progress, but one of the key challenges of successfully implementing devops practices is finding a starting point. Once organizations begin to put people and teams together, the efficiencies can happen, but another big aspect of devops is that it is cyclical, going from dev to ops and back for a process that is improved at the same time it is automated. We hear and see a lot of the same type of thinking for mobile application development — getting it started and building from there.

We have provided some sense of devops implementations in some User Deployment Reports (subscribers only): Thomson Reuters and Fox Audience Network. Based on what we’ve seen so far and what we continue to hear from enterprise vendors and customers, we have no doubt that devops will continue to spread into more mainstream enterprise IT and into more enterprise IT conversations.