IDC Releases First-Ever DevOps and Application Performance Survey; Discovers Downtime Costs for Large Companies in the Billions

SAN FRANCISCO – FEBRUARY 4, 2015 – IDC has released a new report based on an in-depth survey of DevOps and other IT personnel at Fortune 1000 companies that was conducted with the cooperation of AppDynamics, the application intelligence company and a select group of enterprise software companies. The report, titled, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified,” covers several topic areas of strategic importance to enterprise IT departments. Among the findings are that unplanned application downtime costs the Fortune 1000 from $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion every year. The report also offers the first real insights into the adoption and impact of DevOps practices in large enterprises.

“This is an unprecedented view into the workings and practices of very large IT departments,” said IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. “We cover a range of topics across the IT and business landscape, while providing the first look at critical DevOps metrics at these companies, an area of high interest from executive teams. Our survey indicates that over 40 percent of these companies have a DevOps practice, and another 40 percent are actively evaluating DevOps. The DevOps teams are deploying new tools, building connections among various stakeholders, and increasing project speed and success, among other benefits that they are delivering.”

The research also brought to light the real costs and impact of outages. On average, infrastructure failure costs large enterprises $100,000 per hour. Critical application failures exact a far steeper toll, from $500,000 to $1 million per hour. Whether infrastructure or application, 35 percent of respondents reported time-to-repair of one to 12 hours. Double-digit percentages — 17 percent for infrastructure failures, and 13 percent for application failures — measured their time-to-repair in days rather than hours.

Obstacles, opportunities for DevOps

While the majority of Fortune 1000 respondents have or are considering DevOps practices, it is not a path without challenges. Well over half of those surveyed cite “cultural inhibitors” as the biggest risk for DevOps implementation. More than 40 percent point to fragmented processes, and slightly more than a quarter say lack of executive support are the biggest challenges to DevOps implementation.

At the same time, expectations for DevOps practices are high. Two-thirds of those surveyed expect DevOps to improve customer experience; almost as many are looking for it to lower IT costs. Other outcomes that place high on the list of expectations include improved productivity, higher profits, and improved IT employee satisfaction. DevOps is expected to accelerate delivery of capabilities to the customer by an average of 15 to 20 percent.

Toward those goals, the initiatives that respondents plan to implement as part of DevOps include automation (60%), continuous delivery (50%), continuous integration (43%), automated testing (43%), and application monitoring/management (43%), among other capabilities.

Application management tops the list of new tools DevOps teams are likely to purchase. Tool additions or replacements are a definite priority, as IT organizations that have tried to custom-adjust their current tools for DevOps practices have a failure rate of 80 percent.

IT sharpens focus on business outcomes

Whether it’s improving the efficiency of IT operations or minimizing application and infrastructure downtime, the focus of IT is moving increasingly toward business outcomes, and to that end, the business transaction is the critical metric.

“This research points out that application performance equals business performance,” said Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics. “And it shows how DevOps can help to mitigate these performance issues. IT is moving beyond DevOps to BizDevOps, where IT works even closer with the business owners to understand how performance and customer behaviors impact business transactions, which really are the make-or-break metrics for success. Our AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform is designed to address the challenges and opportunities highlighted by this research — to ensure applications and infrastructure are up and available, and to empower DevOps, and ultimately BizDevOps, to optimize user experience toward the successful completion of business transactions. In today’s software-driven enterprise, successful business transactions are the key to IT success, and they are the common language that can bring together biz, dev, and ops in productive collaboration. And the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform is the only platform that effectively characterizes and tracks business transactions.”

Access the full IDC report, DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified, by Stephen Elliot, compliments of AppDynamics and IDC.

The AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform is a comprehensive software solution enabling companies to maximize business performance. The platform embraces three core principles:

• See everything with unified monitoring. AppDynamics enables an integrated view of real-time user experience, application performance and infrastructure capacity.

• Act fast with DevOps collaboration. AppDynamics provides the ability to isolate, resolve and automate the resolution of application infrastructure bottlenecks -- in production.

• Know the business impact with application analytics. AppDynamics enables deep real-time analytics to help businesses make better decisions, and create bigger impact -- all with certainty and confidence.

The platform is designed and architected to give business users the certainty that their business is running at its best, to give IT the operational visibility and control they need, and to give end users the great experiences they’ve come to expect and demand. For a results breakdown, please visit the AppDynamics blog.

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