A new report from venture capital and M&A data provider PitchBook has explored how DevOps tools will continue to blossom in developer and enterprise contexts – as well as how Covid-19 has quickened digital transformation.

The company’s latest quarterly emerging tech report on cloud tech focused on an overview of technologies related to DevOps as it sees opportunities in ‘broader organisational efforts to make complex systems, workflows and other processes more cohesive, responsive, and manageable.’

With this in mind, PitchBook’s area of analysis for DevOps includes spaces such as enterprise communication and collaboration tools, low-code and robotic process automation (RPA).

Overall, the pandemic is increasing the pace of CI/CD adoption as more companies work to move application development processes from behind the firewall and into cloud environments. In terms of how this looks practically, the report sees a wider increase.

“We expect this to drive more investment and innovation in collaboration and communication ecosystems that can facilitate the distributed enterprise,” the report noted. “This trend will also encourage a quicker shift to cloud computing as businesses seek to minimise location-based manual operations.”

As companies shift to a changing style of work, DevOps can also help with this. “Organisations are evolving into continuous creators of digital IP,” the report noted. “To be successful, they must find ways to streamline and prioritise product creation and reduce administrative bottlenecks.

“DevOps has the potential to help organisations realise these goals, while making it easier to manage the complexity and fast-paced nature of today’s IT landscape.”

The report focused on two primary funding announcements in the past quarter; CircleCI, who raised $100 million in a series E round in April, and developer collaboration platform Postman, who secured $150m in June. Collaboration technology more widely also saw an uptick, including deals for Loom, Figma, and Miro.

The latter two are key to an emerging trend which the report notes as ‘DesignOps’. Improvements in the software development supply chain, PitchBook said, are putting pressure on companies to enhance design practices and facilitate better collaboration.

Writing for this publication earlier this month, Patrick Hubbard, of SolarWinds, explored whether DevOps and APM would see an uptick from the ‘next normal.’

“IT tends to hunker down during uncertain times and run as little as possible – but I’d argue the value [DevOps] brings to IT teams of many different sizes can be key to enterprise transformation ambitions – digital, survival, or otherwise,” he wrote.

“It remains unclear what the ‘next normal’ entails, but the fundamentals of great service delivery remain the same,” Hubbard added. “The DevOps focus on flexibility and continuous process improvement to break transformation logjams comes in handy when the future of technology is full of new possibility.”

You can read the full report here (email required).

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