This can reduce needs and demand for lab hardware, including mainframe, which is very expensive, and software to support testing and development. In many cases, DevOps will actually help lower IT costs as duplicate roles across Dev and Ops can be eliminated if the two sides work as one team. Companies that have adopted DevOps have experienced real and measurable benefits; most have seen or anticipate seeing about a 19 percent increase in revenue. They have also experienced or anticipate seeing 20 percent to 23 percent improvement in areas such as collaboration between departments, quality of deployed applications, customer numbers, and time-to-market speed.

Consider the example of one of the largest retailers in the world, which recently adopted continuous delivery -- a key component of DevOps -- for application development. While the company previously delivered 12 to 15 releases a month, and been very successful doing so, it is now able to turn out 5,000 deployments a month due to continuous delivery, which include anything from a full application release to incremental updates such as fixing or adding new features or updating contents like price changes or special offers.

Another example of DevOps in action comes from a major telecom provider -- think of your cellphone carrier -- using service virtualization technology to create testing environments to significantly boost development. And with release automation technology, they were able to break down the walls that prevent a continuous flow while keeping the same level of agility all the way to production, reaching new levels of speed.

In my experience working with companies across industries, from retail to telecom, those that have a quarterly release cycle wish to grow that to six releases a year. Those with six releases a year want to do 12. Even companies like Facebook, which is known for daily production updates, are looking for ways to kick things up another notch. Companies with DevOps have seen about 20 percent faster time-to-market for new services, a significant differentiator for any business.