The future of DevOps automation is defined by five intersecting forces: relieving manual burdens on IT teams, embracing cloud and hybrid environments, accelerating innovation, building reliability, and making automation and orchestration a cornerstone of business strategy. Organizations that master these forces will lead their markets—those that don’t will struggle to keep pace.
This is an exhilarating time in the world of DevOps. A technological revolution is taking place, driving the practice forward with tremendous speed.
As advances in application workflow orchestration ease the burden on Dev and Ops professionals, the IT department at large gains the ability to positively impact the business more holistically, through innovation and enhancing customer experiences.
We recently had the opportunity to speak with a variety of industry leaders and influential voices who shared their perspectives on what’s coming next and how organizations can get ahead of the curve to take advantage of new opportunities.
What do industry experts say about the future of DevOps?
Five strategic investments will define which organizations reach the next level of enterprise technology maturity—and which fall behind.
Reaching the next level of enterprise technology maturity requires focus and investment across five key initiatives:
- Empowering IT by relieving the burden of manual tasks and complex workflows that can be automated.
- Positioning your operational framework to thrive in increasingly cloud-based and hybrid environments
- Embracing new innovation to accelerate the speed of business, rapidly testing and deploying novel ways to create better customer experiences
- Rallying around reliability and developing predictive processes that help guard against downtime or failures
- Integrating these technical underpinnings throughout the organization, making automation and orchestration a cornerstone of the business strategy
Here’s where top experts are setting their sights.
How is IT driving innovation through DevOps?
IT departments are no longer peripheral back-office functions—they are active orchestrators of digital transformation, and investing in both the technology and the people behind it is essential to that shift.
Ronald van Loon, Principal Analyst at Intelligent World, believes that pressures on IT departments “have shifted their role from a peripheral back-office function to an active orchestrator of adoption and strategic innovation.” Though this may present new challenges, it also presents significant opportunity.
“While Ops has consistently evolved in recent years alongside emerging technologies and the increasing focus on digitalization, the pandemic-induced acceleration of digital transformation has rapidly redefined the role of Ops to coincide with the evolving context of the current digital age,” he says. “Future-facing IT departments must be powerful advocates for digital leadership and accelerate digital transformation by acting as partners to other internal departments and assume greater responsibility for improving business performance.”
This means not only rethinking organizational dynamics, but also investing in tech professionals so they are fully enabled to seize these opportunities, according to Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute, who focuses on helping develop skills and talent:
“Human transformation drives digital transformation and successful human transformation is nurtured through a culture of continuous learning and innovation. IT leadership should therefore ensure that there is sufficient time and resources allocated for DevOps professionals to learn or groom new human, process and technical skills—whether in formal training, peer to peer mentorship or intelligent experimentation.”
How does cloud computing reshape the DevOps environment?
Cloud and as-a-service solutions give DevOps teams the agility to adapt almost instantly—a capability that has shifted from competitive advantage to baseline business expectation.
The new era of business is defined largely by agility. Not only does an unburdened IT department provide more bandwidth for Dev and Ops to stay innovative and adaptive in a fast-changing environment, but the emergence of cloud-based technology and SaaS delivery further enables a nimble enterprise.
As TMC CEO Rich Tehrani points out, adopting and optimizing around these solutions is proving to be a vital differentiator.
“Cloud and as-a-Service solutions allow all organizations to become even more agile and efficient,” he says.
For his part, 7wData Yves Mulkers envisions a complete paradigm shift driven by these capabilities, declaring that, “It’s time for a new type of flexible modular enterprise. One that is resilient and agile enough to swiftly adapt to changing markets and economic situations.”
How can Dev and Ops teams redefine the customer experience?
The greatest competitive promise of DevOps automation and orchestration lies not just in operational efficiency, but in the ability to deliver consistently better customer experiences at speed and scale.
The trends cited above—empowering IT to play a bigger role, and taking advantage of cloud computing’s transformative potential—are all leading to a point where Dev and Ops can more directly impact innovation, driving enhanced customer experiences. And while the operational efficiencies stemming from the rise of automation and orchestration are certainly welcome, it’s here where the greatest promise for competitive advantage lies in this technological revolution.
Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research, Inc., calls out three key opportunities for DevOps teams:
- Comprehensive integration of touchpoints and applications for a consistent view of the customer
- Enterprise-wide analytics to provide real-time insights for personalization and more
- An organizational emphasis on building trust by keeping the entire customer journey safe, secure, and reliable
The path to making these ambitions a reality? According to Kirk Borne, Principal Data Scientist and Executive Advisor for Booz Allen Hamilton, automation and orchestration of workflows will separate successful modern enterprises from non-successful ones.
“Workflow automation and orchestration is the way to drive greater business value from deep and wide data sources: smarter data-informed business decisions, innovative and faster responses to events, and serving customers with the right solutions at the right time in the right context.”
Activating your people, data, and operations to accomplish more? It’s all about identifying the right tools and knowing how to maximize them.
Frequently asked questions
What is the future of DevOps automation?
The future of DevOps automation centers on eliminating manual operational burdens, scaling cloud and hybrid infrastructure, and embedding workflow orchestration as a core business capability. Leading IT analysts consistently point to automation as the foundation that allows DevOps teams to shift from reactive maintenance to proactive, business-driving innovation.
How does application workflow orchestration benefit DevOps teams?
Application workflow orchestration allows DevOps teams to coordinate complex, interdependent processes across systems and environments—reducing manual intervention, minimizing error, and freeing engineers to focus on higher-value work. By automating workflows end-to-end, DevOps teams gain the speed and reliability needed to support modern continuous delivery pipelines.
What role does cloud computing play in the future of DevOps?
Cloud and as-a-service solutions give DevOps teams the agility to adapt rapidly to changing business conditions. Organizations with cloud-native or cloud-optimized DevOps practices can deploy updates, scale infrastructure, and respond to disruptions significantly faster than those relying on traditional on-premises approaches.
How can DevOps teams improve customer experience?
DevOps teams improve customer experience by integrating customer touchpoints across applications, leveraging enterprise-wide analytics for real-time personalization, and building reliability into every stage of the delivery pipeline. Automating and orchestrating workflows ensures that customer-facing systems remain fast, secure, and consistently available.
What skills will DevOps professionals need going forward?
According to Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute, the most important investment is in continuous learning—spanning human skills, process knowledge, and technical capabilities. Formal training, peer-to-peer mentorship, and structured experimentation are all cited as effective pathways for developing DevOps talent capable of leading digital transformation at scale.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of BMC.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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