Modern Application Development Demands Better Data Operations

Meredith Kopit Levien, the incoming CEO of The New York Times, was recently quoted in an article about her plans of reimagining "the way we do our work to look and feel and operate the way transformational tech companies do."

Today, it’s not just technology companies building software—even a business like The New York Times wants to become a world-class digital and tech company. In fact, the Times has more engineers than any other department in the company, excluding journalists.

For large enterprise businesses, the pandemic has forced them to accelerate their digital capabilities, so they can compete for sales online and learn to survive with little-to-no foot traffic. As a result, the speed of application development has become a top priority, and companies are hiring tens of thousands of developers to build and deploy new features in order to achieve a stream of continuous delivery for their customers.

But one of the biggest challenges that enterprises face is data access. Moving data across an enterprise is still painfully slow. While migrating to the cloud and automating code deployment has proved to speed up application development, data bottlenecks are still a headache. They still cost time, productivity, and millions of dollars.

“This absence of data availability and automation creates a silent cost to the business in lost productivity and revenue,” analysts write in a new IDC report.

This research indicates a strong correlation between the benefits of automating data operations and delivering on more digital initiatives designed to capture new business opportunities and grow market share.

Study participants, also users of the Delphix Data Platform, are enterprises with an average of 70K+ employees and $51 billion in revenue. Leveraging a data operations platform that combined data delivery and data compliance allowed participants with faster data, reducing the time to provision, refresh, and integrate dev environments.

They also had access to higher-quality data that enabled the ability to run additional testing cycles, which in turn led to fewer data-related defects and errors (73% reduction per application) being introduced into the software pipeline. Companies estimated they improved the performance of their applications by as much as 50%.

With these improvements, dev and test cycles were compressed by 40%, enabling more time for coding, and there was increased developer efficiency. Specifically for DevOps teams, there was a big reduction (53%) in correcting application errors, and companies were able to free up 30+ developers to contribute to additional applications and upgrades.

As quoted by one participant: “Delphix has had a dramatic impact on our DevOps. Our team is saving 70% over their normal time.”

By significantly reducing the time to develop new applications, AppDev teams were able to build 33% more releases per new application and 26% more features.

“As a services company, we probably have grown revenue by about $5 million to $10 million a year with Delphix-enabling services,” explained another participant.

If you look at continuous testing, one of the longest, most complicated parts is data delivery. Without the ability for AppDev teams to quickly and easily provide data for their software test environments, continuous testing isn’t possible. Without continuous testing, you can’t maintain quality or delivery. It’s time to make the right investments in your data operations to get to rapid release.

Download the full analyst report here.