Although DevOps emphasises people (and culture) over tools and processes, implementation utilises technology.
As a result, Gartner expects strong growth opportunities for DevOps toolsets, with the total for DevOps tools reaching $2.3 billion in 2015, up 21.1 percent from $1.9 billion in 2014.
By 2016, the analyst firm believes DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy employed by large cloud providers to a mainstream strategy employed by 25 percent of Global 2000 organisations.
Gartner believes that rather than being a market per se, DevOps is a philosophy, a cultural shift that merges operations with development and demands a linked toolchain of technologies to facilitate collaborative change.
So much so that Gartner views DevOps as a virtual (and likely temporal) market and has focused the scope of the definition on tools that support DevOps and practices associated with it in the context of continuous delivery, continuous improvement, infrastructure and configuration as code, and so on.
Gartner categorises these tools as DevOps-ready, -enabled and -capable tools.
"In response to the rapid change in business today, DevOps can help organisations that are pushing to implement a bimodal strategy to support their digitalisation efforts," says Laurie Wurster, research director, Gartner.
"Digital business is essentially software, which means that organisations that expect to thrive in a digital environment must have an improved competence in software delivery."
Predictably, Wurster says DevOps-ready tools have seen and will continue to see the largest growth potential.
These tools are specifically designed and built with out-of-the-box functionality to support the described DevOps characteristics and traits.
Most DevOps-enabled and -capable tools currently exist as part of the larger IT operation and development toolbox; however, with time to value as a critical demand factor from clients, emphasis in support of DevOps has transformed how these tools are positioned and perceived in the marketplace.
For Wurster, the DevOps trend goes "way beyond" implementation and technology management and instead necessitates a deeper focus on how to effect positive organisational change.