Skytap's Software Development Survey 2015 Reveals Containers a Key Technology in the Modernization of Software Delivery, with Enterprise Adoption Expected to Nearly Double by Next Year

SEATTLE, Oct. 27, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand Environments as a Service (EaaS), today released key findings from its Software Development 2015 Survey, conducted online and at VMworld 2015 U.S. The majority of survey takers were from large enterprises (25,000-50,000 employees), and either serve as C-level executives (21%), or work directly within application development and quality assurance departments (30%). Skytap's survey exposed the reality behind container adoption, which is expected to rise from 25% to the same level as IaaS/Cloud usage (47%) as the top tool for the modernization of software development according to respondents on the frontlines in the industry.

Another telling finding of the survey was a noticeable gap in the demand versus utilization of test environments. The survey found that less than 6% of companies are fully utilizing their entire infrastructure and software lab setups in pre-production. Over half estimated (53%) that at any given time only 51-75% of their organization's entire infrastructure and software lab setups in pre-production were being utilized. Meanwhile, over half of developers (54%) strongly agreed that stable test environments are the top thing they need from IT to produce quality software – more, and faster access to test environments came in as a close second and third.

Additional key findings from the Skytap Software Development 2015 survey include:

• Push for More Frequent Updates: According to the survey results, over the next year the timing of software updates is also expected to shift. Only 6% of respondents currently update their software daily. However, 16% said that over the next year they've set daily releases as a target goal. The majority of respondents (69%) currently release software updates at least monthly, if not weekly.
• Time is a Critical Factor in Developing Quality Software: Over half of those surveyed (54%) ranked "time" as the most critical factor in achieving quality software faster, with "people" following closely behind with nearly half of the respondents (42%).
• Self-Service Access Increases Production: In order to efficiently produce quality software, having self-service access to test environments was nearly twice as important (43%) for developers as responsive IT (25%).
• DevOps is Influential: More than three quarters of respondents (81%) agree that DevOps impacts their ability to develop quality software faster. Reviews were mixed, though slightly more found DevOps made things easier (49%) versus harder (31%).
• Current Efforts Still Focused on Cloud and Infrastructure: While containers are on the roadmap for many, they aren't the first step in modernization for most enterprises. Currently customers are seeking improvement from Cloud (IaaS) solutions (58%), Infrastructure as Code (IaC, at 48%) and Continuous Integration/Delivery solutions (46%) at a much higher rate than containerization (25%).

"Two years ago, container technologies like Docker were largely considered to be the domain of Internet startups, and unusable for enterprise applications, now 75% of these IT leaders are using or planning to deploy them. That's a huge shift," said Dan Jones, director of product management at Skytap. "Much of this early usage is exploratory as large companies build their container skill set and determine which approach to take for updating legacy applications – evolve or rewrite. Containers are just coming into the spotlight as another member of the DevOps tool chain for accelerating application delivery."

Skytap's full Software Development 2015 Survey report is available here: www.skytap.com/research-center/2015survey/.

NOTE: Totals that add up to more than 100% are due to accepting multiple answers.

About Skytap, Inc.
Skytap provides Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) to transform the software development lifecycle and help customers deliver better software, faster. Today's enterprise is challenged to continuously deliver new customer-facing applications, while overcoming increasing change and complexity in IT infrastructures. Our customers use Skytap to manage, share, deploy and decommission on-demand environments that contain everything needed to collaborate at each phase of the SDLC, without unnecessary costs and project delays due to manual configuration and dependencies. Enterprise IT organizations maintain full visibility and cost control, while allowing dev and test teams to self-provision labs and share complex environments with ease, for a lasting boost to agile DevOps initiatives. To try Skytap and learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

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Contact:
Melissa Boggs
Barokas Public Relations
[email protected]
206-264-8220

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SOURCE Skytap, Inc.

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