New Research Shows that Companies Implementing a DevOps Strategy for Salesforce Report Significant Return on Investment, Upwards of $5 Million

CHICAGO, Oct. 31, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Copado, a leading native DevOps platform for Salesforce, today released the State of Salesforce DevOps Report, which identifies and benchmarks how the most sophisticated companies use DevOps best practices to manage Salesforce at scale. The independent report, sponsored by Copado and executed and analyzed by Beagle Research, is based on thousands of data points collected from over 200 global Salesforce customers using DevOps to accelerate and improve the speed and quality of their implementations. It provides a new way of measuring the innovation performance customers are experiencing on the Salesforce Cloud.

Inspired by the Accelerate State of DevOps Report, Copado and Beagle analyzed performance across Salesforce teams in terms of the dual goals of innovation velocity and release quality and security. Using the four metrics of lead time for change, deployment frequency, change failure rate and mean time to recovery, the report categorized respondents into four performance profiles that can be used to identify and measure the characteristics of both high and low performance. These four metrics drove positive organizational performance and business outcomes of Digital Transformation projects on the Salesforce platform, confirming that it is possible to optimize for stability without sacrificing speed.

In particular, the report found that:

• 12% of organizations were Elite Performers
• 23% were High Performers
• 40% were Medium Performers
• 7% were Low Performers

Key takeaways from the State of Salesforce DevOps report include:

More than 35% of top performers cited more than $1 million in ROI; 17% reported greater than $5 million: One of the most striking results of the survey was the clear business impact of DevOps when combined with the Salesforce platform. The highest performing companies are building a DevOps strategy around Salesforce to maximize their returns.

Salesforce implementations are far bigger now than ever before: Over half the survey was companies that support over 5,000 users and 22% support more than 10,000 users. Almost 16% had more than 100 members on their delivery team and over 75% had delivery teams of 10 or more, including admins, developers, architects and system integrators.

Nearly 60% of respondents support more than 5 production orgs, with 12% supporting more than 10 production orgs. Each of these production orgs generally has many sandboxes and development orgs. This points to massive challenges in managing, deploying and synchronizing metadata and data across orgs.

More than 40% of teams supported Salesforce on behalf of 8 or more business units; only 8% reported running Salesforce for a single business unit. Managing the needs of different business units leads to additional challenges in managing and deploying the Salesforce metadata.

The size of the delivery team is the #1 factor affecting the throughput of innovation:
Research found that when measured against the number of delivery team members, the size of the team negatively impacted performance. Delivery teams of 10 or less were more likely to reach Elite performance. No teams with more than 100 contributors reached that level and were the most likely to be low performers. Smaller teams outperformed the largest teams, yet the average size of delivery teams is growing. Teams with more than 10 contributors were four times more likely to agree that non-Salesforce teams have more mature practices for managing the development lifecycle.

Elite performers were 173% more likely to integrate changes at least daily: Integrating developer code changes daily is a hallmark of continuous integration, reducing the complexity of merges and allowing team members to refactor and keep the code base more maintainable. Practices such as version control are widespread, and Elite performers were five times more likely to automate all of their deployments.

80% of larger Elite organizations used Salesforce-specific commercial tools to aid in their development lifecycle: While many smaller teams relied exclusively on generic DevOps tools or tools built in-house, none of the larger teams of Elite performers did so.

"Every year, thousands of companies spend millions of dollars on Salesforce as the foundation of their digital transformation strategy," said Ted Elliott, chief executive officer for Copado. "The report shows aligning Salesforce with a DevOps strategy will maximize that investment and drive real business benefits. Companies who pursue a three-layered strategy that balances the organization of the team, establishment of end to end CI/CD processes, all running on an integrated technology platform outperform the rest."

Businesses wanting to understand how they fare against both Salesforce and industry-standard metrics for development velocity, quality and security can receive a DevOps assessment from Copado. The company will be offering these free evaluations during Dreamforce 2019, taking place in San Francisco, November 19-22.

Methodology
Beagle Research surveyed over 200 executives, managers, and members of Salesforce delivery teams to learn about their development lifecycles. Conducted in September 2019, the survey included companies of all sizes with an emphasis on enterprise companies with over 10,000 employees. The goal was to identify and understand the capabilities and practices that lead to excellence in innovation delivery and drive real business results among the leading Salesforce customers. The analysis was done on the Tableau Analytics platform including data visualization, cross tab analysis, and core BI.

Additional Resources
State of Salesforce DevOps Report: https://copado.com/state-of-salesforce-devops-report/
DevOps Assessment schedule: https://copado.com/dreamforce-2019/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/copado-solutions-s.l/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CopadoSolutions

About Copado
Founded in 2013, Copado is a leading DevOps platform for Salesforce. For enterprises wanting to accelerate their Salesforce deployments, Copado simplifies the release process, increases developer productivity and maximizes return on investment. The platform is comprised of Agile Planning, Release Management and Compliance & Testing. Backed by Insight Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, Copado counts more than 100 enterprises as customers, including Fair Trade, MassMutual, Shell and Vlocity. With more than 7,500 installations, Copado has received the top rating of 100 percent positive feedback on Salesforce AppExchange. More information can be found at: https://www.copado.com/

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SOURCE Copado