Dive Brief:
- Salesforce made its DevOps Center available to the general public Thursday following months under beta testing. The product aims to accelerate development and shorten release cycles by making it easier to build, test and deploy solutions collaboratively.
- For CIOs, Salesforce said the product could be used to understand and unlock customer data in real-time and at scale, as well as a tool to give other C-suite members transparency into innovation efforts while maintaining security controls.
- The center is designed to work for hybrid or fusion teams through a low-code approach, according to a Salesforce blog post.
Dive Insight:
Salesforce’s DevOps Center facilitates better transparency of the stages of app development, including apps built with low-code, aiding teams in one of the biggest challenge areas for low-code adoption: governance.
Low-code tools enable the distributed development of capabilities, which in turn can cause duplicate applications, shadow IT and security issues.
Many businesses have begun to implement frameworks or guides for citizen development in order to curb misuse. Others have created fusion teams that allow workers outside of IT to solve problems under the guidance of tech professionals, ensuring that best practices and security standards are in place.
Guardrails and more transparency are essential, especially as low code usage grows. The worldwide market for low-code development is expected to reach nearly $27 billion in 2023, a 20% increase from this year’s $20.5 billion in spending, according to Gartner research published last week.
“Now, low-code tools are more manageable because they are cloud-based, and so there’s cloud-based controls, access controls, ability to manage and monitor environments, what’s being used or not and who the users are, so there’s much more visibility that IT has,” Jason Wong, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said.
“A lot of [vendors] are adding these capabilities, recognizing that this is a need as these tools become more integrated into the IT stack and not just like a standalone, departmental type of app,” Wong said.
In its beta stages, DevOps Center had nearly 13,000 active users and a deployment timeline average of every nine minutes, according to the blog post. Salesforce users can install the product at no additional cost if they are a part of the Professional, Enterprise or Unlimited Edition organization packages.
