DevOps is still a relatively new concept in many organizations, particularly those that have kept their developers and other operations teams siloed for years as a general rule. But DevOps and continuous delivery are steadily catching on, even in larger enterprises, as organizations realize the massive benefits an integrated development process can reap.

Electric Cloud (News - Alert) specializes in helping their customers deliver their software products quicker and more efficiently, and they achieve this by automating DevOps in a way that makes sense for each organization. TMC (News - Alert) Group Editorial Director Erik Linask recently got a chance to discuss the burgeoning area of DevOps with Sam Fell, product and marketing executive at Electric Cloud, at the recent Editors Day Santa Clara 2015.

“DevOps, quite plainly, is a cultural shift in the way people work together,” said Fell. “It’s really bringing those two teams (development and operations) together.” And that process includes all the players in the middle of the development chain like testing and Q/A departments as well as finance. “Really, DevOps is about helping companies transform themselves into an organization that can respond much more quickly to customer demand.”

Automating the DevOps process is the next logical step to achieving a quicker and more efficient time to market, and the company’s Electric Flows solution does just that. Released in October, ElectricFlow is designed specifically to help companies speed up their application releases by streamlining and automating software deliveries. The solution replaces tedious manual work like maintaining checklists and spreadsheets and replaces those processes with a unified view across traditional and continuous delivery style application releases. The result is increased reliability, transparency and predictability for developers and operations teams across the board while lowering risk and speeding up time to market.

“We have customers that have gone from three-month cycles between software releases to being able to release software every 10 minutes,” said Fell of the success of Electric Cloud’s offering. Ultimately, he added, it comes down to organizations being willing and ready to let go of labor-intensive manual processes prone to human error and embracing automation.

“Making that mental transition as a business, to be able to say, ‘As long as there’s zero risk involved in consuming that new application, why wouldn’t I want to get value from releasing an update?’ ” said Fell. Fortunately, a large number of organizations of all sizes are becoming open to making that transition.

Check out the full interview below: