The term 'DevOps' first debuted as a hashtag for the DevOpsDays conference in Ghent in 2009. However, just because it was obscure then doesn’t excuse the lamentable ignorance about it, which has been revealed in Rackspace’s research published today.

The headlines from the report partially demonstrate why the UK is so far behind the USA in hi-tech development. Our DevOps ‘talent’ might as well be still using flint tools as far as the pace of US technology development is concerned.

The survey, carried out by Vanson Bourne for Rackspace, reveals that nearly a third (32 percent) of the 250 UK respondents were not familiar with the concept of DevOps and of those that were familiar with it, only four in ten have actually implemented DevOps practices. This puts the UK significantly behind the US (66 percent adoption) and Australia (50 percent).

RackSpace gives a neat explanation of what DevOps is: “…it is a set of principles that drive greater collaboration between different groups responsible for taking a product or service to market, usually starting with Development and Operations. It builds on strong principles of automation and agile development to create a more end-to-end view of how you ship new value to your customers.”

The survey shows that, of a sample of 700 IT decision makers in the UK, USA and Australia the following were familiar with DevOps.

Despite DevOps’ novelty, over half of respondents (55 percent) have already implemented DevOps practices or approaches and 31 percent are planning to within the next three years. The US and Australia are significantly ahead of the UK in this regard, just 40 percent of UK companies have implemented DevOps as opposed to 66 percent in the US and 50 percent in Australia. Equally, more UK companies aren’t planning to adopt DevOps at all (25 percent), compared to the US (7 percent) and Australia (14 percent).

The survey shows that US companies are by far the most mature in terms of the depth and breadth of DevOps practices implemented – from team integration through to all elements of automation. UK companies, in contrast, are far more likely to have focused on some of the more ‘technical’ aspects of DevOps, rather than the cultural aspects of team integration and goal alignment.

This points to a stark difference in the way software development is approached between the two countries, possibly driven by the explosion of technology businesses in Silicon Valley, with the UK still catching up.

While the cloud is not necessary to the existence of DevOps it provides an important change of norms. What previously had to be done by physically moving and touching hardware is no longer needed in a virtual world. Hence the importance of the methodology.

As Donald Guy said In a recent blog about the need for a cultural fit to both teams: “They often don’t especially get along. On top of the diametric opposition of their goals, there is sometimes a mutual lack of appreciation. The devs think that they are doing the real hard work: writing the code, and the ops guys are just IT tech graduates there to do manual labor and make sure the company doesn’t have to pay Geek Squad.

"Ops guys meanwhile understand that the whole f#!$ing enterprise rests squarely on their shouldersÔÇè—ÔÇèthat without them literally nothing would work: that the devs could write all the fancy, broken software they want and then throw it in the garbage, and that might be just as good cause at least it wouldn’t set that on fire.”

The other cultural problem exposed by this survey is the financial one. As Silicon Valley continues to sprint ahead of the UK, leaving Tech City sitting behind in the sand pit, we need to look at the clues provided in this survey to the financial, cultural and leadership issues that lead to the USA grabbing all the opportunities and the most of the UK IT industry clutching at leftovers from the table.