Benchmark Report Reveals Critical Quantitative Metrics for Enterprises Transforming into Software-Driven Organizations

Pivotal Software, Inc. (NYSE: PVTL), a cloud-native platform company, today launched its inaugural Built to Adapt Benchmark (The Benchmark), a commissioned research report by Longitude Research Ltd, a Financial Times Company, and Ovum Ltd that provides a quantitative framework of measurable indicators designed to gauge how well an organization builds software that delivers business value. Since August 2017, Pivotal has used The Benchmark to assess the software development proficiency of organizations across five industries and six countries.

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The Benchmark indicators are designed to focus on how to build great software that delivers business value. Each indicator is organized across five business outcomes that define a modern software company: Speed, Stability, Scalability, Security, and Savings. Across the world, organizations in every sector and market are changing their businesses due to software innovations—from German car manufacturing, to US retail, to Japanese telecoms. To keep pace with competition, the world’s leading businesses are learning to become software-driven organizations themselves: rapidly accelerating developer productivity, porting applications to the cloud, automating infrastructure, and innovating with new software.

While each Benchmark indicator is organized across five business outcomes, some indicators are applicable to multiple categories. For example, budget flexibility to easily initiate new projects can impact Savings and Speed. And the optimal investment ratio of developing versus maintaining software can determine an organization’s ability to Scale, as well as reduce technical debt to unlock Savings. Effective team integrations to operate in small balanced teams in order to take an idea on a Monday and build working software by Friday can unlock Speed, as well as Savings and Scalability.

Built to Adapt Benchmark Framework

Built on Pivotal’s experience working with world-leading disruptors and established businesses, the Built to Adapt Benchmark aims to provide a new framework for assessing and discussing the performance of a given company, market or sector on their transformation into a software-driven future.

Pivotal partnered with Longitude and Ovum to assess organizations in six markets—the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Japan and Singapore and across five industries—Banking, Insurance, Automotive, Retail, and Telecommunications. The administered survey was designed based on widely accepted standards of best practice in software development. In addition, research showed that there are five business outcomes that define an effective modern software company, which is measured with a set of quantitative indicators.

Methodology

The research consisted of 1,659 information technologists (IT) across chief information officers, chief security officers, chief technology officers, and executive IT leaders who work in the aforementioned industries.

The sampling frame is designed so that results are comparable by sector or by country. The margin of error for all sectors is 5.4% at the 95% confidence level except for Automotive for which the margin of error is 6.2%—this is because of the lack of automotive industry businesses in Australia and Singapore reduced the overall sample. The margin of error by country ranges from 5.2% in the United States to 7.3% in Australia and 7.3% in Singapore at the 95% confidence level.

Insights & Data

The results of the commissioned research report, based on a global survey of 1,659 respondents, indicate that:

Speed:

• US organizations polled are most likely to get continuous or daily feedback from customers (51%) compared with 43% in Germany, 38% in the UK, 19% in Australia, 16% in Japan, and 12% in Singapore.
• 55% of US organizations are deploying code on a continuous, hourly, or daily basis. That fares well against the global average of around 39%, but well behind Germany, where 72% of organizations are deploying on a continuous, hourly, or daily basis.

Stability:

• US organizations report approximately 22% of their software launches or upgrades are delayed due to defects.

Scalability:

• 45% of applications run by US organizations have been built or refactored to run in the cloud, compared with 31% in Germany, 38% in Australia, and 37% in both Japan and Singapore.
• Only in the US are half of organizations (51%) spending more on developing new and/or refactoring legacy software than they are on maintaining existing IT systems. In the UK and Germany, just 43% and 44%, respectively, of organizations are managing the same.
• US organizations offer a mixed picture on scalability.
  • More than half of US organizations stated scaling their infrastructure to accommodate a doubling of workloads would require minimal structural changes (55%), compared with an average of 39% across all markets.
  • However, one-third of those organizations say doing so would result in extremely high levels of service disruption (32%), compared with an average of 17% across other markets.

Security:

• 33% of US organizations reported development of new applications being paused, or existing applications suspended, due to security concerns 11 or more times in the past year, compared with only 12% in Germany or 14% in the UK.

Savings:

• US IT budgets are among the least flexible, with half of organizations (50%) saying budgets are fully committed at the start of the year, making it difficult to initiate projects mid-cycle.
• US organizations are leading the way on automation, with more organizations than anywhere else:
  • Performance monitoring is mostly or fully automated at 70% US organizations, compared with an average of 54% across all markets.
  • Infrastructure provisioning is mostly or fully automated at 58% US organizations, compared with an average of 38% across all markets.
  • Software testing is fully or mostly automated at 56% US organizations, compared with an average of 43% across all markets.

• US software teams have an average of more than 6 software developers to every operations/QA team member—the highest of any country—compared with a global average of 5.
• US developers are spending more time (42%) than elsewhere writing code for new products and features, as opposed to carrying out maintenance or troubleshooting old code.

Quotes

"Pivotal believes that businesses across every industry need to innovate at the speed of startups to succeed in a world increasingly defined by software. As a result, fast organizations are best positioned to develop and deploy software that successfully responds to demanding and evolving consumer expectations," said Edward Hieatt, SVP of Services and Customer Success, Pivotal. "With the Benchmark, the world’s largest enterprises now have a quantitative framework of measurable indicators that can be used gauge how well their organization builds software that delivers business value to their customers.”

"Today, the world’s most valuable and influential brands are software companies; and the future of every company and industry will certainly be digital. As the pressure to transform mounts, a growing number of business and technology leaders struggle with holistically measuring their progress towards transforming into a software company,” said, James Watson, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Longitude Research Ltd. "As CEOs are embracing software to revamp their playbooks, value chains, and business model, the Benchmark serves as a comprehensive framework to quantitatively measure their progress from incumbent to digital disruptor.”

About Pivotal

Pivotal combines our cloud-native platform, developer tools, and unique methodology to help the world’s largest companies transform the way they build and run their most important applications. Our technology is used by Global 2000 companies to achieve strategic advantages in software development and IT operations. Learn more at pivotal.io.

About Longitude

Longitude is a specialist thought leadership research agency, and is majority owned by the Financial Times newspaper. In 2016, it was recognized as one of the Leap 100, the UK’s fastest-growing companies according to City AM and Mishcon de Reya. In both 2017 and 2018, it was chosen as one of the FT1000, the 1000 fastest-growing companies in Europe. Longitude has more than 50 multinational clients spanning sectors including professional services, financial services, technology, and industrials and manufacturing.

About Ovum

Ovum is a market-leading research and consulting firm focused on helping digital service providers and their vendor partners thrive in the connected digital economy. Through its 150 analysts worldwide, it offers expert analysis and strategic insight across the IT, telecoms, and media industries. Founded in 1985, Ovum has one of the most experienced analyst teams in the industry and is a respected source of guidance for technology business leaders, CIOs, vendors, service providers, and regulators looking for comprehensive, accurate, and insightful market data, research, and consulting. With 23 offices across six continents, Ovum offers a truly global perspective on technology and media markets and provides thousands of clients with insight including workflow tools, forecasts, surveys, market assessments, technology audits, and opinion. Ovum is part of the Business Intelligence Division of Informa plc, a leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events group listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Source: Pivotal Investor Relations

©2018 Pivotal Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Pivotal is a trademark and/or registered trademark of Pivotal Software, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

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