Everyone will tell you how DevOps will save you money, how Continuous Delivery decreases costs, and how Agile Development avoids costly rework. But nobody is talking about how it actually INCREASES revenue. Well, us Daticals are big fans on improving both top line and bottom line numbers, and I’ll share with you just how we view software releases from a financial perspective.

Consider this: companies that sell pants require inventory to sell. For example, if you want to purchase a pair of pants from a store, you expect the store to have your size. Of course the store doesn’t know who will buy which size, so they guess and purchase jeans ahead of time. That’s called inventory.

Now, just like you might not pay cash for the jeans but instead put it on a credit card, large retailers can rely on lines of credit to purchase inventory. But, there is risk. What if they purchase a bunch of size 30 x 42 pants? They will have to sell those odd sizes at a loss, or even worse, just throw them out and eat the cost.

The same thing happens with your release cycles. The longer your release cycle is, the more cash you have tied up in development, QA, and operations. This is because until you release the software, you will not realize any return on your investment. If your release cycle is LONG your potential revenue is tied up that entire time, while you suffer “death from a thousand cuts” as you continue to bleed out cash in the form of salaries and infrastructure expenses. That’s called opportunity cost. 

We don’t like opportunity cost here at Datical, so we embrace Agile development and Continuous Delivery, focusing on releasing new features and fixes on a two-week cadence.  This way we don’t have to wait an entire year to discuss new developments with prospects.  Our conversations are constantly refreshed by incremental advances in the product.  What’s even better, those conversations fuel the product backlog with features we know customers actually want.  It’s a virtuous cycle.

OK, say that I’ve convinced you that DevOps and Continuous Delivery help unlock revenue faster.  You’re chomping at the bit to shorten your release cycles and automate your deployment process.  Now, once you start getting speed in your application delivery and testing organizations, it will become apparent to you that database schema changes are the next bottleneck. Until you resolve that log jam, you will be leaving money on the table AND incurring unnecessary costs.

That’s why we released Datical DB, to handle that last mile of Continuous Delivery for the Database. On top of that, we have a Rules Engine that enforces your corporate, technical, and regularity standards automatically .

NOTE: The idea of long release cycles equating to unnecessary inventory came from our good buddy, Nick Parker, from uShip. He’s pretty cool and throws even cooler parties.