“Where do you put your value as a company?” asked Sacha Labourey, CEO of DevOps automation platform maker CloudBees, speaking with The New Stack.  “Where do you think your differentiation will come from?  I’ll be a bit sarcastic here, because I have great regard for the IT Ops people, but a company is not going to become a leader of the market because it’s just ten times better at installing Linux and switches.  A company is going to be ten times better in the market at differentiating features, value, through software.  That comes from the development.”

Here, Labourey represents a very powerful argument:  Too many of the processes that constitute IT operations are undistinguished, providing minimal business value to the company.  Automation absorbs those processes, enabling individuals to be reassigned to more value-intensive roles.  That’s assuming, of course, that their bosses haven’t watched that video where their heads pop into nothingness.