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What’s been happening in the DevOps sector over the last 3 months?
Our Buyer Intelligence platform has been continuously tracking first-party buyer signals across our database, bringing you timely insights in the form of our latest cybersecurity intent report.
Our mission? To help tech vendors keep their demand generation strategies tightly aligned to real market demand.
Published quarterly as part of our category-specific intent reports, our latest blog takes a deeper dive into the shifts most likely to impact your DevOps campaigns — and how you can action these insights to drive success.
Ready to level up your strategy? Let's go...
This quarter vs last quarter: what’s changed?
Where Q3 research centred on toolchain choice and deployment failures, Q4 2025 intent shows buyers focusing on why delivery is slow, where friction exists across pipelines, and how DevOps performs once it's live.
Buyer behaviour increasingly reflects a focus on lead time, integration bottlenecks, automation gaps, and post-implementation metrics, signalling that teams are under pressure to prove delivery impact at scale rather than justify DevOps as a concept.
4 key shifts shaping Q1 2026:
Speed and reliability have overtaken tooling as the core concern
Pain points have shifted from toolchain complexity to slow deployment times and integration challenges, signalling frustration with end-to-end delivery velocity rather than individual tools.
Automation gaps are now a shared constraint across buyer groups
Skill gaps remain relevant, but the lack of automation is emerging as the bigger blocker to consistency and scalability.
Evaluation behaviour is moving from vendor choice to practice optimisation
Buyers are researching best practices, performance optimisation, and cost management alongside tooling.
Decision-stage research now extends into execution and measurement
Implementation roadmaps, KPIs, and post-deployment review are increasingly part of late-stage evaluation.
These shifts point to a market that is operationalising DevOps, not just experimenting with it. Content that focuses purely on tools or features is losing relevance as buyers look for proof, benchmarks, and execution guidance.
Market snapshot
Here's what our latest DevOps intent report reveals about the current market:
- Interest is strongest in the software development, financial services, and telecommunications industries.
- Traction is highest among enterprises with 1,000–5,000+ employees.
- Software engineer, DevOps engineer, and product management functions show the greatest engagement with cybersecurity topics.
From insight to impact, here's how to apply our insight into your campaigns:
Targeting and segmentation action points:
1. Segment enterprise organisations in surging industries and geos into priority tiers.
2. Within these tiers, filter intent signals among trending job functions to inform topic clusters.
Why?
Segmenting your market into priority tiers helps to focus go-to-market teams on the accounts most likely to convert. Further segmentation techniques such as topic clusters opens up opportunities to tightly align content to specific audience segments. The result? Relevancy at scale.
Research patterns at account level
5 hot topics dominating research in the DevOps space (over the last 3 months), are:- Containerisation – Buyers are prioritising standardised, portable runtime environments to improve deployment consistency and reduce environment-related failures across teams.
- CI/CD automation – Persistent friction in release cycles is driving focus on automating build, test, and deployment stages to improve speed without sacrificing reliability.
- Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) – Teams are looking to codify infrastructure to reduce manual intervention, improve repeatability, and support scalable DevOps operations.
- Cloud infrastructure – Research reflects growing attention on how underlying cloud environments are designed, governed, and optimised to support DevOps performance at scale.
- Monitoring and observability – Buyers are increasingly focused on gaining end-to-end visibility across distributed systems to diagnose issues faster, reduce MTTR, and maintain performance as environments scale.
The topic showing the greatest decline in popularity is:
- Collaboration tools with a 18% MoM decrease
What do these insights mean for your content strategy?
To keep your strategy aligned to market demand, we recommend:
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Show how containerisation, CI/CD automation, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) reduce delivery friction in real environments, using metrics such as lead time, deployment frequency, and MTTR.
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Address automation and integration challenges through CI/CD pipelines and IaC workflows, rather than relying on isolated tool recommendations.
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Position cloud infrastructure and monitoring and observability as foundational enablers of security, scalability, and performance, not bolt-on considerations.
Pro tip: Use AI/NLP tools (topic modelling, entity extraction, semantic clustering) to audit your content library against competitor coverage. Flag underserved subtopics and build differentiated assets where demand is growing fastest.
Buyer group analysis
For DevOps buyers, the pressure is no longer theoretical. As platforms sprawl and pipelines multiply, teams are being judged on how quickly they can ship, how reliably they can recover, and how consistently DevOps holds up under real-world scale. Our report shows how the emphasis on these factors shifts by role and seniority.
What does this mean for your persona development?
Tailoring content to buyer role nuances is critical for engagement and conversion. Here's how you can translate these insights into accurate personas.
Persona A: Influencers and researchers (such as software engineers and DevOps engineers)
- Concerns: slow deployment times, integration challenges, and lack of automation, reflecting day-to-day friction in delivery workflows.
- Content preferences: they want practical guidance, best practices, and examples they can test or adapt within their own teams.
Persona B: Mid‑level decision makers (such as DevOps managers and team leads)
- Concerns: toolchain complexity, deployment failures, and visibility gaps, often tied to accountability for team performance.
- Content preferences: they want comparative frameworks, operational benchmarks, and clarity on how improvements will be implemented and measured.
Persona C: Senior budget holders (CTOs, CIOs)
- Concerns: slow deployment times, integration challenges, and automation gaps, viewed through the lens of cost, risk, and scalability.
- Content preferences: they want business impact narratives, ROI models, and evidence that DevOps investments improve reliability and reduce incident cost.
Action point: Create a persona matrix aligned to job functions (e.g. platform engineer vs. VP of Engineering). Map their pain points against the funnel stages they are most likely to participate in. For example, engineers and SREs may engage early (implementation and best‑practice content), while senior engineering leaders will respond to BOFU tools like ROI models and rollout risk frameworks.
Recommended reading: How to map content to the new buyer journey
3 DevOps demand gen plays:
Our AI Buyer Intelligence platform is able to interrogate research patterns by buyer stage. Here's how to action these insights into a full-funnel demand gen strategy aligned to real buyer behaviour:
Tip: Keep the exact keyword phrases in page titles, H2s, alt text, and internal links so performance teams can tie content to intent spikes and prioritise syndication/remarketing accordingly.
Ready to activate these insights?
Why not try our demand gen planning framework? It’s a collection of templates and planning aids, including:
- Buyer group intent mapping
- Multichannel campaign blueprint
- Funnel‑aligned strategy shortcuts
Everything you need to turn category intent insights into campaigns that convert.
