Some argue that IT operations doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all about innovation in today’s fast moving digital world, so IT teams must focus their efforts on software development. This is the impression we get from many pundits and technology companies nowadays. “Developers, developers, developers” has been the battle cry of more than one IT vendor executive. If IT operations is mentioned, it’s often equated to ‘keeping the lights on’ in a dismissive and sometimes derogatory manner. Even when speaking of DevOps, the emphasis is typically on ‘Dev’, with the ‘Ops’ piece regarded as a necessary evil, there purely to serve the needs of upstream developers. Some have then been heard to propose ‘NoOps’ as the ultimate goal. Our aim in this paper is to re-balance the discussion. We’ll do this by walking you through our latest research on how the IT operations game is changing. Central to this are the results of a study (see Appendix A for sample distribution and methodology) in which we gathered responses from over 400 European IT professionals on the evolution of demands and challenges, and how Ops teams in medium and large organisations are responding. As we shall see, those taking a smart and modern approach are not just keeping the lights on, but enabling services that directly help their businesses compete in the market.