What is DevOps?

When looking for a good definition for DevOps, I liked what Wikipedia had for the definition of the term:

"DevOps is a clipped compound of "development" and "operations". It is a culture, movement or a practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes."

Considering that this is such a new process, or movement, the techniques and expertise are limited. With that being said, there have been years of expertise gained through another term, named software delivery. Years ago, there were essentially two main providers of this type of tool and software delivery; Microsoft had their SMS server and Altiris also had an orchestration tool—both seemed to have limited practice to deploy applications and run scripts on the client's desktop for general management.

There was always trepidation when running these tools on servers...