I recently completed the above Microsoft/edX course (full details of the course are here) with a final mark of 95%.

Why is DevOps important? Huge increases in efficiency for tech companies

#DevOps is the art and science of trying to automate/streamline as much as possible many stages (i.e. humans are still involved in the writing of code) of producing and deploying software.

A formal definition is:

DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users. You cannot buy DevOps and install it. DevOps is not just automation or infrastructure as code. DevOps is people following a process enabled by products to deliver value to end users. (Donovan Brown, Microsoft DevOps Program Manager).

DevOps involves things like running automated tests before code is deployed, storing infrastructure and compliance requirements as code (thus increasing reproducibility when having to deploy to different environments/machines, and increasing confidence by regulators that organisations are less likely to break compliance via human error). 

Just tech companies? All companies will need to transition into tech companies to take advantage of big data and AI

With the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, experts like Bernard Marr say that it is essential for companies in every industry to transition into technology companies if they want to stay ahead of the pack. Adopting a DevOps approach for technology companies can lead to huge reductions in flexibility and hence time to market.  According to a 2017 report by Puppet Labs  (now called just Puppet), high-performing I T organisations experience three times lower change failure rates and recover 24 times faster than their lower-performing peers.  They also deploy 200 times more frequently.

Note: if you are contemplating doing this course, please note that (as often happens with edX courses) the instructions for the labs (exercises) seem to be quite a bit out of date, since both Microsoft's Azure platform and Visual Studio software have advanced quite a bit since they seem to have been written.