The 2010 IBM Tech Trends Survey, conducted by IBM DeveloperWorks with 2000 developers, throws up some interesting trends in the coming years. The survey highlights the growing importance of mobile platforms and cloud computing among the developers, a clear indication that cloud computing is very well beyond the inflated peaks resulting from marketing campaigns. If anyone wants to find the pulse of what is happening in IT, it is important to check with the developers. This survey highlights some interesting trends developing from the developers point of view.
Some of the trends predicted by this survey are
- A whopping 90% of developers think that cloud computing will dominate the traditional on-premise computing by 2015
- 55% of the surveyed developers think that application development on mobile platforms will surpass the development on the traditional computing platforms by 2015
- More than 40% of the developers think that Mobile will be one of the dominant trends in 2011, one-third consider cloud computing and/or SaaS to be important next year and around 25% consider Social Media and Business Analytics to be important
- For the question on which new industry developers will pick to expand their IT careers based on the best available opportunity, more than 30% of them answered that they will choose Telecom. This is an interesting side trend to note knowing how Alcatel-Lucent is luring developers through an attractive platform and interesting acquisitions like Programmable Web
Some of these trends are clearly visible in my interactions with developers. In fact, if the recent iPad meme is any indication, the importance of mobile platforms in the enterprise context can be well understood. The developers’ attraction towards Android platform further advances this trend. Clearly, the next 3-4 years are going to change the enterprise IT landscape so drastically that it may be tough for some of us to believe that IT existed how it is existing today. Interesting times are ahead and it is time for organizations to realize that Cloud Computing and Mobile platforms are crucial to any successful enterprise strategy. If you are a developer, I would love to hear your thoughts on where we are headed in the short term. Please feel free to get in touch with me through this site or by using the comments section below.
Related articles
- Cloud, Mobile Come Up Big in IBM Survey of 2,000 IT Pros (devx.com)
- IBM Adds Developer Tools, Resources for Expected Boom in Cloud, Mobile Application Development (IT Channel Planet)
Borrowed time – that’s what any developer who isn’t embracing the cloud is living on. Frankly, if cloud-enabled applications are not on a developer’s roadmap, in around two to four years’ time their technology solutions will NOT survive.
While the important factors when building applications remain constant: cost, functionality, security, integration and reliability, we’re finding that our developer (mainly independent software vendors) community’s end customers want to explore the cloud and understand how they can benefit from it. With more and more customers are adopting cloud-based services, this accelerating trend is not a good omen for developers whose businesses rely on the sale of on-premise applications.
But a question we’re hearing a lot is: what are ISVs supposed to do in the meantime while facing a dilemma of maintaining profitability with on-premise applications, while embracing the cloud?
For most ISVs, the majority of their revenues come from their existing ‘on-premise’ applications and customer demand for cloud-enabled offerings leaves them with something of a dilemma. They need to find a way to offer cloud-based and mobile solutions without compromising their existing on-premise products. However, it seems there is no way for ISVs to avoid building and managing what are effectively independent products for cloud and on-premise customers.
What are they supposed to do – for the cloud and mobile devices, either they build an entirely new Cloud-based product from scratch or integrate with a Cloud platform such as Force.com (again with a separate code base).
This is the kind of problem we’ve been thinking about at Magic Software (http://www.magicsoftware.com) and that is why we’ve designed uniPaaS to be the best and simplest toolset for ISVs who want to build applications that can be deployed both to the Cloud, on-premise and mobile from a single code base.
It is interesting to note that Developers, who are possibly the largest driving force in the IT workforce, are recognizing and embracing the transition.
hi editor,
As a profession, I am Java/J2EE developer; and also I do freelance for PHP. As a programmer/developer; how the cloud computing will going to change my career. The cloud computing will be adopted by only large/medium/small scale companies Or also going to effect the freelancing/individual developers as well? I would like to upgrade my skills to sustain in cloud computing generation. Please suggest me how cloud computing is going to effect/improve my current job;
Thanks in advance.
Venu
Epslon Technologies
Hyderabad