2017 has been a banner year for developers, particularly those who have successfully adopted DevOps in their organization. Driven by increased customer demands and the arrival of new automation technologies, the trend was important enough for research firm IDC to conduct an entire FutureScape conversation around the topic.
We watched the presentation and found the following highlights salient to possible industry changes:
- Artificial Intelligence and DevOps Have Arrived: According to IDC analysts, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning will become the fastest growing segments of software development by the end of 2018. By 2021, 90% of organizations will be incorporating cognitive, AI, and machine learning into new enterprise apps. For development teams, this means the faster development, testing, and deployment of technology solutions.
- Waterfall Gives Way to Cloud: IDC’s second prediction believes that cloud functions will gradually transition to the mainstream, becoming less proprietary in the process, which must happen to sustain growth. According to their analysts, 80% of Fortune 1000 companies will conduct at least one routine task using cloud functions by 2021. For organizations still using traditional development methods, this trend should be of worry.
- Security Leads: Development without integrated security and compliance will fail, as security-led development will be a priority for 90% of orgs by 2020, a shift created by the data and privacy breaches over the past few years. Organizations who include security in their strategy will be the winners in trust and revenue, far outpacing those who choose not to.
- Standardization is On the Way: In the area of development technologies, IDC expects development tools based on open source software (OSS) and polyglot environments and multiplatform support will lead to an increase in language agnosticism and gravitation to a core set of 3–5 best of breed languages by 2021. That said, IDC also expects commercial support for OSS dev environments to remain key. For all organizations adopting DevOps, this is a call for appropriate re-training so that no developers are left behind.
What Does This Mean?
As you’ll read in our DevOps guide and checklist below, adoption within organizations is tough and requires ample leadership buy-in, employee culture, and focus on innovation. With many changes on the horizon, it’s absolutely critical for everyone to work together towards a common goal. Whether you’re on the beginning areas of your DevOps journey and exploring solutions or in the midst of implementation, reach out to one of our experts at sales@perficient.com for a conversation today.
