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ORLANDO, Fla.–Progress Software predicts the end is nigh for the “Application Ice Age,” as technology has now reached a tipping point and currently belongs to anyone and everyone.
Indeed, at its Progress Exchange 2014 conference here, Progress officials said the underlying technology behind everyday apps has become ubiquitous and as a result, everyone is becoming empowered by today’s affordable, high-powered devices.
Moreover, as enterprises look to build their business on top of this landscape, Progress predicts six major technology trends that will shape the year ahead.
“In 2015, organizations will face unique application development challenges,” said John Goodson, chief product and technology officer at Progress Software, in a statement. “The face of IT is changing, with more business-line personnel contributing to development projects, which means seasoned IT professionals will be tasked with more migration and maintenance requests–from UI design to data integration to load testing. Both IT and business users will have a meaningful impact on application development, and they will work more closely together. The winners will choose the right tools and identify the most collaborative and efficient approach to delivering purpose-built applications that are easily consumed and provide the necessary integration and analytics to drive the business forward.”
The first Progress prediction is that citizen developers will unite and IT will respond. IT can’t keep up and it’s not their fault, Progress said. Businesses are demanding more and the consumerization of IT has raised user expectations.
The latest trend to address the issue is citizen developers or the bring-your-own-apps (BYOA) generation — technically adept business users who understand the business and have enough technical experience to build apps or to effectively participate in the development process. IT will start responding to this trend and leading organizations will help promote this concept by enabling citizen developers to be more self-sufficient in building complex business applications without exacerbating shadow IT, Progress said.
The company’s second prediction is that “Construction Begins on the Internet of Things Bridge.”
Progress officials said organizations will start to deliver on the hype of Internet of things (IoT) across a wide array of industries. Initial steps will be taken to assimilate IoT processing into internal and customer facing applications, including increased use of IoT friendly languages like Node.js. While complete ROI success stories will be limited in the short term, organizations that don’t begin planning or modifying their development processes risk falling behind more forward-thinking competitors.
The third Progress prediction for 2015 is that developers will get a one-two punch with low-code environments plus agile development.
Indeed, Progress said that while organizations strive to leverage enterprise architecture concepts to best manage their application efforts, silos often exist between different development efforts. Even in today’s cloud-based world, organizations often commit to one-platform approach.
Moving forward, leading organizations will react to the diversity of applications and their mix of developer skill sets by leveraging a combination of development approaches that include both low-code (high-productivity) and agile (high-control). This will allow different skill sets to be applied in an effective and collaborative fashion without the constraints of a one-platform approach, Progress said.
Progress Predicts 2015 Breakthroughs for Citizen Developers, IoT, Node.js
The fourth Progress prediction is that Node.js will supercharge the adoption of JavaScript. JavaScript’s rapid growth will continue and will be buoyed by the success of Node.js on the server side, along with the power of MongoDB, the company said.
Another key driver will be the adoption of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions that enable Node.js developers to focus on developing applications instead of worrying about the deployment, scaling, management and monitoring of Node.js and MongoDB applications. This will parallel the rise of DevOps as it automates key processes and enables small development projects to take off while also providing the infrastructure for large, mission-critical applications, Progress said. One of the major indicators of this trend will be the release of Node.js 1.0.
With its belief in the emerging importance of Node.js, Progress in June acquired Modulus, provider of a PaaS for hosting, deploying, scaling and monitoring data-intensive, real-time applications using Node.js and MongoDB.
The Modulus Node.js and MongoDB cloud platform allows users to create real-time mobile, software-as-a-service (SaaS), social and big data apps that run across distributed devices and can seamlessly handle floods of data requests with built-in performance monitoring and analytics.
The fifth Progress Software prediction for 2015 is that the enterprise will start drinking from “data ponds.” Progress said 2015 will bring the next step in the evolution of data usage. As an increasing number of data streams feed the so-called “data ponds,” the enterprise will take their newfound ability to integrate these data sources and start building business applications that transform the data into actionable insight. This will not only increase the value of that data but it will also incentivize businesses to ensure all of their business critical data is integrated and flowing into the same pond, Progress said.
And the sixth Progress prediction is that tech savvy consumers will travel in the retail HOV lane of the transaction superhighway. Progress officials said 2015 will be the year that tech-savvy consumers say goodbye to standing in long lines. The proliferation of online ordering and in-store pickup will continue but the trend will become more widespread as the user experience becomes more streamlined and reliable. Retailers will also start exploring the crossroads of the Internet of things and predictive analytics to enable “predictive selling,” the company said.
For example, the connected home will enable certain retailers to break down even more additional road blocks and offer consumers products they may have not realized they needed, such as milk or water filters. With an alert to the consumer’s phone followed by home delivery, the only action needed from the consumer was to open the alert and press buy, the company said.