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Nearly five million developers worldwide are currently using the cloud as a development platform, and a another 4.1 million expect to be using it in the next six months, according to Evans Data’s Global Development and Demographic Study.
The study, which uses secondary research, proprietary population algorithms and survey data from the company’s Global Development survey, estimated that an additional 5.2 million expect to use cloud technology in the next seven to 12 months or later. Only 4.8 million have no plans at all for using cloud technology.
“There are many reasons why the cloud is becoming a popular development platform. Chief among them are concerns about flexibility,” Michael Rasalan, director of research at Evans Data, told eWEEK. “Organizations move to the cloud because cloud technologies make it easy for them to scale up, scale down, work with numerous vendors without worrying about lock-in, and do so with a lower total cost, than when building up and supporting an on-premises development infrastructure from scratch. As developers become more confident that cloud solutions are reliable and secure, the argument for embracing the cloud as a development environment only gets easier.”
He explained that right now, the regions most involved with developing in the cloud are located in the Asia-Pacific, with a lot of this investment driven by India and China, though he pointed out the United States also continues to be a large consumer of cloud services.
While Latin America has the lowest number of developers currently using cloud technology, it also has the most optimistic outlook for increasing cloud usage.
Among developers who are using the cloud today, the largest plurality are independent software vendors (ISVs), followed by developers who work on corporate software for use within their own companies.
The report noted that those who work on software for sale to private clients, such as value- added resellers (VARs), systems integrators, or consultants, have only a somewhat smaller number of developers in the cloud than corporate developers.
“We predict that cloud will continue to be important in the future, most definitely because there is a confluence of technologies that complement, enable and drive each other’s adoption: mobile, and big data are part of this group,” Rasalan said. “Because cloud services allow organizations to scale up rather easily without needing to build out an on-premises development environment, smaller organizations should, and will, be a factor for more cloud adoption.”