IT Rollercoaster Turns into a Ski Jump

Paul Nashawaty on why IT organizations need to make the leap to cloud platform development.

App dev velocity and cloud opportunity is deconstructing IT as nothing in the past has ever done. When it’s over, some IT organizations may own nothing other than a lot of responsibility. Someone, after all, will still need to make sure all the parts, wherever they reside, work well and are robust, agile, secure and compliant. But business is already moving on.

For example, 3Q14 data from the recently released International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker shows that almost a third of combined worldwide server, disk storage and Ethernet switch infrastructure spending came from cloud deployments.

Cloud Security Concerns are Fading

A recent article on CIO.com underscored this point. “Concerns about [cloud] security and overall cost continue to fade as businesses face the upgrade costs of replacing data centers,” Joab Jackson noted.

Citing additional IDC data, the article suggests that by 2017 organizations will spend more than half of their budgets on cloud computing, and the cloud computing software market will be worth more than $75 billion.

Step Away From the Roller Coaster Ride of Locked-in Tech

Everyone knows information technology moves fast. Trends come and go with blinding speed as markets and vendors rise and fall – a proverbial roller coaster ride, for sure. Well, it’s going to get better – or worse – depending on your perspective. Prepare for launch as a group of trends vault IT into a truly amazing new world.

In a press release, Richard Villars, Vice President, Datacenter and Cloud Research at IDC said:

“Public and private clouds represent the 'compute factories' and 'digital content depots' of the Third Platform era.”

As Business Applications Today noted early last year, the “Third Platform” is an increasingly common term in the industry that IDC defines in terms of social technologies, mobile devices, big data analytics and cloud services. The Third Platform is also more casually referred to as “SMAC.”

As these technologies increasingly blur, and then erase, the lines between home and work, uptime and down time, SMAC environments encourage flexibility of form and freedom from device type. The comfortable confines of desktops and servers break apart, and information—and work space—moves freely from device to cloud, country-to-country, application to application.

Proving the Promise of IT

At Progress, we see this new wave as an opportunity for IT to finally and fully live up to its promise – providing ubiquitous intelligence and enormous new capabilities to every part of the business. With all of this going on, it makes sense to radically simplify the development, deployment and management of business applications and provide on-premise or cloud deployment options, while offering standards-based connectivity across data sources or devices. And, by the way, it needs to be less complex and easier to accomplish than ever before.

It turns out that’s exactly what we’ve been focusing on with fresh capabilities like our Modulus platform, which is offered as a hosted service but can also be deployed by enterprises in public, private and hybrid clouds. Modulus is just one way to supercharge your development and deployment initiatives. Judging by the thinking coming from analysts, and our own customer and partner ecosystem, we think we are moving in the right direction.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments as we test out the slopes. Follow me on Twitter, or contact us now to set up an appointment.