Application Development & Deployment

In order to assess IT spending priorities over the next 12-18 months, ESG recently surveyed 633 IT professionals representing midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations in North America and Western Europe. All respondents were personally responsible for or familiar with their organizations’ 2015 IT spending as well as their 2016 IT budget and spending plans at either an entire organization level or at a business unit/division/branch level.

As part of my research planning for 2016, I sat down with ESG VP John McKnight to talk about application development and deployment predictions for 2016. Containers have been receiving a lot of attention in the last 18 months. Given the concerns that exist over container security and manageability I would have bet against this prediction at the end of 2015.

As part of my research planning for 2016, I sat down with ESG VP John McKnight to talk about application development and deployment predictions for 2016. PaaS and DevOps have both been around for a decade.

As part of ESG’s application development and deployment (AD&D) research, this survey was primarily focused on understanding interest in platform-as-a-service (PaaS). There were 4 specific objectives in fielding this survey: quantify PaaS adoption; understand the level of satisfaction with PaaS and why; identify what PaaS features are most important to IT managers and developers; and examine what languages, frameworks, and development environments are most preferred by developers.

This report will examine the fourth objective: what languages are in use by developers who are either Paas users or evaluators. Other reports will examine PaaS adoption, satisfaction, and feature preference.

ESG surveyed 326 IT professionals and application developers representing predominantly midmarket enterprise (100 to 999 employees) and large enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations in North America. The sample included 176 application developers and 150 IT managers. The language use questions in this survey were only administered to application developers.

Modern application development and deployment is built around the principles of virtualization, agility, scalability, and manageability.

In this ESG Video Blog, ESG Principal Analyst Stephen Hendrick discusses ESG Research on platform-as-a-service trends. In Part 5, Stephen discusses application deployment features.

Red Hat and Black Duck Software announced in October 2015 that they are collaborating around the delivery of secure, compliance, and certified container images. We see this as a win-win for both vendors. Black Duck gains validation of its automated software solution and visibility across Red Hat’s customer base and ISV ecosystem. Red Hat gains an industrial-strength way to certify open source Docker images from a security, compliance, and operational standpoint. As a next step, both vendors need to move beyond a simple collaboration and create a more seamless way for ISVs, developers, and end-user enterprises to produce and consume images that are trusted, compliant, and certified from an operational standpoint.

IBM recently announced the IBM Bluemix Garage Method, a full lifecycle approach to developing, deploying, and managing applications. The Bluemix Garage Method is a modern comprehensive approach to the software development lifecycle (SDLC) that employs agile methods, is environment independent, and emphasizes the importance of great design and continuous process improvement. This method has been well vetted within IBM but it will be important for IBM to demonstrate adoption across a broad range of enterprises, especially those with a significant investment in legacy IT assets.

In this ESG Video Capsule, ESG Principal Analyst Stephen Hendrick discusses ESG Research on platform-as-a-service trends. In Part 4, Stephen discusses application development features.

In this ESG Video Capsule series, ESG Principal Analyst Stephen Hendrick discusses the DevOps transformation within IT. Part 4 of the series covers the future of DevOps.

In this ESG Video Capsule series, ESG Principal Analyst Stephen Hendrick discusses the DevOps transformation within IT. Part 3 of the series covers how DevOps is changing IT.

In the wake of the 4th annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) user conference, AWS has finally emerged as a leader in cloud infrastructure and platform services. AWS now has over 1 million active customers and year-over-year growth in EC2 instances, data transfer, and database use that is close to 100% as of 2015 Q2.

IBM acquired SoftLayer in June 2013 and released Bluemix in June 2014. From a market timing standpoint, IBM qualifies as a late entrant. However, the real question is, “Does this timing work for or against IBM?” Data from ESG’s recent PaaS usage and satisfaction survey shows that IBM’s market timing has worked well. IBM’s efforts to generate visibility for SoftLayer and Bluemix coincided with a surge of market interest in PaaS. Consequently, IBM was able to gain considerable ground in a remarkably short period of time. This brief examines where IBM is today with Bluemix and helps explain why IBM is a “go to” vendor for enterprises of all sizes.

Red Hat has taken an important first step in defining a compelling architecture for supporting IoT needs and explaining how its product portfolio enables enterprises and partners to craft high-value IoT applications. This brief presents a simplified IoT architectural reference model developed by ESG and then discusses Red Hat’s alignment with this model. The Red Hat solution is very comprehensive and involves nearly the entire Red Hat portfolio. The breadth and depth of IoT use cases suggests that a comprehensive portfolio is desirable because it ensures that the right selection of products is available to meet the needs of the solution.

A significant part of any enterprise mobility strategy begins with mobile apps that are designed, developed, and deployed in the cloud. Developers are consuming these services from the cloud and not letting IT stand in their way. However, every time a mobile application lands on the public cloud, it adds a potential risk to VMware's long term business model, since it is an application that is more likely to not be running on VMware infrastructure and has likely landed on Amazon AWS, Miicrosoft Azure, or some other developer-friendly and mobile-app-friendly cloud platform.