At the start of 2017, Godel highlighted the technological trends that it believed would drive continued acceleration of the digitisation of industries at breakneck pace. As we come to the end of a busy first quarter we look at our predictions and see if they were correct.

We stated that the three main areas which would continue to disrupt vertical industries and drive software development this year were agile, digitisation/cloud, and business intelligence. These are the areas which are also driving the gap in technological skills – especially software development – which means companies are struggling to find the right people to help them deliver the right technological infrastructure for growth, leading them to look for partners like Godel to deliver the resources required.

Increased adoption of agile methodologies

Agile development has seen wide scale adoption thanks to its ability to provide flexibility to adapt fast to change, to granulate projects thus reducing complexities, and to bring products to market much faster by deploying large projects in much smaller components. Agile deconstructs a project into digestible phases and considers every iteration of the project that brings it to a successful conclusion. There is clear accountability and responsibility among project owners and working with a nearshore development partner like Godel means that there is the right skill set and resource commitment from the team to be able to achieve success. In 2016 we saw demand for agile development teams grow enormously, as evidenced in the 11th State of Agile report which found 94% of organisations practicing agile in some manner, and so far in 2017 that growth has continued.

Migrating to the cloud, amongst other digital transformation initiatives

We’ve reached a critical point in the evolution of cloud infrastructure where digital transformation in organisations is no longer just a project or an initiative for certain areas of the business to undertake. In the next few years, the cloud will be at the core of every organisation’s delivery to customers making them ‘digitally native’ businesses. It will be central to what the business does and how it operates, and every growing company, no matter how old or in which industry it operates – will have digital delivery at its heart. The biggest benefit the cloud brings is the ability for firms to be able to scale flexibly and fast. It provides levels of automation that could never be achieved with traditional legacy systems, and in 2016 we saw the cloud move towards highly automated system development and delivery. Many of Godel’s customers have applications which are mission critical to their business but are not cloud ready – preventing them from taking advantage of the benefits the cloud delivers: speed of performance, availability and a quality customer service experience for clients. This year we have seen organisations begin to address the challenge head on by re-engineering monolithic applications and moving them to the cloud.

Business-wide business intelligence

As businesses grow they collect more and more data exponentially, creating lakes of data. It stands to reason that the information we accumulate must be put to good use in terms of analysis to feed back into the business. In 2017 there is demand for fast analysis of real-time data across all business departments. The data we collect today is out of date tomorrow and less relevant in terms of the service we deliver back to customers – so analytics and business intelligence must be ‘always on’ – real-time data streams that can deliver modelling capabilities. Business intelligence and data is driving much of the need for development skills in 2017 – at Godel we have seen a tenfold increase in the requirement for these skills.

So far, so good with our predictions, but we have one to add to the mix which is already gathering pace in 2017.

Microservices

Cloud adoption success for businesses with legacy systems in place can only be achieved by breaking apart these systems into microservices, each of which can be deployed independently, but via open APIs can communicate with ease, interconnecting the services. Many growing organisations have monolithic applications critical to their business which must be reengineered in order to transfer them to the cloud. We have seen the need for microservices accelerate so far this year, believe this will be a key trend throughout the rest of 2017.