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Multi-cloud, blockchain and more sophisticated PaaS tools are three trends expected to reshape app development practices in 2018. Is your team ready for the change? – App development
Experts expect 2018 to be a year of change for cloud app development, as trends like DevOps, hybrid cloud and blockchain continue to take off.
Here’s a closer look at these and other emerging trends, what they’ll mean for enterprise app development teams and the potential challenges and risks they pose.
In 2018, vendors will attempt to improve their platform as a service (PaaS) offerings to speed up application development and support DevOps workflows. Leading cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, will continue to roll out tooling to automatically provision PaaS-like capabilities via containers and Kubernetes. In addition, CIOs and app development teams will start to take advantage of higher-level service mesh tools, such as Istio and Linkerd, to recreate the benefits of monolithic apps within a collection of microservices.
However, these more sophisticated cloud tools come with potential vendor lock-in risks, said David Bartoletti, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. For example, AWS provides a set of tools to automatically provision containers with its Elastic Container Service, but those tools won’t necessarily help developers who need to move apps to private infrastructure or manage apps that span cloud platforms. Continue reading
Application Architectures: for many organizations, the existing architecture, and systems that support customer- or employee-facing apps are outdated and cannot be scaled or built upon as quickly as required by today’s realities—especially when it comes to
supporting the demands of mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Companies may want to develop new apps, create new customer experiences or expose data to partners or third-party developers, but tremendous improvements to infrastructure, process, management, connectivity, and security are needed to support that plan. This problem is exacerbated when working with partners that use different protocols and databases, making it difficult to connect efficiently.
A new digital transformation layer is needed to help benefit from investments in mobile and IoT, integrate new acquisitions or optimize the partner supply chain. Continue reading
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) requires many components and many different tools. In this piece, we examine five ways ERP is evolving to make your implementation easier.
Most businesses that have moved beyond the startup phase are likely looking into acquiring enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Whether you’re trying to get a handle on how your customer relationship management (CRM) efforts are impacting your bottom line, or if you’re tracking revenue from point-of-sale (POS) to research & development (R&D), ERP can be an asset to your company.
Although ERP is one of the older segments of the business software landscape, ERP vendors are consistently evolving to become more powerful, more affordable, and less complex. Mega-vendors such as Oracle and SAP have a major share of the ERP market, but newer companies are nudging their way into the space with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options that are changing the game. In this piece, we’ll examine the most important trends to expect from the ERP industry in 2017. Continue reading
There’s a lot of information about DevOps out there, making it hard to determine exactly what it means. However, there are still key principles you can stick to in order to achieve success through DevOps. Here are four questions that, according to our experts, you should be asking when thinking about your DevOps strategy.
DevOps tasks should be clearly connected to the applications they support, and businesses should, in turn, identify the business processes those applications support. This lets organizations map out what is referred to as a zone of business impact for each DevOps process, and it’s a fundamental part of DevOps documentation. That way, as expert Tom Nolle points out in his piece on the connection between DevOps and enterprise architecture, the impact any DevOps strategy has on business processes — even if the impact is simply a risk of disruption — can be planned for ahead of time. This will also ensure that development teams understand the business process lifecycle or even lifecycles, that their application may impact.
Implementing continuous delivery means that changes to your application are created and deployed on an ongoing basis. If your apps are not being delivered continuously, it’s important to start thinking about building a continuous delivery pipeline for them by making sure that everyone involved in app development and delivery is working together. According to expert Chris Tozzi in his piece on applying DevOps principles to app modernization, part of this means ensuring you have the infrastructure tools in place to roll out changes quickly from development to production. Continue reading
Building cloud web services with microservices provide benefits, such as scalability, and allows enterprise apps to access new features and tools. Follow these steps to success.-Cloud Web Services 
Amazon and Microsoft, the two leading public cloud providers, both offer several dozen web services, each representing a useful application feature or tool that users can invoke through an API. On the surface, these offerings look a lot like microservices. Deeper into implementation, the similarities grow.
A microservice, like a cloud web services, isn’t a part of a single application but instead provides a general resource for applications. Several different applications and many users can access a microservice at the same time — just as they could a cloud web service. A microservice also has the ability to scale in response to load and replace itself if its underlying resources fail, also like a cloud web service.
The only problem with using microservices to build your own cloud web services is that it’s not always clear what gives microservices the desirable properties above. Cloud architects may fail to deploy microservices the right way, and thereby reduce microservices’ value in providing cloud web service features. That’s why planning microservice deployment is critical. Continue reading
Keep up with the latest advancements in mobile application development, such as AI and big data integration, and see which trends IT and developers are tracking in the enterprise.- Mobile app development
Just like the trees through the four seasons, mobile application developers are used to changing. This new season has brought three trends that are quickly becoming essential to keep track of for organizations both big and small.
One constant in mobile application development is that nothing is constant for long. Emerging technology has adapted to the modern mobile world and is geared toward advancing mobile app development at a rapid pace.
The enterprise is looking for applications that can work across multiple platforms and still provide an excellent UI. Developers are now using artificial intelligence (AI) to produce and integrate big data, enhancing the user experience and application integration into workplaces previously untouched.
The driving force behind the latest mobile app development trends is user experience (UX). If employees cannot do their work on the application due to an incompatible user interface or continuous lags, productivity halts. The quicker IT and developers embrace these top mobile app development trends and implement them, the sooner organizations can get ahead of the game. Continue reading
Cloud computing trend remains a hot topic in the business world, and the trend is likely to continue according to Cisco’s latest Global Cloud index forecast, which covers 2013 through 2018. Cloud data centers, private cloud solutions,
infrastructure as a service, as well as a platform as a service are all hot, thanks to the numerous advantages of cloud computing.
For this article, the purpose is to explore some of the major trends in cloud computing that you should prepare to adapt to your business in 2018.
The world has undergone a rapid transformation in the last few years as far as communication and business transactions are concerned. Today, people largely use mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to access the internet, inquire about businesses, purchase items, and much more. That’s when IoT came into play, rising above the use of mobile devices to accomplish more tasks.
Gartner Research predicts the number of IoT devices in the world to be at least 20 billion by 2020. You know what that means? Continue reading
If you own a business, you need to answer this important question: Does your company have a website? If it doesn’t, it ought to. Naturally, online businesses require websites for marketing and selling products or services by definition,
but even local brick-and-mortar business needs to be discoverable via the web. Word of mouth only gets you so far in this internet-centric age. These days, people discover new businesses—even local business—via Bing, Google, and Yahoo, search engines that make it incredibly simple to find companies’ products, operational hours, and prices. If your business doesn’t appear in the search results, especially on the first page, it’ll be difficult for potential clients and customers to find you. In other words, no website, no money. You do not want that. Of course, web hosting isn’t just for businesses. You may want to host a personal website for many reasons.
Either way, the first step in building your online presence is finding a web host, the company that will store your website’s files on its servers and delivers them to your readers’ and customers’ browsers. Web hosting services offer varying amounts of monthly data transfers, storage, email, and other features. Even how you pay (month-to-month Continue reading
Financial Technology has been around virtually as long as the financial services industry itself. But since the economic meltdown of 2008, a new breed of disruptors has displaced traditional e-commerce providers with more efficient services.
When you use PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Wallet or simply your credit card to make an online purchase, you the consumer, the e-commerce retailer and the banks behind the money exchange are using FinTech.
When Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade or Fidelity Investments purchase stocks and the banks settle the securities transactions, that’s FinTech.
And when you go online to find the best mortgage rates for that dream home or to refinance the one you’re in, that’s FinTech. Continue reading
Whether you’re a business looking to consolidate processes or looking to reduce overhead, getting the right ERP system is crucial. Find the best ERP software for you.
ERP systems come in many different forms, so it is important to find the best ERP software to help you achieve your business goals and optimize your systems and processes. Since ERP is one of the most difficult systems to implement because of its end-to-end impact on corporate systems and operations, the success of your ERP implementation is as important as the ERP system itself.
Not every company is the same. Choosing the best ERP software isn’t just a matter of looking at the features and offerings of different vendors. It’s a matter of looking at those features and seeing how they best fit your company.
While every ERP software vendor has essentially the same functions, each one caters to a certain industry and company types. Here are several common ERP use case scenarios in which you might find yourself, as well as the products that might help you resolve issues and achieve goals. Continue reading