Top IT trends to embark on a decade of openness and collaboration

By Marshal Correia

A decade gone by, the Indian IT industry has seen several waves earmarking the age of technology disruption to transformation. It was a decade where ‘digital transformation’ was the buzzword as it swept across public and private sectors, helping businesses evolve, compete and succeed. In fact, the last decade saw historic Government projects like Aadhaar and GST rolled out, all alluding to the digital leap the nation took.

As we enter the new decade, the question really is how businesses adopt new capabilities that will help them be agile, customer centric, innovative and cost sensitive at the same time. Also, constant changes enabled by digital transformation not only impacts operation models and IT sourcing strategies, but also internal and legacy processes. Therefore, in such a dynamic scenario the industry is looking at an open IT architecture to stay ahead of the competition and achieve the next frontier - digital leadership. Here are the top trends that is poised to drive true value for businesses, helping them raise the bar in the new decade:

Adoption of open, hybrid multi-cloud approach
While the deployment of hybrid and multi cloud will gain traction across industries, organizations will need a hybrid cloud strategy that empowers their developers. As organizations digitize their business to enhance customer experiences, organizations need a platform that allows developers to seamlessly design and deploy applications that are responsive to the business needs of today and tomorrow. As a result, industries like banking, telco, manufacturing will adopt hybrid cloud based on open standards as open technology gives them freedom and flexibility to choose from the ever-growing palette of development tools such as programming languages, databases and web servers — to build and test their applications, without worrying about the infrastructure..

Container and kubernetes adoption will gain popularity
As applications are becoming more complex in nature, container adoption is expected to grow across all phases of the application life cycle (development, testing and production). Often applications are written on a developer system which is different from the production environment, leading to issues during the release. Containers help developers and organizations by creating a consistent development environment to rapidly develop and deliver cloud-native applications that can run anywhere. Containers are self-contained environments that allow developers to package and isolate applications from an operating system making them easily portable between different environments.

Containers are lightweight with high density allowing many of them to be hosted inside the same virtual machine or physical server making data centre more efficient and cost-effective. Also, the trend towards multi-cloud means businesses will need to move data and applications across various clouds. As a result, using containers on kubernetes to build cloud-native applications will be the right decision.

Transformation from monolithic to microservices
Before the digital revolution, many applications that are fundamental for business operations and revenue growth were not designed keeping digital experience in mind. These applications were built as large, multifunctional, tightly coupled monoliths, where various components were combined into a single bucket, regardless of the technology environment. For example, an e-commerce application would generally include the web user interface, product catalogs, shopping cart, product recommendations, product ratings and reviews, payment system, and other components needed to make purchases on the e-commerce website — all in one. As business priorities are evolving, enterprises continue to identify the changes and new features required for their customers. As agility, flexibility and security are becoming crucial for organisations to stay competitive, it becomes imperative for businesses to modernize their monolithic apps by decomposing them into tiny micro applications which can be packaged and deployed independently into the cloud.

Eliminating automation silos
Businesses today are reeling with a myriad of platforms, systems, processes, applications and people. Most of the organizations are struggling to manage all of this in the most seamless manner, therefore leading to a fragmented and siloed environment. In such an environment, IT has a huge role to play by collaborating with multiple teams and reducing the time to resolve issues by implementing a DevOps culture. DevOps speeds up innovation by accelerating the process of development to deployment. At its core, DevOps relies on automating routine operational tasks and standardizing environments across an app’s lifecycle. For instance, organizations would need to leverage Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) practices, so that changes to their applications can be made quickly and reliably, as per the new and changing business needs. Integration of DevOps mindset will help mitigate siloes and increase collaboration and efficiency.

Gartner predicts that Indian IT spending will touch $94 billion in 2020, of which it is expected that software spending will account for about 17 per cent and all of this primarily led by growth in consumer devices. Various businesses and industries are at different levels in their digital transformation journey as a result they will have different priorities moving forward. But, they all share the objective of achieving business outcomes and customer centricity through digital readiness. Regardless of industry or size, every business needs to consider technologies, teams, and processes that together form an open culture and tighter collaboration.

(Marshal Correia is Managing Director, Red Hat India.)