Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Jamie MacQuarrie, co-founder and managing partner at Appivo
The Evolution of DevOps, Life after MDM, and One Other Thing
Nobody has a crystal ball (mine is acrylic) but I can take an educated guess at what 2018 will bring. There will be a lot of talk about AR & VR, blockchain, foreign hacking and so on. Who knows what will come out of those discussions - probably nothing that will impact the day-to-day of IT Pros outside of those specific fields. A few more practical predictions for 2018 are: BizDevOps, Life after MDM, and App Platforms.
BizDevOps isn't new, but 2018 is the year we'll see it start to pick up mainstream adoption. It won't be a "hey we're doing this now," but rather a natural step in the evolution of DevOps. Trends and technology come and go, but the last 15+ years have taught us that aligning with and incorporating the business is always good practice. For IT projects that originate from the business, incorporating business users into the process (establishing a habit of continuous feedback and improvement) is a great way to ensure that the focus stays on delivering business value. Ultimately, with the maturation of low-code platforms, IT may want to enable more technical business users to create their own lightweight apps. This will be critical for some IT teams in order to relieve pressure on understaffed app dev groups and reduce the growing backlog of app requests.
2018 is also the year that we find out what these pocket supercomputers can really do. With most companies getting a handle on MDM/EMM, we can start putting our phones to work with new and innovative productivity tools. Is the device secure? Yes. Now what? Many companies have already built sizable app backlogs, so 2018 will focus on speed of delivery and the delivery of real business value. There's a definite tie-in with BizDevOps which, when implemented correctly, has the potential to accelerate the whole process.
Speaking of accelerating delivery, most enterprise companies face a skill gap when it comes to writing cloud-native applications thanks to the the deep pockets of the big tech giants (ever try to hire someone away from Google?). However, 2018 is when we'll start to see a proliferation of apps that truly leverage cloud services. Most succesful cloud projects are built on the ruins of failed attempts. So fail fast or hire someone with experience of failing somewhere else. Better yet, look to next-gen low-code and M/RAD platforms to jumpstart your cloud-native projects.
To summarize, important trends to watch in 2018 are BizDevOps, mobile apps and cloud-native architectures. These three topics combine behind a single theme: IT will bring business-aligned value online faster than ever. It's not an option. The world is moving faster than ever and it's not enough to merely keep up. When it comes to technology, IT needs to lead.
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About the Author
Jamie MacQuarrie is the co-founder of and a managing partner at Appivo - the smart platform for digital transformation. Jamie's career started in the dot-com era which sparked his passion for startups and building innovative business solutions. Most of his career has focused on harnessing new technologies to benefit Fortune 500 companies. Technologies and tech trends of interest include the rise of Java, the automated management of distributed computing environments, the adoption of virtualization and the evolution of cloud computing, industrial internet-of-things (IoT) solutions, cloud-native applications and serverless computing. Jamie's work has received a number of industry recognitions leading to speaking opportunities at various conferences, online and in print.
Jamie spent the five years prior to Appivo working on Cloud Computing solutions at Cisco and newScale (acquired by Cisco). Prior to that he was at BMC Software, Washington Mutual Bank and Marimba; earning ITIL certifications along the way. Jamie holds a degree in Industrial Engineering & Engineering Management from Stanford University. Jamie can be contacted @jmacquarrie on Twitter and through www.appivo.com.