By Paul Porter, VP of Engineering and Travis Depuy, Product Evangelist at xMatters

2020 IT Ops & Developer Predictions: Low Code/No Code Reign, Docker and Kubernetes Challengers, CX a Priority for Technical Pros

In 2019 there have been critical advancements in the digital transformation of enterprises. IDC recently revealed that global digital transformation (DX) spending and innovation will directly account for over 50% of all IT spending by 2024-up from 31% in 2018. 

At xMatters, we've seen how a focus on the customer experience helps successful enterprises digitally transform and compete in the emerging "digital-first" marketplace. There's been a significant shift in who within an enterprise's technology organization is responsible for the customer experience. Just a few years ago, many would say ITOps professionals are primarily responsible. Today, businesses use customer experience to measure success; so product, development, and SRE teams have also taken on responsibility for delivering uninterrupted customer experiences. We believe this will continue in 2020.

Paul Porter, VP Sales Engineering at xMatters

Customer experience will be job #1 for technical pros, too.

There's no doubt about it, the task of continuously delivering a superior customer experience (CX) is going to expand beyond IT Operations groups. If you touch any part of the infrastructure on which the CX depends, you will shoulder some of the load. The writing is already on the wall. In the just-released Incident Management in the Age of Customer-Centricity report, 91.7% of the more than 300 DevOps, ITOps and business leaders surveyed said delivering a superior customer experience is a priority in their role. In 2020, regardless of whether your business card says "Developer," "ITOps" or "SRE," your performance will be judged in part of the quality of the customer experience.

Engineering becomes more prominent and SOAs finally mature.

As is already being observed in smaller organizations, in 2020, the subservience of incident management organizations to engineering organizations will spread to larger enterprises as well. Companies are increasingly automating ITIL and ITSM. Those professionals that are impacted will be redeployed to positions that create even greater business value. Relatedly, in 2020, organizations will become more proficient in delivering service oriented architectures (SOAs). While today there is still a lot of learning happening, moving into next year SOAs are going to become less a science project and more real world production, at scale. 

More microservices will equal a higher volume of customer degradations. 

As more organizations use microservices to benefit from the development agility and shorter time to application deployment they offer, we will see a greater number of incidents across the enterprise over the next year. This shouldn't be surprising because as with anything, the greater the number of moving parts, the more opportunity for something to go wrong. Incidents that occur within and between containers may have a more narrow impact; however, throughout 2020 they will degrade the customer experience nonetheless.

Travis Depuy, Product Evangelist at xMatters

Low code and no code will reign. 

Low code and no code user interfaces will continue to make major inroads among non-developers who are more focused on achieving an end result than they are on how it's done. By abstracting the technical layers of a software platform and presenting its features in a more easy-to-use, often drag-and-drop UI, users experience all the benefits more quickly, without having to be steeped in software languages and architectures. This is not to say the seasoned developer will be overlooked. Access to command line interfaces will still be available. In 2020 the majority will choose the low code solution, and this will be true whether on-premises or in the cloud, where abstraction will allow for microservices (containers and orchestration systems) to run across multiple clouds simultaneously. 

Docker and Kubernetes get company.

Increasingly, enterprise infrastructures will be broken into discrete components, moving further away from traditional monolithic architectures and applications. As they do so, today's leading containerization solutions are going to find they have more competition. In 2020, Docker will see more competition from the likes of rkt (pronounced "rocket") and CRI-O in production environments. Container orchestration platform leaders, i.e., Kubernetes, will also face rising competition from the likes of AWS Fargate and IronWorker. Companies want to differentiate themselves and their offerings more quickly. Adding containerization is going to become the norm, spurring greater competition to meet the demand and giving engineering teams more choice.

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