By Paul Dix, co-founder and CTO, InfluxData

Developers Take The Reins in 2020 to Build Momentum Behind Open Source Software and Purpose-Built Databases

I believe the biggest enterprise trends in 2020 will be driven by developers that work directly on building applications and infrastructure. In the past five years, the number of solutions available for different use cases and business demands has grown exponentially, giving enterprise buyers more freedom of choice. Companies can now pick the best software to meet their specific needs from many different sources, rather than going to a single vendor to set up their entire infrastructure.

With more options to choose from, we are seeing the power over purchase decisions start to shift from CIOs and executives to developers on the front-line. This trend is already playing out with the increasing use of open source software (OSS). Developers tend to favor OSS because they can try it immediately on new projects without having to go through a long evaluation and purchase process. Developers also like the fact that OSS is transferrable to any company. When they take the time to develop expertise using an open source solution for their job, they can take that with them wherever they go next. If they've been working with proprietary software, they could have to learn an entirely different solution if their next company has a contract with a different vendor. In addition, developers get to know the products better than anyone else - understanding how they perform and contribute to specific business goals. The CIO is unlikely to uncover the most effective new solutions when programmers in the trenches are constantly testing out different technologies among a wide variety of options.

The rise of non-relational databases is another trend that has been led by front-line developers. The momentum behind specialized database management systems will continue to build as more programmers move away from the one-size-fits-all approach of SQL and leverage purpose-built databases to get the high performance needed for specific workloads. The database ranking site DB-Engines shows that non-relational databases are experiencing the fastest user growth, and developers are increasingly aware of which database systems do best with different data categories, such as document graph, key-value, object storage and time series.

CIOs and CTOs will continue to play important roles directing IT strategy in 2020, but the democratization of enterprise tech purchase decisions will continue to transform the tech industry. The continued growth of open source software and purpose-built databases are just two examples of a trend that will ripple across the entire software ecosystem.

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About the Author

Paul Dix is the creator of InfluxDB, the open source time series database, and the founder and CTO of InfluxData. An emerging database category, time series has been the fastest-growing segment of the database market for the past three years, built to manage the massive volumes of time-stamped data produced by IoT devices, applications, networks, containers and computers. Paul has helped build software for startups, large companies and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the series editor for Addison Wesley's Data & Analytics book and video series. Paul is the author of Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails which was published in 2010 by Addison Wesley. In 2009, he started the NYC Machine Learning Meetup, which now has over 7,000 members. Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University.