The year of developer productivity

By Tucker Callaway, CEO, LogDNA

This year has been unlike any other in many ways, and yet it feels very familiar. From a business perspective, it feels a little bit like 2001 when the dot com bubble burst, and a little bit like 2008 when the Great Recession decimated businesses across the globe. In each of these dark periods, I've watched great businesses and individuals respond with intention, agility, and grit.

Prediction 1: Efficiency will be the new business tech imperative

As in 2001 and 2008, I see businesses today taking an honest look at the foundations they're built on. Companies don't have the luxury of doing things how they've always been done and must make calculated decisions at every level of the organization. Optimizing for efficiency may include ditching legacy enterprise products and adopting lightweight SaaS solutions, moving to the cloud, or rethinking their processes so that they can shorten their development cycle and bring new products to market faster. Tools that enable businesses to become more efficient will thrive in 2021.

Prediction 2: Products will be designed for DevOps workflows

There's a difference between taking superficial steps towards modernization and truly transforming. Although companies have been incrementally improving how their developers, operations, and security teams work together, many of them haven't fully embraced a DevOps culture. We hear customers say they need to optimize their SRE headcount but can't afford to have their developers slow down as a result of it. This forces organizations to make their developers more efficient within their existing workflows. For example, companies boost efficiency by enabling developers to manage their own logs, removing the need to wait for an SRE to provide the information needed to troubleshoot an application. In 2021, we're going to see an increase in products designed with the developer experience in mind that integrate with their existing workflows.

Prediction 3: Innovation will pull us through

This year, forward-thinking companies focused on what matters most -- the people, the facts, and the future. To survive in 2021, they must continue to test ideas, validate their returns, and be willing to pivot when things aren't working. For large incumbents, it's very challenging to be this agile, which creates a massive opportunity for the next generation of tech companies to be disruptive. Organizations that come through the challenges of 2020 will be the ones who met necessity with innovation. To reduce costs they'll replace legacy tools with modern SaaS or Open Source solutions, to ship products faster they'll rethink their change management processes, and to move faster they'll break down silos between teams. This level of innovation is the only way that large companies can compete with startups born in 2021.

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About the Author

Tucker Callaway is the Chief Executive Officer of LogDNA. Tucker has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software, with an emphasis on developer and DevOps tools. He is responsible for driving LogDNA's growth across all revenue streams and creating the foundation for future revenue streams and go-to-market strategies. Tucker joined LogDNA in January, 2020 as President and CRO and took the torch as CEO six months later.

Prior to LogDNA, Tucker served as CRO of Sauce Labs and Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Chef. He holds a BA in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.