Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
On Driving Growth, Modernizing Modernization and Paying Off Debt: 5 Predictions for 2021
By Bob Quillin, Chief Ecosystem Officer,
vFunction
A turbulent year has given way to what we at
vFunction believe will be a more promising 2021 - a year that can turbocharge
future growth for companies willing to face some hard truths and get busy. As
has so often been the case, CIOs and IT teams will play a central role in what
comes next.
So what comes next?
1. The Agility
Imperative Explodes
Agility is defined as
the ability to move quickly and easily, the ability to think and understand
quickly. 2020 reinforced - in a big way - that agility is the big reason for
digital transformation - that we all needed to be ready to move, think, and
understand quickly - responding to unforeseen changes in our business (exhibit
A: COVID). Agility needs to be job one everywhere in an organization. That goes for businesses, to reach for
maximum business model agility moving forward, and for tech teams, driving
agility as a cre design principle across applications, infrastructure,
operations. In 2021, this will drive even more enterprises to cloud and cloud
native - which were built to deliver agility as a first principle. Those
organizations that were prepared for a virtual, digital world before 2020 were
uniquely prepared and positioned to survive and often grow in 2020 and now into
2021. Those that did not, are now clear
they need to double down on their modernization and digital transformation in
2021.
2. Focus on
Your Scale & Scalability Responsibility
Scale is often
thought of as something that helps you grow, expand, and react more quickly - a
corollary to agility, but core principle on its own. 2020 was a year where we
saw the need to scale up
and
down on a moment's notice - shut this down, move employees to home, turn this
back on - then off - then back on. Zoom, Inc. back in January of 2020 at Zoom
HQ in San Jose, was one of my last customer sales calls for Oracle Cloud. I
think of where they were back then, pre-COVID in the US but present in China
and clearly already starting to fester in the US. Zoom's infrastructure and
business between then and now is a master class in scalability. But other organizations
were in a scramble mode - scale this down, then scale something else back up -
then back down.
It was an
unprecedented testimonial for why organizations need to ramp up their Scale
& Scalability skills in 2021.
3. Technical
Debt - Bill Comes Due Now
Technical debt has
been piling up for years and the bill has now come due. Developers and
development teams have been delaying refactoring or modernizing legacy
applications and instead taking the easy, fast, or expeditious route - with
tech debt compounding year after year. So many legacy applications have dead
code layered on more dead code that no one wants to touch, for fear of what
"could" happen. The resulting apps have become increasingly difficult &
expensive to update, extend, and move quickly in case something unexpected
happens - enter 2020. So tech debt bit almost every company in
2020 - and slapped us all in the face. That goes for IT teams, dev teams,
product management, architects, and in 2021 CIOs and IT leaders need to pay
that bill.
4. Lift and
Shift Experiment Fails - Time to Refactor
2020 ushered in the
end of the "Lift and Shift Era." Lift
and shift was a quick fix that many IT organizations chose to pursue as a
stopgap, which essentially just resulted in even more technical debt piling up. Unacceptable! Why refactor or
rewrite your legacy applications when we can move them to the cloud - and defer
that work? So many reasons, and a perfect recipe for compounding tech debt. Now
here comes 2020 again.
What lift and shift
failed to do was address all the things listed above: agility, scale, tech
debt. To drive agility, increase scalability, and drain our tech debt - we need
to do the right thing - and that is to refactor these legacy applications into
cloud native apps. This should not be a surprise to anyone, but we now have the
spark, impetus, and the biggest catalyst in a generation to push these projects
forward. Too many factors are piling up here to keep doing what we've been
doing - it's time to refactor your monolithic apps in 2021.
5. Modernization
Gets Modern - Finally
Legacy spend in IT
still consumes 70-90% of CIO budgets, but revenue acceleration, improved
agility and faster time to market continue to be the top 3 goals for CIO's.
So CIOs and their
Java development teams are having to reassess their modernization initiatives
immediately, to look for ways to accelerate snail-pace modernization programs.
They are hungry for automation, for new AI, ML, and data science
innovations that can disrupt how
modernization has been done - which is low and slow - like smoking BBQ in Texas
where we go low and slow. Unfortunately, these apps aren't briskets, so it's
time to grill ‘em like hamburgers - break them up into smaller micro-briskets
and cook them fast and efficient. Seriously, in 2021 new, innovative technology
has arrived to modernize modernization and to accelerate microservice
refactoring. In 2021, application architects, developers, and CIOs can apply
modern tools and tech to modernize their Java legacy applications.
It's not difficult to see that the
through-line here can be summarized in one word: growth. Next year promises to
be pivotal in realizing what vFunction believes will be a years-long run of
innovation, refinement and growth.
##
About the Author
Bob Quillin is the Chief
Ecosystem Officer for vFunction, responsible for developer advocacy, marketing,
and cloud ecosystem engagement. Bob was previously Vice President of Developer
Relations for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Bob joined Oracle as part of
the StackEngine acquisition by Oracle in December 2015, where he was co-founder
and CEO. StackEngine was an early cloud native pioneer with a platform for
developers and devops teams to build, orchestrate, and scale enterprise-grade
container apps. Bob is a serial entrepreneur and was previously CEO of
Austin-based cloud monitoring SaaS startup CopperEgg (acquired by IDERA in
2013) and has held executive and startup leadership roles at Hyper9, nLayers,
EMC, and VMware.