Application development professionals need to become "lean and mean" to emerge from the current economic recession, according to Forrester Research.
In a report titled The Top Five Changes For Application Development In 2010, Forrester details five key changes with the overall goal of becoming "lean and mean so you'll be ready to move as the Great Recession wanes, thus leaving no doubt of your development team's contribution to improving business efficiency and driving increased revenue."
Embrace cloud as an early-stage platform
Cloud offerings will continue to expand and evolve and companies should look at time-to-market, scale, and comfortable entry points into the new way of consuming computing resources. Users need to figure out where cloud fits into their overall strategy and take immediate advantage of the services available.
Follow in the footsteps of the Web giants and Web start-ups
Start-ups and Web-oriented companies tend to be more agile than their enterprise counterparts. Much of this is cultural and requires developers, and more importantly, management, to recognize that the status quo has changed
Favor flexibility and cost over platform loyalty
Open-source and Web-based applications may have quietly crept into organizations previously, but now is the time to reconsider all aspects of performance, how you define "good enough" and realize that developers have more power--and more tools at their disposal than ever before.
Become passionate about user experience
As fellow CNET blogger Matt Asay wrote recently, "it's not what the software can do. It's what it does. For normal people. Without training or user manuals." To that extent, application developers need to make applications more intuitive and visually appealing in order to provide a better experience and gain more sales.
Upgrade the talent on application development teams
During the past 10 years or so, there have been a number of efforts that support smaller, more focused development teams. Technology at start-ups tends to be developed by a small group, just as open-source projects tend to be developed and maintained by a core group. This changes the manager's view of putting teams together and also puts more pressure on star developers, which can present a whole new set of challenges.
Firms like Forrester tend to work with larger companies, and my reading of these recommendations shows the evolution of both application development as well as the analysts' role in providing practical advice. There is no question that this is a positive for the IT industry and analyst groups as a whole.
I was somewhat shocked by the stellar results Oracle recently reported, considering the sorry state of the economy. I even called an analyst friend to find out if maybe there was some house of cards ala Computer Associated that explained the consistent rise in revenue and margin. But I was reminded of two simple facts explaining why Oracle remains dominant:
- Applications drive database sales
- Oracle owns pretty much everything
Oracle's acquisition streak has given the company an enormous breadth of offerings (say what you will about quality of the software) and the attempt at offering it's own Linux variant gives it an OS that's passable if not meaningful. But, I don't know that owning the operating system is important to the growth of sales in applications or databases. (Note: Matt Asay wrote a very good post about why Ubuntu should be Oracle's Linux of choice.)
Oracle applications and databases have to run on an operating system, but the operating system doesn't necessarily drive software sales, or sell databases. The OS may be a point of influence, but doesn't drive the dollar values that you get from software.
Meanwhile, Oracle has amassed such a wealth of software that it can not only drive it's own database sales through upgrades and replacements (JD Edwards or Siebel running on DB2 seems unlikely) but it can up-sell databases to customers of BEA or any of the other myriad applications it now owns.
Add MySQL into the equation and Oracle can sell you a database pretty much anytime for any purpose, to support any application (which you can probably buy from them too.)
This leads into some questions regarding Cisco's strategy, based on the idea that hardware should sell applications, as well as IBM's strategy, where services have often sold software and hardware. The future is of course a mix of all of these strategies, but it's not clear that another company is as well positioned as Oracle.
While certainly not unstoppable, Oracle's execution has been very impressive, especially in a down economy.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
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