COVID 19: GlobalData Survey Reveals Minority to Cut Cloud and App Dev Spending

Charlotte Dunlap – Principal Analyst, Application Platforms

Summary Bullets:

• Only 30% of survey respondents will cut cloud budgets

• Within app modernization projects, the vast majority will prioritize app development/management

While less than half of global enterprises surveyed by GlobalData indicated plans to cut cloud and application development IT spending budgets, ops teams will seek more consolidation and automation to achieve a DevOps model.

In the area of application platforms, a recent GlobalData survey revealed that only 30% of respondents indicated plans to cut IT spending in cloud computing. In the area of application development, respondents reported that application development and management was the priority by a large margin compared to more traditional app infrastructure and DevOps areas including: application lifecycle management (ALM); application platforms (PaaS); business process management (BPM); ICT services management; and app performance monitoring (APM). The survey included over 4,000 IT buyers across the world to better understand how COVID-19 is expected to impact technology purchases.

What this survey tells me is that enterprises are looking to vendors to make good on their promises around application modernization, including agility, increased productivity and cost effectiveness. In a COVID-19 era, operations teams remain interested in these technologies for achieving digital transformation, but solutions need to be less complex and invite involvement from broader audiences of developers and non-developers, spanning from site reliability engineers (SRE) to LoB users. This is particularly important considering the general lack of available expert enterprise developers. Vendors need to cater to the users’ level of expertise so that professional services are not necessarily required with all app modernization projects.

Also noteworthy on the GlobalData survey is that some advanced innovations are heavily influencing IT purchasing power, and AI probably tops the list. AI solutions are increasingly being embedded into solutions including platforms such as low-code, providing more developers with access to the high-value technology. So in the same way that low-code and no-code platforms turned regular folks into citizen developers, AI is bringing the same value to more solutions, including emerging markets such as intelligent automation. So developers, including low-code and no-code developers, can benefit from AI without having to become data scientists.

In summary, the cloud is not going anywhere, nor is app modernization which aims to move workloads across broader hybrid and public cloud deployments. This is why the cloud wars will continue to heat up between AWS, Azure, GCP, and others. Cloud leaders will continue to jockey for mindshare through various licensing models, adoption of popular developer toolsets and a push towards more attractive cloud scaling including serverless architectures. It’s why the industry will see ongoing acquisitions such as IBM and Red Hat and VMware and Pivotal. And it’s why compelling new DevOps portfolio consolidation will headline vendor messaging and digital conferences in the next 12 months. This is the time for cloud providers to step up their high-value services aimed at enterprise developers.

For a broader look at the GlobalData survey results including which industries will remain most resilient during the Pandemic, please see additional perspective from my colleague Rena Bhattacharyya. (Please see COVID-19: GlobalData Survey Reveals Bright Spots for IT Spending , June 30, 2020)

 

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