ISG Provider Lens™ Next-gen ADM Services Archetype Report 2018
Next-Gen ADM Services
The global next-gen ADM market is following two different growth trajectories for the application development and application maintenance segments. Next-gen application development has branched out into areas such as analytics, IoT, cloud-native architectures, SaaS-based offerings, security, customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX), mobile apps and others. Most next-gen development activities are focusing on solving business problems, improving profits or revenue, or enhancing brand value, rather than acting as a support mechanism for running IT operations. Concurrently, next-gen maintenance activities are focusing on finding different avenues to achieve cost savings by using technologies like intelligent automation. Such efforts can eventually reduce the cost of maintenance activities by 20 to 30 percent, thereby allowing enterprises to reinvest in development activities. Enterprises are at the forefront of adopting and integrating next-gen ADM technologies. Enterprise-wide adoption of concepts such as DevOps is providing many benefits, such as: helping clients achieve agility and coordination among development, testing and production functions; developing a culture where application updates are shaped by user feedback; eliminating silos and realizing maximum value across the application lifecycle; bridging the efficiency voids across business processes.
- Digital labor is making the existing workforce more productive. Digital labor goes far beyond the realms of bot-based automation to include diagnostic, predictive and remediating capabilities using intelligence acquired over time to solve non-linear problems. Digital labor is enabling the current ADM workforce to focus on higher-value work. For example: While working on a data analytics project, the analyst can now spend more time analyzing data, rather than checking the data authenticity, quality and applicability.
- Demand for hybrid cloud environments is higher: Enterprises are increasingly creating cloud-native applications that can be moved directly to the public cloud. However, owing to security and regulatory reasons, a pool of applications still resides in the dedicated private cloud. Hence, enterprises are seeking providers that can accomplish migration and maintenance across cloud environments.
- Business-based metrics are used more often to measure results: To divert budgets towards digital transformation, enterprises are looking for methods to quantify the nextgen services and their direct impact on business. Commercial contracting structures and preferences are shifting from traditional input-based transactional models to ones that are built on business-based metrics.
- DevSecOps is becoming the new normal: DevSecOps has replaced DevOps across the board. Enterprises and providers alike are realizing that security cannot be an afterthought. Thus, during early DevOps implementation phases, security principles are being incorporated as a default feature.
- Rapid application development is on the rise: As enterprises transform by becoming agile, there is a growing necessity for tight integration among their business, engineering and operations organizations. These organizations are required to maintain rapid development cycles to quickly add features to existing offerings and release new ones in the market. Such enterprises are preferring to partner with service providers that can offer a globally distributed agile organization that balances the cost dynamics with the need for speed.
- Full-stack developers are preferred for application development: More and more, providers are preferring full-stack developers for application development to avoid unnecessary coordination cycles. Having a single resource provides a 360-degree view of the environment to speed the entire development cycle. A full-stack developer is a developer that has knowledge and expertise to work from back-end through front-end application components.
- Companies want to test automation as-a-service: Test automation-as-a-service is being advocated as a differentiator to win testing contracts with dominant digital scope. Enterprises are engaging with service providers to build test automation centers of excellence (COEs) and initially manage them.
- Domain and vertical integration is necessary: A wide range of testing services are being mapped with industry-specific tools, reusable scripts and accelerators. The services being mapped include test consulting, application testing, application security testing, enterprise solution testing and IoT testing. Moreover, service providers are creating specialized vertical solutions for testing clients.
- Testing is becoming a technology enabler: Testing is being viewed as an enabler to implementing emerging technologies. For example, for many IoT projects, service providers and clients are resorting to SIL (software-in-a-loop) and HIL (hardware-in-a-loop) testing approaches to test the real-world performance of connected devices.
- Demand for full-stack testing engineers is increasing: The desire to achieve continuous testing capability has led to greater demand for full-stack testing engineers. Such resources are expected to have knowledge across test phases. For example, a full-stack engineer might be required to perform test execution automation on Selenium, integrate it with Jenkins for continuous integration and then provision the test environments in public cloud and virtual environments.