20 Feb 2020 - BEIJING, CHINA: International Data Corporation (IDC) today announced the release of IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Developer and DevOps 2020 Predictions — China Implications (IDC #CHC45894020, January 2020). The new IDC paper puts forward ten developer and DevOps market predictions for 2020 with a specific focus on China, as well as actionable insights for technology buyers in the DevOps market for the next five years.

Nan Wang, Senior Market Analyst, Enterprise System and Software Research, IDC China, said that the study provides a well-rounded analysis and discussion of developer and DevOps market trends and their impact on digital transformation and business’ technology departments.

“Senior IT leaders and business executives will come away from this report with guidance for managing the implications of these technologies,” she said. “Furthermore, our market predictions will help inform their IT investment priorities and implementation strategies.”

IDC’s Top10 developer and DevOps market predictions for 2020 are as follows:

1. Enhanced AI optimizations for developers

By 2024, 56% of companies will not confine their artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) use to application development. By then, close to 10% of AI/ML-based optimizations will focus on software development, design, quality management, security and deployment. By 2023, 70% of companies will invest in employee retraining and development, including third-party services to meet the needs of new skills and working methods brought about by AI applications.

2. Wide use of container platforms

By 2024, 70% of new application developed with programming languages will be deployed in containers for improved deployment speed, application consistency and portability.

3. Growth of part-time developers

By 2023, the number of part-time developers (including business analysts, data analysts and data scientists) in China will be double the number in2019. Specifically, part-time developers will increase from1.8 million in 2019 to 3.6 million, representing a CAGR of 12.2%. By 2020, 15% of customer experience applications will deliver hyper-personalization through reinforcement learning algorithms continuously trained on a wide range of data and innovations.

4. DevOps as a daily activity

By 2023, the number of organizations releasing codes for specific applications will increase to 30% from 3% in 2019. By 2024, at least 90% of new versions of enterprise-grade AI applications will feature embedded AI functions, though those disruptive AI-focused applications will only account for 10% of the total market.

5. Accelerating transformation of traditional applications

By 2022, the accelerating modernization of traditional applications and the development of new applications will increase the percentage of cloud-native production applications to 25%, driven by the utilization of microservices, containers and dynamic orchestration.

6. DevOps focus on business KPIs

By 2023, 40% of DevOps teams will invest in tooling and focus on business KPIs such as cost and revenue as operations will begin to play a more important role in the performance of end-to-end applications and business impact.

7. Use of related analytical tools driven by open source software

The increasing reliance of applications on open source components has driven the rapid growth of software component analysis and related tools. By 2023, software component analysis tools, which are currently only used by a minority of organizations, will be used by 45% of organizations.

8. Companies establishing their own development ecosystems

By 2023, 60% of Chinese G2000 companies will establish their own software ecosystems, and 50% will access important reusable code components from publicly accessible community code libraries.

9. Growth of open source codebases

By 2024, open source software derived from open code libraries as a percentage of all enterprise applications will double to 25%, with the remaining75% being customized according to organizations’ business models or use scenarios.

10. Recognized applicability of DevOps

By 2024, applications that completely use DevOps will account for less than 35%. Enterprises have recognized that not all applications can benefit from the complex operations spanning development and production related to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

As shown by the above predictions, emerging business models and frequently changing needs for services have created challenges to enterprises’ IT infrastructure. Going forward, the ability to quickly establish new business systems and continuously respond to system iterations brought about by market changes will emerge as the top priorities for IT departments

In response to these external pressures, companies have begun adopting modern methods to implement application development, packaging and testing. In this new and challenging environment, machine learning and AI are being widely used. IDC predicts that the work of future will, to a large extent, will be influenced by how developers and the DevOps community evolve in the next five years.