According to analyst house Gartner, the global app development market is going to hit £5.7 billion ($9bn) by the end of the year, a 1.7% upturn on 2011.
As their latest report, entitled ‘Market Trends: Application Development Software Worldwide’ notes, this will come as a result of the cloud significantly altering the landscape in terms of deploying, designing and testing apps.
Asheesh Raina, Gartner principal research analyst, said: “Application modernisation and increasing agility will continue to be a solid driver for AD spending, apart from other emerging dynamics of cloud, mobility and social computing”.
Specifically, Gartner cited the following as pivotal to app development growth:
- Evolving software delivery models
- New development methodologies
- Emerging mobile application development
- Open source software
The Gartner report notes that cost, agility, flexibility and speed are the key reasons why app developers would want to “cloud-enable” their software.
“Application development for cloud demands rapid deployment, a high focus on user experience and access to highly elastic resources for software testing, while requiring comparatively less underlying infrastructure for developing applications,” stated Raina.
The report covers four years, ending 2016, and claims that by 2015 90% of large mainstream enterprises and government agencies will “use some aspect of cloud computing”.
As vague as that is, it’s optimistic concerning cloud uptake. Elsewhere, analysis firm Frost and Sullivan revealed that over half of Australian firms using cloud computing services are spending a tenth of their IT budget on the cloud.
Cloud computing was recently cited by Gartner as one part of four in the new ‘Nexus of Forces’, alongside social, mobile and information, which if the prediction comes true will become the paradigm for the future of IT.
It’s fair to say that cloud computing is at the heart of everything now, so is this news concerning app development a surprise?
