OutSystems, a company developing modern application platforms – including low-code development, has shared results from an InfoBrief study by leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC. The Asia/Pacific 2020 Software Survey: DevOps, DevSecOps, and the Future of Digital Innovation, sponsored by OutSystems, delves into how organizations in Asia-Pacific can turn into digital innovation factories to thrive in today’s business environment. According to the results obtained, 39 percent of Asia-Pacific IT leaders depend on visually guided development tools. The top three reasons for adoption were the belief that visually-guided development tools are the future – the simplification of the developer experience, and the provision of a more intuitive developer experience. With more than half of Asia-Pacific decision-makers confident their organizations will rely on low-code platforms for at least a quarter of all planned projects, low-code tools are set to gain critical mass adoption in the upcoming year 2021.
“With the Asia-Pacific region now in rapid growth, the region is set to further expand into an increasingly formidable data powerhouse by 2024,” said Mark Weaser, Vice President, Asia Pacific, OutSystems. “It’s only natural for enterprises in our region to gravitate towards the dramatic benefits of using visual development tools for building cloud-native applications. OutSystems is privileged to be able to support the needs of businesses in the provision of low-code and cloud technology to help the region reach its full potential as a digital data powerhouse in the near future.”
Catching up with early adopters
To keep up with the demands for technology solutions that are fast outgrowing current IT capacity, Indian developers remain under pressure to deliver solutions at lightning speed. Low-code platform features help these developers to handle the dynamics of software development much faster. 28 percent of enterprise leaders in India list faster integration of customer feedback with software version releases as their primary business goal. They believe applications that are based on speech recognition and voice synthesis, as well as software that are based on blockchain and AI technology will dominate the future. 60 percent leaders agreed that serverless computing will be a mainstay in 2022 and beyond.
Primary challenges
At present, 23 percent of Indian organizations plan to adopt visual development tools in the next 18 months. Interestingly, the main challenge faced in India is far different from those of their neighbouring peers in the Asia-Pacific. Educating leaders about secure DevOps top the list, with 58 percent of organizations listing it as the top challenge faced, followed by having a secured DevOps process and making sure DevOps teams are multi-disciplinary at 56 percent and 53 percent respectively
“Having spoken to multiple developers in the region, OutSystems is aware of the mounting concern for integrated security, particularly with the rising scale and instances of data theft today,” stated Weaser. “OutSystems provides a range of security functions encompassing application security, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) infrastructure and an always-on incident response team. While OutSystems focuses on accelerating application development, we believe speed cannot come at the expense of security. We provide clients with nothing less than a secure runtime environment and the tools necessary for secure development.”
Post-Covid-19 agility
On security in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, IDC expects software development lifecycles to continue to shorten and gathers that enterprises should take care in integrating security into planning phases in order to stay ahead of the curve. Rising customer expectations can and should be met with innovative customer experiences to engender the creation of new markets and audiences; risk-taking, data analysis and continued incorporation of customer feedback does well in driving new ideas on new platforms. The concerns of the 27 percent of Southeast Asian organizations listing recruitment as their top priority are well-founded; with hiring freezes, labour crunches and tightening regulations, companies are encouraged to start recruitment planning before the need to fill the post arrives. Building apps enables upskilling and continuous education, whereas letting business developers work side-by-side with IT helps address development shortfalls.