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2019: Software Development Trends That Will Dominate Asia Pacific

In today’s digital age, software and services are imperative for driving business growth and expansion in Asia Pacific. To meet the ever-evolving demands and business requirements, enterprises need to drive innovation and achieve agility, flexibility and speed.

These all lead to increased demands for software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions – in fact, the SaaS market in Asia Pacific is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 34.3 percent from 2018 to 2023[1].

To truly drive transformation in Asia Pacific, businesses can no longer depend on traditional approaches to software development. Below are four software development trends for businesses to succeed in 2019:

More enterprises will go Agile

Enterprises will soon come to the realization that working in siloed organizations, managing waterfall projects, and resisting the transition to the cloud will break their business. 2018 may have seen an increased uptake of organizations adopting DevOps – however, in 2019, organizations will also go Agile.

Agile software development promotes well planned, small iterations by highly collaborative cross-functional teams. It provides an alternative to the sequential development and long release cycles traditionally associated with waterfall. Agile is also a good fit for any business and team – regardless of its size. One prime example is DBS Bank. To improve agility within the enterprise, the largest bank in Southeast Asia redesigned the way they worked, shifting from waterfall to an agile work process which they learned from a series of engagements with Pivotal Labs.

The emergence of AI-driven or “smart” applications

Data continues to be one of the most important assets that an enterprise has at its disposal, and the ease with which insights around it can occur will rapidly accelerate in 2019. As identified by Gartner as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2019, new application development will start involving artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) co-developers and in turn, finally starting the realization of “smart applications”. More professional data scientists will partner with application developers to create most AI-enhanced solutions to a model in which the developer can operate alone using predefined models delivered as a service.

By 2022, at least 40% of new application development projects will have AI co-developers on their team[2]. This means that there will be a high demand for qualified and experienced data engineers and data scientists, who will be vital in this upcoming wave of innovation.

Enterprises will start taking a “security-first” stance

Cloud security is of utmost importance as more enterprises undergo digital transformation and adopt multi-cloud technologies. As everything becomes increasingly connected, the attack surface will also become broader. It is thus essential for forward-thinking enterprises to incorporate security thinking in all aspects of their business and applications, from the ground-up.

Some measures enterprises can implement include taking a proactive approach to change the state of systems aggressively as opposed to acting only when a breach has been detected; automating and adopting immutable infrastructure to eliminate systems with unique (and therefore problematic) security configurations; applying patches as soon as they become available; and hastening the pace of change to prevent malware from thriving.

Increased transitions from monoliths to microservices

Microservices refers to an architectural approach that independent teams use to prioritize the continuous delivery of single-purpose services. It is the opposite of traditional monolithic software which consists of tightly integrated modules that ship infrequently and have to scale as a single unit.

As mobile devices become ubiquitous in the digitized economy, traditional application architectures such as monoliths, operations and pace of development will no longer be adequate. To meet evolving customer needs and stay competitive, more enterprises in Asia Pacific looking to achieve agility and scalability will make their transition to microservices. According to IDC, 90 percent of new apps will feature microservices architectures that improve the ability to design, debug, update and leverage third-party code by 2022[3].

2019 will see software developers start finding ways to operationalize AI-driven applications and work seamlessly across teams, beyond just operations and the developer teams. Adopting new methodologies to rev up innovation, agility, scalability and speed is immensely doable, but done well, changes permeate through the entire organization. To succeed, business leaders will hence need to work through any challenges with the teams, putting in place processes and training to ensure that no one is left out while making an organizational shift.―Enterprise Innovation

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