Clouds gathering on horizon for software devs, say wise men
'There are things to be done. I don’t know what they are'
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The software industry will dissolve into a soup of micro-detailed web services delivered over the cloud by 2022, with IT departments reduced to “guiding” users to prevent them from leaking their companies’ crown jewels onto the net.
That was the extremist version of the vision sketched out by a panel considering “The Software Industry Ten Years from Now” at the Cloud Computing World Forum yesterday, which considered how the cloud will affect the development and management of software.
Eriks Dobelis, former information SVP at Air Baltic and professor at the Riga Business School, said that services delivered by SaaS “will get smaller and smaller, focusing on a single task.”
This has obvious, and potentially unpleasant implications for people who make their living developing and/or selling massive bespoke applications.
John Harris, chief architect & VP global IT strategy, innovation and learning at GlaxoSmithKline, and chairman of the Corporate IT Forum, said:
“The accessibility of platforms means that software development is no longer such a specialist activity.”
As the “internet of things” generated oceans of data, the traditional software great and the good would no longer be in a position to dictate terms, Harris said. He cited the example of Google Maps, where it was crowdsourcing - for want of a better word - that had created many of the most interesting applications.
“There are things that can be done. I don’t know what they are,” he said, “but software will be created by the world.”
As for the IT department, he said: “We won’t be controlling. I think our job will be to guide.”
Dobelis said that it would become increasingly difficult to protect intellectual property in the form of software, with the costs of protection increasingly simply uneconomic compared to the benefit.
However, Harris pointed out that for a company like GlaxoSmithKline, protecting its core IP was an existential challenge. So, he argued, the challenge for IT departments became educating users about what to keep well away from the cloud. When it came to the “crown jewels” they had to be in “the most secure environment".
CohesiveFT CTO and Borland veteran Patrick Kerpan said that as companies give up hands-on control of their data it will have to be encrypted, so that as the hardware and the data pipes get faster, the potential loss does not represent the penalty it does today.
But Kerpan said that while companies and individuals might feel they are no longer spending a fortune on software, they will find they are handing over a fortune for their data services – from broadband, to cellular and cable.
As for the possibility of making money from the software industry, Fort Technologies' sales and marketing director Noel O’Grady quipped:
“If nobody’s buying software, I’ve got just a few years to sell my company,” before pointing out that his business was providing the tools for developers and providers to tie the myriad services together. ®
COMMENTS
Just like all other forms of engineering
We won't software engineers in the same way we don't need structural engineers, mechanical engineers, etc, etc, because all the big problems have been solved... right?
How on earth do these pointless committees even get off the ground, let alone find anyone to publish its ramblings?
What if "the cloud" is just a fad?
Basically a "cloud" is a very similar environment to a mainframe batch operation of years gone by. You submitted your "job", something, somewhere did something with it and produced your results. The person who initiated all this had little or no control (JCL notwithstanding) over the process.
While this sort of set-up provided a solution, like the cloud, it wasn't very flexible and like the cloud, the person who wanted the work done would often want a little more control - or assurance - over the nuts'n'bolts of the process.
As a consequence, it's easy to see that the huge datacentres that house "cloud" service providers these days are analogous to the manframe operations of yore. It also follows that in the IT world, nothing lasts forever - so what we see as a cloud-based solution today will be seen as a cloud-based problem, tomorrow.
So if we're looking forwards 10 years, sure; there WILL be cloud operations, but there will also be other ways to do thing. Ways that haven't yet been invented (just like cloud computing didn't happen in 2002). What they will be is difficult to say, but if the cycle keeps spinning round, I'd guess that the users would be emerging from the remains of cloud-based architectures and wanting their own systems to run their own applications in their own way.
There's No Silver Bullet
[John Harris] said:
“The accessibility of platforms means that software development is no longer such a specialist activity.”
I dunno what he means by "accessibility", but Fred Brooks pretty much shot the "silver bullet" theory of software development several decades ago, but I guess this idiot subscribes to the theory that anything learned more than a few years ago doesn't apply to him and his brand of snake oil.
Software development is "hard" in the same way that differential equations are hard. That is, if you have a particular mindset and enough training then actually they aren't, but very few people have that combination so in practice it remains a specialist activity.
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