Applications

…but developer productivity and commercial flexibility are bigger

I managed to get along to the Cloud World Forum in London this week. It was a busy, fast and noisy event (sometimes very noisy) which provided a way to sample a lot of views in a short space of time. The fundamentals of cloud computing are well established so there were no paradigm shaking revelations (and this wasn’t the kind of premier global event where such things might get announced anyway). I did pick up some subtle signals which might be of interest to organisations wanting to move to the cloud, suppliers competing for cloud business and engineers working with cloud technologies. This first post focuses on the customer perspective.

Guest post by Daniel Smithson

The app store concept has become an accepted feature of consumer electronics remarkably quickly. When Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams were writing about producer/consumers in Wikinomics in 2006 major corporations like Apple and Sony were trying to block their customers efforts to open up their devices and add new functions. It was another two years before Apple added their app store into their ecosystem and yet now it is hard to remember not having access to thousands of applications on your smart phone.

A recent post by Gartner caught my eye this week. A key topic at one of Gartner’s events will be their views on how applications are managed and the shift they expect from a mainly project-based structure to a more product-based structure. I think this is a great idea and I have already written and presented a conference paper about how the approach to software maintenance should shift from projects to product life-cycles. I would really like to provide a link to the paper but it was the UK Military Computing Conference in 1991 and you will have to find a paper copy of the proceedings somewhere!