Developers today wear many faces: They are traditional programmers, but also Data Scientists, IT architects, entrepreneurs, and self-taught casual users. Gartner, in fact, has predicted that by 2020, 60% of all fast-mode application development projects will be done outside of formal IT teams, driven by the rise of citizen developers.
“We are going to have a massive amount of people around the globe whose normal day is going to be tinkering and programming,” says Larry Weber, Program Director, Developer Marketing, IBM Analytics, Cloud Data Services.
That’s going to contribute to the good things that already are taking place – better user experiences, and increasingly embedded Analytics and social media features will be prominent in applications, for instance. As more users who are experts in their field rather than technology specialists join the developer ranks, they’ll bring a wealth of knowledge to the development process that can lead to “great solutions and new business models,” he says.
They’ll rely more, too, on open source technology, including NoSQL databases, to reduce risk, lower costs, and move faster. They’ll leverage the Cloud, particularly for processing entities native to that environment and for mass analytics, taking advantage of it agility, scalability, flexibility, adaptability and ecosystem connectivity. In addition to that, he told an audience at the Enterprise Data World 2016 Conference, the Cloud also can function as a tool for masking complexity to new age developers.
“Open source can be a pain if you don’t have the expertise. But the great thing about the Cloud is that you can tap into open source programs and play with that while Cloud Services handle maintenance, installation and everything else in the background for you,” he says.
Open Up to Data with Open for Data
In its Open for Data program, IBM provides hybrid Cloud Services, based on open source and leveraging business’ on- and off-premise investments, to help the widening group of today’s developers use, understand and flow unstructured data across different services to the right user in the right context. “More people are looking at problems differently because of the Cloud and open source and more people are getting hands-on because of these solutions,” Weber says.
The vendor’s Cloud Data Services program makes available tools such as the IBM Cloudant fully managed NoSQL database service; IBM dashDB fully managed Cloud Data Warehouse that’s purpose-built for Analytics; and IBM Compose Cloud-hosted platform for building enterprise applications on open source database technologies.
It delivers these and other fully managed data and analytic services on the IBM BlueMix Platform-as-a-Service for creating, deploying and managing applications in the Cloud. In an interview after his presentation, Weber called BlueMix a “playground for developers.”
Other self-service and full-service options in the BlueMix catalogue include IBM DB2 on Cloud, MongoDB by Compose, BigInsights for Apache Hadoop, Predictive Analytics and Insights for Twitter.
With BlueMix, users can choose a programming language to deploy a web app to the Cloud using Java and Eclipse tools, for instance; create a pipeline to build, test and deploy it in a team collaboration environment; and add database or other cloud services to the app.
“We are trying to listen to developers, to the new builders, to people who are using software to build and do cool things,” Weber says. “We want to bring new services to be able to empower them. From a Cloud Data Services perspective, IBM is open for data.”
Adapting to New Developers
IBM Cloud Data Services includes among its resources open data sets in its Analytics Exchange to download and use, such as the U.S. Demographic Measures: Population and Age set. IBM’s acquisition of The Weather Company’s product and technology businesses also makes it possible for it to customize that proprietary data for specific industries for Cloud Data Services users.
Such data packages, for instance, could be tailored for use by the insurance sector in applications to alert policyholders ahead of hail storms, or to help utility companies forecast demand and help identify likely service outages, the vendor has noted.
“Data sets are important for creating critical mass in so many ways,” says Weber. “It’s adding value and a level of creativity to the whole process of building an application.”
The pay-as-you-go model is part of the picture, and a new direction for IBM, Weber notes. It’s free, for example, to get started with Compose Enterprise and leverage its production-ready databases to power apps that might require full-text search, geospatial functionality or a recommendation engine (or all of them).
Monthly fees from there depend on factors such as gigabyte requirements. Bottom line: “It’s not going to break the bank to build and leverage these services,” he says, and using them opens the door to faster prototype creation.
The other tactic IBM is taking is to make developer advocates available to users to help them work with data in the Cloud. “You can pick up the phone and have someone to talk to,” Weber says, unlike other Cloud Data Services that may take a more hands-off approach. Not only that, but as developer advocates solve problems, they put code out there for others to take advantage of in the open source style. “Along with the tools we are investing in these new areas, trying to embrace the open source vision,” he says.