I D C I N C O N V E R S A T I O N. Ac c e l e r a t e d Ap plication Deve l o p m e n t : B u i l d, D e l i ve r a n d M a n a g e

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1 I D C I N C O N V E R S A T I O N William Lee Associate Research Director, Cloud Services IDC Asia/Pacific Joseph Smith Director, Cloud Product Management Singtel Group Enterprise Ac c e l e r a t e d Ap plication Deve l o p m e n t : B u i l d, D e l i ve r a n d M a n a g e May 2018 Sponsored by Singtel Historically, custom application development is both expensive and time consuming to build, maintain and manage. The situation becomes even more challenging if a proper log and/or documentation of the code was not kept by the developer. In the event where the developer has left the organisation, these custom applications will usually die a natural death, resulting in more development cost and time to the enterprise. In today's digital business, digital native enterprises need accelerated application development in order to attain the speed required to capitalise on new business opportunities. This has spurred the rapid adoption of low-code development aiming to make it easier to build applications by removing as much of the hand coding as possible. IDC predicts that the number of low-code/no code developers will grow by double digits through 2021, with these non-traditional developers building 20% of business applications and 30% of new application features in Availability of such low-code development platforms has also soared in recent years with many of them delivered as cloud platform as a service (PaaS). The ability to build applications at speed is still inadequate to address all challenges across the application development life cycle. Delivery and management of these applications is equally if not more important than the build and test of the applications. In an ever-growing multicloud environment, applications built and configured for one IT environment need to be efficiently replicated or transfered to a different environment or cloud, if required. IDC predicts that by 2021, automation will improve development efficiency by up to 25%, supported by analytics-based real-time decisions in configuring IT environments and a low/no-code approach to building business solutions. Containers will be the pivotal technology behind all development platforms. Coupled with the maturing DevOps processes and tools adopted, digital native enterprises will be truly empowered to be agile and responsive to the speed of digital business. #AP77109X

2 William Lee, Associate Research Director of IDC's Asia/Pacific Cloud Services Practice, speaks to Joseph Smith, Director for Singtel Cloud Product Management, about the rise of low-code development platforms and how enterprises are deciding between building custom applications versus buying standard off-the-shelf applications to meet their digital business needs. This IDC In Conversation interview discusses the challenges and opportunities of building, delivering and managing the application development life cycle in a digital native enterprise. Q: Why has DevOps gained prominence over the last few years? How important is its adoption for a digital native enterprise? A: Marc Andreessen famously said, Software is eating the world, and for most businesses it is true that software is found at the heart of their operations, customer and employee engagement. With increase in velocity of software development, organisations are able to drive step change in innovation and respond to market opportunities and threats at speed and lower cost. DevOps methodology helps organisations achieve continuous delivery of software and adapt to the need for frequent iterations on design, development and deployment that are requisites of cloud-native applications. Thus, DevOps has become pivotal for the success of digital business and is fast becoming the standard way of working for all digital native enterprises. DevOps has transformed the traditional waterfall method of software development to agile development so organisations can gain: Accurate visibility into actual progress of projects Easy adaption to changing requirements through the development process Continuous maximisation of business value throughout the development process Reduction of overall risk associated with software development These help to drive enterprise performance in the modern digital economy, enabling organisations to deliver business value to their customers quickly. We are seeing an increasing number of businesses recognising the power that DevOps can bring for their operational efficiency and overall performance. The benefits to the organization when DevOps is adopted successfully include: Improved quality resulting in reduced business risk due to: Repeatable deployment processes Testing against production-like systems Deploying into production more regularly and more consistently Automated tasks reducing the chance of human error Increased speed as a result of: Automation allowing tasks to be completed quickly Headless execution of activities, allowing tasks to be run out of hours, thus maximising the availability of environments in the working day Cost efficiencies as a result of: Automation allowing tasks to be performed by smaller teams Testing in production-like environments resulting in errors being caught earlier in the life cycle where they are cheaper to fix Cross-skilled teams IDC

3 Q: Can you share how Singtel's Liquid Sky TM supports DevOps processes and tools? A: Liquid Sky TM brings together the required tools for a DevOps approach (see figure below). It includes an overlay of the process approach of how to best bring the tooling landscape together to deliver on the promise of DevOps and the cloud. Liquid Sky TM not only incorporates continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tooling for agile application development, but also includes systems of record like IT service management (ITSM) with integrations into incident, problem, change and configuration management. It integrates continuous monitoring, security and testing tooling, billing and chargeback capabilities to provide a resolved tool chain that encompasses the end-to-end processes and systems that modern enterprises need to integrate. Based on a module function defined architecture it is adaptable for individual customer implementations that can include existing tooling investment and comes with integration into common tooling technologies that span ITSM, CI/CD, IT operations management, security, logging and billing. The major components of Liquid Sky TM include: Service Portal Self-service catalogue and IT service management Cloud Orchestration Hybrid cloud abstraction layer Configuration Management Cloud component configuration and policy enforcement Application Manager Application specific deployment and configuration Logging and Monitoring Information aggregation, normalisation and visualisation Security Single sign-on, role-based access control and host protection Liquid Sky TM also features a robust security framework comprising six pillars: 2018 IDC 3

4 Foundation Covers low-level functions such as network isolation, stateless and stateful firewalls, application firewalls, host-based anti-virus and anti-malware Threat Management Centralised logging, vulnerability scanning and security patch management with threat intelligence from trusted sources Identity and Access Management Role-based access controls with enforced auditing allowing end-to-end action tracking Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Normalising data from centralised logging to provide event correlation from multiple sources Data Privacy Data encryption at rest, in-transit and in-application (for development environments) Application Security Application development scanning tools and sandbox environments with containerisation and service registration Q: What do you think about low-code development and DevOps? How are these approaches impacting the application development life cycle in an enterprise? A: Low-code development is like LEGO building for software using modular components (like LEGO blocks), with each performing a specific task or function. Users only need to focus on the configuration of functions without having to account for the coding rules and the required infrastructure to run the applications. This method not only frees up the development teams to focus on the business logic for the applications, but also empowers business professionals with little coding experience to build simple applications for their business problem. This can speed up the software development time as well as improve collaboration between IT and business. Hence, organisations should look into such platforms, many of which are available on the cloud like Microsoft PowerApps, Salesforce App Cloud and Appian. Although a low-code development platform can reduce the time to build an application, to get from ideation to execution, enterprises will need to consider the entire application development life cycle. From building (and testing) the application to delivering it to the users, and finally managing the revisions throughout the lifespan of the application, these are what DevOps processes and tools address. Thus, low-code development is complementary to DevOps methodology in improving the speed of custom software development, deployment and maintenance. These two approaches will impact the build versus buy strategy of many enterprises. Although cloud has made the buy decision of many off-the-shelf business software applications easy with low setup cost and ease of implementation, many of these applications lack customisation to deal with the changing business requirement especially for digital businesses. This is where low-code development and DevOps are required to accelerate the digitalisation process and scale the applications development and deployment for a multicloud environment. Q: How do you see the growth in the number of low-code/no code developers? Are enterprises choosing build over buy of application for their digital business needs? A: We do see a growth in the number of low-code developers especially among the more seasoned business IT users in our customers. For enterprises that do not have a deep pool of development talent, especially small and medium-sized businesses, we believe low-code tools are the way to go to build quick simple applications for their business needs. For more complex custom applications, collaborative development between IT and business users is necessary. In which case, enterprises should work with cloud platform providers that support DevOps processes for continuous delivery and multicloud deployment which are quintessential for digital business IDC

5 However, it is a pretty diverse landscape out there today for organisations and the right approach to each problem brings a complex set of challenges and decisions. If you can get the outcome of the software at a competitive price, it is clear that software as a service (SaaS) will continue to see its popularity grow, especially for applications that offer little competitive advantage in developing or maintaining yourself, for example, those from the back office such as or collaboration tools. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) also makes sense but only goes some of the way. Singtel s Liquid Sky can help our customers stitch together the continuum from on-premises to cloud and across the multiple delivery models required from IaaS to PaaS and SaaS. A B O U T W I L L I A M L E E Dr William Lee is a domain leader of IDC s Cloud Services Research programme. He represents IDC externally via media channels and internally as a domain lead to support bespoke consulting and integrated marketing program engagement. William has over 15 years of experience in the field of industrial infocommunications technologies. He is an accomplished speaker and practitioner in ICT, market research innovation and process excellence. William was previously involved with IDC s Manufacturing Insights before he started his own consulting and advisory services firm for IT-led service innovation and digital transformation. William graduated from Cranfield University, United Kingdom, with an Engineering Doctorate in Industrial and Systems Engineering. A B O U T J O S E P H S M I T H Joseph Smith is the Director of Product Management in Singtel. In this role, Joseph leads the execution of Singtel Cloud s product vision and strategy, enabling organisations to explore new business ideas and innovations through Singtel Cloud products and services. He is also responsible for developing integrated product road maps and sourcing required stakeholder agreement and investment. Prior to Singtel, Joseph led the Cloud and Datacentre products in Optus, Australia. He also worked as a Strategic Programmes Manager for HP, where he was responsible for the datacentre portfolio that generated hundreds of millions in annual revenue. Joseph has 23 years of experience in the ICT industry, spanning most functions in technical, projects, delivery, business operations, sales and business unit agreement. Joseph holds a Master of Business Administration from Australian Institute of Business. A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I ON This publication was produced by IDC Custom Solutions. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Custom Solutions makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A licence to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee. C O P Y R I G H T A N D R E S T R I C T I O N S Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests, contact the Custom Solutions information line at or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localisation of this document require an additional licence from IDC. For more information on IDC, visit For more information on IDC Custom Solutions, visit Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F IDC 5