At the OTN Cloud Developer day, developers got a chance to try out the Oracle Cloud. I sat down with Digby Malakar, Director of Product Management, Oracle Cloud, to find out what's driving the cloud for developers. Digby discussed the pressures on software development organizations, and the problems that the cloud can solve.
Digby described trends that are putting more and more pressure on development teams. With the need for cutting-edge infrastructures, enterprises are facing pressure to modernize to achieve the flexibility, scalability, and responsiveness that will help them remain competitive. But companies can rarely afford to increase the size of their staff. The difference between the increasing demand and the size of development resources is known as the "development gap."
Digby explained that every passing year, we draw closer and closer to achieving the vision of the ubiquitously connected global village. The number of internet users today exceeds 2 billion worldwide, with global internet penetration estimated to grow from 35% at the end of 2012 to 42% by the end of 2016. The cloud provides opportunities to improve development costs, productivity and throughput by utilizing geographically dispersed teams and processes. At the same time, this flatter and more connect world is having a number of other effects. Data production will be 44 times greater in 2020 than it was in 2009, reaching a worldwide total of 7.9 zettabytes (or eight trillion gigabytes) by 2015. As developers are pressured to utilize that data to create more compelling applications and enable actionable business insights, companies are searching for solutions that will provide the unprecedented capacity, scalability, and speed to keep pace with that explosive growth.
Also, mobility is untethering individuals from needing to be at any particular place in order to be productive. In 2011, 420 million smartphones and 14 million tablets shipped. In 2016, those numbers will balloon to one billion and 96 million, respectively. Now project teams can be more global than ever, code sharing and collaborating from anywhere in the world as seamlessly as possible. The cloud is an infrastructure to help them do that.
Another trend is the impact of social interaction on applications and end-user expectations. Social platform adoption is such an integral part of our lives that 90% of all internet users now have an account on at least one social service. There are more than 13 million business pages on Facebook. As social behaviors continue to increase, modern development environments must keep pace and offer similar levels of seamless and frequent interaction.
Using cloud can help companies close the "development gap." The adoption of a standards-based cloud infrastructure enables companies to modernize at a gradual pace as modern and legacy element coexist, training both IT staff and end-users as they go along. Individual developers have their own set of reasons for embracing the cloud. Using the cloud can dramatically reduce provisioning, deployment and management time, and increase throughput and quality with more efficient construction and testing. You can learn more and get a free trial at cloud.oracle.com.