Top 10 Popular Technologies For Enterprise Software Development

What is it that is bringing technology nearer to enterprises?

What is it that is a big enabler of productivity and profitability in organizations?

The answer lies in Enterprise Software Development. Enterprises are leveraging the potential of umpteen technologies and the list is increasing day by day. Enterprise software development is seeing the brightest side right now with certain highly popular technologies taking the credit. There are many but not all have been able to prove their worth around the globe.

Let us look at what are those technologies that have shone across enterprises, their key features and why are they so popular amongst the business arena.

“We’re changing the world with technology” – Bill Gates

Key Software Technology Trends Ruling Enterprise Software Development

• .NET Core

.NET Core was contributed to the .NET Foundation by Microsoft in the year 2014. Microsoft’s ASP .NET Core is a cross-platform, open-source framework for developing contemporary, cloud-enabled, and IoT-based web applications. ASP .NET Core, a recent web app development framework is furnished with many heightened features that empower developers to develop dynamic web apps. Microsoft itself says that .NET Core is the Future of .NET, what more do we need to perceive its worth!

ASP .NET Core is a combined version of ASP .NET MVC and ASP. NET Web API, making it simplistic to design, develop, and deploy software at high speed and extreme efficiency. It is a cross-platform development tool to develop and run apps on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It can be easily adopted by people and businesses, including for individual, academic or commercial determinations. Many establishments use .NET Core as part of apps, tools, new platforms and hosting services.

Key Features

• Open source with a strong community support
• MVC (Model View Controller) pattern helps make coding and testing faster
• A page-based programming model that makes it easier to build attractive web UIs
• Built-in support for multiple data formats and multiple devices
• Simplified modern web app development with advanced features and tools
• Easy integration of modern, client-side framework and development workflows
• Ability to host on multiple environments including IIS, Apache, Nginx, Docker, or self-host
• A cloud-ready configuration system and built-in dependency injections
• Secure client-side and server-side validation with the help of Model Validation

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• .NET Core 3.0 released in September 2019 and all new .NET applications should be based on .NET Core
• All future investment in .NET will be in .NET Core, including Runtime, JIT, AOT, GC, BCL (Base Class Library), C#, VB.NET, F#, ASP.NET, Entity Framework, ML.NET, WinForms, WPF and Xamarin
• .NET Framework 4.8 will be the last major version of .NET Framework
• It will become more extensively adopted as it grows in popularity
• Its tooling will become more efficient, bug-free and helpful – increasing developer productivity
• It will become the industry standard for new development efforts within the .NET ecosystem

Organizations Using .NET Core

Siemens Healthineers, GoDaddy, Quantum Technologies, Tencent, Stack Overflow and more

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence systems naturally establishes at least some of the following behaviours related with human intelligence: planning, learning, reasoning, problem solving, knowledge depiction, awareness, motion, and management and, to a lesser extent, social intelligence and originality. Artificial intelligence is the reproduction of human intelligence actions by machines, mainly computer systems. These procedures include learning, reasoning and self-correction. Looking at the stride at which establishments are accepting this technology, AI development is in trend today and applications of AI contain expert systems, speech recognition and machine vision.

Key Features

• Near real-time sustenance to clients
• Expressive insights from cloud-based data
• In-depth business analytics with better decision making
• Increased business automation
• Improved user experience with AI chatbots
• Augmentation in sales, client satisfaction
• Market automation

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• With AI, logistics will become more effective and efficient
• Automated machine learning will help workers especially those in knowledge work areas
• AI will help customers talk to technology more frequently, lessening involvement of humans
• AI will bring revolutionary changes in the healthcare segment to fight severe diseases
• IoT and AI will converge closely and IoT will become the biggest driver of AI in the enterprise
• AI will automate DevOps with AIOps

Organizations Using AI

Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Banjo, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Twitter and more

• Internet of Things (IoT)

‘Internet of Things’ is a comprehensive concept that signifies ‘connected’ and ‘automated’ environment in the home, offices, industries, plants, vehicles with the help of embedded systems, network, control systems, and automation technologies.

The Internet of Things is all about more connected objects and things over the internet, empowering quicker communication and automation up to a certain extent. A growing number of IoT devices such as smart home appliances, smart vehicles, and wearable technology are saying a lot about the growth of this technology over recent years.

Key Features

• Real-time monitoring & tracking of devices
• Data-driven marketing
• Perceptive data analytics
• Augmented business expertise & customer loyalty
• Efficient processes & smarter operations
• Quick & greater customer service

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• Social issues will be essential in the world of IoT
• Businesses will lead the gush in IoT adoption in 2019
• Devices will become more voice driven
• AI will progressively affect IoT
• IoT will enable smart cities
• IoT will play a major role in CRM and Helpdesk
• Scope and availability of IoT will widen with 5G networks

Organizations Using IoT

General Electric (GE), Rolls Royce, Cisco, Google, Garner and more

• Information Security/DevSecOps

“Information security, sometimes shortened to infosec, is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management.” – Wikipedia

Enterprises and its taskforce that uses the digital media are constantly in need for information security measures specially to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability. Each enterprise, depending upon its own workflow, requirements and technological build need to implement a security policy that takes care of all aspects of security, be it any phase of the project.

One such project execution methodology that focusses on information security is DevSecOps

DevOps + Security, DevSecOps lays emphasis on the security as a shared responsibility. Security measures should be taken into consideration right from the start to the end-to-end process flow. According to Red hat, DevSecOps means thinking about application and infrastructure security from the start. In 2019, DevSecOps will be capturing attention as a pivotal point towards maintaining security level throughout the app development lifecycle.

The core elements of DevSecOps are test automation — tooling and beyond, threat modelling — a shift in perspective and skill enhancement. DevSecOps is a way of forthcoming IT security with an “everyone is responsible for security” attitude. It includes injecting security performs into an organization’s DevOps pipeline. The objective is to integrate security into all stages of the software development workflow.

Key Features

• Building security foundation between DevOps principles
• Thinking about infrastructure and application security right from the start
• Built in security aspects and mechanisms
• Automated framework
• Built for containers and microservices
• Security auditing, monitoring, and notification systems are managed and deployed
• Immutable infrastructure improves overall security

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• There will be mature adoption of microservices & containers orchestration services
• Trends will move from “CI Pipelines” to “DevOps Assembly Lines”
• There will be a remarkable growth of inputs from AI & ML in DevOps

Organizations Using It

Fannie Mae, PayPal, Allianz and more

• Serverless Computing And Microservices

Serverless computing is a robust development practice that alternates virtual machines with compute power as and when needed and moves away after the utilization is over. Serverless surely does not mean there is no server involved. There are servers involved but they are managed by the cloud service provider like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform. It is a cloud-based computing service and like all functionalities in the cloud, it runs on servers when needed. It has been constantly compared with the container technology.

Serverless computing provides productive, machine-agnostic abstractions for IT engineers. It offers a modern, future proof architecture wherein you can leverage the newest modernization in distributed systems and large-scale software development. It enhances the productivity level of developers to a great extent.

The trend is also now towards microservices architecture, in which there are structured applications as an assortment of loosely coupled services. Easy build, expansion and scaling pose to be instant benefits of this popular style of architecture. Enterprises are looking at microservices as an apt method for their software development strategy.

Key Features

• Facilitates the app to be flexible and scale up and down up to multiple concurrent users thereby Increasing app performance
• Serverless functions are small, simple and have little overhead
• Saves on time spent in server management
• You pay for the time when the server is executing the action thereby saving big time, i.e. pay per execution
• Adjusts well with microservices and helps developers build their own instances
• The cloud service provider takes care of everything about provisioning infrastructure and managing downtime
• No need to offer specific cloud servers and hence available all the time

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• Serverless will be applied to Stateful and long-running apps
• Kubernetes is the perfect infrastructure for serverless and will become the default for serverless
• Functional languages are more in vogue with serverless
• Testing serverless is an emerging concept gaining maturity
• Because of IoT development, Microservices will soon turn out to be a preferred choice for majority of developers
• Serverless Microservices are the next big thing in the technological world

Organizations Using It

Netflix, Codepen, Zalora, Coca-cola, Nordstrom, eBay, Amazon, the UK Government Digital Service, Twitter, PayPal, Soundcloud, The Guardian and more

• Predictive Analytics

Enterprise Business Intelligence is making its presence felt, in major industry domains across the globe. And now, here enters the most modern telescope carrying a futuristic view of the huge bulks of data – Predictive Analytics. As the word suggests, with all the heap of data lying behind and forecasted in the future, what interpretation would the data carry and how would it assist solve business issues? What value addition would it tag along with? Predictive Analytics solutions act as a window to the future with which an organization can implicitly leverage the business data to identify and resolve business matters. It is more of a medium to assist identification of future outcomes based on the past data. It redefines your measures of success and predicts what could be the possible outcome.

Key Features

• Enhanced sales forecasting
• Building better marketing policies
• Increase client retention & employee satisfaction
• Identify novel growth areas
• Clear understanding of the business objective being supported
• Well-defined set of business performance metrics specific to the organization’s business objectives

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• Predictive Applications will empower applications through Machine Learning
• With technology transformation, the role of data scientist will evolve further
• As more application teams embed analytics into software solutions, confidence in the technology will grow exponentially and be applied more broadly

Organizations Using It

Netflix, Facebook, Match.com Boston Medical Center, Oracle and more

• Angular JS

As an opensource web and mobile application framework powered by Google, AngularJS has been instrumental in facilitating both the development as well as the testing of apps with MVC and MVVM architectures.

As an opensource JavaScript framework, AngularJS has carved a niche for itself and has become a popular name when it comes to building robust data-driven web and mobile apps. It follows an agile approach and adapts to quality-based development. It offers quick development along with its plug and play components.

Key Features

• Supported by IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio .NET IDEs
• Supported by Google and a great development community
• Data binding & Reusability
• Two-way data binding
• Customized widget development
• Simplistic code with HTML template
• Improved Security to Web Applications
• Facilitates Making the Most of Existing Data
• Builds highly sustainable web apps

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• AngularJS is also adding support for annotations and assertions into the Traceur compiler, so that the application you write can be even more declarative
• With the latest version, the aim is to bring in some features like nested states, sibling views into the core AngularJS router
• Aims to introduce an easy to understand way of authentication & authorization

Organizations Using It

PayPal, Lego, Netflix, The Guardian, Upwork, Freelancer, YouTube for PS3 and more

• Cloud Computing

Cloud computing seems like magic – completely capable of transforming the face of your business in such a positive and lucrative manner that it would be tough to perceive what it was before the cloud technology was implemented. Looking at this cloud fever, n number of companies have started opting for it, not knowing in detail, what they want, what is needed and how can it be achieved.

Enterprises have started transferring their technology setup but in real terms, have not transformed yet. For a real authentic transformation, only technology upgradation and migration are not enough. It requires a certain mindset which is keen to adapt to these changes and is all set of undertake any kind of challenge that comes its way. The cloud computing has come as a revolution and has swept off organizations under their feet, them not realizing what is happening and how. What enterprises just know is they cannot do without the cloud now and the best part is if done in the right manner, cloud implantation turns out quite profitable, productive and progressive.

Key Features

• Resource pooling
• On-Demand self-service
• Simplistic maintenance
• Effective collaboration and scalability
• Large network access
• Automatic and secure system
• Pay as you go model
• Measured service with enhanced security

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• Multi cloud or poly cloud solutions becomes increasingly popular
• Cloud native apps integrate the concepts of DevOps, continuous delivery, microservices and containers
• Serverless computing to garner more attention
• AI, edge computing, service mesh will get more focus

Organizations Using It

Netflix, Xerox, Pinterest, Instagram, Etsy, Apple, The Hartford, Delhaize, Pearson and more

• Container Technology (Kubernetes, Docker)

The container technology focusses towards remote stateless environments that help in extracting away variances in OS distributions and basic infrastructures. Containers are light in weight, independent, executable packages of software that encompass all elements needed to run it like code, libraries, system tools, runtime etc.

It is like a virtual machine, simulating a real machine with many similarities but significant architectural variations. Containers execute on a unified OS kernel isolating itself from the environment when moved from a single computing background to another.

Docker and Kubernetes are two big names in the world of containerization.

Docker

Docker is a container management service which helps developers to design application and make it easier to create, deploy and run applications by using containers. Docker has a built-in mechanism for clustering containers, called “swarm mode.” With swarm mode, you can use Docker Engine to launch application across multiple machines. Docker Swarm is Docker’s own native clustering solution for Docker containers which has an advantage of being tightly integrated into the ecosystem of Docker and uses its own API.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source system for managing containerized application in a clustered environment. Using Kubernetes in a right way helps the DevOps as a Service team to automatically scale up-down the application and update with the zero downtime. Kubernetes provides much more beyond the basic framework, enabling users to choose the type of application frameworks, languages, monitoring and logging tools and other tools of their choice. Although it is not Platform as a Service but can be used as a basis for complete PaaS.

Key Features

• Distributes a large and complex monolithic app into container based microservices
• Modifies the novel architecture based on the requirements of the new system
• Complete control over distinct containers and the virtualized infrastructure on which it executes
• Frames policies, performs resource management and marks high-end security
• Maximizes the utilization of container management and migration offerings

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• Containers and orchestration empower the following phases of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud
• Open source groups continue to succeed around containers
• Public cloud container acceptance is shifting to Kubernetes
• Docker to offer enhanced value when it comes to continuous delivery, scalability and resource efficiency

Organizations Using It

PayPal, Visa, MetLife, Citizens bank, ADP, Cornell University, Globant SA, Amadeus, Oliver Bernard and more

• DevOps

DevOps is an approach to bridge the gap between ‘Development’ and ‘Operation’. It is an engineering culture which aims to combine software development and operation strengthening better collaboration and communication among the teams.

DevOps, as service, offers the 5 Cs that showcase the cultural and technical shift in the software engineering methods. Continuous planning, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment and continuous feedback for the basis of DevOps implementation.

Increasing number of organizations are turning to DevOps consulting as a mechanism to ensure competent software delivery – internally as well as to clients. DevOps is the face of the future of project execution methodologies. Demand for DevOps developers and engineers is increasing, at a rapid pace. If you look at the DevOps trends that have been predicted for 2019, it has a rosy future.

Key Features

• Faster delivery, better release control & versioning
• More recurrent software releases
• Improved development velocity and reduced time for action
• Reduced cost over time
• Better collaboration amongst project teams
• Reduced IT Costs & improved productivity
• Increased customer satisfaction & retention
• Better response time with alignment to business objectives
• Improved business agility
• Better employee efficiency & satisfaction

Upcoming Trends / Latest News

• Automation will become the focus area
• DevOps will talk very closely to latest technologies like Microservices
• Security will become the central focal point with DevSecOps
• Collaborative customer feedback and optimization

Organizations Using It

Amazon, Netflix, Target, Walmart, Facebook, Etsy, Adobe, Nordstrom, Sony Pictures and more

And, The List Seems Endless

As we go through the most popular and eminent technologies that have been carving a niche for themselves, we come across many others through our minds. And the list seems never to end. But it must and hence here were some of the most deserving candidates. There is much more that can be written or compared but this surely gives us a transparent peep into the windows of these technologies.