My view on the economy of IT industry in the next few years (Its NOT about block-chain!)

I was a competitive programmer, by the far, who had to face new technologies every day and master them. Not only I know the price of change, but also I can feel it. With a background of working for many companies and organizations as a software developer, technology adviser, and IT manager, alongside with launching my own miniature products, I’m gonna suggest the list below, as a result of my latest brainstorm on forecasting IT economy, which all can be the seed for the next $M platforms. I follow a top-down approach in this article.

BUSINESS LAYER: Boosting personal brands and challenging medium-sized businesses HR

Why should anyone work for a medium-sized company while one can earn more? Sales managers exactly know that it is not enough to sell a product, but it’s important to repeat the successful sell. Because of that, they are spending a lot (money and energy), to optimize their CRMs, and they seek new technologies which can give them a hand with their data. In last decades, companies have learned that they must store data, to the highest extend they are able to, but they don’t really know how to use that data to empower their selling cycles and increase it’s frequency on a larger customer base. That’s why they are medium-sized (not bigger and richer) companies and never get satisfied by those geek data scientists whom they hired! This is a blue ocean blinking to shipmasters: Let’s bet on data solutions as a service, management as a service, or personal branding as a service! e.g. Landing page generators, cloud-based CRMs (with workflow optimization), internet storefronts, or if you have close relations with university, you may think of business intelligence (BI) services, and so on.

TECH MANAGEMENT LAYER: DevOps teams no longer have to install Apache and MySQL.

It’s as simple as this: 1- Hire those who can master Linux containers, Kubernetes pods, they know Docker, and they love it. 2- Keep calm and don’t buy physical servers, use PaaS instead.
Ok, that was a joke! It’s not simple at all if you have roots in bare metal. The migration sometimes have high costs for businesses and must have a clear, exact feasibility analysis. Believe it or not, there are moments when you are in the best situation to make the dream come true, and don’t waste them, mate!

IT managers have to define new cloud-native policies with ops team and get ready to move any alive digital stuff to PaaS (and those static ones to a cloud-based Object Storage). This means major changes in jobs descriptions, personnel abilities, education, attitude, etc. Developers must work closely with ops team (now they are somehow the same) and fully accept the responsibility for the service deployments, and anything on the top of the runtime cluster.

IT MANAGEMENT LAYER: The knight returns (Enterprise Integration)

Surely you have heard of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), or you are going to Google that right after pushing clap button and starting following me. They are still alive. Microservice architecture and Domain Driven Design (DDD) are heating up. And they have a revolutionary philosophy: Independence. In human words, it means that each service (containing tasks) must run to complete, without any dependency to other services and etc. It was not that much possible till today, which data transfer and wide-band fast networks are cheap enough to be used on demand. So integration, is a challenge again. And the point is, knowing RESTful is not enough, and it’s time for ESB providers to add value and earn money. It has dozens of new problems in security, routing, storage, standardization, and so on.

SCIENCE LAYER: AI for DevOps, AI for CRMs, etc.

It’s not sci-fi. In my opinion, if human can do a regular job good, machines can do it better! Orchestration, the keyword that DevOps and CRM have in common, was never ever as regular as today is. DevOps which was always one of the most stressful jobs, is getting boring. Those geeks are writing scripts that can trigger almost anything on a decision. Wait! What? Decision? But AI’s Genetic Algorithm can do it better, right? :) And it will make the optimum decision (that’s the reason AI is made for). Yeah, it’s not that easy, but it’s a good idea for you next startup.

All those logic works like a charm for CRMs. They need work and data flow optimization, real-time monitoring, health check, support, forecasting, and so on.

Fine

We can wait and see if ideas above will happen someday, but I’m gonna play all-in with one of those ideas on my own.

Wish you all the best;
This is Reza,
IT consult by day, IT student by night.