IT professionals always have an eye for the future and the new year provides an opportunity to focus on new development. What can businesses expect for DevOps and developers? How will patterns evolve in relation to edge computing and serverless options?
To gain a detailed insight, Digital Journal caught up with Couchbase CTO Ravi Mayuram. Mayuram’s predictions are about the future of the database, with a focus on how DevOps will play into Web 3.0, the evolving role of the CTO and the evolution of AI.
DevOps will Adopt Blockchain and Newer Programming Languages
According to Mayuram: “With the emergence of Web 3.0, working with blockchain (specifically Ethereum) will be in every DevOps pro’s playbook—mirroring the boom of adopting machine learning. Newer programming languages, such as Solidity, that are designed for developing smart contracts will enter the toolkits of developers.”
2023 Will be the Year Cost Efficiency is Officially Built Into the Tools of Today’s Modern Tech Stack
In relation to cost pressures, Mayuram predicts: “In light of today’s market volatility and spikes in inflation, more companies are re-evaluating their technology stack. Increasingly, we will start to see more vendors bake cost efficiency into their solutions as a way to offer a competitive advantage. This shift will drive more vendors to ensure their offerings optimize costs for customers while enabling increased productivity.”
Drawing on a case, Mayuram cites: “For example, more organizations today are moving away from having multiple database technologies that provide for different functionalities of the business and instead are considering one single database that is efficient, able to scale and be used across the organization. Database providers that support a variety of verticals and use cases and lower the cost of doing business will see heightened demand.”
Being open to change is important , opines Mayuram: “Technology has the ability to impact business cost optimization and for vendors today, adaptability is key – especially in this changing business environment. Technology providers who can understand sudden market shifts and continue to provide innovative, yet cost-saving solutions will come out on top.”
As the Runway to Land Digital Transformation Results Shrink, CTOs Will Prioritize Architecting Technology to Serve as Better Business Partners for Enterprises
Looking at the tole of leadership, Mayuram finds: “Traditionally, CTOs were known as technologists and not so much as business stakeholders and strategists, but today – the role of the CTO is expanding to not only encompass the technology vision, but business vision, too. Companies are more hyper-focused on their tech investments than ever before and as the runway for digital transformation gets shorter, CTOs must look through the lens of providing smarter solutions to support overall business strategy. More importantly, CTOs are now thinking about how they can be better business partners to customers by providing solutions that will not only benefit a customer’s technology stack, but offer a service that can bring efficiency and agility to keep technology spend under control.”
Cloud Databases Will Reach New Levels of Sophistication to Support Modern Applications in an Era Where Fast, Personalized and Immersive Experiences Are the Goal
In terms of wider business developments, Mayuram predicts: “From a digital transformation perspective, it’s about modernizing the tech stack to ensure that apps are running without delay – which in turn gives users a premium experience when interacting with an app or platform. Deploying a powerful cloud database is one way to do this. There’s been a massive trend in going serverless and using cloud databases will become the de facto way to manage the data layer. In the next year, we will also see the decentralization of data as it moves closer to the edge to offer faster, more dependable availability. Additionally, we’ll start to see the emergence of AI-assisted databases to enable teams to do more with less. The proliferation of data will only continue, making AI-assisted databases a critical strategy to making the data lifecycle more operationally efficient for the business.”
The Role of IT Will be Redefined to Meet the Needs of Digital Transformation
Building on the digital transformation theme, Mayuram finds: “The days of IT teams focusing purely on delivering and managing IT infrastructure are gone. This reflects the growing importance of IT professionals for organizations, as they continue to prioritize digital solutions for business growth, customer experience and other benefits. To deliver this, tech departments will be expected to play a wider, more consultative role in understanding business needs, and address these with technology solutions.”
This may mean new hiring practices, says Mayuram: “This shift changes the requirement for essential skills within IT teams, as businesses place much greater significance on key IT activities, such as digital transformation. With these projects at the very top of business to-do lists, and the benefits touching all areas of an organization, it’s clear how useful IT professionals will be in a consultative role, to help plan, implement and maintain digitization efforts.”
Mayuram adds: “We will also see IT professionals required to educate other areas of the business. This will be driven by the rise in utility computing, and tools like low-code development, which lower the barrier of entry to successfully creating and managing applications. With other employees developing systems and overseeing cloud infrastructure, IT teams must act as the gatekeepers for efficient and compliant work.”
In terms of other skill sets, Mayuram finds: “In addition to the skills needed for effective consulting, IT teams must also act on intelligence from all the data that businesses collect and generate. Team members demonstrating these skills will quickly make themselves more recession-proof as they help the business evolve and make the most of its resources.”
In an Increasingly Data-centric World, Edge Computing Will Fuel the Evolution of Reliable AI
With the application of more advanced technology, Mayuram draws on artificial intelligence as the key innovation: “AI is ubiquitous in our everyday lives. It suggests what to buy and the news we read. It could determine the emails we receive and augment the cars we drive. Moving forward, AI will be even more embedded in our world. It’ll go through a maturation phase that enables us to rely on it more. Predictability and explainability of AI will improve dramatically as we move forward. Moreover, AI will evolve from being algorithm driven to being more data driven. In order for this to be effective, more and more computation will happen at the edge for AI to be reliable, responsive and cost-effective. This trend of more data influencing the algorithms will determine how AI will evolve to be a tool that is relied upon heavily in this data centric future.”
