Custom Software Engineering technology trends for 2022

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least?twice as fast as that!”Red Queen, “Through the looking glass”, by?Lewis Carroll

Although “spaghetti code” is considered an antipattern in programming, the “big picture” of the modern economy looks quite similar. Businesses are both tightly bound and interdependent. Goods, services, and money move around at lightning speed, and resilience is often seen as a tradeoff to profit.

The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated the situation even more, as it introduced many unexpected restrictions and changes to familiar ways of doing business. At the same time, for some areas, it has created new opportunities — innovative solutions are needed to overcome the disruption, and they’re needed now.

As providers of IT solutions that are meant to handle this complexity, we are particularly sensitive to any market challenges and demands. Therefore, we must keep a keen eye on market trends, and prepare ourselves for the challenges of tomorrow, while, simultaneously, trying to excel in the endeavors of today.

We analyzed a range of sources (Gartner, IDC, Stack Overflow, Thoughtworks Tech Radar, etc.), as well as current and predicted demand within Accenture. As a result, we came to a number of conclusions regarding the Custom Software Engineering strategy in FY22.

Java and Cloud skills — still in demand

The main demand in our segment of the market still lies in Java and Cloud skills. In the post-digital world, software solutions are not just everywhere — they must be distributed and intelligent. Being successful means being always available to customers worldwide: for a web portal, page load delay in three seconds means?abandonment rates of up to 87% . Moreover, because of lockdowns all over the globe, demand for digital solutions and services has spiked, and many companies have been forced to digitalize their business processes.

Cloud provides scalability and resilience and allows for optimization of costs, but at the same time requires deep knowledge of the vendor ecosystem. Therefore, in an increasing number of cases, having an industry certification is a must for a developer. AWS is generally seen as the biggest powerhouse on the market, but Google Cloud Platform is rapidly catching up, and also has built up a strong partnership with Accenture. Thus, we will concentrate on?having?more Cloud-certified engineers?for these vendors.

Cybersecurity

Another hot trend is?cybersecurity. As an increasing number of companies (forced to) go cloud, they often have to move valuable data out of the safety of private data centers to the vendor’s infrastructure. Ability to fully control access to sensitive data and services, encryption in transit and at rest, traceability — all these factors are very impactful. Also, from a continuous delivery perspective, a popular development setup, with multiple service providers and frequent releases, has introduced many additional risks and challenges, as even a single security incident can break the client’s confidence and trust, and eventually lead to loss of business.?Holistic security architecture, with protection at each level,?automated security tests, and?developers equipped with security best practices,?is a baseline standard.?

Cloud SaaS AI solutions

AI is getting more and more attention from big businesses. Companies like Google managed to accumulate a tremendous amount of data and use it to train image and speech recognition neural networks, which are provided as SaaS. Chatbots and computer vision systems automate communication processes which until recently were seen as only human-to-human. Deep learning solutions, often built on?Python, in combination with?Big Data,?have improved the quality of financial forecasts, uncovered previously unnoticed patterns, even helped to proactively predict and mitigate service disruptions. In this field, we see our primary niche as?the?integration of Cloud SAAS AI solutions to client systems.

The article is prepared by Volodymyr Khrystianovskyy? (Accenture Certified Technology Architect / Java evangelist / Associate Manager)