Credit: 124276305 © Everythingpossible | Dreamstime.com
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seen application development services support the push for digital transformation projects, new research has claimed.
According to research firm Information Services Group’s (ISG) Provider Lens Next-Gen Application Development and Maintenance Services Archetype Report, the pandemic has caused enterprises to increase their demand for IT modernisation, which includes app development, the firm said.
“The pandemic has forced many companies to look at continuous transformation as a way to stay ahead of the competition,” said Prashant Kelker, partner of digital strategy and solutions of ISG.
“During the past year, many have realised it is better to keep elevating operational efficiency and finding new ways to reach customers incrementally, rather than treating each improvement as a one-off effort.”
As part of that elevation, the report found enterprises that take on app development and maintenance (ADM) providers have been focusing on remote working processes, as opposed to relying on teams based in physical locations.
The report also condensed the current COVID-19 landscape of ADM clients into three different groups: enterprise modernisation, operational excellence and packaged software implementation.
Enterprise modernisation clients are focused on overhauling legacy systems who want to integrate app touchpoints and silos, build cloud-native apps, implement advanced technologies and improve the speed of their time-to-market.
As such, these clients are looking for providers that have modernisation and cloud experience, the report claimed, as well as those that can operate in an agile and DevOps model and are competent with the emerging technology stack.
Meanwhile, operational excellence clients are looking to cut costs, potentially using automation, ticket resolution, incident eliminations pre-empting app failure.
Regarding packaged software implementation, customers are looking for commercial off-the-shelf products, usually as a means of upgrading to the latest version of a product or moving over to another vendor.
The report claimed this group also includes greenfield or brownfield implementations of one or more software categories such as enterprise resource planning modules, customer relationship management, customer data platforms, big data and analytics, web content management, collaboration software suites and commerce websites.
