Originally published in The New Stack Update.
Over the past months, we’ve seen several blogs saying “cloud is eating software” instead of “software is eating the world.” There’s now data to back up that claim. Looking at the 2017 SIM IT Trends Study, software as a percentage of the entire IT budget may have peaked at 17.9 percent in 2015, and is now dropping to 15 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, budgetary spending on cloud services continues to rise, displacing budgets for on-premises hardware and software. It appears that CIOs are trying to constrain the growth of software investments so they can continue spending on more analytics and security-related projects. This phenomenon begs the question: Will demand for software developers stagnate if budgets don’t keep up? We take a deeper look at the data in Parity Check: The Software Budget’s Appetite Kept in Check by the Bottom Line; it doesn’t paint a dire picture, but it does indicate that we should challenge our assumptions about application development and maintenance.
