Mobile will be the future of IT: IBM

BANGALORE, INDIA: Even as tablets and smartphones go places on the sales front, a heart-warming development is happening on the development side too — the increasing demand for mobile applications.

A new survey from International Business Machines found that the number of developers working on mobile application will tremendously increase in the future.

Over half of the respondents that comprise 2,000 IT professionals in 87 countries, believe that within the next five years, more developers will be working on mobile applications and cloud-based architecture than traditional computing platforms for enterprise, according to a blog post on The Wall Street Journal by Timothy Hay.

“In all areas of software development, mobile computing is seen as the number-one hottest IT opportunity next year,” Jim Corgel, an IBM general manager of independent software vendors and developer relations was quoted as saying.

“Not only will mobile spike to the forefront, but by 2015, it will dominate everything, the respondents said. The cell phone is no longer a gadget - it’s what IT is going to become,” Corgel added.

Many companies, including startups, in the mobile space are said to be doing well. A two-year old company named MobileIron Inc., which makes systems-management applications for businesses, already has more than 50 customers, said the blog.

Another one is mobile banking company ClairMail Inc., which raised $13.8 million this week from Norwest and other investors, and is poised to hire as many as 100 new workers in the coming year.

IBM’s survey also found that 91 per cent of the respondent believe cloud computing will overtake on-premise computing as the main way that businesses access data within the next five years.