UK enterprises are turning to application development and maintenance providers to help them meet the twin challenges of COVID-19 and Brexit and expand their digital business capabilities, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG)
In its 2021 ISG Provider Lens Next-Generation Application Development and Maintenance Services Report for the UK finds the application development and maintenance (ADM) market is proliferating in the UK with the increase in digital business demands.
ISG Digital Strategy and Solutions partner Ola Chowning said that the ongoing pandemic and Brexit had increased the need for UK enterprises to optimise IT costs and harness new technologies to gain a competitive advantage in an ever-changing market environment.
The report says that agile development has become a high priority for UK companies needing to define software requirements and react while maintaining software quality.
Brexit has given many enterprises an increased sense of urgency, leading to faster decision making and a focus on clear value propositions.
In addition, Brexit is expected to lead to a shortage of qualified software developers in the UK, with limitations on foreign workers and uncertainty about employing remote workers from within the European Union. As a result, some smaller software development providers in the UK may lose market share to more extensive, international providers.
The report also finds ADM service providers offering many tools, frameworks and methodologies, making the market confusing to many enterprise clients. In addition, service providers often partner with other frameworks, software, and solutions providers and develop proprietary platforms and methodologies, leading to additional market confusion.
The ADM market in the UK is driven by client requirements including cost reduction, modernisation and speed to market, but implementation varies significantly across client application environments. Providers make the environment more complex when they try to cover as many client scenarios as possible.
The report also finds the accelerated use of agile development practices has exposed limitations in scaling agile development within large enterprises. The number of tools and frameworks are nearly endless. When companies free their agile teams to choose their tools, clients and providers find it challenging to integrate agile development processes.
In addition, DevOps continues to be a challenge for most enterprises, with less than half of all agile development teams using it efficiently, the report says. Automating repetitive tasks is necessary, and without automation, development teams tend to skip process steps, including quality assurance.
Meanwhile, the report says that the managed application services market has been adapting to automation, agile, and new business and software functionality demands. As a result, providers are being challenged to focus on enhancement requests and application bug fixing, alongside requests for new functionalities, often with short implementation timeframes. Leading organisations handle this by separating new development streams from their enhancement and bug fixing backlogs.
The report adds that many enterprises also struggle to merge legacy application maintenance and new applications running in agile mode. As a result, automation has been gaining more attention and has become a competitive differentiator. Service providers are combining IT processes under automated operations with AI capabilities, including AIOps. Providers add value by integrating AI-powered automation throughout the development process, and especially in quality assurance, to provide analytics dashboards and insights for process improvement.
The report names Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys and Wipro as Leaders in three quadrants and Atos, Coforge and TCS as Leaders in two. Accenture, Hexaware, LTI, Persistent Systems, Tech Mahindra, UST and Zensar are named Leaders in one quadrant.
EPAM is named a Rising Star—companies with “promising portfolios” and “high future potential” by ISG’s definition—in two quadrants. LTI and Softtek are named Rising Stars in one quadrant.
