Local software developers have to offer a better quality and higher level of business software, in order to be able to compete with the likes of India.
This is according to Brian Harding, COO and co-founder of Airborne, who says: “As a country, we are also very poor at developing our own software products and that is where some of the biggest opportunities lie.”
Stuart Kelly, Airborne's technical director, says the biggest trends to hit software development is the consumer demand for mobile applications as well as cloud computing.
“In SA, mobile applications are there, but cloud is still catching up due to our local bandwidth constraints and the fact that current cloud offerings are focussed on overseas markets. Even once cloud platforms become easily and reliably available in SA, South African companies will need time to establish a level of trust and maturity with the paradigm,” Kelly explains.
He adds that putting user experience as a priority has become a major influencer in the way software is produced. This has been largely influenced by “the user experience tidal wave that Apple unleashed.”
Chris Lazari, Airborne director of infrastructure services, says the software language HTML 5 will have a major impact on how applications are developed.
“Mobility and the consumerisation of IT mean software development companies now need to cater for a variety of platforms if they wish their product to succeed.
“Consumers are making IT decisions for companies now and the introduction of multi-platform corporate environments means that an application that runs on a Windows workstation is now also expected to run on an Apple iPad. Employees are now using their smartphones and tablets to work ubiquitously and would require applications that enable this.”
ITWeb, in partnership with Airborne Consulting, is running a software development survey to find out what makes local software development projects succeed or fail. Survey respondents stand a chance to win an Apple iPad 2.
Share