Developers see real-time Web and data communication as one of their biggest opportunities and are starting to prioritize accordingly, according to "Meeting the Challenge of an Always-On, Web-connected World," a research report from platform provider Kaazing. The company surveyed 300 developers from around the world through February and March, with 67 percent of participants coming from the U.S. Here are some of the highlights of what Kaazing found:
- 78 percent of all respondents report allocating some portion of their budget this year to real-time Web and data communication platforms
- 33 percent plan to assign 10-20 percent of their total 2013 IT budget towards real-time apps
- The top three real-time apps included monitoring (34 percent), push notifications (33 percent) and collaboration (30 percent)
- iOS, Android and HTML5 were almost tied in terms of developer support, at around 50 percent each
- 58 percent said security was the biggest benefit of real-time communications, although even more (67 percent) also ranked it as a big concern.
"Beyond continuous connectivity, the once static Web is now a live, interactive, and constantly changing mesh of communication and connectivity, a Living Web," the report said. "This new Living Web will allow businesses to interact with their customers at levels never imagined five years ago."
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Source: Kaazing |
Kaazing's platform is aimed at enterprises, and this research is looking at the extent to which large organizations are rethinking their mobile strategy by focusing more on real-time communications tools such as the one mentioned above. For consumer developers the data may indicate how quickly things like push notifications and collaboration will become common features of enterprise apps, which could in turn pave the way for their acceptance in the mass market. For example, developers in countries outside of the U.S. who participated in the research ranked games and real-time polling among the apps that interested them the most.
Although the strong support for the three main platforms is probably to be expected, a dark horse in this race is Microsoft, whose development of Windows 8 Phone and related software included a number of features designed to more easily enable real-time applications. If these numbers are true, it will be interesting to see to what extent Kaazing and other platform providers will offer consumer developers more tools to make real-time communication apps more easily.
For more:
- download the full report
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