What factors are driving software systems development? Economic and business SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis drives some of the decisions to build, modify, update, and retire the systems we build and use. There are new platforms (what’s the latest overloaded use of the term "platform" these days?), new languages, new API(s)/Frameworks, new architectures, new methods, growing collections of best practices, new hardware, and new operating systems that drive systems development.
There are also a few fundamental (foundation?) factors that drive all systems development. Here are a few that we’ve come up with:
- Moore’s law is alive and well – processing power continues to double every 18-24 months. (1) (5)
- In 2006, electronics manufacturers produced more transistors (at least 26 million-million of them) than the world’s farmers grow grains of rice. (1) (4)
- There were Five Exabytes (10^18 bytes) of new Stored Information (Paper, Film, Magnetic, Optical) and Eighteen exabytes of new Information Flows (Broadcast, Telephony, Internet) produced in 2002 (In 1999 the world produced between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information). (2)
- The CERN Large Hadron Collider will produce 10–15 petabytes (10^15 bytes) of data every year. (3)
- It is projected that just four years from now (2006), the world’s information base will be doubling in size every 11 hours. (1)
With the increasing processor power (the number of transistors on a processor chip and especially with the rise of multi-core, multi-processor, and cloud computing systems), the increasing need to store, retrieve, and processess information, the importance of improving business productivity and efficiencies (especially during these challenging times), and the unlimited opportunities to create new businesses and economies - this is the perfect time to be a software, systems, and database developer. At Embarcadero we empower application developers and database professionals with tools to design, build, and run software applications in the environment you choose.
Do you have other fundamentals that drive your systems development? Add your comments to this blog post.
Notes:
(1) IBM Global Technology Services - “The toxic terabyte: How data-dumping threatens business efficiency,” July 2006.
(2) "How Much Information? 2003", UC Berkeley Study 2003 (Full Report, Executive Summary).
(3) physicsworld.com article - CERN 2008.
(4) Contest: Guess Intel Transistor Shipments, Win a Great Prize!
(5) Intel Core i7, Quad-core, 731 million transistors
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