Aussie firms in middle of pack in software development

Australian enterprises ranked fourth out of six markets surveyed in terms of how well they build software that delivers business value in a new report commissioned by Pivotal Software.

The research commissioned by the Financial Times' Longitude Research and Ovum assessed enterprises across five industries on their software development proficiency.

The companies used the Build to Adapt Benchmark developed for the research, which measured software development proficiency across five indicators reflective of the business outcomes that define a modern software company — speed, stability, scalability, security and savings.

According to the report, enterprises across the world are transforming their businesses due to software innovations, and major companies are striving to become software-driven to keep up with their more agile competition.

In terms of speed, Australian companies surveyed were among the fastest to deploy software changes following user feedback, taking an average of 7.1 days to deploy a simple change.

Australia was on par with the global average for stability, with an estimated 19% of software launches and upgrades delayed due to defects.

For scalability, Australia was second only to the US in terms of the proportion of applications built or refactored to run in the cloud (38% compared to 45%). But just 20% of Australian companies would feel confident scaling their existing architecture with minimum structural changes if they suddenly had to double the workloads on current applications.

In terms of security, 23% of Australian companies reported having experienced more than 11 security-driven service suspensions or delays over the past year, but was behind both the US (33%) and Singapore (28%) in this respect.

Finally, the report found that Australian companies have more applications per developer (3.7) than any other country, indicating that productivity is high and the potential for savings is significant.

But Australian companies are requiring far more IT operators than their counterparts in the US. Nine in 10 Australian companies report having one IT operator for every five or fewer developers, whereas in the US, 79% of companies have five or more developers per operator.

The five industries covered by the research were banking, insurance, automotive, retail and telecommunications. The six markets were Australia, the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and Singapore.

Image credit: ©alphaspirit/Dollar Photo Club

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