Technology moves so quickly, but why does enterprise IT move so slowly?

Enterprise IT

The most exciting aspect of the most recent RedMonk Programming Language Rankings is their uninteresting. “Java is retaining a substantial portion of the corporate applications market due to a mix of its versatility and the enterprise’s inertia,” noted RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady.

That isn’t to say that things are any better in database land. More than 70,000 developers were questioned by Stack Overflow, who discovered that… still love PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis. They did the same thing in 2017 when they posed the same question. But, yeah, by the way, even though these well-loved databases continue to make advances against incumbents like Oracle and Microsoft, DB-Engines reports that those incumbents are still frequently employed.

So, what’s the bottom line? In the business world, change is sluggish.

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Beyond set-top boxes

For millennia, people have been writing off Java. It’s a slow process! It’s far too bug-tolerant! There are various options, including Rust, which has recently gained a lot of popularity. On the other hand, Java refuses to relinquish its hegemony in enterprise computing. According to O’Grady, there are a few reasons for this:

The language previously used to control cable set-top boxes is still a workhorse and has continuously found new work to do. Java’s ranking performance has remained impressive throughout the years, and it [has] demonstrated a remarkable capacity to adapt to a fast-changing landscape.

It isn’t because Java is a favorite among programmers. According to Stack Overflow’s survey data, developer sentiment is nearly 50/50 on whether they love or hate Java (47.15 percent vs. 52.85 percent ). Do you desire a popular programming language? Rust is a good option (86.98 percent of surveyed say they love it). Or is it a language that programmers dread? COBOL targets 84.21 percent of responders who want to hurl rocks at the old language. But what about Java? It’s smack dab in the middle, the most mild-mannered of developer preferences.

Despite this, it’s an enterprise default, ranking among the top 10 in the RedMonk rankings:

1. Scripting in Java
2. Python is the second language.
3. Java (version 2)
4. PHP is number four.
5. Cascading style sheets
6. C++ is number five.
7. NET Framework
8. TypeScript is number eight.
9. Ruby is number nine.
10. C tenth

Only TypeScript was invented within the last decade of the programming languages on that list (2012). Everything else has existed for a long time. As much as we like to think that technology moves quickly, things slow down once it enters the workplace. Considerably.

Data at enterprise speed

We know that businesses are embracing real-time data processing on the data side. The startup behind Apache Kafka, Confluent, went public in 2021, allowing businesses to stream data to improve customer experiences. The process by which humans recently reported a 64% rise in overall sales and a 200% increase in cloud revenue, demonstrating that corporations have gotten the message. Confluent isn’t alone; a slew of data platform firms (Snowflake, for example) are wooing firms with a modern, cloud-centric approach to data.

Despite this, the industry’s most widely used databases have not altered in a decade. Although we looked at the databases that developers chose (Redis, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL), the three databases that developers chose in 2017 are the same three databases that developers chose in 2017. Meanwhile, Oracle and IBM DB2 top the “most despised” list, with Microsoft SQL Server faring slightly better, but corporations continue to utilize Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL according to DB-Engines.

Why? Because, whereas “most adored” indicates where the market is headed, “most despised” mainly indicates where the market has already arrived, with familiarity fostering disdain. To put it another way, these legacy databases have been there long enough for enterprise IT experts to take a good, long look at them and, more and more, want to move on.

Which the company will do. Slowly.

That’s all there is to it. Developer sentiment towards technologies like Rust and Redis isn’t to be overlooked–they’re indicators of where engineers want to take the companies that use them. However, we must not underestimate the difficulty of transformation in workplace computing.

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.