NoSQL is gaining acceptance by corporate enterprise developers – arguably even more so than the overall developer community.

About 56% of enterprise developers report at least some use of NoSQL and 63% plan to use it in the next two years. That’s according to Evans Data Corp. annual developer survey which found that the big driver for the interest is the need to manage big data. NoSQL is generally viewed as a next generation database environment. It is non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontally scalable.

Evans Data CEO  Janel Garvin said to Integration Developer News that NoSQL is “considerably stronger” in the enterprise segment than within the general developer population where 43% expect to use NoSQL.

This defies the conventional belief that the enterprise community is behind in terms of NoSQL adoption.  Its strength though is testament to a growing interest by IT operations in application development and working with developers to provide tools for creating services where traditional methods fail. The failures of traditional architecture is becoming increasingly apparent as the capability to scale is hindered by the inability to manage big data loads and the new generation of applications that increasingly requires software that is decoupled from the hardware.  The movement is heralding an acceptance for such technologies as Hadoop which have historically been used to manage large-scale Web oriented environments.

The Evans Data survey also pointed to other similar trends that shows how IT is going through a major transformation.

According to the survey, about 40% of all North American developers are now working on apps for wireless devices with 73% planning to extend enterprise apps to mobile devices within the next 12 months.

“Extending the enterprise to mobile clients is one of the hottest areas of development in the mobile space today,” Garvin told IDN. “Enterprises have to accommodate a large variety of clients today – and most of them are mobile. Enterprise messaging and collaboration tools are considered the most important enterprise apps for mobile devices currently,” she added.

In terms of the cloud, developers say they are still reluctant to move beyond test and development as security is still a major concern.  Instead, they are opting to keep sensitive data stored on-premise while doing transactions in the cloud.

Services Angle

The services providers of the world need to increase their investment in developers who understand NoSQL and even to a larger extent, big data. These are the people who will help IT operations with managing information and providing leading edge perspectives about IT transformation.