One of the biggest ongoing conversations in tech right now pertains to the shifting role of developers, and what this will mean for IT departments. A recent survey by Puppet Labs shows that developers are becoming so influential in shaping products and user experience, that business success demands an understanding of just how important a role they play.

Not so long ago, the boot was on the other foot. It used to be that enterprises, with their enormous purchasing power, were the biggest consumers of IT technology. Software and hardware were far more expensive than they are now, with almost everything needed to build a simple website, be it operation systems, development tools and servers, only available through a commercial license.

Back then, developers could only work within their employer’s means. But things have drastically changed since then, firstly with so much software being open-sourced and made readily available, and later, with the evolution of the cloud market dispensing with the need for hardware.

Cloud-based innovation

The expanding cloud has totally disrupted the power structure within IT. Individual developers simply aren’t in a position to afford a dedicated server, and while shared hosting was perhaps a viable option, it doesn’t come close to the power of the cloud. Within the cloud, all hardware is virtualized and run by a hypervisor that can perform numerous tasks at once, administering servers, and creating partitions of CPU, memory, storage and more.

With no competition for resources among users because everyone gets their own virtual server instance, it appears to developers as if they have their own dedicated server. This affords almost unlimited options and flexibility, vastly improving the agility of those businesses that are willing to reach for the cloud.

Open-source empowering developers

Just as important as the growth of cloud is the widespread development and adoption of open-source. The ready availability of numerous free software projects has had a massive impact on IT that few would have foreseen 10 or 15 years ago.

This is something Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst alluded to when talking with SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier on theCUBE at Red Hat Summit 2014. Whitehurst explained how we’re seeing two major phenomenon happening at the same time: the birth and growth of the big Web 2.0 companies, which drives the explosion of open source codes, and the growing demand that’s now being driven by consumers.

“Before, most code came from large enterprises. Large web 2.0 companies use open source to drive innovation,” stated Whitehurst.

“If you look at whether its DevOps, continuous deployment, those are all things that have come out of the Web 2.0 movement which is all built on open source.”

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This shift towards open-source is empowering developers like never before. It’s not that developers just control applications and the code – these days they control the entire infrastructure, and that’s led to increasing integration of developers and IT. In the future, IT departments will revolve almost entirely around developers, further accelerating innovations in the cloud. Pretty soon, almost every major enterprise is going to shift its IT into the cloud, and it’ll be the developers who push them there.

When it comes to information technology, it’s developers who’ve become the real decision makers. And those employers who’re willing to accept this new reality will fare much, much better than those that don’t.

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