Data governance isn’t the only element of corporate technology strategies that is undergoing major changes due to the explosion of smartphones and tablets in the workplace. A newly published survey of 200 enterprise IT executives commissioned by Red Hat Inc. reveals that nine out of ten plan to increase their investment in mobile development next year by an average of 24 percent to support users more effectively beyond the desktop.

Spending will continue to climb from there to fund the creation of about 21 new custom apps per organization through 2017, many of which are set to incorporate technologies that have only recently begun seeing use in the traditional enterprise. The growth in adoption is most pronounced on the server side, where over a quarter of the respondents said that they intend to use primarily  Node.js compared to a mere 15 percent who are sticking with Java, the language powering 71 percent of current projects. Microsoft Corp.’s .NET fared only slightly better with a 17 percent share of the votes.

The shift toward newer development frameworks is part of a much broader modernization effort that is also seeing organizations making use of more and more resources from outside the corporate firewall. According to Red Hat, more thn 31 percent of the participants in its study said that their app development teams already use cloud services in their work, a figure that is expected to pass the one-third mark within the next two years. That’s an encouraging sign for its growth plans.

The company gained a managed middleware suite specifically geared toward supporting mobile workloads through its acquisition of FeedHenry Ltd. last year that could turn into a major source of revenue if the trend continues at the current pace. But first, Red Hat will have to find a way of setting its platform apart from the numerous other alternatives out there, a goal that won’t come easily.

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