In the four years that Cornelia Davis has worked on the open source Cloud Foundry platform at Pivotal, she has spent much time explaining the technical merits of the emerging technology to customers and partners, she said in her keynote at Collaboration Summit last month.
“But I spent just as much time talking to them about how they had to change the way that they were thinking about solving problems to be able to use the platform effectively,” said Davis, CTO of the transformation practice at Pivotal where she helps customers develop and execute on their cloud platform strategies. “And also, conversely, how the existence of the platform allowed them to think about things differently.”
Cloud Foundry, known as a Platform-as-a-Service or Cloud Native Platform, enables companies to transform their problem-solving abilities as much as their technology infrastructure.
Companies crave this transformation for many common reasons, she said. They want to:
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enable speed to market.
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deliver better customer experience.
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create an engaged and enthusiastic workforce.
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create better products.
“What does it take to change?” she asked. “It’s all about the developer. It’s changing development practices.”
Using a cloud native platform allows the transition of development practices away from the traditional Water-scrum-fall toward much more Agile methods that allow for continuous delivery and, thus, continuous innovation, she said. In other words, it enables DevOps – or the breaking down of silos between a company’s developers and operations teams.
“The fact that deployments are high ceremony is a huge problem,” for companies that use a traditional development method, she said. “Deployments have to be low ceremony so that we can do them very, very frequently.”
In organizations that have embraced continuous delivery, change is the rule – not the exception– and the key to their success is the cloud platform.
“All of the successful internet scale companies are doing this. They all built their own platforms. The platform matters,” Davis said. “You have to have the right platform to be able to do continuous delivery and continuous innovation. That platform needs to support development and operations.”
Watch Cornelia Davis’s full keynote, below, for more on how a cloud platform enables change and innovation.
And view all 13 keynote videos from Collaboration Summit, held March 29-31 in Lake Tahoe, California.
