Silicon Valley has long been the upstart entrepreneur who builds the next big thing in their garage. Whether it was Steve Jobs building the first personal computer in his garage to the development of Pinterest at a co-working space, the ingenuity, creativity, and agility are the motivating factors towards driving change and innovation.
In the narrative of Silicon Valley, we’ve also seen many of these companies grow to fledging Fortune 500 firms and having to deal with the challenges of digital transformation. While smaller companies have an easier time adopting to the mobile, social, and digital needs of their customers, larger firms have traditionally needed to find ways to overcome and adjust to the challenges of a large workforce and slow approval processes.
Re-Inventing Silicon Valley
Prior to the mainstream adoption of cloud computing, organizations had few places to turn if they wanted to be agile, save for the innovative project manager who knew how to efficiently manage a team. However, having the right staff in place still wasn’t enough, since developers and programmers needed the right technologies to move quickly as well. Furthermore, for enterprises that weren’t built in the cloud, shifting over from legacy infrastructure to cloud wasn’t an easy sell either. IT challenges include:
- Managing culture change
- Leveraging existing technologies while considering new ones
- Re-training employees for new skills
- Getting leadership buy-in
Do these challenges seem familiar? That’s because they are from our webinar from last month where we received similar feedback from our audience. The question still remains then: With the push towards cloud computing and pressure from customers to innovate and iterate, where can IT leadership look?
Moving in a Pivotal Direction
Several weeks ago the Perficient team attended the Pivotal SpringOne Platform conference in Las Vegas, where we were able to immerse ourselves in the next generation of cloud application development. As organizations undergo digital transformation to meet the demands of consumers, their technical teams must adjust and learn to enable lean, rapid, and iterative software delivery, similar to the Silicon Valley startups they compete against.
At the conference, we learned how the software development process was being redefined by Pivotal through “cloud native”, a term describing the modern technologies, practices, philosophies, and architectural approaches governing the new paradigms of software development. For cloud-native platforms to be effective in their use, the following characteristics are required:
- Standardization for easy heavy lifting and addressing of challenges across all teams.
- Automation and self-service
- Elevation of concerns for ease of communication
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Interoperability and extensibility
- Enhanced DevOps collaboration
Each of these characteristics is present in Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), an open source based cloud platform built to accelerate software delivery, transforming virtual infrastructure into a fully-featured and enterprise-ready application platform. Deployed in both private and public cloud environments, PCF offers the speed, automation, and operational excellence IT leaders crave. Numerous organizations from insurance to automotive showcased their takeaways in using the PCF platform at the conference, demonstrating that cloud-native is here to stay.
In closing, we believe the conference delivered important insights towards the future of cloud and DevOps, while also showing that the modern enterprise has the resources and technologies to compete even with the nimblest and agile of startups. Our team is excited to see PCF in action for the future and its impact towards the development of the next generation of technology innovations.
Learn More
Are you part of an organization looking to innovate and compete with Silicon Valley startups? If so, reach out to us and let’s explore how Pivotal can transform your development capabilities.
Learn more about our partnerships here.
