Traditional industries are scared. More and more customers — wanting more control — are moving to disruptors with better technology.
This is the age of disruption.
The technologist’s world is getting really big, and they need to change today and plan for the future — simultaneously — when their industries are changing so rapidly. The CIO, for example, needs to be nimble enough moving forward, while planning for tomorrow, with increasingly smaller budgets.
So, how can traditional industries respond?
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The cloud native galaxy
Developers are now creating the future of companies. The code they write and the software they create is allowing traditional companies to be competitive again in new and changing markets.
And the cloud, and open sources communities like the Cloud Foundry, are crucial in facilitating developer community growth and innovation.
Cloud Foundry, the 4-year-old open source project, is one of the largest open source communities in the world.
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Half of Fortune 500 companies — 61% large enterprise, 14% small enterprises and 25% SMEs — are using this community. In this cloud native galaxy, all the capabilities of these organisations are pulled onto a single platform.
“It’s an exciting revolution,” said Abby Kearns, Executive Director at Cloud Foundry during her opening keynote at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Basel.
“And better than saving time and money, the platform increases application velocity — moving into production workloads faster,” she said.
By industry
In the automotive industry, for example, Volkswagen grew their app development capabilities in house and expanded their suite of applications across all 12 brands via the Cloud Foundry.
The outcomes of this were:
• 0 to 250 developers in 2 years.
• 2400+ instances in production in 5 regions.
• 1 million users.
In the financial services and insurance industry, Allianz needed the agility to develop digital customer-centric products in its ‘Digital Factory’.
The results of partnering with Cloud Foundry:
• All digital factory and products are deployed and operated in the cloud.
• Production went from days to minutes.
• More than 350 ‘Digital Factory’ employees working on these projects.
“These companies are letting Cloud Foundry shape the future of their company, focusing on interoperability, velocity and most importantly, innovation,” said Kearns.
Fly in the cloud
It is generally accepted that open source communities are hotbeds of innovation, bringing together hundreds of thousands of developers across the world; in a forum where they can share ideas, build code and innovate.
The Cloud Foundry platform facilitates this, but we need examples from users — from traditional industries — of how this has helped them stave off disruption.
The future of enterprise applications
Boeing, the aviation and aerospace company, presented during the opening of the summit.
The organisation, according to Enes Yildirim — Global Head of Digital Transformation at Boeing — wanted to digitally transform.
The transformation needed to have a “focus on people, culture and agility, combined with lean principles.”
“We wanted the transformation to help our customers by making our technology abundantly easier to use,” continued Yildirim.
“So, we implemented Cloud Foundry, and this helped us move from the initial conversations to focus on the business and enabling delivery, and velocity.”
“This was achieved in the first 80 days, with a DevOps tool chain, and we can now develop and code as and when we need it.”
“We went from 0 users to 2,000 users, with 1,000 production applications. That’s scale.”
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Staving off disruption
For traditional businesses in traditional industries, survival depends on digital transformation. A failure to improve the customer experience, retain customers and innovate will lead to extinction. Plain and simple.
How can these businesses succeed, and not be destined to the history books?
It’s all about running apps at scale — using a platform, or containers in multiple clouds. It’s about using an open source cloud community that brings together developers, and new and emerging cloud native technologies to drive innovation.
“We have come far, but there is a long way to go,” said Kearns. “We need more conversations, more ideas to evolve and innovate on the platform.”
