Why Open Source Freedom Leads Technology Adoption In the Enterprise
Cloud Foundry sponsored this post.
A modern enterprise is a business focused on the future. It’s aware of the past (and may even derive a good amount of its revenue from a legacy product) — but its long-term survival depends on building for tomorrow. This is why at Cloud Foundry Foundation we often talk about “building the future.” In my mind, modern enterprises are leading the charge in building the applications, the tools and the functions we will need for tomorrow, today.
Modern enterprises also think critically about what they should build themselves and what they should source from somewhere else. Talented engineers are one of the most valuable assets a company can employ in order to be competitive, so ensuring these engineers have the freedom to focus on differentiation is super important to a company’s success. What this all comes down to is agility — the ability to rapidly respond to customer, partner and stakeholder needs in an ever-shifting competitive landscape. The faster you can iterate between needs and delivered technology, the more responsive you can be as a business.
Years ago we talked about “internet time” in reference to the shift in business response. Now, we’re on “cloud time,” which renders internet time antiquated. The Cloud Foundry family of open source software is built with this fundamental imperative in mind. Our projects focus on exceptional developer experience and massive operational leverage. When Cloud Foundry becomes embedded in an organization, engineers are free to create the applications they want to build to drive their companies and their users toward the future.
Developers can code in their language of choice, with their framework of choice and skip the complex configuration of environments and mundane operational tasks. Cloud Foundry Application Runtime abstracts away the environment setup and much of the operational burden of running software. It handles many of the harder and slower, deployment and operational tasks automatically so developers can focus on building applications creatively, speedily and at scale.
How Cloud Foundry Foundation Supports Developers — and Business
Our role at the Cloud Foundry Foundation is to enable a healthy ecosystem of open source contributors, Cloud Foundry end users, service providers and vendors. We do this by ensuring vendors are successful — even as they may compete with each other — by providing a neutral territory for collaboration and technical leadership. We sit in a position to ensure the voice of the user is heard by the project management committees and the open source contributor community’s work is made visible to those users — and we enable user-to-user collaboration around shared problems.
It’s been an exercise in using both my technical and business history to help bring all of these organizations and people together. I work closely with developers and CIOs alike at all of our member companies, which run the gamut from major aerospace corporations to NGOs to multinational telecoms providers to think tanks working on energy efficiency. My background allows me to have conversations with technical leaders and developers across verticals, particularly focusing on having empathy for their daily struggles. I’ve found the enterprises that work with the Foundation seek support in navigating the rapid pace of change in the technology landscape, from cloud computing to developer tools and frameworks. In this way, open source software is a leading indicator of what’s coming next and the Foundation’s collective knowledge can offer guidance critical to the enterprise.
Feature image via Pixabay.
