We had the opportunity to attend CloudFroundry’s CFSummit conference held in Frankfurt September 27th and 28th 2016. The conference was well attended with over 700+ participants, coming from customers, prospects and the ecosystem. 

 
So take a look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)

 


No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):

 

 
Want to read on? Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:

Cloud Foundry is growing – Not surprisingly, Cloud Foundry is doing well in Europe. Last year’s Cloud Foundry Summit in Berlin saw about 400 attendees, the 2nd edition this year in Frankfurt saw over 700. Interest in Cloud Foundry is the same as in North America, enterprises are looking for a PaaS platform that allows them to build Next Generation Applications, with the option to deploy on premises and in the cloud, to multiple clouds, and develop software in a modern way that is in tune with the 21st century challenges and best practices. Being in Europe / Germany – there is a European touch to the ecosystem – with e.g. local vendors like SAP and Atos having more prominent roles than e.g. at Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara earlier this year.

Focus on Government – Contrary to the North American edition of the conference, the European edition had an emphasis on showcasing on what is happening in government, with Tuesday having a UK government technologist, and Wednesday having a Dutch government technologist on stage. Certainly no coincidence – could it be that European governments are endorsing and embracing PaaS projects more than e.g. in the US? An interesting wrinkle – that needs more discussion going forward.

IoT rules all use cases – No surprise, as seen on other European events, the IoT use case is strong and prominent. All the way to the fact that IoT reference customers at North American events – usually come from … Europe. And while the average European IT leader is concerned moving customer and employee data into the public cloud – there is no concern, not even discussion when it comes to IoT. The technical requirements are simply too large to even consider running on premises and the pressure on the high quality, high price European manufacturers is simply too high for not choosing a faster to implement cloud strategy.

Community Outreach – On the flipside the more traditional use cases take more time, PaaS, agile development, CI / CD etc. are all newer trends for the Europeans than their North American colleagues. So Pivotal, Cloud Foundry and partners need to invest into community evangelism efforts, and the creation of the Ambassador program is certainly a good step. We will have to check in a few quarters on progress and if it has really moved things in the direction of higher awareness, less concerns and ultimately better adoption.

MyPOV

A good event for Cloud Foundry and partners. European Enterpises have a keen interest to understand what PaaS in general and more specifically – Cloud Foundry can do for them. But basic skepticism towards new best practices, tools and trends coming from North America run high traditionally in Europe – and with good reason: Not everything that comes over the Atlantic, hyped as the derniere cri real lasts and has an impact on enterprise automation. Cloud Foundry now needs to convert that good interesting, first showcase and trial objects into live customer projects, that can be showcased at the 3rd edition of CFSummit Europe in 2017. We will be watching.

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).




More on Pivotal / Cloud Foundry
  • Event Report - Pivotal SpringOne Platform - Spring in its 2nd spring - read here
  • Event Report - Cloud Foundry Cloud Foundry Summit - It's good to be king of PaaS - read here
  • News Analysis - Pivotal makes Cloud Foundry more about multi-cloud - read here
  • News Analysis - Pivotal pivots to OpenSource and Hortonworks - Or: OpenSource keeps winning - read here
  • New Analysis: Pivotal Now Makes It Easier Than Ever to Take Software from Idea to Production - read here

More on Next Generation Applications::
 
  • Event Report - Google I/O 2016 - Android N soon, Google assistant sooner and VR / AR later - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud - read here
  • Event Report - OpenStack Summit 2016 - Austin - OpenStack matures, grows up - read here
  • First Take - Workato’s Workbot cuts business users some slack with Slack integration - read here
  • Progress Report - Cloudera is all in with Hadoop - now off to verticals - read here
  • First Take - SAP Cloud for Planning - The next spreadsheet killer is off to a good start - read here
  • Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - moves into DaaS - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP commits to Cloud Foundry and OpenStack - Key Steps - but what is the direction? Read here
  • Event Report - MongoDB is a showcase for the power of Open Source in the enterprise - read here
  • Musings - A manifesto: What are 'true' analytics? Read here
  • Future of Work - One Spreadsheet at the time - Informatica Springbok - read here
  • Musings - The Era of the no-design Database - Read here
  • Mendix - the other path to build software - read here
  • Musings - Time to ditch your datawarehouse .... - Read here

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.