So take a look at my musings on the event here:
No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation:
Want to read on?
Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:
Growing, growing – staying humble – The part that strikes me the most with Cloud Foundry is that despite its substantial success in the PaaS market, the vendor remains humble… certainly kudos go to the management team and certainly the combination with open source on the foundation side helped. But a commercial software vendor, with similar success, would have a different attitude and conference. The humble approach maybe well the secret that attracts so many enterprises to make Cloud Foundry their PaaS of Choice.
It’s not about cloud only and not about single cloud – Cloud Foundry is also a data point that shows that enterprises don’t want a cloud only strategy, speaking to a number of attending customers and prospects, the on premises capabilities of Cloud Foundry are a point of attraction. And by now it is clear that cloud lock-in is something enterprise want to avoid, too. Right after on premise delivery option, the multi-cloud capability of CloudFoundry were the next mentioned reason for interest in the vendor.
No serious competition (for the moment) – Cloud Foundry is in a unique positon - for now. Much has been said and written about IaaS ‘eating’ the PaaS layer, and a number of PaaS players disappeared that way. Apart from large technology stack vendors e.g. Oracle and Microsoft making a big move, Cloud Foundry is setup very well in the PaaS market. The vendor has basically established itself as the ‘Switzerland’ of PaaS, with investment and uptake of almost all major players in the enterprise software and services market. And ecosystem adoption has ‘flywheel’ effects that are even strengthening this momentum. E.g. when the largest enterprise software vendor (SAP) chooses Cloud Foundry as its PaaS tool, that’s a major win for the platform, as it drags the probably largest services ecosystem in enterprise software on the platform.
MyPOV
There is very little not to like about Cloud Foundry at the moment. The multi-cloud support path the vendor has embarked on about 2 years ago is paying off. Breaking away from the VMware / EMC architecture was certainly a key move, making Cloud Foundry one of the (few) diamonds in the rough of the combined Dell / EMC portfolio. Now it is going to be key to make the next wave of partners and customers successful on the platform to continue the momentum.
On the concern side, much to this analyst’s dismay who always tries to paint a balanced picture, there is very little to be concerned about. Not being too religious on the paradigm of pair programming is a key course for Cloud Foundry, and I heard almost no ‘this way or the highway’ messaging on this at the summit. So the analysis needs to go more into the platform direction, where trends like AI / Machine Learning and the size of compute virtualization (VMs vs micro services) are features / capabilities that the vendor needs to approach and implement the right way, in order to avoid missing out on future ‘attraction’ point to other PaaS players.
But overall a very good Cloud Foundry Summit, vendor, partners and ecosystem are growing, very few, almost no things not to like at the moment. We will keep watching.
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below.
More on Pivotal / Cloud Foundry
- 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.