Five years ago, Pivotal set out transform how the world builds software. That's a pretty lofty vision. But the devil, as the saying goes, is in the details. Every challenge and every customer transformation is unique, and we've learned as much as we've given along the way.
We want to empower teams to build valuable applications and deliver extraordinary experiences to their customers. But in order to empower, you have to be able to teach, and in order to teach, you have to be able to learn.
Here are five lessons that we’ve learned in the last five years. It's by no means an exhaustive list, but they’ve helped us build our business, and we hope that they help your teams and businesses, small and large alike.
Lesson 1: Good things come in pairs.
Where would T'challa be without his genius teen sister Shuri? At Pivotal, we’ve embraced pair programming across the company. Two developers, two brains, and four hands work together on one piece of code at a time. Pivotal CEO Rob Mee explains that this results in software that’s “more efficient, and it produces better code.” It’s also more fun when someone's got your back.
Lesson 2: Why use one cloud when you can use them all?
Five years ago, you played your hand, picked your cloud—public or private—and your workloads and your business were stuck with it. Now, you can move at the speed of business, between clouds, getting the best out of them all, keeping some on-premise for those workloads that require it. As Josh McKenty said, “diversify your cloud portfolio or bank on failure.”
Lesson 3: You can build a business on open source software.
Cloud optionality, or choice, was born from the open source community. Pivotal has been committed to open source software. Why? Because integrating the great code of many committers through an open exchange and community that shapes, checks, and evolves standards, results in faster innovation. Open source can be a force multiplier, and if you don’t believe us, just ask our customers.
Lesson 4: When it comes to security, you have to be faster than the bad actors.
Security is everyone's issue. When enterprises place their trust on software to protect information, the underlying processes have to be modern, and ready to adapt to changing threats. We encourage security teams to reframe their approach around continuous movement. That’s why we embrace the 3 Rs approach: “Rotate datacenter credentials every few minutes or hours. Repave every server and application in the datacenter every few hours from a known good state. Repair vulnerable operating systems and application stacks consistently within hours of patch availability.” That’s what cloud-native security looks like, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry can bring this vision to life for any team anywhere in the world.
Lesson 5: Iteration is the path to meaning.
The best paintings are the fruit of the many studies before them. Great stories are never written in one draft, and big, groundbreaking ideas rarely arrive fully formed. They have to be shaped and validated every step of the way—from the MVP, to its constant evolution. If you do the right thing, and generate development cycles that regularly build, deploy, and measure, from which you learn, you’ll create meaningful products more efficiently.
We love helping companies deliver better, more sustainable software. Because great software helps build stronger teams.
And when it comes to iterating, learning, and making things better, we're right there with you. We’re thankful for all the Pivots, partners, customers, and communities that we work with, and we’re excited for what the next five years (and beyond) will bring. We know one thing for sure: we'll continue to learn and adapt, and share the knowledge.
It’s our fifth birthday, but we want to give you a gift: Use code S1P300_Anniversary between 4/20–4/27 to receive $300 off your pass for SpringOne Platform in Washington, D.C. https://2018.event.springonepl
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