‘Planning is dead’
CEO Jim Whitehurst put the cloud news in a broader context, namely the need for relentless speed: “Planning, as we know it, is dead.” Technological change, he said in a keynote address, is happening at an ever-increasing pace, making it nearly impossible to prepare for.
“I hear over and over and over again — CEOs, CIOs talking about, ‘Oh, I’m worried about being Uberized,'” Whitehurst said in a keynote address, referring to the success of ride-hailing service Uber, which upended the livery industry with its cloud-based business model. “‘I’m worried about being more agile. I’m worried about digital disruption and digital transformation.'”
Organizations can only counter a future that’s “less and less knowable,” Whitehurst said, by giving people the tools they need to tap into their own creativity. That way, they can come up with innovative products and services — and get ahead of the competition.
Software developers are in a position to drive innovation today with new applications, said Todd Mancini, senior principal product manager at Red Hat, but oftentimes they can’t.
“One of their biggest challenges, one of their biggest difficulties, is simply getting started,” Mancini said in another keynote address. “Difficulties setting up their developer tools, their dev and test environments, difficulties understanding the needs of the business, and even difficulties selecting technologies when starting a new project.”
Openshift.io, “a new, end-to-end, cloud-native development experience,” aims to fix that, giving developers guidance to select the right tools and create new applications and cloud services.
The technology is still in preview, but Urbanek said it shows promise. At Dell, he said, “applications rule the roost. And anything that empowers [developers] to be able to deliver more quickly is a big boon.”