Pivotal Podcasts

If someone tells you they have the secret to a fast, seamless digital transformation for your enterprise, don't believe them, says Jeff Dickey. The reality, says Dickey, Chief Innovation Officer at Redapt, is that there is no Easy Button, as much as we wish there were. So should enterprises think about transitioning from legacy infrastructure and newer, modern platforms? Jeff shares his wisdom in this week's episode of Pivotal Conversations.

There's few tasks harder than refactoring a large organization, but that's exactly what we're asking management to do in all this digital transformation hoopla. Existing organizations are tremendously conflicted and tied up in competing incentives already, and then when you try to shift to a product team driven approach, things go even more haywire. Here, Richard & Coté talk with Pivotal's Carl Coryell-Martin who's been pulling apart that bureaucratic bowl of spaghetti for many years now.

In this week's episode of Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain speak with Stephane El Mabrouk from Thales. Stephane helped the company build what it calls its Digital Factory, an environment for Thales engineers and others to learn modern software development. It's all part of Thales' drive to better serve its customers with software.

From all the stories at SpringOne Platform you get the feeling that every organization out there is doing a real bang-up job with improving their software capabilities. Of course, it's not actually everyone out there, but each year we hear about more enterprises and government agencies that are using their own, custom written software to improve their business and operations. In this episode, Richard and Coté go over some of their highlights from SpringOne Platform 2018, cover some of the news (PCF 2.3 and PKS 1.2), and a few other news items in the infrastructure and cloud world.

What a week! SpringOne Platform 2018, which took place September 24 to 28, has come and gone. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain share their highlights from the event and lessons learned from customers, partners and other Pivots.

Perhaps the phrase "business transformation" is what we should say instead of "digital transformation." If the goal of IT transformation is to switch over your organization from an operations, service provider to a product-centric approach, it fits better. While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with West's Thomas Squeo about how West has been making this shift from an IT-as-operators and project gnomes to end-to-end product people. We also discuss the other side of the transformation, how the product people and the executive team learn about technologies like containers and microservices and start thinking about how those innovations let them change the core business. Thomas also gives advice on the career path to becoming a CTO: build up a diverse career path instead of sticking in just one lane.

It's easy to understand what kind of IT culture you need if you're going to improve how you do software, but how do you actually change such a squishy thing? While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with Kyle Campose about how he's done it. We also talk about the phrase "digital transformation" and some sandwich ontology.

Developers are excited about serverless computing, as it removes the need to manage - you guessed it - servers! But that raises a tricky problem: how do you monitor your serverless code? In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain chat with Adam Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO of IOpipe, about the challenge of and tactics for monitoring event-driven and serverless architectures.

You often hear about the "product manager," but rarely about what they actually do day-to-day. This episode we talk with Pivotal's Jonathan Sirlin about product management using several examples of applications and organizations he's worked with. He talks in-depth about one application he and team worked on, covering the process they used to find, prioritize, and then create features and software.

It's human nature to want to cover up your failures. But when it comes to platform and application security, more not less transparency is needed so developers and others can learn from each other, according to Snyk CEO Guy Podjarny. On this episode of Pivotal Insights, Guy joins Jeff and Dormain to talk about the need for more transparency when it comes to security breaches, why it's important to celebrate security successes, and how multiple lines of defense are the key to true security.

"More and more, we see that more traditional, enterprise-y use cases start to fall into these categories," Mark Fisher, Pivotal. Few topics are driving more interest than "serverless." Pivotal has been working on a function framework called Project Riff for awhile. At its core, it's an event driven model for building applications. Recently, the team announced that riff works on knative. We discuss riff, knative, and serverless in general. There's also a little bit of news this week, and some herring history.

"As designers, we think about the why and understanding the human experience, empathizing, and observing, and being curious, and trying to understand what are those important touch-points between a person and technology." We finally talk about design in this episode with Salomé Mortazavi. She goes in-depth into what design is for software, how it operates in a very user centric way, what it's like to pair in designing, tools Pivotal design people use, and modeling how to track the success and quality of design. Also, we talk about umbrella and rain-jacket style in Seattle. No one uses umbrellas, and you just need one rain-jacket, unless you want to match with your shoes. Full show notes: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts

If you've ever shared a document with an entire group or department rather than trying to figure out who specifically should have access to the doc, you've contributed to the security threat-level at your enterprise. Don't feel bad ... you're not the only one! And there are countless other threats facing corporate networks and applications every day, particularly as more enterprises are building their own software as part of digital transformation efforts. Traditional approaches to security help, but to take your defenses to the next level, look to data science. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Pivotal Principal Data Scientist Rashmi Raghu and Director of Information Security Brendan Higgins join Jeff to talk about using data science and analytics to catch unusual and potentially malicious user behavior on corporate networks and share a real-world example the two collaborated on.

SpringOne platform is coming up quick - next month! - so Richard and Coté do their annual favorite talks review. There's talk on agile, pipelines, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Spring, case studies, and so many more they don't have time to discuss. In recent news, Knative was recently announced which is wangling to be "the building blocks for running serverless workloads on kubernetes," as Google's DeWitt Clinton put it. Richard and Coté discuss knative, Istio, and how "serverless" seems to now mean just any old type of programming, but with containers and all that cloud native stuff. They also discuss container registries. Also, European toilet paper and beds.

When we last checked in with Garmin's Jonathan Regehr at Cloud Foundry Summit NA 2018, he an his team were in the process of automating as much of the software delivery pipeline as possible. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Jonathan, an architect at Garmin, updates us on the company's progress, including the importance of testing to fully automate the pipeline to production deployment. He also shares some thoughts on shifting security and QA left, how Garmin is approaching managing its data in a cloud-native way, and makes a great whiskey recommendation to boot.