Pivotal Insights

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Increasing release velocity is often a key driver for enterprises that adopt cloud-native software development. But developers would be wise to spend a little more time ensuring their software is prepared for Day 2 operations upfront, according to Capital One's Kevin Hoffman. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Kevin joins Jeff and Dormain to chat about building monitorable, scalable and configurable software. He also shares some thoughts on the importance of .NET Core and why regulations are no excuse for not innovating.

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Dormain and Jeff welcome Rocky Lotka to the show. Rocky is CTO at Magenic, a software consultancy that helps enterprise's turn digital transformation aspirations into reality. In this episode, Rocky shares his thoughts on when and how to modernize your legacy .NET applications, why the twelve factor aren't just for Java applications, and why .NET and Java aren't so different after all.

To borrow a phrase from the great Winston Churchill, cloud-native data is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, MongoDB's Alan Chabbra joins Jeff and guest host Kamala Dasika to crack the riddle and share how enterprises can make the most of the cloud-native data opportunity.

Containers offer a new, simplified way to deploy and operate databases. But the approach brings with it a host of challenges, including how to manage state and migrate data between environments. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, SnappyData's Jags Ramnarayan joins Jeff and Dormain to talk through the promise and perils of containerized databases. They also chat about the evolving role of the data engineer and how data professionals fit into the cloud-native organizational structure.

This week, Chad Sakac, a longtime EMC executive who in recent months joined Pivotal, joins the show to talk about his new role. Chad spends most of his time on the road working closely with enterprise customers, helping them achieve transformational business outcomes. Chad, Jeff and Dormain chat about the importance of focusing on business outcomes to achieve digital transformation success, why a superhero-led team usually isn't the best approach, and how to choose the right platform abstractions.

Developers and operations teams face different but related database challenges. Developers want to use the best database for the job at hand, while operators want to manage the fewest number of databases possible to reduce complexity. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Pivotal's Joshua McKenty and Microsoft's Ulrich Homann join Dormain to discuss database challenges facing both developers and ops teams, and how a new approach can help satisfy the needs of both groups.

How do you get everyone bought into continuous integration and continuous delivery? One tactic, says Miranda LeBlanc, is to bring the pain forward. Put another way, you need to practice the hard stuff. A lot. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Miranda, a cloud engineer at Liberty Mutual, shares this and other tactics, from both a technology and culture perspective, she has seen used to accelerate teams releasing software faster and smarter.

Speeding up software development and delivery in the enterprise isn't something that happens overnight. Nor is it the responsibility of just a chosen few developers. This week on Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain Brian Roche, Vice President of Products at Cognizant Digital Business, on why accelerating development in the enterprise requires an all-hands-on-deck mentality and Brian shares his experience working with clients across industries to modernize their software development practices.