Interview: @ActiveState on Agility and Ecosystems | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

ActiveState is in the Private PaaS business that plays nice with others. The company describes its core product Stackato as “a secure, stable and commercially supported enterprise PaaS that is built with and on top of various open source packages, including Cloud Foundry and Docker.” This intriguing combination of an enterprise-grade platform, popular open-source packages, and agility led us to a few questions for ActiveState President and CEO Bart Copeland. Here's what he had to say: DevOps Journal: What are the key high-level benefits you bring to ensuring your customers are agile? Bart Copeland: One of the basic principles I learned in my early career as a manufacturing engineer is the concept of always going forward, and never taking a step back. Currently in software development, it is often a painful back-and-forth process between development, testing, staging, and production. The hurdles that exist between each handoff stage needs to be eliminated in order to ensure the enterprise can remain agile and respond to market demand efficiently. This is what Stackato does--accelerates the application lifecycle by removing these hurdles so enterprises can deliver solutions to their customers faster. DOJ: Describe Stackato in a bit more detail for us if you will Bart: Stackato is a cloud application platform that reduces the lifecycle by ensuring that deployment and production environments are identical, and always available. Developers can launch their applications within minutes instead of months or weeks without being constrained by IT infrastructure, significantly speeding up the process. With Stackato, development and operations teams can work more efficiently together by removing these friction points. In addition, Stackato empowers enterprises to innovate by removing the old processes that hindered developers. With backlogs and wait times no longer in the way, the development lifecycle is streamlined and projects can now move through IT operations workflow faster. This makes it easier for enterprises to test out new ideas quickly and safely so experimentation becomes possible, and the cost of mistakes is reduced. DOJ: How does working with Cloud Foundry and Docker technology in Stackato help your customers? Bart: Enterprises need to be agile in today's market, so they need an application platform like Stackato that supports them in developing, deploying and managing their applications more efficiently. Cloud Foundry and Docker are open source technologies that are not only great, they also have a fantastic ecosystem that surrounds them. In addition to ActiveState, the Cloud Foundry foundation has over 30 members including large enterprises such Accenture, BNY Mellon, Capgemini, Ericsson, GE, Intel, NTT and Verizon. IBM has been a long standing supporter of Cloud Foundry and even Docker joined the foundation! With the large ecosystem that both Cloud Foundry and Docker have built, everyone wins. Enterprises want the solution that has the greatest chance of success--one that offers them the agility and functionality to meet the demands of their customers, while having the comfort of knowing that the technology is backed by other large organizations. In addition, the large user base helps improve the technology--with so many people using the technology, it means issues are found much more quickly and can be resolved. By leveraging these open source technologies, we know we're providing the best enterprise cloud application platform on the market with Stackato. DOJ: How important is it to all enterprises to think in agile terms in an era of cloud computing, Big Data/analytics, and now, the IoT? Bart: Agility is essential in today's market. Cloud computing and IoT have created a shift in the way end-users behave. They expect to have access to your application, whenever they want or wherever they are. It is not acceptable for your service to be unavailable, and in a highly competitive market, people will be motivated to take their business elsewhere. So not only do you have to deliver software faster, and make sure it's of a high quality, you also need to make sure that your service or application is always available. Downtime is never an option. All of these factors puts pressure on Enterprise IT to find solutions and platforms, like hybrid cloud or Stackato, to ensure efficient deliverability and availability of their organization's applications.

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