Cloud Foundry

Foreword

Continuous Innovation and the Cloud Foundry Phenomenon

We are living through a time of accelerating change. It is not just our imagination or our subjective biases that makes it feel this way. Not only do our basic materials for augmenting our intelligence and capabilities get cheaper and more powerful every year, but they are being applied in more ways this month than they were last month, this year than they were last year. The volume change is larger when it is measured by the number of people affected. In The Innovator’s Way, Robert Dunham and Peter Denning offer a definition of innovation: “the number of people who change their behavior in order to adopt a new technology or product.”

Because we are in a period when the Internet is still expanding to connect all of humanity, the number of people who are changing their behavior is historically unprecedented. As of 2015, three billion people are connected to the Internet; by 2020, there will be seven billion. This is 10 times the population of the United States and 3 times the population of China coming online across the world in only 5 years. At the same time as these “new activations” take place, those who have been on the Internet for decades are also newly activating a range of new devices along with the PCs and smartphones they have come to rely on.¹

These new devices are themselves only the tip of the iceberg. The Industrial Internet is already showing signs of growing faster than the established, human-centric Internet. Wind turbines, factory equipment, farm machines, jet engines, and a wild array of industrial equipment are starting to send data automatically to data centers that can analyze the information into meaningful results, improving yields, expediting maintenance, and reducing failures and fatalities.

It is small wonder that enterprises are having a hard time keeping up. Born in a time of relative stability and raised on the ideas of sustainable competitive advantage, the world’s largest companies and greatest employers have established financial, business, and technical practices focused on cornering a market through cost, access, or customer control and then trying to extend that advantage forever. As an indicator of the pace of change and the failure of this “common sense” approach to strategy, we can observe that since 2000, 52% of the Fortune 500 are no longer on that list. This is a massive shift in a short amount of time relative to the history of business.

Rita Gunter McGrath, a professor at the Columbia Business School, has done quantitative and qualitative analysis of this shift. From her empirical research, she has offered a new frame of reference: that we are at the end of competitive advantage. Upending status quo, she notes that the companies that have thrived in this turbulent transition have demonstrated four key traits: continuous reconfiguration, options valuation, constructive disengagement, and innovation proficiency.

The first three of these are deep areas in themselves and represent changes in business culture and practice that lead to scientific and experiment-led discovery and development of businesses, including letting businesses go when their time of growth inevitably comes to an end. These topics can be best explained and implemented by experts in the fields of change management, finance, and business strategy.

The last area, innovation proficiency, is the one that those of us who have grown up in the melting pot—and occasionally furnace—of Silicon Valley have some experience with and therefore something to offer every major company on the planet. We have a model some call “innovate or die” in reference to the funding patterns and resulting company lifecycles for software startups. This model works well partly because bad ideas run out of money, freeing the people who built them to leave, learn, and try again, with significantly lower cost when compared to failures in a classic global enterprise. The other reason it works well is because our new businesses are built on technology platforms, and we have developed practices that allow us to build those businesses quickly and iterate them based on feedback from customers on weekly or daily cycles.

This flywheel of learning and practice has led to breakout successes that are redefining the global economy. It is time for every enterprise to benefit from the hard lessons we have learned. Faster cycles are enabled by smaller teams and faster tools. The systems we build need to be secure and reliable, and they need to let us apply today’s insights into tomorrow’s product. These software best practices—not the practices of prior decades—are the ones we want to give to the rapidly transforming world of business.

The engineers and thinkers behind Cloud Foundry have spent the last five years incorporating the best practices of Silicon Valley into an open source software code base that is accessible to all and free to use. Our collective goal is to save a massive amount of time, effort, and inefficiency for people worldwide who are trying to move their companies forward at the new speed of business. We have built an independent nonprofit, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, as the keeper of this software commons to ensure the primacy of user needs and the long-term dependability of the ecosystem of developers and technologies around Cloud Foundry.

The phenomenon that is Cloud Foundry continues to accelerate, gaining users, contributors, and evangelists at an ever-faster pace. With this runaway growth, we can now set our vision on becoming the global standard for application platforms. With a broadly deployed platform, we can create a new and efficient market for enterprise software applications, which has long been a fragmented and inefficient phenomenon.

We believe every company in the world is going through a digital transformation to match the demands of customers, partners, and employees. It is our hope that the software that we are building helps you succeed, and we invite you to join us as members of this movement and as authors of your own software-defined future.

—Sam Ramji, CEO, Cloud Foundry Foundation

August 19, 2015, San Francisco, California

¹ By 2020, there will be at least 50 billion devices directly connected to the Internet.