The cloud way of doing things doesn’t come naturally for traditional enterprises. Processes must be reviewed, infrastructure replaced and workflows modernized before any tangible change can occur, making the transition a painful process all around that many CIOs choose to put off indefinitely even as the new generation of competitors sails past.

But that doesn’t have to be the case, according to theCUBE alumnus and early SiliconANGLE contributor James Watters. He dropped by our mobile studio once again at the recently concluded OpenStackSV summit to share how his company, Pivotal Software Inc., is tearing down the barriers preventing organizations from bringing their applications into the present with host John Furrier.

Since breaking off EMC Corp. and VMware Inc. last April, Pivotal has been the driving force behind Cloud Foundry, an open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) stack originally developed at the virtualization stalwart that fell into its lap as part of the spin-out. Although it has since been transitioned into an independent foundation, the project remains a core component of the vendor’s product strategy, with Watters in charge of mapping out the roadmap for that aspect of its vision.

Pivotal is pitching Cloud Foundry as a way for traditional companies to implement the lessons that the world’s most innovative tech firms have learned in the course of building their application stacks without having to reinvent the wheel. The aggressive messaging around the project underscores the broader EMC federation’s efforts to counter infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) powerhouse Amazon Inc.’s rapid advance on its home turf, a push in which PaaS plays a key role.

A unique place in the puzzle

Infrastructure and platform-as-a-service are often lumped together under the public cloud category, but to Watters, there’s an important distinction between the two that extends far beyond just the obvious technological differences. It all boils down to competition.

“If you think about who Amazon is hurting, Amazon hurts companies like Dell,” he explained. “Dell used to be ‘I’ll go to their website, order my own servers and they’ll ship it.’ That’s Amazon now, you go to Amazon, make a cloud web services calls and you got it. They really disrupted that server disruption market and to a large extent that changed how software adopts about that layer.”

But while that dynamic is certainly significant, it’s not a direct driver of competitive change at the application laytr. Platform-as-a-service, in contrast, is. “If you think about what platform-as-a-service disrupts, it’s much more about Oracle and Oracle’s middleware stack, what am I gonna write applications to, how I’m going to think about my application containers,” Watters detailed.

Cloud Foundry ticks all the boxes on that checklist, he continued, providing a turnkey platform for running applications that offers the same level of programmability as Amazon and comes integrated with Docker, the world’s fastest-growing containerization engine. Coupled with the new Diego runtime for Cloud Foundry, Watters said that the support facilitates advanced use cases with logging, load balancing and other enterprise functions across any number of containers.

“So before you gave us a Ruby app and we ran it, but now you can specify everything about that Ruby app in terms of its packaging and runtime context and push it as a Docker image,” he elaborated.

To win the ecosystem is to win the cloud

Docker is just one of the many third party technologies that work with Cloud Foundry. Pivotal, Watters explained, is placing a particularly large emphasis on building out its ecosystem in an effort to avoid following the fate of CloudBees Inc., Eucalyptus Inc. and other smaller PaaS vendors that lacked a broad partner base and eventually bowed out of the market. But that prospect is hardly an immediate concern for the firm seeing that it does, after all, has the weight of two of biggest vendors in their respective parts of the enterprise market behind its back.

“The thing about platform-as-a-service is that in that layer you have to have huge money for R&D to build out the stack you will need, and you will need huge money for go-to-market and sales because its an enterprise platform,” Watters concluded. “We think it’s a big boys’ game in the same way that Google and Amazon building infrastructure is a big boys’ game.”