Technology businesses are discovering a powerful truth: building custom code is no fun. It takes time, it’s a distraction from working on core products and it’s likely someone out there already did it better. The real solution is for a company to integrate mature and tested products into their own systems, but that can be a job in itself.

Open-source software, built around specific abstract standards, can help simplify the work involved. Cloud Foundry is an organization dedicated to creating and maintaining an open-source abstraction platform to speed up software development.

“The abstraction and automation Cloud Foundry allows companies to focus on creating code for their businesses,” said Abby Kearns (pictured), executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Kearns spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during the IBM InterConnect 2017 conference in Las Vegas, NV. (* Disclosure below). The discussion focused on the plan and purpose behind Cloud Foundry.

Automation, abstraction and perspective

Cloud Foundry isn’t just a development platform product, but also an organization dedicated to standards for integration and automation in the open-source cloud community. Its board includes such industry giants as IBM Corp., Pivotal Software Inc., Dell EMC, Cisco Systems Inc. and more. This wide selection of members gives them a broad perspective.

The plan behind Cloud Foundry is to bring companies together under a single vision of abstraction, Kearns explained. The purpose is to let developers create code faster. Enterprise businesses are becoming software companies, she added. That means lots of code, and the right code, can change how a company understands its business.

“When I talk about Cloud Foundry, I talk about it as a cloud application platform,” Kearns said. The high degree of abstraction and automation in Cloud Foundry means it’s not just a platform, but an enabler for quick code development.

This convergence of open-source software has been a signal toward the evolution of the tech industry. “What is open source? It brings together a diverse set of perspectives and backgrounds to innovate faster,” Kearns said.

As open source builds out, the big players are using these technologies at scale. In a cycle, the ecosystem — and the Cloud Foundry platform — can then take advantage of the industry’s successes, Kearns concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. (* Disclosure: SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE is a media partner at InterConnect. Neither IBM nor other conference sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE