A big topic at VMworld 2015 was the state of modern applications and how they are changing computing. Brian Gracely, cloud computing analyst at Wikibon and cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, hosted a panel during VMworld 2015 about the wide variety of customers that are using the cloud and taking the next step in their infrastructure.

Creating cloud-native architecture

Matt Stine, senior product manager at Pivotal Software, Inc., works closely with customers on cloud-native architecture. He said his company focuses on helping customers differentiate from their competitors.

“I could spend my time stitching together and customizing and building a platform that I think is going to meet my needs, or I could just embrace a set of opinions that exist … and get back to the business of actually developing software,” Stine said.

Simply delivering the software isn’t a differentiator anymore. “We’ve just doubled down on that idea that hey, we want you to focus on the thing that makes you different and that thing that’s actually going to help you win, and we’ll give you the tools you need to do that,” he said.

Emphasizing the workflows

Radhesh Balakrishnan, GM of OpenStack at Red Hat, Inc., said his company tries to provide a menu of options to appeal to a wider base of customers.

“We believe choice is a great thing,” he said. “There is a set of customers with inherent resources internally, within their firewall, that they can do the DIY approach, and some customers want more of an opinionated offering. So we try to address both spaces in the market.”

For Kevin Fishner, director of customer success at HashiCorp, it’s really not about a particular technology at all.

“We have only really emphasized the workflows,” he said. “I think with operations, we see a lot of technologies changing, and we might lose sight of the end goal a little bit. The end goal is to safely move an application from development to production. And the technologies within that workflow are prone to change, but the workflow itself is consistent.”

HashiCorp tends to work with customers who want to move through those workflows quickly in an automated way that reduces human error, covering yet another segment of the cloud-native app market.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE