Established businesses are in danger. Traditionally, large companies have been protected by barriers to entry and the difficulty of establishing a customer network. This is no longer the case. New technology allows small startups to reach out to customers across the world in an instant. Industry-changing products can be designed and built in dorm rooms. To compete, industry giants must organize themselves for the future.

To shed some light on this new way of development, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the Dell EMC World conference in Austin, TX. There, they talked with Michael Cote, director of Technical Marketing at Pivotal Software Inc.

A fear of digital disruption

The conversation opened with a look at how smaller companies are competing with the big names. Cote explained that among the giants, the fear of disruption is a major driver. New technology removes some of the advantages these businesses enjoy, allowing startups to compete on the quality of their product rather than their ability to dodge barriers to entry.

Cote pointed out that if the business is digital, it doesn’t matter what size a company might be, they can play on a level field with anyone. This has forced established businesses to look toward faster, more adaptable development practices.

Agile development and the loop

The discussion shifted toward how companies react to this new reality. Cote described three paths. The worst is that a business could do nothing, staying isolated with its resources in silos. Then, a company go to Software-as-a-Service vendors, getting the software they need from an outside source. The third option is to collapse their org chart into product teams.

“If you’re deploying software every day, every week, these people have to be dedicated to their task,” Cote said.

As for Pivotal Software itself, Cote mentioned that every large organization has custom software, and they want it to work better. They come to Pivotal because the company’s labs, data work, and cloud platform help that happen. There’s a loop of collecting data, analyzing it, and then deciding what to do. “These things work together very well,” Cote said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell EMC World.

Photo by SiliconANGLE