Open-source technology is paving the way for U.S. government entities and big enterprises alike to change the way they operate their companies through cloud-native innovations. The United States Air Force, The Boeing Co. and T-Mobile US Inc., to name a few, are all incorporating open-source tech to support the modernizing efforts underlying digital transformation. But it isn’t necessarily the tech that people are most excited about: It’s the change.

“We get really caught up in the tech, but hearing how people are using it and what they’re doing and how it’s changing their company is really, I think, the interesting story,” said Abby Kearns (pictured), executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. “If I’m a journalist, that’s what I want to cover, because that’s the interesting stuff.”

Kearns spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed various ways governments and enterprises are transforming through open-source tech. (* Disclosure below.)

Cultural change through tech

The U.S. Air Force, Boeing and T-Mobile are just a few of the larger entities that are using open-source tech, and use case studies were talked about at length at the Cloud Foundry Summit, according to Kearns. The excitement is not just about the tech, however, but about the ways the tech is impacting the end users.

“What’s so unique about Cloud Foundry Summit is half the attendees are end users,” Kearns said. “Today, I heard a lot about Boeing. … And the journey that they’re on has been amazing to hear them talk about how they’re changing their company and … the culture change.”

The U.S. Air Force is just one government entity using open-source tech that shared their experience at Cloud Foundry Summit. Kearns noted that it is the whole government. There are eight new distributions for 2018 on the SUSE Cloud Application Platform, and one of them is Cloud.gov.

“Cloud.gov has done so much to bring digital transformation to the government,” Kearns said. “And so for them … being able to offer up a platform like Cloud Foundry — and the digital transformation initiatives around that — to federal agencies is such a powerful story. They are literally changing our government.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cloud Foundry Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Cloud Foundry Summit. Neither the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE