Airbnb Inc. didn’t have better rooms than hotels (or even better rates lately), but it did have a much better software application. This is a cautionary tale for enterprises that think they don’t need to develop software because their products alone are good enough.

“Investing in technology and software, in particular, allows you to differentiate your business,” said Abby Kearns (pictured), executive director at Cloud Foundry.Org Foundation Inc.

Nonetheless, traditional companies venturing into development can feel like fish out of water, Kearns told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Cisco DevNet Create in San Francisco. (* Disclosure below.)

“They’re like, ‘Oh, well how do I do that quickly? How do I really focus on that? Because it turns out, really investing in a lot of other ancillary aspects isn’t core to my business, and it’s not changing who I am,'” Kearns explained.

Businesses are increasingly hunting for development platforms that abstract away infrastructure and automate as much as possible, so their developers (who don’t come cheap) can create more and better applications, she stated. Cloud Foundry is such a platform.

To back up this claim, Comcast Corp. now has 1,000 developers working on Cloud Foundry, and it runs 10,000 applications on it, Kearns stated.

End results like these are important proof points, she added. “We can theorize about the technology and where it should go, but at the end of the day, how you’re using it and what you’re doing with it is the most important,” she said.

Application nation

Other businesses will begin to put greater effort into software development as they come to see applications as the drivers for innovation, market advantage and profit, according to Kearns.

Seven years ago people could not have predicted that applications would be the lifeblood of the iPhone or iPad, she added.

“The applications have really driven the innovation around them, and I think we’ll start seeing that — the applications and the use cases really driving the innovation leaps,” Kearns concluded.

Cloud Foundry Summit is set for June 13 to 15 in Santa Clara, California, and will feature Cloud Foundry Certified Developer training and certification onsite for the first time.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco DevNet nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE