Our guest on the podcast this week is Adam Jacob, CTO at Chef.

We discuss the changing face of large enterprises when innovating with technology. The technology we see in big web companies from Facebook, Google, and Amazon is absolutely going to be used to reinvent how large enterprises function. But large enterprises do not need to transform into tech companies like Google to be successful. More likely the opposite is the case. Enterprises need to realize that they already are a great source of innovation and that with a focus on customers and on technology they can lead the way  to success. It does not have to look exactly like Google for large enterprises to be innovative.

Figuring out what you want it to feel like is the hardest part for large enterprises. If you’re a traditional tire company, for instance, you know the tire industry but you don’t know what it feels like to be a technology company that moves quickly and safely. So how do you get the people inside the tire company to know what it feels like to move fast?  How they can apply that to tires? Knowing how the business works is incredibly important and these enterprises know their markets better than anyone. The trick is to teach them how to use technology to enhance the business they already know.

Chef is a company built around automation. It began with infrastructure automation and has now added other products. Chef found bottlenecks at security and compliance, which led to InSpec. InSpec allows you to include compliance within code so you can continuously test and ensure you are compliant with standards. Another new Chef product is Habitat for application automation.  Habitat acts as a smart supervisor who can build and release the application and manage it as well.