Tanzu Talk

Demonstrating the value of software, how it contributes to revenue, is no easy feat. Staffing can be difficult, especially with an eye to sustaining teams over the years. Jon Osborn returns as a guest to discuss these and other transformation hurdles, plus successes they've had at the Great American Insurance Group.

There are a number of changes to process and culture needed to be good at software development, and one of the most challenging for many enterprises is creating a team dedicated to the platform and treating it as a product. But that, says Pivotal's Paula Kennedy, is a major predictor of success. "The [Pivotal] customers that are the most successful are those that have their own dedicated team with its own dedicated product manager," says Kennedy. "Those are the ones that are able to prioritize, able to meet users needs, able to release features quickly." Listen on for this and other insights from Paula, a member of Pivotal's PCF Solutions team, on best practices for platform teams to successfully adopt platform-as-product.

Each year, the CF Summit brings together users, customers, and other community members. Dormain gives us a tour of the conference with some highlights. Plus, we cover some recent news and talk about open source foundations.

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Stark & Wayne's Dr. Nic Williams discusses why it's important to treat your platform-as-product. The short answer: It results in a more customer-oriented mindset. Listen to the full episode to learn more, including how putting some constraints on developers plays an important role.

This week, we talk with James Urquhart who joined Pivotal recently in the CTO group. We talk about some architectural ideas for converting the enterprise over to an event-driven flow, discuss the reasons for doing multi-cloud, and also what kinds of conversations "executives" find helpful. Coté does a great job mangling Pivotal product names. Also, hot takes on "on-premises" vs. "on-premise."

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Helpful.com's Farhan Thawar* talks about the challenges of building a company from scratch, why it's important to apply smart architectural principals to empower development teams, and why he strives for boring infrastructure.

*Editor's note: Helpful.com was acquired by Shopify following the recording of this episode but before its publication. Farhan and the entire Helpful.com team joined Shopify where they continue to pursue their mission of making communication and collaboration more seamless and effective.

While they are both big and hulking, unlike the dinosaurs the mainframe still walks among us. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, our own Michael Minella makes the case for mainframe modernization and shares lessons learned from the field.

Getting the blinking cursor of kubernetes up and running is only half the job: the other is actually running software in it. While at SpringOne Tour Charlotte, Paul Czarkowski walks Coté through how that's done using the classic Spring Music and Pet store applications. We also discuss burger innovation in Charlotte and the thumb method.

Duke Energy has been working on their software capabilities for some time now. They've recently reached a milestone by opening a brand new innovation center in Charlotte. Coté took a tour of it recently checking out the numerous product teams and their approach to exploring and building strategy, all the way from corporate strategy down to writing code. John also shares a couple of new examples of how lean product management and design in action. Also: gingham.

This week our guests are Dan Stevenson and Brandon Zaharoff from Shields Health Solutions, a maker of software solutions for the specialty pharmacy industry. Dan and Brandon talk about the challenges of developing and running a specialty pharmacy, how Shields' software helps ensure patients are taking their medications as directed, and how and why Shields adopted cloud-native software development to build and evolve its flagship product, TelemetryRX.