Why business resilience depends on software agility

Technology innovation is happening at breakneck speed, creating new opportunities and threats for companies of all sizes and industries. At the same time, ever-evolving macroeconomic conditions are pressuring leaders to drive business outcomes against tighter margins.

While today’s business climate certainly feels like a test for the survival of the fittest, your goal should not be to just survive, but rather to thrive. In this new reality where a bank can go under in two weeks, and new innovations are fundamentally changing our ways of life (e.g., ChatGPT) the speed with which businesses are able to respond to changing market dynamics and customer needs is critical.

In a world where companies are defined by the digital services they can deliver, software agility IS business agility, and in turn results in better business outcomes.

Software agility translates to teams being able to quickly build and deploy applications in order to address changing customer needs, create new revenue streams, and scale to meet demand. Software agility also means that if the organization would like to leverage a new technology to innovate and remain competitive, teams can easily deliver an app that does just that.

However, as organizations rush to adopt cloud computing, Kubernetes, and open source software, they are faced with a sprawling landscape of tools and services that can be overwhelming and costly. And while it’s inspiring to behold the innovation happening around us – or as Stephen O’Grady from RedMonk called it “an embarrassment of riches” – developers can find themselves suffering from “analysis paralysis” and even worse, having to stitch their favorite tools and services together, taking time away from writing code and delivering those applications that run the business and delight the end users.  

Instead of tools serving to enhance productivity, today’s developers are caught in a tangled web of tools and services just to support their day-to-day. Additionally, this has added to the complexity of managing apps and infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment, where teams have to control costs, ensure performance, and manage consistent security policies across these diverse and distributed environments. Businesses with a multi-cloud environment also face a growing number of IT silos that can lead to inefficiencies and increased risk. And, as is increasingly common in today’s tightening labor market, a lack of skilled professionals adds yet another layer of difficulty. The complexity of today’s digital systems has multiple points of friction that need to be addressed if we are to achieve true business agility.

Organizations need a new approach – establish a common platform supported by a platform engineering function to unify application delivery and management across different apps and clouds. This will help in optimizing application development and operations, and strengthening security and compliance. What we are finding is, for developers to be successful and productive, they need: 1. A common data platform, 2. A seamless, self-service experience with minimal hand-offs and separation of concerns 3. Strong knowledge of open source technologies.

With our comprehensive Tanzu and Aria platforms, VMware has become a trusted partner to help organizations become more agile and responsive in software development. Delivering accessible, developer-friendly experiences and IT operational management is core to our DNA. With the depth and breadth of our technologies, alongside the consulting expertise of Tanzu Labs, we help organizations transform their methodologies and practices as well. We deliver near real-time insights across the application lifecycle with simplified, streamlined, and powerful solutions for developers, platform engineering and cloud operations teams to seamlessly provision, monitor, secure, and optimize apps across multiple clouds and their entire app portfolio.

We help customers across nearly every industry – from retail and healthcare to financial services and the public sector – build a culture that empowers developer productivity to enable the delivery of better, more secure software so they can meet changing market dynamics and customer expectations.

When there’s a market condition, how it impacts your business – whether positively or negatively – depends on how fast you can change, move, and adapt. At a time when organizations are pressured to perform and achieve business outcomes more efficiently than ever, now is the time to accelerate app delivery and digital transformation efforts. The best defense is an optimized and more productive offense. Change is inevitable, as we’ve learned in the last few years. So now and in the months and years ahead, it’s imperative for organizations to continue on their journeys to be future-ready for the next disruption.

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