| | November 20168CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONOver the last few years, several new companies disrupted established businesses from a software centric model. Some examples are Amazon, Netflix, Uber, and AirBnB. These companies were able to disrupt these industries by leveraging the agility and speed of changes that software can deliver. Today software is at the core of business strategy and at the center of software is open source technology. This software-centric approach taken by businesses is referred to as digital transformation.But why do businesses need digital transformation? The first reason is around the technology innovation and speed of adoption that a community of developers can deliver in open source. The second reason is around the power of community support and contribution quality. The quality of the code and the rigorous review of the code ensures reliability and production readiness. Another reason is the transparency and openness of the community: Pull Requests can be submitted easily, and acceptance and issues are visible. These reasons have led to the emergence of open source being central to your company's business strategy.This current transformation is similar to the automation and orchestration transformation of the initial cloud computing effort roughly 8 years ago. Back in those days, the buzz and market interest in cloud computing was not accepted by traditional hosting and telecommunications companies. On the other side, a retail company understood that their business needed agility and rapid delivery of software to accomplish the goals that the business vision had before them. This was one of the first examples of software disruption as this retail company that 8 years later is larger than all the hosting, telecommunication, and cloud service providers combined. How did this happen? It's quite simple; they paid attention to one simple rule: "application architecture and programmability are critical to agility and enable the business applications and services to differentiate from the competition". The business application requirements are defined in terms of agile software development, infrastructure as code (IaaS) and automated interfaces through Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs).However, this cloud transformation has not been enough to unlock the business agility, primarily because while it accomplishes infrastructure as code and automation, it's only at the infrastructure layer and this layer is becoming commodity. To differentiate your business services, companies need to Ken Owens, CTO-Cloud Platforms & Services Group, CiscoOpen Source & Cloud Native: Why should Your Business Care?ByTo differentiate your business services, companies need to differentiate at the build, deploy, and run aspects of their software development lifecycle
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