While the change was challenging, having engineers in charge of product visioning ultimately led to better products being designed. That’s why this way of doing things has influenced the way countless startups founded by former SpaceX engineers have structured their engineering departments – including ours.

Are there challenges with setting up software development this way? Sometimes. Does every software engineer want to be in charge of product visioning? Probably not. It’s important for product visioning to be in the hands of engineers – and changes in the industry and software development tools themselves are compelling engineers to up level their skills in ways that lead to better products, and, in my mind, a better career.

From Ticket Taker to Extreme Ownership

Here at Sift, we don’t have product managers so the types of software engineers that we hope to attract are people who want to have total ownership over how our software is designed and what features go into it. SpaceX has an extreme ownership culture where people are given more responsibility and expected to grow into that role instead of being given a little box to work in. When you put people in boxes, you don’t allow them to realize their full potential. I think that’s why SpaceX has accomplished some pretty amazing things. In our effort to create similarly amazing technology, we are trying to also instill a culture of extreme ownership. How do we do this?

A lot of engineers are motivated by wanting to solve their customer’s problems – the question is how much do they feel that through the abstraction of a requirements document versus actually watching their customer use the software? We believe it is the latter, which is why we have our engineers work directly with customers as much as possible. 

This way of working is actually responsible for the original DNA of our product. When we started Sift, our small team sublet space from a company in our network who we knew could benefit from the product we were trying to develop. They shared their data and we set out to develop software that we knew could help them and countless other startups struggling with developing cutting edge hardware in a growing sea of data. We spent three months in their space, iterating our product. We brought the two engineering teams together to show them their data in our tool and had them use their existing solution and the one we were developing side-by-side. At the end of that period we had developed a product they were willing to pay for and one that is now helping a number of other startups solve similar problems.

While we don’t set up shop in our customers offices, we do get our engineers directly involved in new customer onboarding sessions – meeting face-to-face to see how customers work in their existing tool and watch them work in ours. This helps to make sure that our solution is set up in a way that is going to benefit them the most – and informs important product development decisions for the next iterations of our product. Engineers spend a lot of time in the tools they are developing so it’s not always easy for them to identify things that are missing in the product or areas where the product is clunkier than they should be – spending a day or two with a new or existing customer actually watching them use it is the perfect cure for that. This direct line of communication between our customers and our engineers continues long after the initial onboarding session through direct Slack channels that we set up and quarterly meetings with members from our engineering team. 

Engineering in a Post Chat GPT World

While this all sounds like a ‘nice to have’, I believe in a world where increasingly software is going to be written by low code applications and AI copilots, engineers need to level up. AI is going to take over more software development and it’s going to go after the simple things first. Engineers can do one of two things: focus on work that is deeply technical or develop a really deep understanding of how the tool is used, the industry it’s being developed for, and the problem it is trying to solve. 

We want our engineers to be part of the future, not stuck in an endless loop of ticket taking. Despite what the old tropes about engineers say, we are finding legions of engineers excited to welcome a new way of doing things – and that’s going to benefit customers and the engineering profession at the same time.

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To transform with success and grow, collaboration is key. Collaboration not only accelerates the adoption and dissemination of new technologies, it also fosters the culture of innovation required where new, complex engineering solutions are needed to address unique problems. 

This culture-building was demonstrated at our recent Accelerate Conference where we brought together 400 of our top software engineers and Chief Information Officers for an intensive three-day collaboration in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for our ‘Accelerate Global Engineering Conference’. Our end goal is to leverage emerging technologies to address customer pain points; transforming the way data can be enabled enterprise-wide; and accelerating our engineering to simplify, standardize and digitize our processes to become fit for growth. 

Building on this momentum is critical in helping us become a client-focused, data-driven digital bank. Equally important is ensuring we have a diverse workforce engaged to contribute new ideas, innovation and creativity which can lead to greater productivity and business performance.

Creating a great engineering culture 

Building an engaged team should be a priority for every leader. Happy employees are productive, collaborative, and willing to work through challenges. Software engineers are no different and need the right tools, inspiration, and autonomy to deliver impact. 

First, many organizations still struggle to equip their software engineers with the right, up-to-date tools. In many instances, engineers are given the same computers as call center employees while senior managers get the latest and most powerful. At times broken processes are applied to the very cohort of experts that are charged with automating and eliminating them. Software engineers need more powerful CPUs for complex algorithm optimizations, or the additional RAM to host VMs locally, or the GPUs for machine learning, or access to production data to build models.

Upskilling and reskilling engineers should also be a priority to ensure they reap the benefits of new technologies like AI and Machine Learning with agility. At Standard Chartered, our Axess Academies help us ensure the skills of our software engineering workforce are continually upgraded and recalibrated to match the ever-changing demands of the market. For instance, we have over 130 classroom technology courses across the entire stack of technologies used in the bank, from full stack development to GenAI and Cloud Computing. New courses are added every quarter and existing ones are upgraded to reflect industry trends and changes.

Second, many organizations struggle to inspire their engineers primarily because the leaders in charge of this cohort generally do not ‘get’ software engineering. From top down as a bank, we believe that applying our technology in the right way is critical to accelerating our transformation. This enables us to standardize end-to-end, transform digitally while simplifying our business faster and permanently reducing structural costs.

Finally, autonomy is key for software engineers. Autonomy unshackles software engineering teams to ideate and deliver for the business on their terms while fostering a work culture that fulfills employee needs for meaning and personal growth. I would contend that digital disruption and Fintechs are not only about amassing more technology, or even newer technology, but about giving software engineers the space to deliver their agendas and being pivotal in delivering solutions.

With 3 trillion lines of code written every day and around 93 billion lines of code being added every year, and with things only set to increase, it is important software engineers play an instrumental role in the process of determining and shaping the development of new technologies, processes, and outcomes.

With over 10,000 software engineers, we continually build a bank that offers diverse experiences and opportunities for everyone to work on compelling and impactful projects. As our Accelerate Conference highlighted, we can do more to elevate our engineering community by increasing knowledge sharing, breaking down silos and raising the standards of technical excellence. By doing so, we empower the current, as well as the next, generation of software engineers with future-focused skills and experiences to be effective catalysts for digital transformation. 

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Change and growth can also cause cultural issues that, when not managed correctly, may impede innovation and efficiency. Tammy Perkins, chief people officer of Fjuri, recently sat down with me for a Q&A to discuss strategies for recruiting and hiring that can manage these issues and help build a future-proofed engineering team. Her insights are below.

Duffy: At sodo we talk about diversification of the roles and ensuring that hiring addresses existing weaknesses and empowers change. From your view, what does diversification in hiring mean?

Perkins: One of the key factors to success is making sure that you don’t hire people just like you. Instead of hiring for a culture fit, look for a culture add: the missing voice at the table, someone that will add different skills or credibility to the team. That will help drive innovation and new ideas as you continue to evolve.

Hiring to your weaknesses, not your strengths, is a very introspective process. Finding where the team is weak and where it can improve is an exercise that not many people are deliberate about.

Hiring for individual strengths will help the team because people will be inspired to perform. When you’re doing something that’s in your sweet spot, it is motivating. From an employee perspective, you’re amplifying that person’s superpower. From a team perspective, you’re leveraging the strengths of others, and focusing on what makes everyone unique will bring more to the team.

Another thing you have discussed is empowering the people you bring on. This speaks to the superpower you just mentioned. How do you ensure that people will be empowered once they come on?

Sometimes a fear of failure prevents people from being successful. So you want to empower people to make decisions and drive forward, while creating a culture where you’re asking for feedback. That way, it’s not all top-down. It’s bottom-up.

What are some ways you can do that? You have talked before about continuous learning and being open to change. What are your thoughts there?

In terms of learning, it’s crucial to avoid groupthink and encourage people to continue to learn new skills and bring new ideas to the table. You want to model that and have different types of processes within the team or mechanisms where you’re sharing out “here are some new things that I learned this week.” It can be something that’s outside of the particular project that the team is working on. It can be something that is sharpening their skill set as they continue to evolve.

Flexibility is also critically important to growth. If you have people who have a learner mindset and they’re agile, they will be able to scale with new ideas for the future. So you can look at that through the hiring process and hire for the future, versus hiring for the particular role that you have. Also, through your development process, ask the team, “What are some ways that we can be better?” Continuous feedback and improvement is important for a team to be able to scale.

I often find that when I’m building a new team, I have an image in my head of what a role is going to be. I sell someone on that role, then they hit the ground, and within the first two weeks everything changes because what I envision the role was going to be is different from what’s actually needed. How do you deal with those shifts?

First of all, make sure that you hire people who are scrappy and agile enough that they can evolve. If the role changes or you triple in size or sell a new product or do something completely different, those type of people will be able to evolve and adapt. My biggest piece of advice is, don’t hire for a particular role, hire for people who can scale with your company.

Also, when thinking about building for the future, look at some of the long-term strategies that you have. I would recommend selling candidates and your existing employees on the future and the values that you have for the company. If you get really narrowly focused on a particular role, you may miss out on some of the great things that are going to happen in the future. I think tech is uniquely positioned in the fact that the roles change and ebb and flow. It’s almost like pouring water in a cracked floor. The water tries to find where the right opportunities are. I think that’s the same in tech. An organization evolves and different things become important over time. I think setting those expectations upfront is important.

Sometimes the culture within a company is weaker than the strength of the opinions that are being brought in. What are some things that a company can do to make sure that the minds meet?

That’s when you anchor the leadership values as a part of your organization, not just what they do but how they do it and how they deliver. That becomes a key success factor. It’s not just words that you have in your handbook or something that’s on your website. You live it, you breathe it, you own it, and that’s how you define success. Experienced leaders come in, and while they bring great depth of experience, they’re also a part of the leadership values. And they need to role model that as well. Have those values written down and internalize them first, and then you can bring that person on board and say, “This is how we do things.”

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Typically, the debugging process is complicated and lengthy, the company explained. It often involves writing additional code, testing it, getting it approved, and then pushing it to production. Even then, developers often find that they still don’t have the necessary data to solve the issue. With Rookout, all developers need to do is press a button to get the data they need in seconds, explained Or Weis, CEO and co-founder of Rookout.

“We are constantly facing the need for more complexity, greater speed, and frequency in development and in deployment of features,” said Weis. “If we try to work the same way we did 20 years ago, we’ll constantly find ourselves failing. We have to come up with new tools to speed up that process and make it more agile. And that’s what our solution is all about: enabling greater agility and speed when you want to iterate on understanding your own software.”

Rookout allows developers to set up rules inside their code that act as “non-breaking” breakpoints. The application will still continue to run as normal and the data will be collected and sent to where you need it, such as to alerting systems, monitoring, logging and analytics, or a generic webhook. According to the company, the data can also be viewed on Rookout’s IDE.

Rookout was created by two low-level software engineers, Or Weis and Liran Haimovitch. According to the company, they were inspired to create this solution based on their experience working in cyber-units in Israel’s security service. There they learned that visibility of code is essential for both attackers and defenders. Then they realized that this practice of visibility could be applied to software development more generally.

They found that it was often difficult to understand how software is behaving. “We found it very frustrating,” Weis said. “We basically asked, ‘why is this the case?’ It’s my server, my code, my application. Why can’t I just press a button and get the information I need? So we built a product that does exactly that.”

Rookout currently supports Python, JVM, and Node.js in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and local servers. It can also be used with serverless and containerize applications.

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Akana by Rogue Wave Software: Akana API management encompasses all facets of a comprehensive API initiative to build, secure, and future-proof your API ecosystem. From planning, design, deployment, and versioning, Akana provides extensive security with flexible deployment via SaaS, on-premises, or hybrid. Akana API security, design, traffic management, mediation and integration, developer portal, analytics, and lifecycle management is designed for enterprise, delivering value, reliability and security at scale. The world’s largest companies trust Akana to harness the power of their technology and transform their business. Build for today, extend into tomorrow.

Postman: Postman provides tools to make API development more simple. Over 3 million developers use its apps. Its API Development Environment is available on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, enabling faster, easier, and better API development across a variety of operating systems. Postman developed its from the ground up to support API developers. It features an intuitive user interface to send requests, save responses, and create workflows. Key features include request history, variables, environments, tests and pre-request scripts, and collection and request descriptions. It also provides API monitoring for API uptime, responsiveness, and correctness.

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Apigee: Apigee is an API management platform for modernizing IT infrastructure, building microservices and managing applications. The platform was acquired by Google in 2016 and added to the Google Cloud. It includes gateway, security, analytics, developer portal, and operations capabilities.

Cloud Elements: Cloud API integration platform Cloud Elements enables developers to publish, integrate, aggregate and manage their APIs through a unified platform. Using Cloud Elements, developers can quickly connect entire categories of cloud services (e.g. CRM, Documents, Finance) using uniform APIs, or simply synchronize data between multiple cloud services (e.g. Salesforce, Zendesk, QuickBooks) using its innovative integration toolkit. Cloud Elements provides a one-of-a-kind API Scorecard so organizations can see how their API measures up in the industry.

Dell Boomi: Boomi API Management, provides a unified and scalable, cloud-based platform to centrally manage and enrich API interactions through their entire lifecycle. With Boomi, users can rapidly configure any endpoint as an API, publish APIs on-premise or in the cloud, manage APIs with traffic control and usage dashboards.

digitalML helps the world’s largest companies become digital leaders. The ignite API Product Management Platform provides the only APIcatalog with a built-in lifecycle, with an end-to-end focus on plan, design, build, and run. So enterprises can deliver and manage APIs, microservices, SOAP/composite services, business capabilities, glossaries, information models, mappings, metadata, building block code, and documentation – from intake to any implementation.

​Our customers drive participation and leadership in theAPI economy and support large IT Modernization efforts at the same time.  The byproducts: federated microservices architecture, visibility, lineage, reuse, time to market reduced by half, with quality and audit-ready governance.​

IBM: IBM Cloud’s API Connect is designed for organizations looking to streamline and accelerate their journey into the API economy; API Connect on IBM Cloud is an API lifecycle management offering which allows any organization to create, publish, manage and secure APIs across cloud environments — including multi-cloud and hybrid environments.This makes API Connect far more cost-effective than limited point solutions that focus on just a few lifecycle phases and can end up collectively costing more as organizations piece components together.

Mashape: Mashape powers Microservice APIs. Mashape is the company behind Kong, the most popular open-source API Gateway. Mashape is based in San Francisco but has a presence in Europe and Japan. Mashape successfully operates in the API market for more than seven years and offers a wide range of API products and tools from testing to analytics. The main enterprise offering is Kong Enterprise, which includes Kong Analytics, Kong Dev Portal and an enterprise version of the API Gateway with advanced security and HA features.

MuleSoft: MuleSoft’s API Manager is designed to help users manage, monitor, analyze and secure APIs in a few simple steps. The manager enables users to proxy existing services or secure APIs with an API management gateway; add or remove pre-built or custom policies; deliver access management; provision access; and set alerts so users can respond proactively.

NevaTech: Nevatech Sentinet is an enterprise class API Management platform written in .NET that is available for On-Premise, Cloud and Hybrid environments. It connects, mediates and manages interactions between providers and consumers of services across enterprises for businesses or end-customers. Sentinet supports industry SOAP and REST standards as well as Microsoft specific technologies and includes an API Repository for API Governance, API versioning, auto-discovery, description, publishing and Lifecycle Management.

Oracle: Oracle recently released the Oracle API Platform Cloud Service. The new service was developed with the API-first design and governance features from its acquisition of Apiary as well as Oracle’s own API management capabilities. The service is providers an end-to-end service for designing, prototyping, documenting, testing and managing the proliferation of critical APIs.

Red Hat: Red Hat 3Scale API Management is a hybrid cloud based platform designed to help organizations build a more successful API program. It includes access control, security, rate limits, payment gateway integration and developer experience tools. Performance insights can also be shared across an organization with clear API analytics and reporting mechanisms, so that APIs can play a more strategic role in helping to deliver new services quickly, easily, and in a secure, scalable and reliable manner.

SmartBear Software: SmartBear Software empowers users to thrive in the API economy with tools to accelerate every phase of the API lifecycle. SmartBear is behind some of the biggest names in the API market, including Swagger, SoapUI and AlertSite. With Swagger’s easy-to-use API development tools, SoapUI’s automated testing proficiency, AlertSite’s monitoring functionality and ServiceV Pro’s virtualization capabilities, users can build the best performing APIs that everyone loves to use. SmartBear tools are available in the cloud or on-premise.

TIBCO Software: TIBCO Mashery Enterprise is a full life cycle API management solution that allows users to create, integrate, and securely manage APIs and API user communities. Mashery is available either as a full SaaS solution, or with the option to run the API gateway on-premise in a hybrid configuration. The offering enables digital transformation and API initiatives that expand your market reach by exposing and sharing data and services with developers.

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Full Lifecycle API Management
CA offers the industry’s most robust capability set that spans the entire API lifecycle and accelerates every step of digital transformation with APIs – development, orchestration, security, management, monitoring, deployment, discovery and consumption.

Microservices in minutes
CA is the only vendor with automated, low-code development of microservices from new or existing data sources – enabling the creation and delivery of complete APIs with business rules up to 10x faster than other approaches.

The modern software factory
CA API Management integrates with other highly-acclaimed CA products to solve tough customer problems across the API lifecycle, including rapid API testing, omnichannel security with advanced authentication, and precision monitoring of apps, APIs and microservices.

Trusted by the most demanding customers
CA is named a leader in every major analyst evaluation of API management. Hundreds of enterprise, commercial and government customers trust our military-grade security and success stories in the most demanding verticals, including finance, healthcare, retail, transportation, telecom and others.

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Abhinav Asthana, founder and CEO, Postman
Postman is the only complete API development environment, and is used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. Postman’s elegant, flexible interface helps developers build connected software via APIs — quickly, easily and accurately. Postman has features to support every stage of API development, and benefits developers working for small businesses as well as industry-leading enterprises.

Postman supports API design by allowing developers to create APIs directly within its application. And its Mock Service can be used to mock request-and-response pairs for an API under development. Devs can test APIs, examine responses, add tests and scripts to requests and fully debug an API. Automated testing is also easy with Postman by using the Postman Collection Runner to connect with external CI/CD tools. Postman Documentation is beautiful, web-viewable, and machine-readable; devs can download it directly into their Postman instance and begin working with an API immediately. Devs can use Postman’s API Monitoring to test an in-production API for uptime, responsiveness and correct behavior. API Publishers can use Postman to onboard developers faster, with Postman’s Run In Postman button and Documentation.

All these tools are based on Postman’s specification format – the Postman Collection – which is a robust, executable description of an API. Postman also hosts the API Network, which is a library of Postman Collections for the best and most popular APIs in the world.

Ian Goldsmith, VP of product management, Akana by Rogue Wave Software
Most people think of API management very narrowly, addressing only the deploy and run lifecycle stages.  Robust API management addresses design, build, manage and secure phases. Today’s decisions impact your business now – and your future capabilities.

Rogue Wave Akana provides a comprehensive solution spanning all stages of the lifecycle, helping ensure that our customers build the right APIs, build them the right way, and ensure they are behaving correctly.  

The Akana Platform:

• Provides comprehensive API design capabilities supporting the authoring and documentation of APIs with import and export of multiple different API Definition document types.
• Offers the industry’s most complete API security solution with comprehensive support for modern (OAuth, Open ID Connect, JWT, JOSE, etc), and legacy (WS-*, x.509, and more) security functionality and standards.
• Enables seamless mediation and integration with existing APIs, services, and applications.
• Controls traffic to protect backend applications and prioritize traffic for high-value applications.
• Automatically publishes APIs through an intuitive and fully-functional developer portal facilitating self-serviced access and management of APIs and Apps.
• Surfaces insights from API traffic and developer activity via powerful analytics.
• Governs the progress of planning, building, and running APIs across the entire lifeycle.
• Can be deployed across geographic regions with exceptional scale and performance to meet the most complex and demanding requirements.

The depth and strength of our product combined with our experience and expertise helps our customers manage complex technology issues so they can focus on driving new business and measuring the success of their business initiatives.

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According to Microsoft, “Visual Studio Code can easily be installed at the same time as Anaconda, providing a great editing and debugging experience for Python users, with special features tailor-made for Anaconda users.”

Microsoft has previously made investments in the Python community. It has already released a Python extension for VS Code and provides support for Python in Azure Machine Learning, SQL Server, and Azure Notebooks. According to Microsoft, the Microsoft Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is the most downloaded extension in the VS Code marketplace.

In addition, Microsoft created a team to support its Python extension, and will be extending that support for Anaconda environments as well.

According to the Anaconda team, VS Code is a good IDE choice for its users on Windows, macOS and Linux because of its debugging, code completion, and Git integration features. It also offers a number of extensions that developers can tailor to their specific needs.

“Anaconda, Inc. is excited to be able to make installation of Microsoft Visual Studio Code and the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code a more seamless experience for our Anaconda users,” Crystal Soja, product manager for the Anaconda Distribution and Anaconda Cloud, wrote in a post.

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“As APIs are increasingly playing a pivotal role in digital transformation, it becomes imperative to deliver quality, consumable APIs at a faster pace,” said Christian Wright, EVP and GM of API business at SmartBear. “We built Swagger Inspector to simplify the API development process by empowering developers to easily test and auto-generate their OpenAPI documentation with a single tool on the cloud.”

With the tool, developers can easily check APIs are working as intended without having to learn a complicated tool or add new components into existing code or processes. According to the company, Swagger Inspector was designed with no learning curve. Developers can check any API including REST, SOAP and Graph QL. In addition, Swagger Inspector enables developers to create OpenAPI documentation for any API, and host it on the design and documentation platform Swagger Hub.  

The OpenAPI Specification is a standard, programming language-agnostic interface designed for humans and computers to understand and interact with REST APIs without accessing the source code.

“Our company is trying to successfully position ourselves in the API economy by standardizing with the OpenAPI Specification,” said Matthieu Delmas, a web developer at microDon and a beta user of Swagger Inspector. “Swagger Inspector has become an important part of our API strategy, in that we can easily test and auto-generate the OpenAPI documentation for any of our APIs, all during the development process itself.”

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“There’s no end to the possibilities of leveraging the iPhone as a business tool,” said Amy Gu, vice president of Dynamsoft. “Using an iPhone as a scanner in your pocket can help expand any organizations document capture capabilities. So, without a doubt we’re excited to offer this SDK, so our customers can more easily integrate mobile capture into their document management applications.”

The SDK features automatic border detection, trimming capabilities, perspective distortion correction, and image enhancements.

ZeroStack launches ZeroStack Cloud Innovation Partner Program
ZeroStack has announced the ZeroStack Cloud Innovation Partner Program. According to the company, the program is designed to “accelerate partners’ ability to bring their customers the benefits of public cloud at a fraction of the cost, and to offer the control, security and performance of a private cloud environment.” The program supports resellers, service providers, and distributors.

“ZeroStack’s 100 percent channel model makes it easy for our partners to work with us to revolutionize their customers’ cloud infrastructure,” said Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing and business development at ZeroStack. “With our new Cloud Innovation Partner Program, our partners can work with us in a simple and predictable engagement model that presents opportunities for new revenue streams and gives our partners the opportunity to show their customers immediate ROI and drive greater partner profitability with our transformational cloud technology.”

Loom Systems Simplifies GDPR Compliance
Loom Systems has announced a new AIOps platform and virtual IT data analyst that will help users maintain the GDPR compliance. The platform is designed with data protection and privacy that analyzes logs and unstructured machine data for visibility into IT environments. It also offers the ability to search company files, and helps eliminate the manual work required to find logs and delete any personal data when needed.

“A centralized logging platform is essential to getting machine data compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which will start being enforced this coming May,” said Gabby Menachem, CEO of Loom Systems. “Many companies are going through significant changes as a result of the new regulations, and the efficiency and speed that our AI-powered platform offers can significantly help streamline the entire process if companies want to ensure compliance.”

Quest Software makes updates to the Toad product family
Quest Software has announced three new updates to the Toad product family. This includes the release of Toad Edge v1.2, Toad Data Point v4.3, and Toad Intelligence Central v4.3. The new release of Toad Edge adds support for MariaDB and MySQL instances running on Microsoft Azure. The new release of Toad Data Point and Toad Intelligence Central is designed to improve automated data preparation, visualization, and provisioning for data analysts.

“Today’s IT teams – from DBAs to developers to data analysts – are facing a continuously shifting and unpredictable database management environment, making it difficult to manage both on-premises and heterogeneous, cloud-based databases that power their organizations business-critical applications,” said Patrick O’Keeffe, executive director of software engineering at Quest Software. “No one understands this better than Quest, and the new Toad product releases prepare database and data pros with the toolset needed to successfully manage their ever-changing database landscape.”

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“A major transformation is underway in 2018 in both IT organizations as well as the infrastructure and applications they support,” said Lori MacVittie, principal technical evangelist at F5 Networks. “The industry as a whole needs to take under consideration the very real challenges enterprise organizations are facing because of digital transformation. This makeover isn’t superficial, it’s a complete change in business, operational, and engagement models. The lines between application architecture and the network are blurring and will become even more obscured with greater use of public cloud and the growing interest in emerging technologies like containers. The industry needs to understand the security and delivery challenges arising because of that and adjust accordingly – including, perhaps, their own digital transformation to better provide services and solutions customers need to move ahead at full steam.”

The report found organizational confidence to withstand an attack in the cloud is falling due to lack of experience and expertise. Twenty-eight percent of respondents reported protecting apps in the cloud is a top security challenge. Top multi-cloud challenges include applying consistent security policies across all apps, protecting apps from existing and emerging threats, optimizing the performance of apps, and gaining visibility into app health.

However, the report also found multi-cloud strategies are transforming the app development process, and are based on the requirements of specific applications. Fifty-six percent of respondents said cloud decisions are made on a per app basis.

“In this year’s report, respondents made clear they are heavily focused on building the foundation necessary for application driven digital transformation,” said Cindy Borovick, Business Intelligence Director at F5 Networks. “As a result, many are moving toward multi-cloud environments that will enable them to reinvent themselves as platforms for competitive differentiation and innovation, helping create business success in the digital economy.”

The survey also found that “digital transformation inspires architectures and IT optimization initiatives.” According to 72 percent of the respondents, the primary driver of digital transformation projects is the desire to optimize IT infrastructure and processes. Almost half of the respondents claimed digital transformation encourages the delivery of applications from the cloud.

Forty-one percent of the respondents are exploring new application architectures, including microservices and containers, according to the report. Other features included: IT is embracing programmability, and app services are the gateways to the future.

The report was based on responses from more 3,000 IT, networking, application, and security professionals from around the world.

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