16. Open Source Helps Small Businesses Modernize Applications – Tech Field Day Podcast

When faced with the question of application modernization, it can be daunting, especially to people that are, uh, at a smaller organization, maybe there's only a few developers. You look at what's going on, you look at the state of the art, everything from, uh, web scale and modern application to AI and automation. And you can say, I will never be able to catch up.

That's the question on this episode of The Tech Field Day podcast. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we are both on premise, and yes, today on premises recording. Each time we meet, we bring together a group of IT experts to discuss a premise, a single topic.

And today on the podcast, we're talking about the divergence between small businesses and larger businesses and the state-of-the-art in technology. Will they ever be able to catch up? We'll see.

But before we have that discussion, let's meet who's on the panel today. Hi, I'm Paul nti. I am the practice lead at, uh, the Futureum Group for the app dev practice.

Hi, I'm Jack Poller. I'm founder and analyst with Paradigm Technico. And I'm Stephen Foskett, organizer of the Tech Field Day events series, uh, for the Futureum Group and, uh, host of this year podcast.

So many businesses are well, trying to modernize, trying to build modern applications, trying to adopt new technologies like, uh, microservices and, uh, AI and, uh, advanced security and all these other practices. And yet the smaller businesses, it's a real challenge to, to actually adopt any of these things because they don't have as much resources. And the question is, is it, is it really dispiriting?

Will they never catch up? Will they never be able to have the same level of, uh, technology as their bigger relatives? Uh, Jack, what do you think?

Well, yeah, I think that one of the challenges that a lot of the companies face is there's the obvious resource challenge, right? They don't have the people and they don't necessarily have the budgets. I think the other challenge is that the bigger the, the vendors are really building and pitching products towards the super large enterprises, the Fortune 500, the Fortune 1000, right?

And there's only so many of those companies. And a product that is built for the scale of that and the speed of that and the flexibility that those enterprises needs, uh, tends to be almost overwhelming and large and too cumbersome for the smaller companies to adopt. So when you want to, if you're a smaller company and you want to adopt something, say microservices, how do you go about doing that when you have access to all of this technology, but it's a very great cost, and it's built for something.

It has so much that you may not need, and it becomes very hard to get started. I'm not sure if I agree a hundred percent with that. And the reason why I think, uh, is there's a lot of flexibility with technology stacks like open source, right?

And you can, you know, what's the, what's the old saying? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, right?

Um, so if you're a, uh, emerging company or you know, a smaller company that's trying to get more into evolving to the, the tech stack that they need, they can take on different pieces of the tech as they need to, right? And, and one of the other things to consider is, um, while you're modernizing, I hear this quite a bit, there's a lot of applications that are trying to be modernized and moved to that new, the next level. As the applications are being modernized, they, um, can take one or two approaches.

They can either be refactored into the microservices that you're talking about, which can be skill intense as well as resource intense. Uh, but the other thing to do is encapsulate that into a cloud ready state, right? Mm-hmm.

Treat that application as a system of record, right? And then maybe you build net new applications, maybe a react application that's in the front end that acts as that existing application as a system of record. So you're essentially modernizing by building a net new application into the front end, but retaining that heritage application in an encapsulated cloud ready state.

So it could be a, it could be a way to get there. So you've brought up a couple of points, so let's take some of those things in order. So the first one I heard, and I actually completely agree with you on this one, Paul, is that the open source community enables small businesses to really get a leg up rather than having to develop things from scratch, right?

Because if you're trying to modernize, or if you're trying to develop a new application, uh, you know, the first thing you're gonna do is try to find libraries and modules and components and that, that you can leverage and some of the open source stuff is, is incredibly powerful. It, it is something you never could have done previously. So, you know, a a, a small business that's implementing Kubernetes and deploying applications, you know, with, with, with Helm and, you know, none of this stuff would've been possible if not for the open source world, and the result is that they can have an infrastructure that is every bit as modern and high tech and, you know, with the times as the biggest coolest hyper hyperscalers or Fortune 100 companies or whatever.

So I agree with you on that. Uh, so, so let's start with that. Um, do you think that that this is true?

Yes. I think the open source definitely provides the, a way to get started that kickstart, right? And, uh, and, and well, I will bring in sort of one twist, and that is I look at some of the smaller companies and I sort of subdivide them into those that I would call are born in the cloud.

They started in the cloud era. They've started with a whole bunch of technology that today we still would consider legacy not modern, but it still may be cloud-based, has a little bit more modern. Then there are other companies that have been around for a significant amount of time that have, their application stack is really not cloud enabled.

It's much more monolithic traditional architecture, and they're even a further step behind in this modernization process. And it's, it's always a question. So how do you get started?

Right? So one way you're talking about getting started is there's the open source route, and there are a lot of different open source packages, right? And I think that's a good way to help to, to get started and to get help without necessarily having to invest significant amount of resources in the effort.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, I, I, I think there's a lot of truth there because what I find in our research is 68% of, uh, respondents in a, about a 400 person study that we did, uh, indicated that their organization wants to work with vendors that sponsor open source projects, but yet want to work with those vendors that also provide enterprise level support so they can get going in an enterprise, uh, I'm sorry, an open source project initiative, but have support to, to drive them forward.

The other thing that you mentioned that I find interesting is to me it's about time to value. Mm-hmm. Um, and what, what are the trade-offs between time to value?

And, and that same report, we found that, um, when asked CIOs, uh, about their monetization efforts, and they run into those resource challenges and those skill gap challenges and such, um, but they have to move forward. They have to figure out how to move forward. So, so what they tend to do is look to manage services.

So 34% of respondents indicated that they would use a managed service in order to stand up their new instantiation, right? Yep. Versus 17% saying that they want a pure distribution, the pure distribution requires a bench strength to do it.

Mm-hmm. Right? So yes, you get a little less function, maybe not a little, but you get less functionality with a pure distribution, but you, um, with, I'm sorry, with a, um, managed service, but you get a little bit more functionality with, um, uh, pure distribution, and it just, it's a trade off of where do you put your resources.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's another point too, that's, that's really valuable is the, uh, yeah.

The prevalence of these managed, uh, as a service solutions that companies can leverage. Again, that wasn't really as much an option 10, 20 years ago, right? Uh, certainly there were service providers and there were solutions that you could use on demand, but it wasn't the same kind of thing.

It was basically, oh, you're a bank. Well, you can use bank as a service, you know? Right.

And it's your whole bank. Congratulations. You know, that's how it is.

But there wasn't anything less than that. There wasn't any, oh, well, you know, you can deploy some applications here and some over here, or you can, you know, kind of build on this platform or anything like that. There really wasn't platform as a service.

There really wasn't a lot of those solutions. So that's another benefit that lets smaller businesses kind of catch up. Yeah, Yeah, absolutely.

And, and AP Pass as well, application platform as a service, right? Yes. So you can spin up applications relatively quickly, and again, you don't get that full feature rich functionality that you would get with a pure distribution.

However, it gets you running into the direction you want to go. Well, but I think that that that distinction between the a hundred percent functionality versus not is important to understand, because for a lot of the smaller companies, they don't need all the wet bells and whistles. True.

They don't need all the functionality. And that's always been the challenge when you go and you start to look at what is available to, from a, a solution set that is built for an enterprise scale company, it has a huge number of options, huge bells and whistles that you're paying for and never gonna use, right? And that, that's always been the challenge of being a small company, is you don't have the resources to go and buy stuff that you don't need, and you're gonna put it in the shelf or, you know, functionality you don't need.

And so you left with very, you, you used to be left with very few options, as you said Steven, right? Mm-hmm. There was just a limited suite now with open source and with managed as as a service, and also with third party, um, co-developers, right?

With application developer, solution providers that can help you build your application is another route to go that helps a small business where you don't have to invest in the army of developers and DevOps and operating your whole stack yourself. Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, again, I'm gonna fall back on research.

Mm-hmm. When I, when I look at this study, we were looking at the spend for this, um, refactoring or, or creating of new net new cloud native applications, right? We were seeing that 94% of respondents indicate that they're going to either, uh, increase their spend, um, marginally or significantly in the next year.

And where they're putting their money is investing in, in resources human capital, right? Or working with service delivery partners, like you were saying, in order to achieve their goals. So you, you're spot on and with the, with the regards to there, you know, if there's a will, there's a way, right?

Mm-hmm. You kind of get there, you figure it out, otherwise you probably won't have a job to, to do at that point. Right.

But even given all this, um, you are small businesses able to modernize the way that they, are they even able to use any of these opportunities? If you're a business that has only a few IT staff, you know, maybe one developer. Mm-hmm.

How, how can you make that leap from conventional monolithic application that you're running today, or maybe even an outsource application to even start to use any of these application as a service or platform as a service or anything else? How can you cross that bridge? Yeah, I, you know, it's a good question, Steven.

I think that when you look at just a few years ago, it was far more difficult for organizations to get going. Mm-hmm. Because there, these, these, these as a service offerings were not available, as you were saying.

The other side of it is, I'll go back to what I said earlier, which is, um, you don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water, right? You can basically take that, that heritage application and encapsulate it, and it still runs in a cloud state and cloud ready state, right? So what's running in the cloud, and if you wanna treat that as an existing system of record, then go do so right?

And let it live out its life as it needs to, but you can build your, your new applications in front of it. So now you have a more modern experience. And I think that's where there's a kind of a, a stop gap between having to refactor this entire new heritage application to a new model versus building smaller, more modular, uh, applications that can access those existing systems.

Yeah. So I wanna, I want to talk a little bit about sort of the refactoring part of it for a second. And, you know, sort of refactoring, we, we often think about it sort of in the engineering terms, how do you refactor the actual inner workings and the plumbing of the applications?

There's another part of that that I think small businesses get caught in that they really have to think of, and that's, uh, refactoring the actual process and the flow that the, the, the application is supporting, right? And, uh, you know, there was a back, uh, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, there was a very popular book called re-Engineering the Corporation. And it was an exploration of, uh, organizations that basically did, um, uh, modernized their physical applications right into digital applications.

Mm-hmm. And what they discovered is, well, banks would go and say, um, the process we have to do a, uh, a home mortgage loan is we need these different groups in the company to do a sign off, right? So, uh, underwriting this and bank, right?

And there were seven different groups that would do that. So in the digital process, they had all seven different groups still have to go through and read the documents and do the approval. They never said to themselves, why does that occur?

It occurs because in the physical analog world, everything was typewritten and done separately. And so they, everybody had to check to make sure there were no typos. In the digital world, you don't have to typos, so you didn't need the seven different sign-offs.

Right? And so, you know, as a small business, part of what we have to do in modernizing our applications is also modernize our process to go with it and to say, you know, um, what's the, what's the real, what's the process that should look like now that we have all these new ca digital capabilities that we didn't have before? And how much of the, the open source or the, uh, the, the service delivery partners can we leverage that provides utility that we don't have to build ourselves?

I thought you were really going, you were that close to taking us to that automation and AI conversation, because that's where I thought we were going with it. Well there, But that, that can be another part of it. Yeah.

Is do you wanna, you know, we were talking about modernization, but how far do you wanna modernize? Right? Do you wanna say, I want to take the effort where I am today and get close to current state of the art, or do I wanna push my organization all the way up to the bleeding edge?

Whereas, which is where we would get to it, where AI is right now, for some companies pushing all the way to the leading bleeding edge is very advantageous. 'cause you could give them a business, uh, differentiator and a business advantage for others where they don't have that same type of competition. They don't need that differentiation, that level of investment to get all the way to the bleeding edge may not make sense.

Yeah, That makes sense. Well, And so to your point, Paul, then let's dive in. Um, everyone's talking about ai.

I think ai, no matter what you think of it is a, an element of modern applications and modern IT solutions. And yet it is incredibly complicated technology that is incredibly new to people. The average person listening to the, to, uh, to this podcast, the average, uh, it subject matter expert or developer, uh, probably doesn't have a good understanding of AI, is probably pretty daunting.

They're probably pretty scared of where this goes and how this fits into their, into their world. How do you answer that person? Yeah.

Well, well, as they should be. And I, and I'll tell you why, because what we define in our research is, uh, nine months ago mm-hmm. I ran a study and I found that 18% of production workloads have some element of AI incorporated into production workload.

Mm-hmm. We ran that study recently and it, and it increased to 54%. So if that is the trajectory of integrating AI into your production workloads, then yes.

Of, of developers and, and organizations that are not on that edge of understanding how AI is gonna impact their business, may potentially be at not just a competitive disadvantage, but maybe out of business in the future, in the near future. 'cause it have, as fast as this is accelerating, you have to learn and how to adapt and, and to these, to these new ways of doing business. Yeah.

I, I think AI is gonna have a significant in, uh, impact on businesses. And there's so many, you know, it's, it's, there are just so many different ways you can look at it and see what IT capabilities are and what it's potential is. But as you said, Steven, it's incredibly complex and difficult.

And so, um, thinking about it as, you know, from the perspective of small business developers, right? It's always that question of the ROI and, um, balancing the short term versus the long term, uh, you know, and I think that's, you know, that's always the challenge for the small business. And when we think about it, where our think about it as, there's always something I can do today to work on my existing stuff to fix bugs or right, and main, just even general maintenance, right?

Regardless of whether I'm doing new development or not. So we have to balance that with saying, okay, I can let some of the problems that I have existing today continue to be problems while I invest in the future. And again, it's just sort of more, how far into the future do I wanna bring my company?

And how, how far into the future will they, I mean, that's, that's I guess back, you know, back to the core question here, the core premise here. If you're looking at this stuff and you're daunted by it and you're worried that it's all new mm-hmm. You know, it's too much for me to take on.

Now we got ai, now we've got all these automation processes, maybe I'm just gonna step off this train and keep working with what I've got. Is that an option? Uh, so Steven, I don't think so.

I mean, I don't think it's an option, and I'll tell you that it, it, it shouldn't be. And I'll tell the audience here, it shouldn't be as daunting of a task as we are kind of making it out to be. Right.

And I'll tell you what I mean, I was just at a recent, um, red Hat Summit event, and I went to Microsoft Build a few weeks ago. And, um, both of those events have enabled, uh, their customers and prospects to accelerate and get past this journey and, and, you know, and meet the clients where they are in their journey. So if you have trouble around, you know, figuring out how to get here and do this, there are tools and tech stacks that are, that allow you to get there, uh, in a fairly easy way approach.

Like, you don't have to dive in, you know, to the deep end and go, I get, I'm gonna just do all this all at once. You can kind of ease your way into the pool like I do, right? I, I don't wanna get wet all at once, but, but basically kind of ease your way in, make sure that everything is good and it works.

Um, and these, these, um, vendors I just mentioned, there's just some examples, but there are many vendors out there that are looking for the, you know, providing the big green button to move forward and provide the resources for enablement, not just enabling, but actually helping accelerate those initiatives. What I would say is that, you know, the last big evolution slash revolution in the tech industry was the shift from on-premises to the cloud, right? There was a very, at the beginning of that transition period, it was obvious that there were a lot of potential, you know, wins from moving to the cloud, but it wasn't, I don't think it was as revolutionary.

It didn't seem as revolutionary as it turned out to be. I think when we look at AI today, we see it as very revolutionary. And at this point, despite, um, all of the potential pitfalls involved, it's a land grab.

And if you think your competitors aren't going there, you're wrong. And therefore you really have to investigate it and see what the, what the capabilities are for you as an organization, regardless of the size of your organization. Well, I think that that's, um, maybe a good final word.

Um, so if people are listening to this and kind of shaking their heads and saying, yeah, you know, I, it's daunting, it's scary. I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I can modernize.

The good news is that there are a lot of tools that can help you. There's a lot of, uh, you know, sort of maybe not easy buttons, but at least easier buttons that they can push Yeah. To, to get somewhere.

And the resulting solution is actually gonna be a lot better than anything they ever could have built themselves, because they can kind of stand on the shoulders of giants who have built all these tools. Yeah, I agree, Steven. I mean, I think, don't get discouraged.

I think that's the kind of the main focus is figure out what your strategic business needs are. Run your, run your against your KPIs and, and take one bite at a time. Absolutely.

Well, thanks so much for this conversation. Uh, we're actually at App Dev Field Day in, uh, Santa Clara. Uh, we, uh, wrapped up the field day event earlier today and are recording this episode to be used later in the summer.

Um, I really encourage you to continue, uh, checking out some of the outputs from App Dev Field Day. Uh, check out some of the DevOps dialogues, uh, discussions that Paul has recorded here, both this week and in on other occasions. And, um, where can people connect you with you and continue the conversation.

com. And you can find me on LinkedIn as Jack Poller and on X as Poller. And of course, you'll find me at sket on most social media networks, as well as hosting this year, uh, tech Field Day podcast, as well as, uh, the utilizing tech podcast and the Wednesday, uh, rundown of the tech news industry.

Um, thank you for listening, uh, for this, uh, to this episode of the, uh, tech Field Day podcast. Uh, please do subscribe. You'll find us in your favorite podcast applications as well as on YouTube.

Uh, also, we'd love to hear from you. Uh, this podcast is not subscribed. This one was, uh, uh, brought to you by Tech Field Day, A home for of IT experts from around the enterprise, uh, which is now part of the Futurum Group.

Uh, for upcoming e episodes and more, just go over to our website. com/podcast to see other episodes and learn more. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week.