How Pivotal Helped Dell Become 'Startup-Fast'

It wasn’t that long ago when Dell Digital’s software product teams were typically bogged down in very silo'ed development cycles. One of the more troubling effects was how long it took to complete projects, often measured in months. In some cases, software releases could even take a year before deployment. And all to often these very long development cycles did not result in something that met Dell Digital’s business goals — as in, creating something the customer wanted or needed. Besides the requisite culture for agile development, missing in Dell’s digital-transformation strategy was a single underlying platform that Pivotal Labs eventually provided, said Greg Bowen, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Dell Digital (the IT organization that supports Dell). With the help of Pivotal Labs' platform and the adoption of a more agile DevOps culture, Dell Digital's teams are now "extremely hyper-focused on the outcome with the business partner right there in the development process,” Bowen said. “And so, that's allowed us to take the scale of an enterprise company, and become almost startup in nature.” In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded at the SpringOne Platform conference, Bowen discussed how Dell Digital's transformation was dependent as much on culture and processes as it was on selecting the right technologies and tools including, as mentioned above, Pivotal Labs' platform.