If there’s one thing that developers like more than solving a problem it’s not having to encounter operational issues that stifle their creativity and output.
With startups, scale is the name of the game. But frankly, any company committed to innovation and customer satisfaction, whether large enterprise or nascent mobile app developer, should be thinking about scalability.
As CTO of late-stage startup Mindjet, my primary concern is delivering a consistently high level of innovation to our hundreds of large enterprise customers and 4 million+ users.
As our annual user growth climbed to over 30 percent, the team for Planview IdeaPlace – our crowdsourcing platform for innovation – has seen operation costs increase as well, creating scaling limitations for our existing cloud infrastructure. This expansion, though welcome on the user side, quickly started to slow down the pace of internal innovation, affecting our ability to effectively ramp up new users.
A little background: our Planview IdeaPlace crowdsourcing software is designed to help companies leverage employees, partners, and customers to drive innovation projects. Companies can then use the software to predict the value of those ideas, choose which ones to execute, and confidently drive repeatable business change. Our customers have seen upwards of $1 billion dollars in incremental revenue and over 200 patents using Planview IdeaPlace.
Helping enterprises innovate is serious business and it requires a serious platform that will increase the creativity of our development team, while not stifling or overtaxing them with operations.
That’s why we turned to IBM Cloud. The strong enterprise expertise and cloud services offered enable increased innovation for clients who are very much like our own. We evaluated other cloud platforms and providers – HP included – and started our development on Heroku. But it was IBM’s platform-as-a-service, Bluemix, that offered the supercharged scalability required to meet the demands of enterprise clients like us.
The openness of Bluemix, which now include the new Docker-based IBM Container services, has been particularly useful in helping us cut our deployment times to mere seconds. Using IBM Containers, we empowered our team of developers to create with speed and boost overall productivity.
The most critical tenets of creating on cloud center on empowering developers. Keeping that team happy, engaged, and eager to help you build, run, and manage applications cannot be overstated. A happy developer is a good developer. More importantly, removing constraints to speed growth and scalability, that’s just good business.
This article originally appeared on A Smarter Planet. Read it here.
