Not everyone can embrace technology that is on the cutting edge. Most customers are more comfortable using tried and true tools and techniques. Yet, to move forward, every company eventually must transition to newer approaches, especially as these technologies are packaged in a way to make them more accessible.
One area where this becomes clear is application development as developers move to modern approaches like containerization — and tools like Docker or Kubernetes. While these tools can eventually help development teams deliver applications more efficiently, the problem is that they tend to be out of reach for smaller businesses, who aren’t likely to be early adopters.
When a new technology comes out, it is typically only in the reach of companies with large engineering teams, or highly ambitious individual developers who want to play with the raw forms of the tools. Sure, anyone can download the open source versions to get started, but how many of your customers are likely to be adventurous, or even have anyone internally with the skills to try?
Creating packages
We have seen over time that as these tools begin to evolve and companies form on top of the open source projects, they begin to package and sell them in a way that makes them more accessible to more people. The idea becomes to hide the underlying complexity inherent in using these tools. It’s probably not until this point, where you want to start looking at these more packaged products and presenting them to your internal teams — or even your clients.
Just last week at DockerCon, the company’s customer conference in San Francisco, Docker announced its latest version of the platform, Docker Enterprise 3.0, which has been designed with these later adopters in mind. One element of that platform is Docker Desktop Enterprise, which enables IT (or in your case, MSPs acting as a company’s IT department) to set up a development environment with guard rails. This approach allows you to define a set of pre-configured templates with security, governance, and compliance built in.
This gives the developers at your client companies a set of tools that allow them to simply select when they are ready to deploy an application in containers. Instead of having to worry about all of the complexity of configuring the containers and making sure they are secure, you can take care of that for them.
As companies increasingly design tools to abstract away the complexity for developers, it lets them concentrate on the coding and the rest is taken care of for them. As this happens, it makes sense for you start looking at these packaged solutions, and maybe nudging them toward more modern development approaches.
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