EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

PRAVEEN RANGNATH , CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER , IMPLY

Developer empowerment is the foundation upon which a highly successful and productive technical culture is built . Organizations can no longer operate in a manner where executives make decisions around what technologies are deployed within an organization .

These decisions must be made by the developers and technical leaders themselves . Why ? Because empowering technical teams to make technical decisions is a proven path to ensuring the organization deploys leading-edge , scalable technologies , rather than legacy technologies built for a different purpose .

This proven path is demonstrated through some of the largest technology trends we see in the industry today . For example , on the website of every successful software and SaaS provider , there is a link for ‘ free SaaS trial ’ or ‘ free download ’.

development of that software to make it better for the entire community .

Today , many of the most successful software and data infrastructure companies have emerged out of open source projects . These commercial entities built to augment open source software have an immense advantage – from the day they are founded , there are already thousands of users already using the underlying open source technology in production , at scale , which demonstrates to newer members of the community that the offering is scalable and reliable .

The open source model is perhaps the single greatest manifestation of developer empowerment – developers deploy the open source software , they contribute code to make the open source software even better , and they are empowered to continue on the open source path or choose a commercial vendor augmenting the open source offering .

Here too , CIOs must recognize and support their developers ’ preference to engage in the open source model as the best means to innovate and make the right technology decisions .

This is in recognition of how technical teams like to immediately get their hands on a product , usually before speaking to the sales team of that software provider . CIOs must see and recognize this , and support this manner of learning and adoption by their technical teams .

As evident , the world is changing . As every company increasingly becomes a software company , there is no longer a divide between technology and the business . In fact , technology is the new core of the business , which makes technical leaders the new core business leader .

In addition , developer empowerment is shown through the massive industry movement of open source software , where developers not only gain access to free software , but also collectively contribute to the

C-level executives need to recognize this and embrace the new model of developer and technical empowerment as the path to not only success and innovation , but also retention of their top technical talent .

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