Sonja Franić, executive director of the company Aktivis, participated in a panel discussion at the event VMware Tanzu Experience Day.
On Friday, VMware organised an event entitled VMware Tanzu Experience Day. The event was divided into two parts.
The first part was a panel discussion that featured:
- Igor Kaleb, Unit Manager – Infrastructure Services, Asseco SEE
- Martin Obradović, Senior Territory Sales Manager Adriatic, VMware
- Neven Cvetković, Manager Solution Engineering, Tanzu Benelux and Nordics, VMware
- Sonja Franić, Executive director, Aktivis
The second part was a technical session led by Mladen Krivokuća, VMware systems engineer. The event was hosted by Nenad Aleksić, VMware, Regional Sales Manager.
The panel topic was (How to) Optimize Your Approach to App Modernization, and covered some of the hottest trends and principles of building, implementing and managing modern applications, current experiences, and future expectations.
There was a detailed discussion on the VMware Tanzu portfolio of software products and solutions intended for the development, implementation and management of modern applications. It was stressed that this is one of the leading solutions for managing containerised applications. The advantages brought by VMware Tanzu are particularly evident when dealing with applications housed on the cloud. The advantages and reasons to switch to a cloud native platform was discussed by executive director of the company AKTIVIS Sonja Franić, since in early autumn, KING ICT, as a VMware Principal Partner, installed this platform in the system of its daughter company Aktivis – VMware Tanzu as part of the project to build a new cloud native platform aktivManager 5.0 for managing and digitising business processes.
“Recent trends have shown that most companies have started their digital transformation, in the form of digitalisation, modernisation of applications and the business models they offer towards the market. The demands for faster development of software applications and replacements of legacy applications are increasing demands of our customers, and I would say there are no differences here in comparison to global trends. The only difference is in the speed of transformation and the implementation of those trends. Within the framework of these changes and new demands, two years ago we decided to replace our existing monolith, open source platforms with new, cloud native platforms. Like all other legacy applications, over time we have faced the challenge of increasingly complex and expensive maintenance and upgrades, which has reflected on the speed of our development, costs, releasing new versions, and onboarding new development members. In general, our market for new products was much slower than expected or desired. So we decided to implement a cloud native solution in order to be able to fully take advantage of all the advantages of the cloud computing model,” said Sonja Franić.
The new platform has enabled Aktivis to respond to current and future business challenges of its customers by keeping up with the newest, modern trends in software development. Replacing the traditional monolith platforms in operations marked an innovation that was an unavoidable step in its digital transformation.
Sonja also spoke of the advantages that led them to decide on development in the cloud environment, and responded to the question of how they chose VMware Tanzu.
“After our initial decision to head towards development of cloud native applications, Kubernetes arose as the natural answer, as it really is the mainstream when talking about container development and management. Given our long-standing partnership with VMware and the expertise we have and are continually building within KING ICT and the existing VMware segments that we implement both internally and for our customers, it was a logical decision to take our software transformation strategy in that direction. By raising the cloud infrastructure, the Tanzu tools and installation of the aktivManager platform, we received a unique layer through which we can oversee and manage the entire microservice architecture, obtain a faster time to production and deploy, and obtain configuration and scalability at the component level in a secure environment. Another benefit is that we can focus on writing code and dealing with the functionality of demands and the business issues of our applications.”
Finally, Sonja stressed that through this project, Aktivis itself passed through one phase of its organisational transformation, and came to understand that the information silos and organisational barriers between infrastructure and software are quickly disappearing in modern development. Devops knowledge is becoming an imperative, and is fast becoming a trend in managing cloud environments and applications. Every change begins with a decision, and this was proven to be true once again in this transformation.
