You can listen to the podcast and read the show notes here.
Michaela: Welcome back to the show. And today, I've got Tridib Roy Chowdhury. He's the general manager and senior director of product Adobe systems. He's the ultimate man responsible for ColdFusion. Got an enormous team working for him. And we're gonna talk today about the state of ColdFusion, what we can look forward to with ColdFusion 2018 that's coming out this year. And also his take on the future of ColdFusion and things that Adobe's doing there. So welcome Tridib.
Tridib: Thanks, how are you?
Michaela: Doing great. So I know that you've been Adobe for over ten years. You've built a team of engineers, and architects, project managers, sales, designers. You've got a whole team there. And I know also that you've been moving to having more data driven decisions at Adobe. So exciting stuff. So I am very interested to ask you about what your take is on the current state of ColdFusion.
Tridib: So you know like that's going to start a little bit with how I see the business as it stands right now. So now like we are a 22-year old product. And it continues to amaze me how well we continue to do on the business site. So never [inaudible] [01:29] of time about seven, eight years ago when there was this kind of a feeling that ColdFusion is dying and the business was slightly on a downward trend. But over the last few years, we've seen some tremendous growth. So just to give you some numbers. So since 2012 to 2016, we've seen a 25 percent growth on the business which is roughly translates to what six to seven percent year on year. And you must keep in mind that unlike a lot of other products, we bring out other products pretty much every two years.
That [inaudible] was right for our business and for our customers. And like I mentioned that the C.F. summit in Vegas last year. I think we've had about 18 consecutive quarters where we’ve beat our expectations that we give to cooperate. So that's absolutely fantastic. I mean if you look at it, it's pretty much since 2012. We've never missed our numbers and it would have been all right if you are missing not missing the numbers and not going to business because you know that you can always send back those number and set yourself an easy target. But more like for a business which was kind of people but kind of writing obituaries to grow at 25 percent is fantastic. And the last couple of years you've seen growth of like 15 percent plus.
So I think on the business side, we are really comfortable, we are very happy where it is. And that gives us you know like added incentive and possibly a little bit of headroom for us to kind of sit back and say, “You know like can we do something really big? Can we do something adventurous?” And we've done a few in the last few years. But we have kind of looking at what are the big things that we can do? Look one of the things that we looked at recently was we saw that you know, like what's ColdFusion all about? It's about a product which lies at the heart of your right infrastructure. And essentially, it's a glue that caused up… caused together a lot of disparate systems.
And we also looked at a scenario where the voyage is increasingly becoming A.P.I. driven, right. So organizations whether it is you know like the gig economy, [inaudible] [4:01] economies. What we were seeing is that people were starting to explore, how can I expose? Either my data, my intelligence, or my services to a wider audience than my immediate audience and monetize that effort. And at the quote of this kind of spread was A.P.I. So you were opening up. Google started the trend. You know the Google Maps is potentially would not have been as big as it is today if not for the A.P.I.s, right. So we're kind of leverage Google Maps and of course we do possibly do something different tomorrow.
But as of right now, they’re leveraging Google Maps to deliver really a cool service. And that's only one of them. It's difficult today to go to any retail website where they’re not showing you directions through a web page or physical location without the directions. You and I possibly when we invite friends over the easiest way to send them either Whatsapp message with the Google maps pointer, right. And saying, “Follow the point.” And we saw that everywhere. So we decided that for a ColdFusion customer then when we looked at our ColdFusion customers, we saw a very large number of them were starting to explore; how do I expose my silo data and services to a wider audience? And sometimes audience was internal, sometimes audience was external.
And we said, “Can we go out and built a really good A.P.I. manager? Fully knowing that we were not the earliest in the block. There were a whole range of really significant players in the market. And when we decided to build A.P.I. manager, we realized that we will clearly not be competitive with them on feature set from day one. But we said we needed to have a hook. And so the challenge should a team go out. You can build the coolest looking A.P.I. manager, but they're not going to go out and release the A.P.I. manager into the market unless you can convince me is the fastest A.P.I. manager out there. Fastest means that the smallest amount of overhead that we had to each and every A.P.I. call that is going on there.
And to be honest with you till today, we are the only A.P.I. manager out there which has the publicly published white paper on decades on performance. The reason is we clearly are significantly better than most of the well-known competitors. And it gives me a lot of comfort that we've got a large number of customers which are currently going life. Some of them have actually come on C.F. Summit and spoken about it and we plan to kind of expand that base over the next few years. So the other thing that obviously I kind of look at is how are people using my software, right? So one of the things that we kind of ask people is, how are you… what kind of… What are the reasons why you are still with ColdFusion?
And one of things that we found out is 80 percent of the people believe that it continues to be to fastest growing develop… fastest development platform and delivers the maximum user fee. And we do this every year. So it was 65 few years ago, 70 last year, it's up to 80 percent. The next question that we would like to ask is, have you built any new applications with ColdFusion? And this year, the number was 78 percent of our folks are telling that they’re building new applications. It’s not just on maintenance. They are kind of going out and building new applications. And this is a form 70 percent last year. So the trends are something that is really exciting more than the exact numbers.
Michaela: So that really contradicts the idea that ColdFusion is only a legacy language. If three quarters of people are building new apps where they're… that totally contradicts that.
Tridib: Right and that's one of the reasons why we do these surveys on a regular basis is to kind of… if we have to convince ourselves because in case the trend lines are going the other way then our strategy becomes different. If the trend lines are moving up, that means our customers are with us and invest and continue to invest in the technology then it makes us that we need to do like bigger and better things going forward. The other thing that we've found extremely interesting is after a long time, ColdFusion builder is now clearly the most used I.D.E. for ColdFusion and development. 31 percent of the people are using ColdFusion builder as opposed to [inaudible] [08:56] which just now slipped to number two at 22 Dreamweaver which used to be a dominating players seven, eight years ago is now at 16 percent.
You know like [inaudible] left some side it's worth. Which held on for a long time. Now as we're starting to put more resources being C.F. builder, addressing some of the issues that the customers are facing, what they putting you know like performance and things like that. Those are the things that people came back and said, “We don't want more features in C.F. builder. Go and fix some of the performance and the usability issues.” And that’s what we focused on industrially. So 31 percent and we're hoping that this will become a more dominating period as we go forward.
Michaela: That's great! And what are the other things that you found people are looking for in the survey of ColdFusion developers and users?
Tridib: Ha! Other thing that we found is… Again, the other thing that we wanted to look at is this applications that they're building and I don't have the data offhand. But a very high percentage of the people who are building new applications are having this applications as external facing. And why I feel that external facing apps are important metric for us to track, it's because that's shows commitment because they're kind of getting it out. And they're depending on us delivering platform performance and reliability and security when reaching out to their customers and that's where they make their money.
So two things that we keep looking at is how much what percentage of our applications that people are building are external facing and how much percentage of their overall application stack is on ColdFusion. And those numbers continue to increase. Just to give you a sense, percentage of ColdFusion applications that people say or customers who said that they have external facing applications. I think it's in the 70s or early 80s. I don't have the number offhand, but it's very high. And that gives us the confidence that you know like we have a good product and we need to kind of go out and make it bigger and better.
Michaela: It's always been unclear to me how many applications are external on the public web and how many are internal applications. So that’s interesting to see that. What about ColdFusion 2018? What can you tell us that’s exciting about that release?
Tridib: So really what can you expect? So let me just give you a sense as to how we go out and build a product. So one of the things that Rakishith was the product manager for ColdFusion does is he does far most surveys any it does it not one, but he does that staggered over a period of time. So there are no local biases that plays a role in his decision making. And one of the things that… you know like we initially thought that we spoke to customers face to face and we asked them the question; why does it take you so long to upgrade to the latest release of ColdFusion? Just to understand. But it's in our interest that everybody's on the latest version of ColdFusion. And we had a lot of different stories.
And we actually did do a lot of research and a lot of development to see if we can make that process that is seamless. But we’ve also realized that you know like given a lot of applications out there, it's really difficult. It's a really difficult problem to solve. We can take care of a lot of the environmental issues. You know making sure parts don't collide, parts are upgraded and all those things. But at the port… no organization [inaudible ] [12:56] would still depend on an automatic process without doing a formal Kiwi on their applications as they move forward. And we said that's more a comfort level than a technology problem. So while we did spend a huge amount of time and resources on that, we decided we are not going to bring that to the market.
But what we found out interestingly was people across the board; whether there were IT managers, whether they’re developers. We found that the maximum number of people in the ColdFusion ecosystem, their business K.P.I.s or their personal K.P.I.s had the work performance in it in some form or other. Can we make things go faster? And so we said, “You know what? This is one area that we really need to look into.” So we looked into this problem in two extremely interesting manner. One was, can we make the basic engine faster? So you know like in the past, what we had done was we changed languages and we gave you language constructs which made things go faster. But the problem with that approach was that you had to go and make code changes, right.
So if you were passing things for a reference, can you pass it by… now like… If you want to pass it somewhere else then you actually had to go and make code changes and nobody wanted to when changed large amounts of code. So we said, “Can we look at the engine and can we make it faster intrinsically?” So the same code was run faster. So that's one difference that we had to do, right. So instead of passing by reference, passing by value which required code changes, remember we did some stuff around scope. So going forward that gave you for your new application scan done faster. But we wanted to make sure, can your old applications run faster? Then we also kind of asked ourselves, can we go out?
We used to have this performance monitor which used to be a feature of ColdFusion server for a really long time. And we said, “Can we… You know like [inaudible] [14:56] ColdFusion. We have the ability to kind of freely give you three, four things which only we can provide. Number one is can we go out and tell you… in case you have a performance issue. Can we drill down to exact line of code and tell you, “You know what? This line of code should be changed differently or this SQL call needs to be made differently.” Can we also… one of the things that we found out is connected tuning was a big problem sometimes and most people would buy a little bit seat-of-the-pants experience and seat-of-the-pants.
And we are actually trying to look at can we look at the data that's coming through on your connected tuning? And can we automatically tune the connectors for you and keeping it at optimal level. You know like can we change the pool, size can we change the time out? All those things, can we do it automatically and keep your system working optimally for as long as possible? There will be off for some of the cases where things go really hay wired and requires manual intervention. So we looked at performance monitor and it's a work in progress. So we looked at performance as one that we can auto tune as far as possible. If not auto tuned, can we give you… you know like a pretty easy graphical overview of your whole system. Easily pinpoint with red.
You know like this cluster is not working or this web server is not working or this data base server is a problem. You can then click on that element, get dive into it, find out the C.P.U. uses troop etcetera. And not only… and this is the interesting part. We not only give you what's happening in the last five minutes, we can actually bring you historical data. And we can then give you historical data and say, “You know what? These are the places that you had problems? Now do you want to create search screech on the profiler? Where obviously you're going to capture a lot deeper set of information. And then really dive into maybe a line of code to tell you, “You know what? If you can change this S.Q.L. statement somewhere or you need the index on this data base table that will really help matters.
Those are the kind of things that we will do. We also realize that this is a 1.0 product. So we are trying to make sure that we give you as much power as possible. But clearly this is one area that you will see a lot of innovation coming up. You know like the amount of data that your log files will capture is tremendous. And we would also kind of look out once a system gets into place is to what would some of our customers and see if they’re willing to share their data loss [inaudible] [17:50] where we should then be able to kind of analyze that using some kind of M.L.R.A.I. techniques to do even more auto tuning without you being bothering.
And we just send you an SMS or a Whatsapp message say, “You know like we fixed the problem just for the performance but I might have before decide this is the SUP realization afterwards.” So that hey, after that, they’re not going to replace the person, but we're trying to going to make sure that more day to day rudimentary works are taken care of. So that's on the performing side is one of the key areas that you're working on. Now like distributed cashing was obviously one of the big things that we wanted to kind of look at. And that’s now that people use other systems. And so what we decided this time is that we're going to build in a framework where we will have some bundle distributed cash along with the product.
But we will also kind of make sure that if you have a third party distributed cash which is not just… not like distributed by us, you can actually just plug it at into that framework and use that and manage that and get all the reports and all that straight out of the box. So we do a lot of the plumping and heavy lifting. All you have to do is either use the distributed engine cash that we’re shipping with the product or buy any other third party that you have to and just plug it into the system. One of the things that we also wanted to spend a lot of time. And I think if you see in the forums has us really got the maximum amount attention is a lot of work that we're doing on the OOPs.
And I think the oops capability of the C.F. language. So you'll see a huge amount of improvement or enhancement that’s coming in to make it like we developed that C.F. language like Python and see what are they doing with videos that are structured like [inaudible] [19:51]. If you can bring the same richness of facilities within the system. So you'll see a lot more and scenarios on OOPs.
That’s an area we're obviously looking at really heavily is on the language side would be the whole concept of [inaudible] [20:17] operations, right. The whole concept of promise and things like that that we're bringing into the system which would allow you to leverage their panel architectures and their panel hardware that you have it in your system a lot more effectively and out of the box than it was doing before. So that also has a performance angle to it. But I’ll kind of put that straight into the language bucket because I think that’s how people would see it going forward.
Michaela: That's great! I'm kind of curious on the way you do a release. Do you run the new ColdFusion engine against actual customer code? So you can kind of regression tests that when you add new features it doesn't break. You know old code or how do you deal with that issue?
Tridib: Super question. Our regression and especially with the kind of large customer base that we have. We have to take care that the regressions are kept as minimal if not zero as possible. So for the last two years we’ve actually building automated systems. So on the problem that we used to have with regression is that you know they used to have regression saw it you would run your regressions and you'll end up with a lot of false positives. So what we've tried to do and you know as human… and human beings when you see a lot of false positives along with negatives, it kind of biases you and you don't end up give the negative, the true negative as much [inaudible] [21:53].
So one of the things that we did over the last two years. We’ve written a lot of automation on quality engineering side to building systems which will really give you good quality of reduce defaults positives to absolutely bare minimum. Just to give you a sense, we used to have false positives maybe in the next 600, 700, 800 those numbers. Those numbers have I think reduced to less than 50 today. So you know like when we have issues in the regression so we can now focus on them lot more aggressively. And so we don't have to have go to not like 600 regressions to find out 52 regressions that actually happened.
So now we can actually spend time, that same amount of time, quality time on the 52 regressions that we find out. So regression is clearly one of the things that we are focused on. We are determined to make your task of upgrading forms. Now like C.F. 2017, 2016 to 2018 as seamless as possible. So that any code that was working there should be working here. That's the dream. I hope that we are getting there. We’re getting really close to that with 2018.
Michaela: That's great! So can you give us any idea of how many you know… how much code you have that you run the new engine against? Is it so many different sites or so many lines of code or?
Tridib: I'm trying to remember the data. But I can possibly send this to you. I'm trying to remember the size of the [inaudible] [23:38]
Michaela: yes
Tridib: It's just massive. I think we had close to… I think just released them massively. Released form the performance management system. I think the number that I heard somewhere would be in the range of half a million lines of code or something there about. So that's a kind of scale that we sometimes operate on. But I can get back to you on the exact data on like lines of code that we're adding to the system this year.
Michaela: Yeah, I'll put the exact information into the show notes so people can find it on the [inaudible] [24:15] site.
Tridib: Yeah, that would be.
Michaela: So but that’s impressive that you do that. Because I think one of the concerns I've heard with people upgrading to any new version of any software; not just ColdFusion, but anything that any one puts out is that there'll be bugs in the point o release. And I'm wondering how you addressed that issue.
Tridib: Yeah, I mean like I said when we went out, so there were two things that we got. So when we went to customers face to face this clearly was a top of the line issue that they had; migrating from release to release. But when we went out and did the survey, what we came back is coming back and telling us, “We definitely want you to make the system better, but we don't really want to talk end of don't want to feature,” which is to make upgrades simple. Not like… They don’t want you to have a feature which says click this button and you upgrade.
Because what they were saying is the complexities of our system are really massive for you to try to solve it. We have so many different you know like typically a customer would have between 100 to 200 applications of ColdFusion running and they said we will anyway have to run the quality test. If you can make sure that it breaks very few times, it makes that process go faster.
So that's basically what we're trying to do. We're trying to ensure that programs that we’re working or applications that were running in the previous releases continues to run exactly the same way. And hopefully as I said, run a little faster. But we would like to make sure… We've tried to ensure that it breaks as few times as possible. Like I said it's still an aspirational dream and we’re getting closer to it. I doubt if we'll ever get to it, but we continue to push that needle release, on release, on release.
Michaela: Do you measure data for that? Do you have any thing that tells you how much a new version of ColdFusion breaks apps in the field or? Because I know you're really into data driven decisions so.
Tridib: Right! So one of the things that we look at is… Typically, we look at all external bugs pretty much on a regular basis. So me [inaudible] [26:54] the senior leadership of the engineering team look at this pretty much on a weekly or a fortnightly basis. And you know like I think two years ago or maybe three years ago, I had promised that we are going to really put our effort and engineering resources to make sure that the [inaudible] doesn't go out of the wack, right. And we did that. I mean even today, one of the things that we realized when we deal with enterprises and large systems. Enterprises are willing to leave maybe one feature less or one feature coming to a bunch of underlined.
But they really get angry is when we fail to deliver on a promise that we made on a feature. So if the feature was supposed to add two plus two equal to four, they don't want a four point one coming up even two percent of the time or half a percent of the time. Those are the things that we've learned. So our end where end do what it's always to make sure that in case we get a bug from the field as we call it. We… every… it's all hands on deck. We look at this on a regular basis. As you know very well, we come out with an intimidate release which is about bug fixes and security release pretty much every two months or three months.
And what is really nice to see is this especially if it's a security release, we're starting to see a lot of traction. A lot of our community now is starting to pick them up much more aggressively than they used to do say maybe two years ago. And it's really nice to see that because we don't want the bad guys to kind of get to us before we react to it. And we like to do it on the company site.
We try to make sure that you are ahead of the curve and we definitely are seeing the community stepping forward and picking up those releases more aggressively than they are. Now they are able to pick up this releases a lot more aggressively than they were before is because of our commitment that we will not [inaudible] [28:56]. So we have actually been able to deliver that commitment more regularly and as for what's giving the people the confidence that they're picking up those quarterly releases and updating and applying the patches a lot more aggressively than they were two years ago.
Michaela: Yeah, I definitely recommend listeners apply all the patches as they come out because that's how most security issues happen from someone who did not apply the patch. Because I think I read recently that you haven't had a day zero issue in ColdFusion for like four or five years. Is that right or?
Tridib: Yeah, I don't like to talk about it in public that the… jinx this whole process. But yes, I think the last time we had it would be about 40 years ago unfortunately on Christmas day. So we actually have extra people every Christmas Day just monitoring the systems and the chat boards and the security is tough because [inaudible] [29:57] laws always means that it happens when we have a lesser number of people on deck. So yes, we're very happy. And to be honest with you, even when that zero day happened, it happened at a customer place.
And it would not have happened if the customer had followed our security nots and applied the logged on guides and things like that. So if you kind of keep that aside, we've not had a zero day since I've taken over the business. But again like I said, it's really important that the customers realize this. And I talk about it in our forums. When we go out and release our security batch, we do publish a public document saying, “What are the patches and what kind of problems we're fixing, right?” So it's open.
It's out to everybody including the bad guys to kind of look at it. And we've actually looked at it when we had those zero day I think a year after that we actually did look at it. We looked at a log of an attack that was made on a large U.S. institution. They did not break through, but we had the log. And the log was you know like it's a list of all the bugs. The [inaudible] [31:09] batches that we had released. They essentially run script to test each and every batch to see if the company was not complying and they were waiting for it not to be complied. So there were about 150 or 160 such things and it was just a list of all the batch reports that use of sent out.
Michaela: Tell me about do you have a team dedicated security on ColdFusion or how does that work there?
Tridib: So it works at multiple levels. So Adobe as a company is extremely invested right now given the nature of our business, right. So if you know from… the nature of our business has moved from perpetually desktop licensing products where we could send it out to you and you're like that's it. So now our business is currently on the cloud. Very few people realize we are possibly one of the largest if not one of the largest cloud companies out there whether digital marketing, creative cloud and all those. Which means a security is front and center. It's no longer nice to have. ColdFusion feeds off that. So we have a lot security team who constantly is monitoring security alerts as coming from across the world.
We obviously work with the security partners who are also in touch with a lot of things. So essentially, the way it works is as soon as the security alert happens, we get to know about it. The product team get to know about it pretty much in the next five to ten minutes. We had our securities are within the team whose job is to kind of look at that. And it's basically all hands on deck. His first job is to essentially identify the severity of the problem. And we also work with the security team to come up with that definition is this problem severe enough. And most of the time even if it’s not a zero day publicly, we might say this has the potential to become a zero day because X, Y, Z has promised to reveal this notes in 24 hours time.
So then it becomes all hands on deck and we have to release the [inaudible] [33:25] within the timeframe set by what is known as the [inaudible] which is Adobe’s team. Internally what we have done is all our engineers are like greenbelt certified on security. So everybody out here is a greenbelt or a blackbelt on security. Everybody's been trained. We have a security whose job is to review each piece of code that is checked in to ensure that security practices are put in place. In spite of them sometimes things do get through and that's really working well. So the number of things that get escalated to make it will and I get pretty much every security issue that is done has come down tremendously. But it will never be zero. That's the nature of the business that we’re in. But yes, so we have multiple verse.
We have a securities are. Everybody in the team developer, that’s where that quality is trained on security. We do… And then we have the PSRT team. Before the release of our product at every release of ColdFusion goes to third party security audit. So they look at the audit, they give us a report, and it's only if they give the thumbs up that the product is released, right. Then of course things like lock down guides. One of the things that we're doing this year is while you're logged on guide is a guide and people have to go through it. In this release of the ColdFusion, we're allowing you to just click a button and switch on the log on guide automatically.
So we are taking over the responsibility if you switch on that button that we will make sure that your system is logged on. And of course people sometimes want to unlock it because they want to do a few things in a few directories because that's an administration job. But essentially, what we're saying is you can take off a few controls. And what happens typically when you put them back sometimes you forget. We're just making sure that human errors reduce if you follow the process.
Michaela: Do you have like part of your Q&A stuff is focused on security internally? Like you have a team whose job is to hack into ColdFusion so you can find the problems before real hackers do.
Tridib: We have … not just not… Like I said so we are at three levels. So there’s a security training, so we actually… All… I mean most if not all of them have gone through specialized security testing. So we have performance testing, we have security testing, we have specialized training given to people who test for these things. So on similar lines what you talked about. Then we have the Adobe PSRT who also does it on a regular basis. So they kind of have a team to kind of test that scenario. And then we have the third party organizations which comes in. And they’re like professional hackers whose job is to install a product and make sure that… You know like assuming we lock it down, can they break into our system? So those are the three levels that we do.
Michaela: Do you have any idea how ColdFusion compares to other languages on security?
Tridib: That's a good question. So developers recess report and I think it was… escaped my mind. It was from one of the large research consultancy companies which treated ColdFusion as the least vulnerable enterprised classed platform today. And this they got and I will not take the sort of credit for it. The credit goes also to the community because they have been aggressive in installing the patches that we sent out. Because we can send you the patches, but the testing is done based on how many attacks have been reported on that platform, right. So we can give you the software. It's only because people are installing it. So we are by far the number one according to that report.
Michaela: Well that's great news to hear. And something we can be proud of in the ColdFusion world. I'm curious what your approach is to containerization and Docker. Because for the last few years, there's been a move to deploy apps in the cloud using containers. And I'm wondering if there's anything in the horizon for ColdFusion to support that officially.
Tridib: So containerization is something that we promised last November at Vegas. And if I'm not mistaken, we already have an official ColdFusion Docker image available today. If it's not, it will be made available in the next few days. I know that all the bits and pieces are there. I think it's already life. But clearly now people can go and download an official C.F. image from the Docker website.
Michaela: That's great and do you know if there's a change in the licensing to work with that? Because usually things that containerized there’s a pay per minute of use or hour of use or whatever the billing metering model is.
Tridib: Ha! I know we discussed it. I can get somebody to respond to that. I don't have answers… at least the correct answer offhand.
Michaela: Okay, that's fine when you get back to us we'll put in the show notes, so that people can see what that is. Now you mentioned C.F. Summit West there. And I know you're gonna be speaking at C.F. summit East in D.C. in about five weeks time.
Tridib: right
Michaela: What are you excited about for C.F. Summit this year?
Tridib: It's amazing how the summit continues to grow. And actually, the growth is to a large extent limited by our initial planning. So we say okay you have 600 people and we seem to grow those numbers quite aggressively. In spite of going to C.F. to Las Vegas last year. Soon after the horrific shooting that happened. And in spite of a fairly large number of cancellations that came in, we still reached a number close to 500. I think the C.F. Summit in D.C. which was primarily meant for a large customer base in the government. But we've been really surprised to see a large number of non-government customers also kind of coming in attended. So I'm excited for good meetings.
Number one is as I tell people I think the time has come where we are able to celebrate some of the great C.F. stories in the community. Now towards that, I would like to also kind of communicate through this platform. We launched the C.F. community portals last year, right. So the portal’s job is to do two things. Number one is still for us to kind of keep you up to date with all the new things which is happening in the ColdFusion team. But it's a community portal supposed to be managed by a community. So we would like a lot of you to come and tell your stories and share onthe community. So we don't want the community to become like a user forum. Because user forums are places where people come when there's a problem and then they're looking for somebody to help you.
We also want you to do that, but we also want you to come and tell us all these great stories. So we started this process say two years ago where we said you know like one is for me to come and tell you what the state of ColdFusion and what's a better compelling story is to get some of your community folks come up and tell their stories. So we had people like Global Flashcard. We had people like Market America running some really large systems, right. The whole chopped out cop system on the ColdFusion platform. As a testimony to aid the performance, reliability, and the scale that ColdFusion delivers for you. And more importantly, what we're also wanting you to come and share with us is how easily we’re helping you to kind of stay up with the latest and greatest technology, right.
So if it's… whether it's distributed cash, whether it is A.P.I. performance monitor. We want to take the really difficult things and make it really easy for you, right. ColdFusion’s best has being to make hard things made easy. But that's a claim, that's an aspiration from the team. Did we actually make it easy? How much productivity we brought to the table can only be shared by the community. For us to talk about it from the pulpit would be like taking course through a new classic [42:46]. I don't want to do that. What I want the community come and share with us is how easily and effectively we allowed you to embrace new technology, right. And those are the kind of stories we want you to talk about to the community portal and that's everything why we did.
We will also use the community to kind of share. You know kind of old snippets are learnings and things like that. We also can just launch this other community initiative we're doing with another partner of us called C.F. [inaudible] [43:16] which is like… We have various other factors which are out there. So there's a whole range of things that we're trying to do with the community to engage and collaborate with each other. Most importantly, we want you to share your stories with each other and give each other the confidence that you are on possibly one of the biggest and best platforms out there for web development.
Michaela: That sounds great. I'm kind of curious. I know Adobe has an initiative in the education sphere where anyone in a university or college or school can get a free copy of ColdFusion for educational use for learning. Is there anything else you're doing to get new people into the ColdFusion language? Because I know that's been an issue in the past.
Tridib: Yes, so one of the things that we started (and I know Rakshith has been driving that) is to sponsor colleges, community colleges, and universities to teach ColdFusion as the language medium for teaching web development. So I know we’ve worked with quite a few colleges in the past. We continue to engage with some of the new ones today and the whole idea out there is that we need to catch them young. So we need to kind of make sure that when they come out of the schools and colleges, [inaudible] [44:44] of ColdFusion and understand how the trim work works.
And more importantly, to give them a sense it's a fully functional, full blown development platform and it's not something just to make some small bits and pieces. Some of the world’s largest applications are running on this platform. This process actually to the community and we did announce I think two years ago that anybody who kind of introduces us to get local community colleges where they teach or they have relationships with and the community colleges engage with us, there’s a free Apple-like iPad which I think is on offer that we had made at the C.F. Summit.
So that offer is still there and we're looking for spreading our wings. We actually do have a fully functional video best trading material available on ColdFusion, right. And I think it's for I think 40 hours or 50 hours video we have. So we have the content. We need introductions to your local community colleges or your local universities and we can possibly engage with the C.S. departments or their you know like M.C.I. departments to see how we can get ColdFusion into those colleges.
Michaela: That sounds great. So I’m excited to see more younger people involved in ColdFusion. I'm kind of curious, you've been involved with ColdFusion for I think about ten years now. Why are you proud to be involved with ColdFusion?
Tridib: If you look at pretty much all the businesses that I look after at Adobe. One of the things that we try to do in all the businesses is to democratize this whole process of information technology. I think ColdFusion does a fantastic job. Like if you look at when we started off as a tag base languages and you look at where it is today. It's amazing that we took a tag based language, I guess influenced by H.T.M.L. and those things and build an ecosystem and a platform which is second to none on performance and reliability. I think it’s fantastic.
We had some data to say that when people are able to get developers from PHP, C++, or Ruby and other platforms onto ColdFusion and make them fully functional developers in less than two to three months. And I think the reason why they are able to do that is because the strength of the language and the power that we have. So the ability for people without formal computer science background to come into this system was the original goal of ColdFusion. And we continue to do that except now we talk about you know like really higher end concepts of ColdFusion or computer science being delivered to the same paradigm. I think it's fantastic that we're able to do that for 22 years. I think a lot of people possibly would not have been developers today if not for ColdFusion.
So we clearly are making up changed it. The second area I think which makes sense and you talked about data. One of the things that keep going out and when I meet customers is, are we delivering development productivity to your organization? And it is amazing to see how massive applications are often being managed by three to four people because of defectiveness and the productivity that we are able to deliver. And that's one of the promises that we will continue to focus on. We want to get become like continue to remain the fastest development platform out there for enterprise class web development.
Michaela: That is great.
Tridib: [Crosstalk] [48:51] really is I know like give me A inspired, and B it kind of just a heart problem that we continually would like to solve.
Michaela: So the final question I have for you. You know we talked a little bit about how eight years ago, people thought ColdFusion was dying. You know part of the reason for having this ColdFusion Alive Podcast is I believe that ColdFusion is alive and growing. And it can be used as a very modern language better than any of the other languages out there. So I'm kind of curious. This is my question for you. What would it take to make ColdFusion even more alive this year?
Tridib: I don't know what's to make it more alive this year. I think I can just look at it as a 3-year thing. And I kind of ask myself what it… when I talk to my customers, right. So I have two challenges. Number one is, how do I get new customers on this scenario? And we can end up continuing to look reasonably well on that platform. How do I… once I get a customer, how do they sell deeper into his or her organization? Which means if an application is to be built in the organization, am I increasing the chance of my ColdFusion team bagging that [inaudible] [50:14] that somebody else. So to do that, I need to continually ask myself, “What is the problem that they’re facing.?”
And when I look ahead, I think there are three challenges that I see which we have not addressed or we have not done well. I think our initial floatation which more by a couple of years ago was an interesting one. And I think you possibly look at we will possibly re-look at that and see can we do a much better job, right? So mobile development will continue to be front and center, mobile first will continue to remain interesting, and we want to see if we can clear more interesting role than we are doing today. People are going to cloud much more aggressively than they were doing yesterday and that will be more true tomorrow than it is today.
We're trying to understand and it's interesting because I do manage a loud cloud application which is [inaudible] [51:13] which is a large enterprise plus L.M.S. which we have. And we constantly ask ourselves, what are the challenges that we have right from a cloud; purely cloud deployment point of view? And we're trying… we’re going to kind of look at that question really eagerly to see; can we solve some of those issues that people are facing when they go to cloud, to ColdFusion, right? The third one is again interesting.
You know like you can’t kind of do a podcast today without using the word AIML and data sciences and stay relevant. And I think I've used that word at least once in this whole podcast. Can you see what can be doing that space? So cloud data and cloud data and mobility would be three big challenges that all my customers have. No promises which one will pick up. But what we are focused on this time is whichever one that we pick up, we want to make a long linear impact to my customer's life. So it won't be incremental. We want to completely help him to re-imagine how he approaches any of these three. So that’s the goal that we have.
Michaela: Great! Well if people want to find you online, Tridib, how's the best way? What are the best ways to do that?
Tridib: So my email is reasonably public and I will share with you my email address. That's possibly the best way to do so. I'm on Facebook, but like on Facebook I'm already political and sporting animal. So I love sports and I love politics. So you’ll see a lot of that. LinkedIn is another area, so I'm on LinkedIn. So they can reach out to me on LinkedIn and lot of ColdFusion community members are on my connections in LinkedIn. So Tridib Roy Chouwdhury on LinkedIn. Tridib Roy Chouwdhury on Facebook. And I can share with your my email ID which is [email protected]. But I will let you know Michaela as you can put it on your podcast notes.
Michaela: Great! Well thanks so much for coming on the show today and good luck with your talk at C.F. Summit East which is coming up April 25th in Washington D.C.
Tridib: Yes, I'm looking forward to another extremely successful summit and meeting a whole bunch of folks from the community. And I'm actually looking forward to meeting a lot of the community folks on the community portal. So please, engage, share your stories, and collaborate with each other. I think that's what we're looking for. And thanks Michaela for inviting me.
