As the new space intended, I’ve formed interesting, unexpected bonds with my cohorts. But my personal performance at work has hit an all-time low. Each day, my associates and I are seated at a table staring at each other, having an ongoing 12-person conversation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It’s like being in middle school with a bunch of adults. Those who have worked in private offices for decades have proven to be the most vociferous and rowdy.

Trogloxenes, also called cave guests, are animal species which live close to caves or at the very entrance of the cave, but cannot live exclusively in a cave. “Trogloxene”

As mentioned in my newsletter recently, I typed up a think piece on Docker (the company and the emerging ecosystem after it’s EU conference earlier this month. 451 clients can read it behind the paywall, but here’s the 451 Take: The ecosystem around the Docker container technology is in the process of figuring out Docker’s identity while at the same time contending with a sudden rise in popularity. Although early attention on Docker paired it up against the likes of VMware at, let’s say, the IaaS level, as we investigate further, Docker looks like more of a PaaS innovator.

As we have grown and evolved, we’ve realized that the best salespeople don’t have to necessarily be trained in retail. They just need to be trained in life. http://fortune.com/2014/12/26/container-store-sharon-tindell/

I don’t get why that sort of violence is supposed to be funny. It’s like the Three Stooges with hatchets. Anyway, I liked it more than I expected to. http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2014/12/25/instant-review-the-interview/

The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. Month after month, he gets to be a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts.

From Steven Sinofsky: As an enterprise, the pragmatic thing to do is go public cloud and operate existing infrastructure as legacy, without trying to sprinkle cloud on it or spend energy trying to deeply integrate with a cloud solution. The transition to client-server, GUI or Web all provide ample evidence in failed bridge solutions, a long tail of “wish we hadn’t done that” and few successes worth the effort. As a startup, it will be tempting to work to land customers who will pay you to be a bridge, but that will only serve to keep you behind your competitors who are skipping a hybrid solution.

Good commentary, as always, from Red Hat’s CEO. I appreciate all the “color” that team tends to give on their numbers. Whitehurst commentary in Red Hat numbers

Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces - think Amazon, eBay and Uber - that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising. Social-media companies, like Facebook or Twitter, may make cool products that connect their users, but they earn revenue by selling ads against the content those users create.

Tech & Work World Floor wax, dessert topping As I mention below, I’ve had more time to write reports recently. I just submitted one titled “Docker: floor-wax or dessert topping? Reflections on DockerCon EU”. It’s one of our “spotlight” pieces, which means it’s an open-ended think-piece rather than a write-up of a briefing. Here’s some excerpts: 451 Take: The container technology Docker and the ecosystem around it is figuring out its identity while at the same time contending with a sudden rise in popularity.

In contrast to demand-side users of analyst services, people in supply like firms like technology vendors, service providers and equipment manufacturers are tightly focussed using analysts to drive sales. http://www.influencerrelations.com/3471/ten-analyst-firms-that-tech-vendors-value-most

I’ve been speaking with StackStorm on and off for a few months now. I finally got around to writing up a report on them, available for clients. Here’s the 451 Take: StackStorm fancies itself an automation company, and with experience from Opalis Software, it’s little wonder. What’s interesting about its approach is that it’s automating the DevOps pipeline, including the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process. This may seem like a minor concern, namely, working on developer tools.

Rather than looking from the present out to the future, we need to look from the future back to the present to determine which actions will have the greatest impact and create the most economic value over time. http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2014/12/the-big-shift-in-strategy-part-1.html There’s a few more mouth-fulls in there, but the distinction between “terrain” and “hustle” strategies is nice.

Unlike Office Online and Google Docs, the Dropbox badge doesn’t support real-time editing. That means if you edit a document while someone else is working on it, you’ll still be able to save it locally, but you’ll have to manually figure how you want to merge in your changes. Everything sounded awesome until I got to that part…

Tech & Work WorldThe Cloud is DevelopersIt’s an exaggeration, but for the most part “cloud” is all about supporting developers. What I mean by this is that it’s not exactly the best way to run packaged applications: there’s VMware, Linux, etc. for that it seems. When I was working on cloud strategy at Dell, I’d often joke that we should do some field material (“field” == “sales”) that was a crude decision tree, like you’d see in magazines.

Follow-up Confirmed: ActiveState is far from dead ;) One of you notified me that maybe coffee isn’t so bad for your health - really, who knows. I hear eating a lot of bread was once a thing too. From the article: Why the apparent reversal in the thinking about coffee? Earlier studies didn’t always take into account that known high-risk behaviors, such as smoking and physical inactivity, tended to be more common among heavy coffee drinkers at that time.

I’m starting to put together some research into CI/CD. That might even be the wrong name: I’m more interested in starting to catalog different parts (and vendors/projects) in The DevOps Pipeline. Looking at Jenkins and crew seems like a good start. Inspired by @krishnan’s ever excellent Docker ecosystem mind-map, I thought I’d start one for CI/CD. What would you add and correct about it? http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/public_map_shell/487228559/ci-cd?width=600&height=400&z=0.4 There’s also an excellent DZone overview of the space (with a positive example of native advertising if you’re into over-thinking on that kind of thing), and I like this question from the most recent Eclipse Community survey (2014):

Pizza is evolving into a digitally dominated food Papa John’s Adds Google Wallet, Passes 50% Digital Sales, 451 Yankee Group

The main weapon at valve station 30 on Aug. 5, 2008, was a keyboard. Mysterious ’08 Turkey Pipeline Blast Opened New Cyberwar Era Get your Internet of Things PR counter-measures ready!

You want people to work as much as possible to push the product and company out of uncertain territory into profitability, right? Wrong. What you will do is push people to the edge of burnout and unhappiness. They’ll eventually leave your company. From Open (Unlimited) to Minimum Vacation Policy This is a management point I’ve been thinking about over the years: it turns out well rested employees are better long-term.

A good looking list from the press release: Plan Flight (Travel and Transportation) addresses the major expense of all airlines — fuel — permitting pilots to view flight schedules, flight plans, and crew manifests ahead of time, report issues in-flight to ground crews, and make more informed decisions about discretionary fuel. Passenger+ (Travel and Transportation) empowers flight crews to offer an unmatched level of personalized services to passengers in-flight – including special offers, re-booking, and baggage information.

The video recording of this week’s Software Defined Talk, right there. If you prefer audio (I do!) check out the official show-notes. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

I often brow-beat people into the notion that “cloud is all about developers.” That’s hyperbolic - there’s actually a lot more to cloud than just supporting custom written software…and yet, that seems like the bulk of it. By “developers” I mean you’re running a SaaS (you’re a company who sells the SaaS, like an “ISV” would sell packaged software) or you’re a company that uses cloud-based applications to help run their business (think of online banking, or Uber, or mobile loyalty apps like the Starbuck’s app…or internal applications just used to help run a company).

The advertisements will be a little bigger, too, and my advice is for you not to complain, but to engage with our sponsors, who pay the bills around this joint and who make our strategic, tactical, and technical material possible. I’m a fan of everything TPM writes, he’s excellent and his coverage is always deep and timely. The Four Hundred/IT Jungle is about the best place for keeping up with IBM news.

Referrals account for between 30 and 50% of hires in the US. In a paper published earlier this year, researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and MIT studied data from a financial services company, and found that while referrals only made up about 6% of total applications, they resulted in more than a quarter of hires. That’s more than the number hired via online job boards, even though those job hunters accounted for 60% of applications and 40% of interviews.

Tech & Work World Quick Hits Puppet Labs pushes ahead with more staff, broader enterprise DevOps deployments - a recent 451 Research report from Jay Lyman on my team, now free for everyone. Software Defined Talk #17: DevOps is the New Agile - another fine episode of Software Defined Talk. Be sure to check out my cheesy DevOps market timing if you like that kind of thing.

Tech & Work WorldQuick HitsPuppet Labs pushes ahead with more staff, broader enterprise DevOps deployments - a recent 451 Research report from Jay Lyman on my team, now free for everyone. Software Defined Talk #17: DevOps is the New Agile - another fine episode of Software Defined Talk. Be sure to check out my cheesy DevOps market timing if you like that kind of thing. Under Development Podcast #12: Talk to your children about notifications - our all too infrequent podcast on development has a new episode out.

They dubbed it Slack and released it in August 2013. Since then, Slack has grown swiftly: more than 300,000 people use it each day, and the company has more than 73,000 paid users. The company has also raised a lot of venture capital funding—about $163 million since the company switched its focus to Slack. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532606/three-questions-with-slacks-ceo/ Jimminy-fuck-crickets that’s a of lot of cash to raise. People do talk about Slack a lot.

[H]ighway billboards have returned as a coveted status symbol for tech’s directionless marketing departments So that’s what billboards are for! http://valleywag.gawker.com/billboards-of-semi-nude-brogrammers-are-lining-silicon-1660933261

To me this almost the image of…a dog running ahead of the fire. And, as a bonus: “my contention is that the Mac in the 90s sucked!” Exponent: 024: A Celebratory Goblet of Champagne http://overca.st/Bihkhrizk

Everything in cloud competes with everything else http://www.slideshare.net/joshuamckenty/but-what-about-docker

Stefanovic, who co-presents Channel Nine’s Today show with Lisa Wilkinson, has been wearing the same blue suit – day in, day out, except for a few trips to the dry cleaner - to make a point about the ways in which his female colleagues are judged. “No one has noticed,” he said. “No one gives a shit.” Male TV presenter wears same suit for a year – does anyone notice?

Follow-upI mentioned the Software Defined Talk recording last week, the episode is up for those who were waiting. At DockerCon EU - turns out I’ll be at the Amsterdam DocerCon the first week of Dec, just for a day and half, though. If you’re there, it’d be fun to meetup. I’ll have been traveling all of that week, so you can see my brain turned to mush! Tech & Work WorldQuick HitsNetcraft: DigitalOcean Now Third-Largest Cloud - measurements like these are always weird, but the point is still there: DigitalOcean is on mega-growth, them developers like it.

Follow-up I mentioned the Software Defined Talk recording last week, the episode is up for those who were waiting. At DockerCon EU - turns out I’ll be at the Amsterdam DocerCon the first week of Dec, just for a day and half, though. If you’re there, it’d be fun to meetup. I’ll have been traveling all of that week, so you can see my brain turned to mush!

Tech & Work World Quick Hits Rackspace reports solid growth in the third quarter - time to turn back on the love-pipes, I guess. The point being: it’s hard to figure out how to rate a company, esp. on short-term financials. Microsoft rebrands Lync as ‘Skype for Business’; readies 2015 releases (Mary Jo Foley/ZDNet) - people tell me that Lync now is great, and I hope it is.

A few weeks ago, I gave one of my occasional lectures at the University of Sydney, a class on the history of virtual reality and art. (Postmodern theories about disembodiment and self-representation from the 90s have found a new lease on life, thanks to Oculus and Google Cardboard.) So that’s what the kids are learning about down under. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/12/the_last_pc_replacement_cycle_is_about_to_start_turning/

Meetings are where I go to find out what kind of work I should have been doing while I was at the meeting. Back to Work: 195: Prima Facie Butter Coffee http://overca.st/BZhSUqJc

And all of it, Nadella maintained, is part of a product focus which is less far-flung than it might look. When considering Microsoft’s products, “I just think about three things,” he said. “There’s Windows, there is Office 365, and there is [cloud platform] Azure. That’s it. Everything else, to me, you can call them features.” Satya Nadella’s Microsoft Wants To Make Productivity Sexy, Inspiring, And Futuristic

Follow-upIt’s been awhile. The family and I were on vacation for a bit in Paris, and then I was at the OpenStack Summit. Tech & Work WorldQuick HitsWhy Podcasting Is Bigger Than You Think – Edison Research (Annotated Tab Pile) - there’s a thought-technology battle going on to convince people that podcasts are a viable advertising medium. Sounds good to me. SquareSpace, right? Dell World 2014: No to Wall St, Yes to Cash - I missed DellWorld this year for this first time in 3 years, tragic.

Follow-up It’s been awhile. The family and I were on vacation for a bit in Paris, and then I was at the OpenStack Summit. Tech & Work World Quick Hits Why Podcasting Is Bigger Than You Think – Edison Research (Annotated Tab Pile) - there’s a thought-technology battle going on to convince people that podcasts are a viable advertising medium. Sounds good to me. SquareSpace, right?

What they will not do is maintain steady eye contact or smile. If a stranger of the opposite sex smiles at you, it’s best to do as the French do and return only a blank look before turning away. If you smile back, you might find yourself in a Pepé Le Pew–type situation. http://www.fodors.com/news/story_3925.html

You can tell an Ingress user because (a.) they all are looking at their phones, and, (b.) they look like people who go to barcamps. Fading City: 12: Episode Twelve http://overca.st/B8J0MHrMI

docker has a straightforward CLI that allows you to do almost everything you could want to a container. All of these commands use the image id (ex. be29975e0098), the image name (ex. myusername/webapp) and the container id (ex. 72d468f455ea) interchangably depending on the operation you are trying to do. This is confusing at first, so pay special attention to what you’re using. That paragraph switches around pretty quick there.

Follow-up Hey there! It’s been awhile. I warned you, things are monkey-balls over here. Tech & Work World Quick Hits Nancy Gohring summarizes OpenStack vendor sports of late - an excellent, concise overview of the OpenStack movements of late. Nancy is one of the best tech reporters out there working on cloud. I’m glad she’s over on thenewstack.io too. Double Whammy: IBM Sheds Chip Unit As Financial Woes Hit Hard - Power lives on.

One of the “tricks” you learn in programming - “soft skills,” apparently they used to call them - is that you should match the style and formatting of the code you’re editing. If you’re starting with your own code from scratch, no problem, go crazy. But if you’re like most developers in the world and maintaining an existing code base with incremental improvements, you’ll more often than not be editing and adding to existing code.

I’ll put it over leftover chili! I don’t fuckin’ care. Roderick on the Line: 129: “Museo De Garbagemen” http://overca.st/BmEOyJBoc

Most of the hierarchy found in the traditional firm must be eliminated, and the walls between functional staffs must be destroyed. You can’t move fast, no matter how good the systems are, if turf fights among functions are the norm, and if even routine decisions must be processed through numerous layers of bureaucracy. Tom Peters (via fadingcity) Over some ribs and brisket the other days a friend of mine called this notion “management debt,” which seems right.

Now you’re a zombie with bags. Upgrade: 5: Macworld Cosplay http://overca.st/DeCk_eS8Q

Apple’s ongoing war against whimsy http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/os-x-10-10/

There used to be time to arrive. Incremental geographical changes would ease the inner transitions: desert would gradually give way to shrub, savannah to grassland. At the harbour, the camels would be unloaded, a room would be found overlooking the customs house, passage would be negotiated on a steamer. Flying fish would skim past the ship’s hull. The crew would play cards. The air would cool. A Week at the Airport, Alain De Botton

Tech & Work World Quick Hits Join the Foglight beta The look of a leader Developer Events Run Down: What’s Coming Up and What Not to Miss - nice list of developer related events coming up Comparing Uber &co. To traditional taxi fares - yes, indeed. With New Analytics Service, Salesforce Challenges Startup Visualization Crowd - back in the 2000s or so, Business Intellegence was a natural next step for ERP.

As a kid, “downtown” was a weird, mysterious place. Unlike today, no one lived there, there were no family-friendly attractions, and the buildings housed organizations that a kid would never have occasion to visit: the workplaces of lawyers and government officials and bankers. http://blog.asmartbear.com/downtown.html

It was ‘fly.’ Roderick on the Line: 128: “Arcadum” http://overca.st/BmEM1RTP0

I go through a mall, and I have no idea why any of the stores in there - except the Apple store - is open. I don’t know who goes in there, why they go in there, how the lights stay on because they must be buying something. The Critical Path: 126: Making the world go ‘round http://overca.st/Igw8Dhtw

A long wait for a scanning machine can induce many of us to start asking ourselves if we have perhaps after all left home with an explosive device hidden in our case, or unwittingly submitted to a months-long terrorist training course. A Week at the Airport, Alain de Botton

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #050. Today we have 54 subscribers, so we’re +1. Keep your best behavior up for this new person! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsFRONTSIDE.IO - HIRE THEM!

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #050. Today we have 54 subscribers, so we’re +1. Keep your best behavior up for this new person! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors FRONTSIDE.

NBC Universal turned to Spark to analyze all the content meta-data for its international content distribution. Metadata associated with the media clips is stored in an Oracle database and in broadcast automation playlists. Spark is used to query the Oracle database and distribute the metadata from the broadcast automation playlists into multiple large in-memory resilient distributed datasets (RDDs). One RDD stores Scala objects containing media IDs, time codes, schedule dates and times, channels for airing etc.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #049. Today we have 53 subscribers, so we’re +/0. See what happens when I stop posting? I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors FRONTSIDE.IO - HIRE THEM!

I’m just about the give a short presentation on developer relations and marketing at our HCTS conference. For those who didn’t make it, here’re the slides and the “script” I typed out. As you may recall, I wrote a large report on this topic published back in August. It’s been fun talking with people about over recent months. Lost presentation: Selling to Hoodie and the Sticker-Festooned - Building a Developer Relations Program to Win Over Developers as Paying Customers

All the waitresses are nude, but they have telephones for heads! The Flop House: #147 - Devil’s Pass AND Awards Floptacular http://overca.st/93l8kYbw

I feel like any moment where I’m not getting input is a wasted moment. Podcaster Myke, http://overca.st/CKsmAta2Y

Here’s a writing thing that I suspect a lot of people don’t know about me. Everything starts with a Zero Draft. Every comics script starts as a Notepad file. Notepad is raw and unformatted and gives me permission, frankly, to be shit. Everything in my head about the job can just be vomited into monospace type, where it cannot possibly be sent out as finished work. Once I’m empty, the file gets copypasted into OpenOffice, which is where I write comics scripts, and I can start arranging stuff and picking at it and seeing what’s wrong with it.

Our surveys show Cisco has too many people, often takes too long to get things done and has become reactive to changing market dynamics,” Sue wrote. “Big layoffs and restructuring have become routine for the past four years. A more proactive change may kick Cisco’s underperforming stock into gear. https://gigaom.com/2014/10/06/with-hp-and-ebay-breakups-already-underway-could-cisco-be-next/ File under “shareholders are not your friends.”

The single over-arching theme is this idea is that one should not compete, one should try to differentiate really hard. You want to do things that are one of a kind, you want to do something like a monopoly. You don’t want to do things that put you in cut-throat competition, like opening a restaurant. [www.marketwatch.com/story/pet… More for the “tech world is not normal world” files.

Business as usual is the only way rigid organisations can operate; workers are shown only what to do, but not why they do it. They are not paid to make value judgements; in fact they are forbidden to do so. When circumstances change, someone with a bit of wisdom would recognise the fact and perhaps act differently, whereas the rest carry on doing what they have always done http://go.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #046. Today we have 53 subscribers, so we’re +1. The crazy pills are working! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors NEXT WEEK, CHUCKLEHEADS! If you’ve been waiting to get more than $200 off, it’s now $400!

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #046. Today we have 53 subscribers, so we’re +1. The crazy pills are working! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsNEXT WEEK, CHUCKLEHEADS! If you’ve been waiting to get more than $200 off, it’s now $400!

As a product manager, you need to be able to balance all the work against all the work. Maybe you don’t have an ops background, that’s fine – you probably didn’t have a [domain] background when you came to work either. Learn. A lot of the success of a SaaS product is in the balancing of features against stability/scalability work against compliance work… If you want to take the “I’m the CEO of the product” role, then you need to step up and own all of it, otherwise you’re just that product’s Director of Wishful Thinking.

I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed. You know, at a certain point I thought it would be great to make film documentaries. Well, in fact, I found that to be incredibly hard and very expensive to do and I didn’t really have the courage to keep battling away at that.

It’s as if individuals behave with far more intuitive insight than firms. http://www.asymco.com/2014/09/30/the-process-of-theory-building/ via Instapaper

About 73 percent of organizations in a survey of 302 Gartner partners said they’re investing or planning to invest in big data technologies and services this past June. However, 13 percent have actually deployed those solutions. That figure, for organizations planning to invest in the next two years, is up from 64 percent in 2013 across a survey group of 720. Big data: we’ll get to that real soon, honest!

I’ve found myself saying “and that’s fine” a lot recently. I have a weird lexicon of words and their corresponding hacked semantics that I often use in more of a way to entertain myself than to inform other people. Having this weird lexicon keeps me entertained and also lets me filter in and out people who know me well or don’t. It’s like people who call me “Mike.” They have no idea who I am.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #047. Today we have 52 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I should write more awesome stuff to get more sign-ups! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors NEXT WEEK!

Trent must deal with the inner struggle of good and evil, as Tommy himself once had to do as the evil Green Ranger, due to the fact that he gained his powers from a raw Dino Gem in Mesogog’s lab, with the powers originally intended to be Mesogog’s. Mesogog is in fact, Trent’s adopted father Anton Mercer, who, in a faulty lab experiment, began to mutate into Mesogog. Trent later sides with good and saves his father from the mutation.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #046. Today we have 52 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsSOON! If you’ve been waiting to get more than $200 off, it’s now $400!

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #046. Today we have 52 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors SOON! If you’ve been waiting to get more than $200 off, it’s now $400!

…storytelling. Like it or not, that’s exactly what branded content is about: telling great stories about a company in a more intelligent way instead of simply extolling a product’s merits … In the end, journalism is all about access. Beat reporters from a news media will do their best to circumvent the PR fence to get access to sources, while at the same time the PR team will order a bespoke story from its own staff writers.

“Tony is an incredibly strong storyteller—he tells stories through food and travel and a little alcohol mixed in,” says Zucker. “Really, that’s what CNN should be about. I learned as much about Israel and the Palestinians from Tony’s hour on Jerusalem as I did from any reporting that I’ve seen.” I think there’s something magical in that statement. As the Boomers disappear into retirement and the next generation starts running things, I sure as shit hope that framing takes over media and “story telling.

random hipster strangers who you may want to link to This perfectly describes almost every social media company before Facebook, even Twitter for much of it’s early life. And then there was my MySpace. Exactly.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #045. When we hit #050, let’s all have an extra drink - I know I will! Today we have 52 subscribers, so we’re +1. Good job, subscribers! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #045. When we hit #050, let’s all have an extra drink - I know I will! Today we have 52 subscribers, so we’re +1. Good job, subscribers! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.

I’ve gone back and forth on whether managers should code and my opinion is: don’t stop coding. Each week that passes where you don’t share the joy, despair, and discovery of software development is a week when you slowly forget what it means to be a software developer. Over time it means you’ll have a harder time talking to engineers because you’ll forget how they think and how they become bored.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #043. Today we have 51 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors TIME IS RUNNING OUT! Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #044. Today we have 51 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors SOON! Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

I think having Jason spend less time being an administrator and more time writing is a huge win for all of us. That’s the kind of sentiment my type is always angling for: content creation, not the administration thereof. The so called “Maker” work philosophy applied to communication.

The simple assumption, is 40-60% of the time somebody says “let’s implement a rules engine to solve these unknown problems” really translates to “we really don’t know much about this domain so let’s implement something arbitrary as a stop gap”. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LooselyCoupledHumanCodeFactory/~3/4sAVNt9S4Mk/

If you would like to copy and paste text into this document, please paste as text-only or paste into Notepad first to clear styles. In a template for some 451 documents. It’s 2014, and this is pretty much where all the white-collar workers are. That whole “plain text and markdown” rebellion you see among tech-separatists is a weird reaction, but almost an isolationist response to the weirdness of Word.

Please note that using a GPS system will not give you the correct location of the Global Entry Office. Unfamiliar with the Orlando International Airport follow these instructions. As you approach Orlando International Airport stay in the lane for “Terminal B", parking is available in the “B” parking garage. Once in the terminal take the elevator or escalator to the departure level (where the ticket counters are located) this would be the 3rd level, proceed to the Center Food Court “B” side.

Anything that can be learned by a normal American adult on a trip to a foreign country (of less than one year’s duration) can be learned more quickly, cheaply, and easily by visiting the San Diego Public Library. Simon’s Travel Theorem, As read in the preface to The Halo Effect. A bit more here too, including the vital “I’m not trying to be a dick” defense.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #042. Today we have 51 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. Keepin’ it smooth and level for the weekend! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

For electronic recipients of Computergram International the last story is a little difficult. The nearest this electronic sub editor can get is to ask you to imagine the Old Spice advert, except that rather than a muscular antipodean on a surf board, you should imagine a muscular antipodean on an 80286 upgrade board. For those who cannot allow their imagination to extend this far, refer to the hardcopy C.I. or the Hypertec Pty press release (enough said).

In economics, a Veblen good is a member of a group of commodities whose demand is proportional to their price; an apparent contradiction of the law of demand. A Veblen good is often also a positional good. “Veblen goods”

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #040. Today we have 49 subscribers, so we’re +3. What happened?! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors THERE’S NOT MUCH TIME LEFT! Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #039. Today we have 46 subscribers, so we’re +1. Dandy! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors See a preview of my talk at HCTS!

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #038. Today we have 45 subscribers, so we’re +2. Fun! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #037. Today we have 43 subscribers, so we’re +1. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #036. Today we have 42 subscribers, so we’re +/0. Steady as she goes! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

Meta-dataI’m shipping mid-day. Let’s see what happens! Hello again, welcome to #035. Today we have 42 subscribers, so we’re +1. Fun! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

Meta-data I’m shipping mid-day. Let’s see what happens! Hello again, welcome to #035. Today we have 42 subscribers, so we’re +1. Fun! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #034. Today we have 41 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors Below check out a sample of the content at 451’s upcoming cloud conference, HCTS: a draft of my slides on developer relations and marketing.

[S]ince he acts in all purity, without any guile, society is prompt to reject him http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/jun/13/on-krazy-kat-and-peanuts/

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #033. Today we have 41 subscribers, so we’re +1. Yay! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

As newsletter subscribers may recall, we’ve been talking internally at 451 about how service providers could use Docker, or not. The piece on that topic is now up, and free for all to view to boot. Here’s the 451 Take: Given the gulf between the actual needs of application stacks and the ability of modern hardware to pool physical resources, there is an opportunity for providers to move IaaS forward for developers.

My report on SolidFire’s OpenStack reference architecture (RA) is now up. In addition to covering the RA itself, I was more curious to hear how the business had been going that is, “is it a thing?” As I put in my newsletter the day of the briefing, it seems like the answer is yes. Here’s the 451 Take: SolidFire’s flash-driven software-defined storage approach has always been interesting: It promises to act as a generic pool of very fast storage, supporting multiple workloads on each box, with different performance characteristics as desired.

When you buy Amazon stock (the main currency with which Amazon employees are paid, incidentally), you are buying a bet that he can convert a huge portion of all commerce to flow through the Amazon machine. I have to admit, I didn’t really read that closely, but there you go. How Amazon financials work

Excellent piece. Too bad my folks didn’t get around to writing it first, but at least now it doesn’t need to be written. The insights in developer relations are great. At a meta-level: It’d be interesting to “crowd source” analyst research agendas by just bundling up pieces like this and original work and having that be your “corpus” of research. It’s what Techmeme does for news (no original content though). That’s kind of what InfoQ does for appdev and I think it works kind of well there (I find video a bit too oblique, but you could do 500-1,000 word summaries a a la Blinkist on all the conference talk videos InfoQ has - that’d be a good premium service).

However, CEOs often just tell their companies that they “must execute the strategy better.” Clearly this advice isn’t very helpful, as it’s as obvious as saying, “Let’s all just do a better job!” What companies need is to identify specifically what it is that they must execute better. For example, “improve the speed of deliveries” would be a far more helpful instruction, one that could help a company achieve its strategic goal of improving customer service.

Title: Coté Memo #032: when to have an executive summary Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #32. Today we have 40 subscribers, so we’re +1. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th.

The answer, Sacconaghi thinks, is a bunch of things: CEOs and their CIOs don’t believe in IT value as much today as they used to, even though they do still believe in it; factors such as commoditization have led to deflation in IT prices; customers are hesitant because various new ‘architectures” such as cloud computing, CIOs are stuck evaluating new stuff a lot; and spending has lagged the recovery in corporate profits post-recession.

Title: Coté Memo #031: Avoiding Showing Up, Yet Another Private Equity in Tech Story, Cyborgs, and more #VMworld Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #31. Today we have 39 subscribers, so we’re +1. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.

Sell more APM, grow marketshare, probably over at 4-5 year term: The APM market is fragmented. We are the only APM vendor with more than 10 percent share. We can’t reach our potential without joining forces with the channel. No APM vendor has more than 20 percent share, and we aim to change that. If you threw in Keynote (and finessed the taxonomy), a bit of organic growth, and acquired a medium to large sized APM startup, sure!

http://www.via-cc.at/11qp9 Is that anything? Trying out one of the whacky new pseudo social-marketing dinguses.

Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #030. Today we have 38 subscribers, so we’re +2. Nice! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsors Get $200 off when you register for 451’s Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit (Oct 6th to 8th) when you use the code MC200 at 451events.

(I cross post my week-daily newsletter here, but also feel free to subscribe to it directly if you’d don’t want to follow CoteIndustries.com regularly.) Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #29. Today we have 36 subscribers, so we’re +3 - good job, subscribers! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you’re reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.) See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.

WTH: How do you see the path towards the software-defined Data centre? AB: What I believe is driving this trend is that developers and organisations are looking to move extremely fast. Developers are getting used to the paradigm of going on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and getting resources immediately instead of weeks/months of provisioning time. That is the benchmark against which they are now holding their internal IT organisations.

That old pay to play model just doesn’t suit us. So this makes it hard to make it all work. We know it’s tough, but we also know it’s worth pursuing. We do have to thank over 100 sell side (vendor) and 200+ buy side (end users) clients. And to address someone else’s comment, these aren’t webinar attendees (we’d be able to list 1000 clients in that case) These 200 represent folks who’ve engaged us for subscriptions, advisory services, or attended our programs.

[audio cote.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/u…_010.mp3] underdevpodcast: Summary We discuss thinking beyond human error as Bill starts to summarize the book Behind Human Error. It’s always helpful to look at how the system and process caused the wrong move. Also, thinking about hardware, and some nice feedback from designers. Subscribe to the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/UnderDevPodcast Your friends @cote and @BillHiggins Hardware, what is it? Coté is confused about how to think about hardware.

(I’ve had a little email newsletter for sometime. It’s fun! People like it and write to me! Rather than rely on the archiving at TinyLetter, I thought I’d post the archives here. However, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter in its proper format, email…or just read it here, whatever you like.) Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #28. Today we have 33 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.

With EVO, VMware is pitting the hardware vendors against each other for deals that will likely involve hundreds to thousands of nodes in large enterprises, and the competition will drive down hardware prices and therefore the overall price of the EVO solution. If hardware costs less than it might otherwise without such pressure, that extra margin can come from the software and support in the EVO stack. It’s rough being a hardware vendor.

After reading an, as ever, great, deep coverage of some new fangled piece of hardware from TPM, I got to thinking: I don’t really know how hardware analysts approach their craft. What framing and context do they use to understand, evaluate, and judge any given chunk of hardware? I’ve never been much of a hardware person (which was an odd strength while I was at Dell, being that I was there to work on software strategy).

A report I wrote on Intigua is up now. Here’s the 451 Take for y’all now: Intigua has always been a company with a difficult marketing proposition, having started off as a packaging and deployment balm for systems management agents. While there is certainly utility to ‘managing the managers,’ a broader positioning and purpose was clearly needed. Intigua’s new positioning as an enabler of cloud management APIs looks encouraging, and if the company can extend into ‘orchestration’ as a consequence, it can start addressing one of the major gaps of large enterprises that are ‘going cloud.

I’ve been reading up on Novell’s history. So far it’s got some fascinating twists and turns. Wikipedia sums up the turning point well: The inclusion of networking as a core system component in all mainstream PC operating systems after 1995 led to a steep decline in Novell’s market share. That is, once networking become “commoditized,” the unique position Novell had with IPX changed. And then there’s some channel hijinks that happened.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #27. Today we have 33 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

Back in my RedMonk days, I spoke with Zenoss a lot, so it was nice to finally catch-up with them again. They’re moving up-market and adding spending much time beefing up their back-end to handle the resulting, larger scale demands for a systems management platform in the enterprise space. The full report is available for 451 clients, but here’s the 451 Take: Zenoss has been undergoing much change in recent years.

Good, thorough piece from TPM on VMware’s OpenStack and Docker stuff this week, inc.: The lesson to be learned from this is that OpenStack is just a framework for how the components of a cloud are controlled, but it does not prescribe any particular component for compute, networking, storage, or management. Treating OpenStack like a spec, not a stack at #vmworld

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #26. Today we have 33 subscribers, so we’re +1. DANDY! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

As you may recall, I write about virtual desktop stuff from time-to-time. Teradici recently launched a new workstation remote access package for engineers and CAD/CAM types. My 451 report on the topic is out, co-authored with Scott Ottaway. Teradici is an interesting company in this space as they get most of their revenue (70-75%) from OEM’ing their PCoIP technology to the likes of VMware, Amazon, HP, and many others for embedded use in those OEM’ers products and services.

Gartner’s @cloudpundit has a great way of summing up VMware’s future-proofing problems when it comes to their strategy. tl;dr: they need to straddle two worlds, pre-cloud and post-cloud infrastructure. When VMware says “hybrid cloud,” that straddling of “legacy” IT and “real cloud” seems to be what they mean: That brings us to VMware (and many of the other traditional IT vendors who are trying to figure out what to do in an increasingly cloud-y world).

We wore the blue suits, white shirts with button-down collars, striped ties, fedoras and wingtip shoes. The customers felt they could count on us. John F. Akers, “the 6th CEO of IBM,” as quoted in “John F. Akers, 79, Dies; Led IBM as PCs Ascended,” New York Times.

With a headline like that, what’s not to like? “Wall Street’s internet darlings require an endless supply of idiots”

I am going to sound incredibly churlish here but why on earth Lionel Messi could possibly like our stuff is well beyond my imagination. Flattering though it might be. The same goes for the 20 year career short order cook who posts cat pictures, the retired person who joined Facebook last week, the nurse with a heavy religious bent. On and on it went. Long ago I tried some ads for RedMonk on Facebook.

Early on, vendors who wanted to compete with AWS would speak to the idea of an “enterprise cloud.” All the US Federal activity that AWS had been up to - including that $600m private cloud for the CIA - seems to nullify most of that. I think what will be more important is targeting the type of application supported: old school, three tier app that are statefull everywhere, or cloud native, microservices apps that are stateless (shoving statefullness of to caches and databases).

parislemon: Kevin Ashton: Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know. We are not taught to say “no.” We are taught not to say “no.” “No” is rude. “No” is a rebuff, a rebuttal, a minor act of verbal violence.

The third option is to just ignore it and assume somebody will figure it out. Option three is quite common. http://www.ibuildthecloud.com/blog/2014/08/12/evolution-of-docker-and-its-impact-on-aws/

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #025. Today we have 32 subscribers, so we’re +1. YEAH! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

Citrix has a new DaaS service provider survey out. I’m often overly harsh on virtual desktops and, by extension, DaaS. I’m always curious who actually uses this stuff, so the vertical breakout is interesting: The largest number of service providers who responded listed financial services, healthcare and manufacturing as the vertical markets they served. This is an interesting change in the vertical market ranking compared to the December 2011 Citrix Service Provider survey.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #024. Today we have 31 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

Smells like Agile in 2002: Your DevOps efforts will probably fail unless your entire management team buys into the required changes, and executives recognize that they’re going to have to change the way they operate, as well. Have fun storming the castle. Anecdotally, I hear fun tales of BigCo’s being befuddled by all the changes needed here. It shows why it’s vital to prove to The Business side that it’s worth it, which is always tough for such dramatic changes.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #23. Today we have 31 subscribers, so we’re +1 (two are new, so one must have dropped). I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing.

I see “z” in all presentations I receive from the US and I immediately change them, as well as all the other Americanisms. http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/08/14/open_stack_channel_451/#c_2272534

Markdown is great - but my colleagues expect MS Word… makeDoc — toketaWare

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #22. Today we have 30 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

A summary of revenue: [HP’s] software division - IT Management, Application Development, Vertica, security and Autonomy - turned over $3.91bn in fiscal 2013 ended last November, down from $4.06bn in the previous year. With software, it’s good to focus on profits as well, as the margins are much higher. A common problem with large companies is getting cross-selling, inside and out of the company: “The biggest challenge for HP Software,” Youngjohns says, “is to get access to that broad range of HP partners and resellers, people selling systems and device solutions, to convince them software ought to be part of that proposition.

I wrote a brief update on Pivotal recently, the full report is available for clients. Here’s the 451 Take: Pivotal’s connection to the so-called ‘EMC Federation’ gives it an expansive portfolio, but we believe that Pivotal’s core message reduces to, “Hello, Global 2000 enterprises. The middleware stacks you use to build and run your enterprise applications are not so good. Ours is better, so you should use it for new applications development and to rewrite old applications.

A small cup of Starbucks coffee contains 250mg of caffeine. For a frame of reference, espresso tops out at about 75mg. Let’s face it: Starbucks sells a drug I am addicted to. And their app allows me to pay for my addiction easily and rewards me with a free vial - I mean cup - of coffee every so often. I also get free apps on the iTunes app store.

Mobile phones are arguably a more useful import than hamburgers http://qz.com/250059/this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-a-country-gets-mobile-phones

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #21. Today we have 30 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #20. Today we have 30 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. Stable! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

I checked in with Dell’s end-user device management folks, KACE, recently and wrote up a report. Patching and all that isn’t exactly thrilling (but, as they say, necessary), however, it’s interesting to see the momentum the acquisition has had since 2010. Because we’d been collecting revenue from KACE over the years (thanks to Dennis), we could estimate what growing the business 5x looked like. The full report which goes over recent updates, competition, etc.

My new somewhat monthly column in the channel section of The Register is up. It goes over 451’s recent OpenStack market-sizing and relates some anecdotes about how common it is to get outside help with private cloud installs. You know, of interest to people who’d be reading up on channel stuff. One of the co-authors of the 451 report also has a nice summary up, available for free. The folks at Piston pointed out that you could misread one of the mentions of them saying that their customers require PS work.

When you’re asked to write an executive memo, you need (to learn how) to be concise and to the point. When I was at Dell, working in strategy, I wrote many “executive memos.” One of the senior executives, including Michael, had a question about entering a market, buying a company, etc. and wanted our input on it. It was one of the more fun tasks we did, often in a quick half day, at most taking two days.

[audio cote.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/u…_009.mp3] underdevpodcast: Summary Bill and Coté discuss trying to explain DevOps, DevOps metrics, and the processes used by designers vs. software developers vs. management consultants vs. wedding planners. We also go over the recently US Digital Services Playbook, which looks pretty cool actually. Subscribe to the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/UnderDevPodcast Your friends @cote and @BillHiggins DevOps, what is it? Observations from the field - Bill has been on a tour visiting Kickstarter, Etsy, and IBM teams - what are they doing, how is it different, etc.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #19. Today we have 30 subscribers, so we’re +1. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

Here, the example is in airports: It lets the airport team observe where certain areas might become congested, allowing quicker reaction and reducing the impact on passenger flow. Furthermore, the heatmapping functionality enables them to overlay demographics, which proves particularly useful when examining the use of certain spaces. Airports can ascertain where it would be best to place new shops and restaurants, as well as signage and advertisements effectively.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #17. Today we have 28 subscribers, so we’re +3. Fun! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsCome check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct 6th and 8th. I’ll be speaking there on developer relations and marketing. Use the code MC200 to get $200 off when registering.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #18. Today we have 29 subscribers, so we’re +1. Exciting! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsor451 Research, is having it’s big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct. 6th to 8th. I’ll have a session or two on developer relations and marketing, and other analysts will be talking about their area.

The new offerings bring IBM solutions around SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service and BlueMix to CSC customers, including integrating them with the CSC ServiceMesh Agility Platform. The agreement will bring ServiceMesh Agility Platform to the IBM Cloud Marketplace. More: CSC said the IBM alliance will help the company grab a piece of Gartner’s predicted $210 billion market for application services in 2014 and help continue to pivot the solution provider around as-a-Service solutions.

As detailed by Dell’s Forrest Norrod: We typically think in big animal terms. The true hyperscale market is a very small set of customers, maybe the top seven to ten players. The scale-out customers sit below these, and include Web tech, HPC, and the large financial institutions for their quant farms. The core enterprise comes next and includes converged, high-value workloads and volume workloads, and finally there is the SMB/value segment.

“What if?” statements throw fuel on the fire of stress and worry. Things can go in a million different directions, and the more time you spend worrying about the possibilities, the less time you’ll spend focusing on taking action that will calm you down and keep your stress under control. Calm people know that asking “what if? will only take them to a place they don’t want—or need—to go.

Tracking the exact mechanics of bottoms-up shifts in IT is as hard as tracking “real cloud” spend, if not harder: I would listen to developers, but more likely an architect or head of development than allow the grass roots to start buying and using anything they wanted. I am not naive enough to believe that developers don’t go out and look at neat new stuff, a developer happy and content to just do maintenance on existing software is a rare commodity indeed.

[S]ome outfits do still see coding as a risk to be costed, rather than a realisable benefit to be paid for. Robert Brook

Dennis reports on a refer SAP user group survey which points to difficult up-take for HANA. It seems like the primary blocker is coming up with justifiable reasons to buy and use the thing, a “business case,” as the kids say. On the other hand, the actual performance of the thing seem to be real, if under-appreciated by those report hungry LoB-monsters: BW on SAP HANA was always going to be an easy win given the time it takes to run reports.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #16. Today we have 25 subscribers, so we’re +3. THANKS! (Keep telling your friends!) I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorsI’ll be at speaking at a couple conferences you should come to this Fall: One, at 451’s HCTS conference, Oct. 6th to 8th.

As Coté Memo subscribers know I’ve been working on a report on Mesosphere. It now up, as alway available for 451 clients. Here’s the 451 Take: As with vendors like CoreOS, Docker and Red Hat (and the work around Google Kubernetes), Mesosphere is rethinking the infrastructure needed for cloud-native applications. We see a growing demand to rewrite and re-platform the bulk of applications existent in the consumer and enterprise spaces to fit into mobile and tablet form factors and take advantage cloud infrastructure.

I’ve been working on a large (30 pages in lovely PDF) report on developer relations and marketing, especially, though not exclusively, targeted at people like cloud and service providers who are discovering the need to cater to developers. It’s published now. As with most of my work, I’ve tried to inject a bunch pragmatic, tactical advice alongside just enough macro “trends and drivers” nonsense to make the case for why you should care and then how you should start planning what to do next.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #15. Today we have 22 subscribers, so we’re +/-0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsor451 Research, is having it’s big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct. 6th to 8th. I’ll have a session or two on developer relations and marketing, and other analysts will be talking about their area.

Since being tapped to lead Cisco in 1995, Chambers has grown the company from a $2.2 billion hardware manufacturer to a $48.6 billion network hardware, software, security and services powerhouse that’s more bullish than ever on becoming the world’s No. 1 IT company. Cisco had 3,827 employees when Chambers was appointed CEO. Today, there are more than 70,000. Also, a somewhat random DevOps callout from a senior executive:

“OpenStack talent is a rarified discipline,” McKenty said, adding, “to be good with OpenStack, you need to be a systems engineer, a great programmer but also really comfortable working with hardware. You need to understand how the infrastructure works under the covers.” … “There’s 2,000 people working on OpenStack on the vendor side, and the customers can’t compete with HP to hire OpenStack engineers. So they’re relying on us to make OpenStack work for them,” McKenty said.

So I finally got to go to Australia and use those weird slanty bits on my international power adaptors. There’s a good twist to pace layering at the end.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #13. Today we have 22 subscribers, so we’re -1. TEARS! (I feel like Al below.) I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsor451 Research, is having it’s big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct. 6th to 8th. I’ll have a session or two on developer relations and marketing, and other analysts will be talking about their area.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #14. Today we have 22 subscribers, so we’re +/- 0. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsor451 Research, is having it’s big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct. 6th to 8th. I’ll have a session or two on developer relations and marketing, and other analysts will be talking about their area.

Distributed transaction is, I would say, it’s an anti-pattern, and it is very hard to code in if there are like writes in transactions that need to happen in different places, in different databases, it makes it very difficult to make sure everything works really well. Yoni Goldberg, Gilt

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #12. Today we have 23 subscribers, so we’re +1. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsor451 Research, is having it’s big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct. 6th to 8th. I’ll have a session or two on developer relations and marketing, and other analysts will be talking about their area.

I grew up in Silicon Valley and have spent my entire career in tech. Despite these facts, I’m a humanist by nature and a marketer by vocation. About Me, The Borg Queen

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #11. Today we have 22 subscribers, so we’re +1 (leveling back after yesterday’s -1). I’ll have a drink to celebrate! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsor451 Research, is having it’s big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct. 6th to 8th. I’ll have a session or two on developer relations and marketing, and other analysts will be talking about their area.

I had a briefing with Serena a short while ago around the new release of their ALM product Dimensions. They’re interesting to talk with because of their conservative customer base: so it’s a good way to track mainstream adoption of emerging developer practices. Things seem to be moving along nicely there. Since changing PE hands, they seem to have a renewed interest in shipping new releases, which should be fun to watch as well.

First, Microsoft and other vendors like IBM still have a tight grip on the largest companies. Gartner analyst Tom Eid—who predicts that enterprise email alone will be a $5 billion global industry this year, growing about 10% from last year—confirms this. He estimates that Microsoft still commands 75% of the market’s spending, versus about 3% to 5% for Google. I like that specificity of “spending.” The email iron grip

One of my colleagues recently asked this question. Through a series of detailed logic-gates, we can conclude the following two scenarios: In much zombie lore, zombies don’t like to eat (long) dead things or even diseased humans (cf. World War Z, the movie). Therefore: vampires win because they’re immune. However, if the cause of zombie-ism was a “virus” that effected any dead body, not just one bitten by zombie, (cf.

I poked it. A few bits. A little motor from something, rocking; a broken television; remnants of unidentifiable bits and pieces, corkscrewed detritus, on a layer of cloth and dust. Layers of rust and scabs of oxide. From City and the City by China Miéville Pretty wonderful so far: like being a pleasantly drunk flâneur meandering about the The Killing.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #9. Today we have 21 subscribers, so we’re -1. I’m crying right now into my vesper martini. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorMy work, 451 Research has it’s big cloud conference coming up in October. More of the agenda has been posted today, it seems.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #8. Not so brief today with all the typing, I know. Today we have still have 22 subscribers. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsor451 Research has our big cloud conference this October 6th to 9th. I’ll be there giving talks on developer relations and marketing; most vendors and service providers getting into cloud need to start catering to this core set of decision makers and buyers.

Rather than build out your next Instagram or SnapChat knock-off, consider disrupting 30 years of clunky software with horrendous user interfaces. The office-drone masses will bless you for it. Let’s take “enterprise” out of the parking lot

I was on The New Stack Analyst podcast today along with Nancy Gohring, one of the tech reports who’s work I’ve always enjoyed, and, of course, Alex Williams. We discuss Nancy’s recent piece on Azure cloud seeming to grow faster than Amazon’s cloud, the problem with figuring comparisons like this out, some different scenarios for big cloud vendor success and failure based on where the packaged software market goes, and then DaaS and WaaS.

Highlight the whole row under the one you want to freeze, then select freeze pane. How do you lock or freeze one top row in an excel spreadsheet? Well that makes a lot of fucking sense…like most things in Excel of Mac.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #7. Today we have 22 subscribers, so we’re +1. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsor451 Research, is having it’s big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct. 6th to 8th. I’ll have a session or two on developer relations and marketing, and other analysts will be talking about their area.

I took a look at Amazon’s recent earnings call transcript. Not as details-rich as CA’s, and more widely covered, but some little bits and pieces here. See the stand-alone HTML file in my dropbox share, and the raw markdown file if you prefer that. I’m still looking for a better way to render there if anyone has ideas. Amazon 2014Q2 marginalia

53% of financial services industry respondents gave reputation risk a “No. 1” ranking among the hazards. By contrast, 19% named compliance as the greatest risk, and 9% selected data security. Why banks have social media programs

All you’ll need is an idea and some free time. The platform and the infrastructure underneath will not be anything for you to ever worry about. I think this is most people’s view of programming. Yes, folks, it’s just that simple!

However, a source familiar with Dropbox’s current strategy said the company lately has been moving more of its IT infrastructure away from AWS and onto its own turf. There are now 10,000 servers in Dropbox facilities running loads that had been on Amazon EC2, although it’s not clear what percentage of Dropbox’s computing requirements that represents. Dropbox is currently storing data both in its own data centers and on Amazon S3 until the end of the year, this source said.

We all use the same type of data center, same type of hardware more or less, there’s definitely margin on the cogs of operating those goods. SHOCK and AWS: The fall of Amazon’s deflationary cloud

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #7. Today we have 21 subscribers, so we’re +1 again. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. Sponsor451 Research, is having it’s big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct. 6th to 8th. I’ll have a session or two on developer relations and marketing, and other analysts will be talking about their area.

At the chalkboard, I use only Hagoromo faru ta’chi (“Full-Touch”) chalk, for which it has been claimed that it is impossible to make a mathematical mistake when writing with this chalk. I always like a good The Setup. Chalk of Math +5

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #6. It’s Friday night, and most of time was spent talking with people, so this will be short. Today we have 20 subscribers, so we’re +1. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorI mentioned a few newsletters back that my work, 451 Research, is having it’s big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct.

I’m okay but not great at managing my time. In addition to being an editor and writer on my radio show, I’m also the boss, and deal with budgets, personnel stuff, revenue and spending questions, and business decisions. My worst habit: when I should be writing something for this week’s show, I’ll procrastinate by looking over some contract or making some business phone call or doing something else that actually isn’t as important as writing.

While reading through CA’s recent quarterly conference call transcript, I thought I’d try out an idea I had this morning: using CriticMarkup to DIY what Genius.com does: annotating content. It worked OK, except I didn’t invest time in getting the HTML output right, so it looks kind of crappy - you can see the raw markdown file as well. I actually tried using Genuis.com as well, but it started acting goofy so I gave up.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #5. This one will be short. Today we have 19 subscribers. It’s starting to smell like real growth hacking up in here! I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorYesterday, I mentioned that my work, 451 Research, hosts small “round table” events to talk with practitioners and IT buyers.

In the latest The New Stack Podcast, I talk with Alex while he’s on the show floor. We talk about SAP, Microsoft and open source, OSCON, and then talk with Bitnami’s Erica Brescia who has interesting things to say, among other things. about Azure use rising. (Source: http://thenewstack.io/)

So no, this isn’t helping. This is externalisation of cost. This is shirking of responsibility. This is not using technology the way it should be used, or the way it could be used, but the way that it can be used to inflict maximum possible harm - to provide the illusion of choice without actually enabling better choices. Episode One Hundred and Twenty Six: Solving The Problem When I was at RedMonk, I had to buy my own health insurance.

Meta-dataHello again, welcome to #4. Today we have 16 subscribers, but one of them is my work address. So, we’re +2! If you’re a subscriber, I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote. SponsorMy work, 451 Research puts on “round-table” events where end-users and their managers discuss various aspects and best practices of enterprise IT.

Apple paid out $5bn to developers in H1: Google $5bn in the last 12 months. — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) July 22, 2014 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js I’m guessing from quarterly calls.

We’re putting all this stuff out there, thinking that we’re having conversations. But actually, we’re creating evidence for somebody else’s drama. @LloydDavis, Episode Eleven of “Try the Doorbell” podcast.

(Hello there! I’m finally getting around to doing a newsletter-y thing. I like the ones I see, the single page of links. In the bricolage style of weblogging, if that word still exists, that I operate in by default, I thought I’d narrow down to a sort of “Selections from the Daily Wunderkammer” for the daily email. I’ll try it for awhile and see if it works out.) (The next iteration will drop this introductory text and just be the, you know, "

When looking to split a large application into parts, often management focuses on the technology layer, leading to UI teams, server-side logic teams, and database teams. When teams are separated along these lines, even simple changes can lead to a cross-team project taking time and budgetary approval. A smart team will optimise around this and plump for the lesser of two evils - just force the logic into whichever application they have access to.

@valleyhack Well, Cargo Cults tend to think they’ve got it pretty good until they try and land the coconut plane via the bamboo radar — Jack Clark (@mappingbabel) July 18, 2014 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js The Coconut Plane

At it partner conference, Microsoft’s Kevin Turner portrays the company as having 14% device (PC, smartphone, tablets) share: In a world of 14 per cent device share, we have a new mindset: you have to have a challenger mindset. Everyone has to have a challenger mindset. Pretty astonishing if that’s the case, or near it. El Reg covered that a 14% number, from Gartner, earlier as well with more breakout.

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. “What Problems to Solve ,” Richard Feynman

There are different divisions within an enterprise that want private cloud, says Cantrill. “A common trend we’re seeing is the mobile group in a company. Mobile groups have the budget, charter, and it’s all greenfield.” Joyent: SmartDataCenter is Better Cloud for Enterprise than OpenStack

We would spend weeks rewriting systems, an eternity in startup-time, just because a cloud server with 8 gigabytes of RAM was falling over. Putting Teeth in Our Public Cloud

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Roald Dahl (via kateordie)

Digging behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, Carr explores the hidden costs of allowing software to take charge of our jobs and our lives. Drawing on history and philosophy, poetry and science, he makes a compelling case that the dominant Silicon Valley ethic is sapping our skills and narrowing our horizons. Blurb from Nicholas Carr’s upcoming book, The Glass Cage

From Tim Anderson on the London IO viewing party: I found the demographics different than most IT events I attend: a younger crowd, and plenty of start-ups and very small businesses, not at all enterprisey (is that a word?) That’s, as always, the thing to track: is Google changing to get into the enterprise, or is the enterprise going to have to change if they want to make use of Google?

In case you haven’t noticed, I have a few new podcasts that have been chugging along nicely. If you like my past work at DrunkAndRetired (OK, it’s not officially “done,” but we sure as shit don’t do much there anymore) you’ll like these two: Under Development - each week Bill Higgins and I talk about the software development, with a lot of “here’s some wisdom from an old guy talk.

I recently checked in with EnterpriseWeb and wrote-up a 451 report on them. They’re an intriguing company, with big ambitions. 451 clients can read the full report, but here’s the 451 Take: In the context of our devops coverage, we often speak about the ongoing need for new application development (appdev) approaches caused by emerging drivers such as mobile, social and cloud platforms. Cloud-native apps beg for different architectures than the classic, on-premises three-tiered approach, while the need to integrate with more services than ever has been charging along since the days of mashups-cum-composite applications.

Microsoft shot for consistency with Metro, putting the square interface on its tablets, phones and PCs under something it called three-screens and the cloud. Yet Microsoft was wrong to lump PC users in with device users, as it turned out neither customers nor developers wanted Metro on their PC – they hated it. There is a notion that Metro was a failure there, which would be good to see the proof points in (low Window 8 uptake?

Rebecca Greenfield, writing for Fast Company, traces the return of the internet newsletter to the death of Google Reader. A representative from TinyLetter told her that there was an uptick in users just as Google pulled the plug last year. Some of us switched to other RSS readers, nevertheless a number of bloggers saw their community and traffic take a hit, and posted less as a result. … We subscribe to newsletters because we like someone and take interest in their unique points-of-view.

Silicon Valley nurtures a winner-take-all culture that thinks in terms of monopolies and absolute market dominance. The concept of sharing a market with competitors is anathema Change the world, get all the marbles

And if you guys remember, JavaWorld 2000, 2001. Remember when they hired Britney Spears to be the spokesperson for Java.com? Like the world’s worst effort to attempt to be kind of this emotive brand. It was awful. Adam Gross covering developer marketing in his Heavybit talk

Passengers cannot leave babies in an infant carrier and attempt to put it through the X-ray machine. Just in case you were wondering… Least you think that’s a joke, check the TSA blog, which says: “Yes, we’ve been asked many times, and no, you can’t.”

One of the companies I’ve followed closely over the years took funding recently, for the first time. This short Analyst Note covers the funding, including this quick market overview: We expect to see more interest in the development space, driven not only by devops but also by companies’ increasing desire to use custom-written software to expand their business. Vendors like Atlassian are also riding this wave – Atlassian reported fiscal 2013 revenue of $149m for its ALM offerings.

The design for Wieden+Kennedy New York moves away from the office-as-playground to put work back at the heart of creative work. Work, it’s where you work

I think it’s a bit unreasonable to expect a Web application circa 2013 to be still up and runnable in 2053. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/how-to-design-a-web-application-with-a-40-year-lifetime/

Lot and lots of discussion about culture and culture change. This discussion has been going on since forever, and if we are being frank with ourselves, it isn’t going to change dramatically soon. So what to do? Don’t lets make the culture change discussion stop us from doing things. Have a go, fix what you can right now. “Hell is other people,” but don’t let that stop you

More than 10 million servers in the world are managed by CFEngine today, which is around a quarter of all of the machines installed, depending on whose estimate of the server base you use. Around 10,000 companies worldwide are using CFEngine in at least 100 countries globally. CFEngine marching along

Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers—obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state.

“Causal Consistency”

I just keep getting questioned: “What’s big in cloud and what’s really happening?” You see people saying the cloud market is a hundred bazillion whatever, most of it unsubstantiated. When you drill in, you find they were making numbers up, top down. Enterprise markets are trillions and trillions, so it’s got to be some percentage right? So we’re trying to go from the bottom up to see if it makes more sense.

From a 2013 Gartner press release: The use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend, according to Gartner, Inc. 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017. New IT spend gobbled by cloud by 2016

This anecdote sums up an annoying problem on cloud marketing (and product management): At the break I chatted with a somewhat bemused attendee who had come in the hope of learning about whether he should migrate some or all of his small company’s server requirements to Azure. I explained about Office 365 and Azure Active Directory which he said was more relevant to him than the intricacies of software development.

Followers regurgitate half-understood jargon, abbreviations and acronyms Much clarity is lost. http://findthethread.postach.io/signalling

Fast low-latency access with seamless handoff orthogonal frequency division multiplexing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash-OFDM#FLASH-OFDM (via fadingcity) Yup, sounds about right.

Unless we collectively choose to pay for a safety net, technology alone isn’t going to make it happen. https://al3x.net/2014/06/17/dear-marc-andreessen.html

“You guys keep asking about that [the IPO] . . . we try to slow down. I don’t think we could move any faster, I don’t think we feel any extra impetus to move faster,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said “There is no time in the future by which it has to be done, it could never happen, we absolutely could do that. We are in the luxurious position that we have the two founders that are still in total control of the business, so when we feel the business is ready, from the perspective of our market and culturally, we can take that step.

Gartner, in its “Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems” report, a copy of which was reviewed by CRN, estimated the market for integrated systems, which includes single-vendor and multivendor converged infrastructures and hyper-converged infrastructures, will grow more than 50 percent in 2014 over 2013 to reach $6 billion. Converged infrastructure to grow to $6bn in 2014

For one, it looks like HP Helion OEM’s SwiftStack, which is a nice partnership. Two, their CEO points towards going after enterprise storage: SwiftStack founder and CEO Joe Arnold said all enterprise applications will eventually rely on object storage to keep up with growth of data and access points required by users. ”It’s the only way enterprises will be able to compete today and in the future,” he said.

Recently we have seen Docker cluster management projects appearing which are predominantly focused on managing clusters in a single provider’s environment. Clocker is designed to deploy and manage Docker clusters in a portable and cloud provider agnostic way. Clocker can even be used on-premise exploiting an enterprise’s virtual or private cloud environment. Along with things like MesoSphere and PaaS trying to reinvent itself all the time, this injection of Docker into the “how do I run a cloud?

A good podcast is like being with a group of interesting friends…a group of interesting friends that you don’t have in real life! Mike Stoner on Hack Circus

He points out there is no need to check if you have new email: you have. Everyone always has new mail waiting. No one complains about not getting enough email. Review of “The rise of the humans: How to outsmart the digital deluge” from Simon Rockman at The Register

We think [Machine OS is] an interesting, somewhat esoteric pursuit,” Swainson said. However, Dell is most interested “cheapest, best, standards-based [tech] – all of this mundane stuff that is how computing gets done. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/12/dell_hp_machine_os/ One of the better summaries of Dell’s approach, from Dell itself.

The problem is not that the various visionaries have their own jargon or even that they talk in acronyms. The problems begin when they come down from the mountain and forget to translate that jargon into common language. The point is not to sound smart to people who don’t understand the concept, but to communicate that concept. http://findthethread.postach.io/smac-my-pitch-up

MyIT 2.0 started shipping at the end of April, and is already off to a fast start with nearly $5M in deals during BMC’s fourth quarter — including major telecom, financial services, transportation and consumer packaged goods customers. BMC expects MyIT 2.0 will generate $10 million per quarter in revenue going forward, with pull-through revenue for other parts of our business. And, back in my, the company said it had over 900 SaaS customers across it’s SaaS portfolio.

The hardest thing for most first-time engineering managers is getting used to the fact that the sum of your importance is now far beyond simply the code you write or the infrastructure you design. Your job just got a lot harder, you need to balance more distractions and learn how to keep yourself out of too many critical paths. If your first answer to every problem is “I can just bang that out,” you’re probably doing it wrong.

I have been thinking about that Merlin idea: “is this the group of people I want to hang out with an be associated with?” and how it drives long term career planning. Except for me, I think it’s “ideas,” and people in so much as they’re mediums for ideas. (Things have mostly worked out for me over the years here.) Also note-worthy: all too quickly Clay Christensen raises and scurries past an incisive point in How Will You Measure Your Life?

[Option] [5] produces ∞ infinity sign. learn to type infinity sign on keyboard

My colleague Jay Lyman and I wrote up Red Hat’s recent OS release, RHEL 7. Of interest to us, of course, is the work Red Hat is doing with containers. Clients can read the full report, and here’s the 451 Take: In order to differentiate and draw enterprise interest for RHEL 7, Red Hat is wise to look to new technologies, such as containerization, and make them enterprise-ready. The company will need to find new sources of growth beyond Unix conversion and Windows defection, so its effort to link to other technologies and products – cloud computing, RHEV, OpenStack, OpenShift and devops – will be critical.

Docker blasts into 1.0, throwing dust onto traditional hypervisors

Have 15 minutes be the default. Sure, sounds interesting. See also Rumsfeld’s meeting rules which opens with a more management take on what meetings are for: If you think about it, a meeting’s function is to pool an organization’s collective wisdom and knowledge in one room, making it easier for a manager to learn what his team knows that he doesn’t, and to provide guidance to all of those involved in one place at one time.

VMware to build converged compute and storage hardware

One of our new, excellent analysts Scott Ottaway and I wrote up a report on Citrix’s Workspace as a Service portfolio and strategy. Clients can read the full report, but here’s the 451 take: Citrix reported impressive double-digit revenue growth and total licenses from its cloud service provider channel. Citrix also launched multiple new technologies – XenApp, XenMobile, ShareFile – as well as announced a cloud-managed Workspace Services option that service providers or enterprises can leverage to optimize, automate and more easily manage WaaS infrastructure and users while still maintaining the end-user relationship.

Demand for software developers remains high

Office 365 makes huge sense for many organisations, and is growing fast – “the fastest growing business in the history of the company,” according to Corporate VP of Windows Server and System Center Brad Anderson, speaking to the press last week Update on Microsoft’s cloud plans from TechEd

Here is a very funny parody of the infamous dancing banana. This is a piece of crap that dances just like the banana. The turd stole his moves! He’s probably very smelly too. http://www.sherv.net/dancing.shit-emoticon-497.html

They patiently waited three years to reach that punchline. http://depression-and-movies.tumblr.com/post/87484105662/community-has-pulled-off-one-the-most-patient

The 451 analysis of Cloudera’s acquisition of Gazzang is up, which I co-authored. Here’s the summary: As more Hadoop projects are moving from proof of concepts into production, companies are looking to better secure the data in those ‘big data’ projects. Cloudera hopes to grease the wheels by acquiring Austin, Texas-based Gazzang, a security vendor that specializes in encryption and key management for databases and big-data workloads. The target’s technology will be folded into Cloudera’s Navigator product, and its Austin office will become the Cloudera Center for Security Excellence, further building out the company’s security capabilities.

Most IT pros not actively preparing for the impact of the IoT - Spiceworks Survey

Many have asked, “why not choose JavaScript as the language to replace Objective-C?” I’m not even going to attempt an answer to that question. http://thenewstack.io/inspecting-swift-apples-gem-of-a-new-programming-language/

My other issue is managing my time. Whole weeks - months? - seem to go by where all I’ve done is barely kept up on email. Me, in some correspondence with Robert Brook.

Not everything that used to be here is still here. Broken Links, Perfect Path

With Swift, and all of its announcements today, Apple is being proactive about courting the next generation of developers. http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/02/apples-delivers-developer-fanservice/

As the company scaled, the task of administration became increasingly complex, due to “call-back soup”, a common complaint with Node.js. Call-back soup

My second column at The Channel Register is up, a quick overview of our recent DevOps work at 451. They’ve got a fine strapline: “But you’ve got to untangle deployment wizards from the duct-tape cats” At the moment, there’s some charts missing from it - I’m sure they’ll show up soon. In the meantime, you can see the charts here. You may recall the first one on developers being “a thing.

SAP’s own Business Suite application stack running atop HANA has broken through 1,000 customers and is one of the fastest-growing products in the company’s four decades of operation. Also, some notes in what OSes are used to run SAP, esp. the database portion: UNIX almost never for new deploys. SAP HANA momemtum

The reality is that finance will eat strategy for breakfast any day. “The Capitalist’s Dilemma” There’s a lot to like in this recent Christensen and van Bever piece. It’s a re-framing of how companies should think about what success means when investing in new businesses.

In many ways the turnaround at the company is a reflection of trends in the broader Hadoop community, which spent much of last year dealing with the fallout of hyped tech claims and false promises. This year, by contrast, some businesses seem to be finally squeezing some real value out of the tech, bringing a new round of enthusiasm (and cash) into the startups involved with the tech. Hadoop hype update

But the digital world opens up the same opportunities to everyone – you still aren’t special – and as I keep saying, the easier it is to do something, the better it has to be. It is impossible to stand out. When everyone can do it, standing out is harder

If you’ve ever wondered why Facebook is such a joyless place, even though we’ve theoretically surrounded ourselves with friends and loved ones, it’s because of this need to constantly be wearing our public face. Facebook is about as much fun as a zoning board hearing. http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm

Why I Won’t Get Divorced, or, Living with Beowolf

If it weren’t for these thumb-fingered rich idiots destroying technological development, we’d be sipping champagne on Mars right now. Bruce Sterling

fadingcity: I finished my story called ‘The Island’. robertbrook/the-island

To some extent Gartner has recognized that managed cloud is in its infancy and has named Rackspace in its 2014 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), a report that focuses on multi-tenant cloud infrastructure providers. At Rackspace, we’re looking forward to seeing the upcoming Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Enabled Managed Hosting, North America, which will focus more on the service layer on top of the infrastructure, rather than the infrastructure itself.

Internet of Things Needs a Steve Ballmer Moment, Says Deutsche - Barron’s

Eventually, a group gets just big enough that the first response to every attempt to collaborate is “this is too long.”

[Big Data, cloud and social/mobile] are truly going to change the profile of this company. And, if you think about it, actually they’re going to change the profile of this industry. As I like to think of it, the industry is reordering. If you take cloud, data and engagement, those are shifts that taken in total, this convergence, it will reorder the industry and we will lead that. We’ll lead it from the enterprise perspective.

How Shippable Has Scaled Docker In A Way It Never Could With AWS VMs

IDC Revises 2014 Global IT Spending Projections Downward

Here’s what happened in America between April 14 and 17. In the state of Washington, a 6-hour downtime of the 911 emergency phone system was caused by a third-party vendor’s router failure, resulting in 4,500 missed emergency calls. Police responding to an unrelated incident at the home of a New Jersey man found three containers of radioactive material he had stolen from a military arsenal. A bomb threat was made against a Verizon call center in Tennessee.

The single most important lesson we learn from the short history of the consumer internet industry is that winning internet business models are engineered around consumers. In fact, consumer internet businesses must be designed, architecturally, to be more consumer centric than their physical world equivalents. This is because, fundamentally, the internet increases transparency and information availability to reduce friction, and thus shifts market power to users relative to physical world models.

“The nature of boards,” says Buffett, “is such they’re part business organizations and part social organizations.” Buffett hammers home his point by noting that directors are “getting paid $200,000-$300,000 a year,” so “believe, me, they are not independent.” Boards are just highly paid people

I come to work to relax. “Are you more stressed at home than at work”?

A lot of what we call work is noise. Nassim N. Taleb

Always love some funny writing, eh? Since Google’s (virtualized) cloud is itself built on top of Linux containerization, this means developers will enter into the paradoxical situation of running a container-based OS on a hypervisor on top of a container. “M.C. Escher’s cloud”

Google: ‘EVERYTHING at Google runs in a container’

New Connector Links Heroku and Salesforce.com Data Repositories

How could I have broken anything? All I did was change a comment. Evolving Java-based APIs - Eclipsepedia

While the wearable band market appears to be strong with 2.7 million units shipped in the first quarter, the smartband market isn’t doing as well. Total smartband shipments didn’t even break half a million in the first quarter, according to Canalys. Fitbit rules 50 percent of the world’s wearable market

Ford Continues With Open Source Strategy To Attract Developers and Connect Cars In China

Always use a vanilla Gmail account as your main Google identity. Don’t be tempted to use anything else. Google account hell, Dave Briggs

The (female) Guardian journalist who wrote about my talk at Boring 2012 didn’t believe I was interested in IBM tills until I started giving my (partially elaborated) history of growing up near an IBM plant, as a small girl playing with electronic components etc. Like it’s simply unfeasible for a woman to have an interest of their own, of any level of intensity, without a ‘sweet’ context. @Finalbullet, on being sweet

A round up of why you should stand up more at your desk

Also, see this other story on the topic. HP Orchestrates Datacenters With OpenStack, Chef

LiveOak raises more than $100 million to back Texas startups

[S]tudy after study puts the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions somewhere between 70% and 90%. The second, less familiar reason to acquire a company is to reinvent your business model and thereby fundamentally redirect your company. Almost nobody understands how to identify the best targets to achieve that goal, how much to pay for them, and how or whether to integrate them. Yet they are the ones most likely to confound investors and pay off spectacularly.

This is the common staffing benefit of new technologies: As such, Redmond says, the result is not that IT becomes redundant; it becomes more strategically important than ever. And, significantly, it goes from being a department that normally says “no” to user requests to one that can start saying “yes.” Even comparatively minor things, such as the vast 50GB inbox quota that Office 365 offers will, for many, be a breath of fresh air.

Steady Growth in Corporate Cloud Spending

Why startup biz dev deals almost never get done

“We don’t move into a market unless we think we have a realistic chance of gaining 40% market share with sustainable differentiation,” Chambers said at the Cisco Live conference when asked if the company needs to acquire an established cloud provider like Rackspace to succeed in cloud services. “And we try not to move into markets that don’t have really good gross margins, unless they’re unusually strategic for us. That’s a market that is very, very price sensitive; that’s taking on the big giants in Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.

How VMware sees OpenStack as a standard - Network World

[I]t is time for Dell to allow an independent open source community to take the reins of the Crowbar project. Dell “will stop sponsoring engineers to be committing and supervising the [Crowbar] project,” meaning they that the company is no longer funding developers to work on Crowbar. As Crowbar lead Rob Hirschfeld points out in his post on the topic, he and other community members will continue to work on Crowbar as an independent project.

Good ol’ TPM! Also: Rackspace is also the largest publicly traded cloud and hosting provider, and unlike its rivals, its numbers are right out there. No one knows for sure what revenues and profits AWS, Microsoft, and Google are getting from their cloud and hosting businesses, and ditto for smaller players and telcos who also sell capacity by the month or by the hours. The pressure from Wall Street has Rackspace looking at its options, and maybe had the company a chance to do it all over again, it would have stayed private.

Let’s pull news out of its hole

OpenStack Code Contribution Trends

This is the common OpenStack meme for coverage. Each Summit there’s more and more users - “customers” - but it will take a while before OpenStack is suddenly us an “overnight success.” Looking at it from a different perspective, OpenStack is one of the biggest, new model for open source development: they’re iterating on the concept and mechanics of open source in new and novel ways, deep in bazaar mode vs.

“software-defined washing” - IT leaders convene on London for the UK’s first software-defined conference

OpenStack Dominated By Tire Kickers, Code Testers – For Now

Lydia at Gartner summarizes the motivations of OpenStack vendors, touching on what it means for “lock-in”: Customers should expect to be no less locked into an OpenStack-based vendor/provider than they would into any other CMP or cloud IaaS provider. Reflections on the OpenStack Atlanta summit

In many ways, Neutron’s failure and planned rebirth are a metaphor for OpenStack as a whole, with the tech promising too much at the start, becoming overly dependent on vendors, and only being fixed when paying punters started to confront its weaknesses. As the OpenStack collective learn these lessons the hope is that they will run into fewer errors, and perhaps make good on their plan to provide a viable cloud operating system to telcos and other businesses.

Red Hat Plays Hardball on OpenStack Software

Red Hat Opens Up CloudForms Hybrid Cloud Manager

Goodbye HANA daddy, assorted cloud bods: SAP gets corporate

I’m constantly shocked at how poor most people are ar scheduling meetings. There’s often simple things like “use the free/busy function” that you have to remind people about. Anyhow, there’s some good tips here if you’re someone who does all their meeting scheduling in plain text (read: you need help!), e.g.: Instead, when I’m setting a meeting with a single person, I write and say, “Let’s have lunch together. How about next Wednesday at Cardiac’s House of Cheese at 11:45AM?

Create a universe within your show Your universe should include a theme song, phrases you like to use, segments, anything recurring. Differentiate your show. This signals your values and has the benefit of giving your audience a fun way to communicate with you and with each other. The best shows do this organically. This whole idea is how we got “Baba Booey.” Other than finding your voice (my last tip on podcasting), that’s the most important part, long term.

Why the Housing Bubble Tanked the Economy And the Tech Bubble Didn’t

“I am not a lawyer, but from a developer perspective, the idea of copyrighted APIs does nothing but introduce friction and uncertainty into the very integration efforts the developers use APIs to accomplish,” said Jeffrey Hammond, a vice president at Forrester Research. “Devs will now need to worry about the potential for API lock-in via copyright, as alternative suppliers can’t produce like-for-like substitutions without risk. I don’t see how this is good for developers as it amps up the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about using third-party services.

It’s Beta Time For CoreOS, The Linux Distro For Massive Server Deployments

Box strikes deal with GE to become the default file-sharing service of its 300,000+ employees

Del.icio.us sold again, to YouTube founders

The channel business at Dell is about $20 billion per year. Dell said he can see that growing to $40 to $50 billion. Suggesting $60bn in “commercial” sales total for Dell? Dell’s business sales are 1/3 through partners

The proportion of enterprises that have replaced or plan to replace existing ERP systems with SaaS has doubled from 12 to 24 percent in the past year, according to research published this week by industry analyst firm Forrester. In addition, the numbers planning to use SaaS alongside on-premise ERP — for example in ‘two-tier’ ERP deployments — leapt by more than half to 41 percent. Taken together, the survey shows that 65 percent of enterprises expect to be using SaaS in some ERP role before the end of 2015 — a massive increase of two thirds on what respondents were saying a year ago.

Good overview and some competitive and historic context. HP Helion: OpenStack redux

“They are absolutely our most devoted and fierce fans,” Mr. Plotz said. Gabfest fans often show up for live podcasts, another area of expansion. “They stand in line to get into an auditorium to watch three people talk into a microphone,” said Mr. Bowers, who estimates they have attracted crowds as large as 800 people for the live events. Slate Raising Its Investment in Podcasts, hey, let’s hope so.

I’m always looking for definitions of “enterprise grade,” and this is a good contextual point for that: The noise in the consumer market would have us believe that software is almost disposable. Something doesn’t work – junk it. Users don’t like XYZ software – replace it. Fail fast, fail often – that’s the road to success. That’s not the way (most) things work in the enterprise. It is largely true regardless of whether we’re talking a mom and pop shop, the truly global companies and pretty much everything in between.

My report on Lakeside Software’s new release is up. SysTrack is one of the veteran tools used in the end-user device management space and, if it can start adding in more mobile and tablet functionality, is well setup to profit from the churn in that area helping companies asses and then plan for how to migrate those fleets of aging PCs to new platforms. Here’s the 451 take: While end-user device management has been one of the sleepier areas of IT in recent years, the shift to mobile and the rise of non-Microsoft end-user devices looks to be creating enough churn in this space to make it more interesting.

By way of example, Butterfield said that there are about 2,000 messages a day written by humans in Slack at his company. Another 6,000 more are generated automatically by machines. With such a high volume of information, having it all in one place, ordered, highly searchable, and with human chat layered on top helps make a fragmented and overwhelming amount of communication easier to deal with. Sounds good to me; I wonder if the email zombies will see the light this time.

Oracle announced that it’s putting OpenStack into Solaris, which is good fun. James Niccolai asked for my thoughts on the topic for his story. I hadn’t been briefed, so it was just speculation, but here’s the full text of what I sent over: Solaris was always - and no doubt still is - technically advanced. For example, the zfs filesystem, dtrace, and zones were always tasty looking for Linux folks.

They ran it at network.com: While the Sun Grid has been an interesting alternative for large companies who might want to offload some of their workloads–such as the Monte Carlo analysis used to assess risk in investment portfolios, which doesn’t have any account information in it and is therefore not a big risk for a financial institution to let out on the other side of its firewalls–the Sun Grid is not supposed to be the utility that they use, but rather the utility that is the prototype for the ones that Sun expects its partners to build.

In the early years MS-DOS versions up to version 5 sold for a relatively high price, of the order of US$1,000, but the executable Terminate-and-Stay-Resident (TSR) database engine file could be distributed with applications without payment of any licence fee. The good ol’ days: Btrieve, Wikipedia

Enterprise software vendor TIBCO has acquired Jaspersoft, an open source business intelligence company, for approximately $185 million. One of the older charting kit companies goes for pretty cheap to an established BI (and queue/middleware) company. Jaspersoft acquired for $185m by TIBCO

Seriously though… if anybody but major datamining companies are going to get remotely enthusiastic about this IoT business, two things need to happen: The Internet, things, and you « Outguessing the machine (via iamdanw) The incentive for businesses to keep an “internet of things you bought from us” is overwhelming. What’s in it for them to make it open? LAN-of-Things, then. (via fadingcity) “LAN of things.” That’s a-LoT better!

The vast majority of people do not have, nor will they ever have a personal computer. They haven’t been exposed to Windows or Office, or anything like that, and in their lives it’s unlikely that they will. Stephen Elop, Microsoft’s new executive vice president of Devices, in the post announcing the completion of the deal to acquire Nokia. This is not your father’s Microsoft. (via parislemon)

According to IDC, the 5 percent IT growth it sees for 2014 is comprised of two elements: Stagnant legacy infrastructure growth (0.7 percent) and a high third-platform infrastructure growth (15 percent). Just to bring the point home, IDC asserts that a full 29 percent of 2014 IT spending and 89 percent of all IT growth spending will be in the third platform; of the latter, a full 50 percent represents cannibalization of traditional markets.

I have a new podcast up that’s on the ongoing topic of software development, big and small, tools and practices, news and theory, old and new. I’m co-hosting it with Bill Higgins. I’ve talked with Bill Higgins for many years, and occasionally we’ve done a podcast episode together. He was in town a few weeks back, and I thought we should start recording our conversations rather than have them disappear into the ether.

Anything you want will happen, but sometimes it’s hard for people to see that when they’re in the middle of it. It looks like it’s incredibly complicated. Well, it’s not complicated at all. In fact, it’s so uncomplicated it’s amazing. All it is about is the work. Finally, if you do the work people will notice and you will get what you want. That’s it. It’s as simple as that.

The research reported in this book … shows that in the cases of well-managed firms… . good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

A good overview of what the software-heavy enterprise storage company does, including this assessment on market segment targeting: SolidFire is very honest about not being built for the mid-market, as it feels that most of the middle of the market is headed toward cloud providers anyhow. Some may consider this a weakness, but I consider it a great strength. It has allowed SolidFire to focus on the pain points of organizations with large storage and storage performance needs, to do so with great scale, and to do so in a way that greatly reduces operational complexity and all the mental friction that usually accompanies that scale.

I like this post on what filling up the deal-flow pipeline for VCs looks like. For example, a good bozo bit heuristic: One of the reasons that a meeting doesn’t go well is that the founding team will say they expect $50 million in revenue in 5 years, but they have difficulty articulating how they’ll get to their first $1million. Having worked on the buy side of the table (when I was in corporate strategy, working on M&A for software and cloud at Dell), there’s a similar story for what the exit looks like.

My overview of the Red Hat Summit is up now, for clients only of course. Here’s the 451 Take: Like many infrastructure companies, Red Hat used its recent annual summit to point out the importance of developers as the driver for the next wave of IT spending: namely, developers writing new software on top of cloud platforms, often using devops-like practices. We, of course, think paying attention to this space is wise as companies seek to become digital enterprises, using custom applications and cloud-based IT to instrument and boost their business processes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Yeah, this should definitely be in 3D.” No, what he said was, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” That’s what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential, and aware of your inexperience. And that’s really tough. There are moments when you’ll have a different point of view because you’re a fresh set of eyes; because you don’t care how it’s been done before; because you’re sharp and creative; because there is another way, a better way.

[A]pplication development and maintenance eats up 34 percent of the total IT budget and that by getting rid of legacy applications, simplifying complex architectures, and ceasing outdated approaches to IT staffing, companies can cut those application development and maintenance costs in half. The cost of old corporate code

So we’ve built some first-generation integration between Chef and BladeLogic 8.5, which we’re demoing in our booth for the first time here at ChefConf. You can use BladeLogic to call Chef cookbooks and recipes on a push/scheduled basis, and you can reference BladeLogic compliance policies from inside your Chef cookbooks. It’s all very early and not production-ready, but we want to put this integration front and center with the people here at ChefConf and start a conversation about how they want to blend these two approaches to a stable, managed IT infrastructure.

Brandon Butler sums up the “old” (Linux) vs “new” (middleware and cloud) revenue stream for Red Hat The company gets about 80% of its $1.3 billion in revenues from a category that’s headlined by RHEL, and those subscriptions aren’t likely going away any time soon, says Joel Fishbein, who tracks Red Hat’s stock closely as an analyst at BMO Capital Markets. … The enterprise transition from Unix to Linux is fairly mature, with revenue from the RHEL-focused main part of the business growing 13% last year, Fishbein says.

A 13-year study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology has revealed that if you take naps during the day, your life is going to be short… The report, which was performed by researchers at Cambridge University, studied the habits of over 16,000 men and women in Britain and found that those who take naps during the day are almost a third more likely to die before they turn 65.

A 13-year study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology has revealed that if you take naps during the day, your life is going to be short… The report, which was performed by researchers at Cambridge University, studied the habits of over 16,000 men and women in Britain and found that those who take naps during the day are almost a third more likely to die before they turn 65.

A few weeks ago, I talked with Chris Kanaracus for his story on Infor moving parts of their application portfolio to Amazon Web Services. Chris said this looked like a pretty strong endorsement for using AWS, and asked for my thoughts, which were: Yes, this a nice vote a confidence for AWS. However, I think most SaaS companies would look at AWS as capable of being used like this. There might be questions about pricing long-term, but technologically it’s just a stack of middleware running on a bunch of servers.

I spoke with a couple of reporters earlier this week on the partnerships between Google and VMware and Google and Citrix around supporting Windows XP on Chromebooks. VMware has $200 off Chromebook discount for business buyers, and Citrix has a discount as well. Both are deep into vying with each other around the Desktop-as-a-Service market and interested in dominating that market which is looking to be driven by a pretty simple need: providing a way to use Windows applications on non-Windows devices.

To illustrate this point during the opening keynote, George Kledaras, CEO of FIX Flyer, which creates algorithmic trading platforms, talked about how impossible it is for people to keep up and used the day when the statements from the Federal Open Markets Committee of the US Federal Reserve Bank are put out. The entire cycle, from the nanosecond that the FMOC statement was released, including the transmission of trading instructions from Chicago, where the report came out, to the exchanges in New York, took 150 milliseconds.

To illustrate this point during the opening keynote, George Kledaras, CEO of FIX Flyer, which creates algorithmic trading platforms, talked about how impossible it is for people to keep up and used the day when the statements from the Federal Open Markets Committee of the US Federal Reserve Bank are put out. The entire cycle, from the nanosecond that the FMOC statement was released, including the transmission of trading instructions from Chicago, where the report came out, to the exchanges in New York, took 150 milliseconds.

As an analyst, you often gets asked and paid to provide press release quotes (see some of mine here, though the I haven’t been good at saving all of them). Yes, press releases are still widely done and used. As someone who write-up the tech world happenings, I actually find them handy. Knowing how a vendor talks about themselves is actually important for analyst work, and the good press releases are more like media kits that line up all the relevant facts and links to other sources…and there’s all the bad stuff too, that’s still floating around.

PowerPoint and its infamous bullet points have been so abused in later years that the term “PowerPoint death” has become widespread, to the extent that some voices claim that PowerPoint is making us stupid or threatening our thinking and reasoning. It’s understandable that as a reaction some very popular books published in the last couple of years about presentations focused on creating minimalist slides, with stunning visuals and little text.

PowerPoint and its infamous bullet points have been so abused in later years that the term “PowerPoint death” has become widespread, to the extent that some voices claim that PowerPoint is making us stupid or threatening our thinking and reasoning. It’s understandable that as a reaction some very popular books published in the last couple of years about presentations focused on creating minimalist slides, with stunning visuals and little text.

Evans Data’s Developer Marketing 2014 survey of 450 software developers showed that 19.3% (or approximately 3.5 million) developers worldwide are women, compared to the years between 2003 and 2009, when the percentage of female developers was in single digits. Record number of women in software development, survey says - SD Times: Software Development News Of note, if you do the math (thanks to @barton808 for correcting my bone-headed thinking) you get 17.

We are also seeing big growth in the private cloud space. But in terms of building a public cloud to compete with partners we are not doing that at all. Michael Dell in an interview with CRN. See also the longer piece on CRN going over Dell’s cloud strategy.

Evans Data’s Developer Marketing 2014 survey of 450 software developers showed that 19.3% (or approximately 3.5 million) developers worldwide are women, compared to the years between 2003 and 2009, when the percentage of female developers was in single digits. Record number of women in software development, survey says - SD Times: Software Development News Of note, if you do the math (thanks to @barton808 for correcting my bone-headed thinking) you get 17.

We are also seeing big growth in the private cloud space. But in terms of building a public cloud to compete with partners we are not doing that at all. Michael Dell in an interview with CRN. See also the longer piece on CRN going over Dell’s cloud strategy.

My report on BMC’s Control-M’s recent updates catering to developer is now up, for 451 clients. The 451 Takes is below: BMC’s proposition to speed up the batch job process cycle squares with what we tend to see in the mainstream wilds of IT. Cloud and devops are creeping into these shops at a steady pace. These shops often have sophisticated batch job processing at their center – submitting inventory orders, processing HR files, supply chain analytics, or otherwise nightly updating the enterprise state machine to drive decisions and actions in the next business day.

My report on BMC’s Control-M’s recent updates catering to developer is now up, for 451 clients. The 451 Takes is below: BMC’s proposition to speed up the batch job process cycle squares with what we tend to see in the mainstream wilds of IT. Cloud and devops are creeping into these shops at a steady pace. These shops often have sophisticated batch job processing at their center – submitting inventory orders, processing HR files, supply chain analytics, or otherwise nightly updating the enterprise state machine to drive decisions and actions in the next business day.

I still hear CIOs worry that cloud vendor lock-in would let them raise prices. This ruse is used to justify private cloud investments. Even without switching vendors, you will see repeated price reductions for the public cloud systems you are already using. This was the 42nd price cut for AWS, the argument is ridiculous. Adrian Cockcroft on recent public cloud pricing reductions

Business instincts and intuition are being augmented and increasingly replaced by data analysis as the drivers of success. We’ve seen it at Dell. Our marketing team uncovered more than $310 million in additional revenue last year through the use of advanced analytics. This year, we expect that number to exceed half-a-billion. Michael Dell, who invested personally in the recent Cloudera mega-round

I am not sure what to conclude from the obvious high level of interest in compiling [.Net] apps for iOS and Android. Tim Anderson, ever astute and detailed on the Microsoft programming ecosystem

Business instincts and intuition are being augmented and increasingly replaced by data analysis as the drivers of success. We’ve seen it at Dell. Our marketing team uncovered more than $310 million in additional revenue last year through the use of advanced analytics. This year, we expect that number to exceed half-a-billion. Michael Dell, who invested personally in the recent Cloudera mega-round

I am not sure what to conclude from the obvious high level of interest in compiling [.Net] apps for iOS and Android. Tim Anderson, ever astute and detailed on the Microsoft programming ecosystem

I still hear CIOs worry that cloud vendor lock-in would let them raise prices. This ruse is used to justify private cloud investments. Even without switching vendors, you will see repeated price reductions for the public cloud systems you are already using. This was the 42nd price cut for AWS, the argument is ridiculous. Adrian Cockcroft on recent public cloud pricing reductions

Apparently, this is a real thing. Via Stacey Higginbotham. “App notifications upon low egg inventory”

Apparently, this is a real thing. Via Stacey Higginbotham. “App notifications upon low egg inventory”

Our report on Amazon WorkSpaces is up. The full report is available for 451 research clients, but here’s the 451 Take. When it comes to making things cheap, few companies have the zeal and credibility of Amazon. While new, mostly non-Microsoft devices are rapidly changing and fragmenting the end-user device market, there’s still a palpable need to support existing Windows applications. DaaS seems like a viable ‘green screen’ strategy for supporting these corporate applications on new devices.

Our report on Amazon WorkSpaces is up. The full report is available for 451 research clients, but here’s the 451 Take. When it comes to making things cheap, few companies have the zeal and credibility of Amazon. While new, mostly non-Microsoft devices are rapidly changing and fragmenting the end-user device market, there’s still a palpable need to support existing Windows applications. DaaS seems like a viable ‘green screen’ strategy for supporting these corporate applications on new devices.

With these changes Microsoft has shifted its emphasis from Windows developers building Windows apps via Windows Azure to all developers building all apps via Microsoft Azure – an important distinction and one likely to grow more apparent over the coming months. It sounds like Build is a nice conference with some dramatic changes from previous Microsoft policy (strong ties to Windows and NIH). To be fair, many bits and pieces on Microsoft have long been “heterogenous,” it just wasn’t emphasized too much as a big deal.

With these changes Microsoft has shifted its emphasis from Windows developers building Windows apps via Windows Azure to all developers building all apps via Microsoft Azure – an important distinction and one likely to grow more apparent over the coming months. It sounds like Build is a nice conference with some dramatic changes from previous Microsoft policy (strong ties to Windows and NIH). To be fair, many bits and pieces on Microsoft have long been “heterogenous,” it just wasn’t emphasized too much as a big deal.

I’m guessing from the article it’s from Gartner…or maybe this ABI Research reference: Google’s Chromebooks – manufactured by Samsung, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Acer – topped 2.1 million unit sales in 2013 and are expected to climb to 11 million annually by 2019. This surge matches the interest we saw in a joint study with Spiceworks. While the overall shipments are low relative to the behemoths of iOS/Android and Windows, there’s growth in Chromebook land.

I’m guessing from the article it’s from Gartner…or maybe this ABI Research reference: Google’s Chromebooks – manufactured by Samsung, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Acer – topped 2.1 million unit sales in 2013 and are expected to climb to 11 million annually by 2019. This surge matches the interest we saw in a joint study with Spiceworks. While the overall shipments are low relative to the behemoths of iOS/Android and Windows, there’s growth in Chromebook land.

Pretty good stuff in there. It’s really dodgy figuring out what people are doing in/with cloud at this point, and on which side of the firewall, so every data point and anecdote helps. Surprise, surprise: New survey shows public cloud adoption way, way up

Pretty good stuff in there. It’s really dodgy figuring out what people are doing in/with cloud at this point, and on which side of the firewall, so every data point and anecdote helps. Surprise, surprise: New survey shows public cloud adoption way, way up

I put up a short, “analyst note” on Boundary’s funding today, which 451 clients can read in full. Tracking from our last report on them in November 2013, they’ve increased both customer count and average deal size, so good for them. I always found it hard to find the market sizing for “systems management delivered over public cloud” (or “IT Management as a Service”/ITMaaS) market when I was at Dell looking at that.

I put up a short, “analyst note” on Boundary’s funding today, which 451 clients can read in full. Tracking from our last report on them in November 2013, they’ve increased both customer count and average deal size, so good for them. I always found it hard to find the market sizing for “systems management delivered over public cloud” (or “IT Management as a Service”/ITMaaS) market when I was at Dell looking at that.

We teamed up with Spiceworks recently to write a report checking in on Google Chromebooks, mostly around their market-share and usage. It was a nice experiment to see how our two pool of data and analysis could be meshed together to investigate how IT is operating in the wild. Spiceworks looked at 71,159 companies worldwide to see what OSes were on their desktops, which gave us some good input on Chromebook usage.

We teamed up with Spiceworks recently to write a report checking in on Google Chromebooks, mostly around their market-share and usage. It was a nice experiment to see how our two pool of data and analysis could be meshed together to investigate how IT is operating in the wild. Spiceworks looked at 71,159 companies worldwide to see what OSes were on their desktops, which gave us some good input on Chromebook usage.

When Capital One started to roll out agile development in 2011, Wolfs said it amounted to just one percent of software that was delivered. Today, 85 percent of software is delivered by the agile method. With agile, Capital One now also releases approximately 400 product releases a month, has cut delivery times to three to six months while “cutting costs significantly” and has 95 percent of products meet expectations on the first release, according to Wolfs.

When Capital One started to roll out agile development in 2011, Wolfs said it amounted to just one percent of software that was delivered. Today, 85 percent of software is delivered by the agile method. With agile, Capital One now also releases approximately 400 product releases a month, has cut delivery times to three to six months while “cutting costs significantly” and has 95 percent of products meet expectations on the first release, according to Wolfs.

Version 3.5 of TaskTop is a dot release with some fun stuff scurrying around in the background. Here’s the 451 Take: Tasktop has done well in recent years as a pragmatic way to connect together disparate silos in the application lifecycle development space. The approach Tasktop is taking to better unify the process of getting software out the door is unique and encouraging, as its wide array of OEM partners attests.

Version 3.5 of TaskTop is a dot release with some fun stuff scurrying around in the background. Here’s the 451 Take: Tasktop has done well in recent years as a pragmatic way to connect together disparate silos in the application lifecycle development space. The approach Tasktop is taking to better unify the process of getting software out the door is unique and encouraging, as its wide array of OEM partners attests.

I have to work myself up in the morning to Twitter, because it’s so immediate and stressful. You shouldn’t have to dive completely into it. At first I’ll scroll through, and see if there’s anything from the last half hour or so that I may have missed while I was getting myself mentally prepared for the day. Then I’m off and running. For the rest of the day, Twitter is the ruler of everything.

I have to work myself up in the morning to Twitter, because it’s so immediate and stressful. You shouldn’t have to dive completely into it. At first I’ll scroll through, and see if there’s anything from the last half hour or so that I may have missed while I was getting myself mentally prepared for the day. Then I’m off and running. For the rest of the day, Twitter is the ruler of everything.

Mike Olson of Cloudera on the Intel relationship: It genuinely is true that the important story here is the commercial relationship we’ve crafted with Intel. We go to market together, and that’s fantastic for us both—we reach many more customers directly and through our partners. We build better software that takes advantage of Intel silicon innovations, and get it into the open source sooner. Our customers get the best product earlier and get more value from their data.

Mike Olson of Cloudera on the Intel relationship: It genuinely is true that the important story here is the commercial relationship we’ve crafted with Intel. We go to market together, and that’s fantastic for us both—we reach many more customers directly and through our partners. We build better software that takes advantage of Intel silicon innovations, and get it into the open source sooner. Our customers get the best product earlier and get more value from their data.

My report on the cloud ALM tool Codenvy is up, for 451 Research clients. You can also sign up for a trial if you want to take a peek behind the paywall. Here’s the 451 take: The idea of a Web-based IDE comes into vogue almost predictably every three to four years, just like all-meat diets. This space is usually plagued with developers scoffing at the idea of coding in a browser, figuring that lag time and other performance problems will ruin their typing.

My report on the cloud ALM tool Codenvy is up, for 451 Research clients. You can also sign up for a trial if you want to take a peek behind the paywall. Here’s the 451 take: The idea of a Web-based IDE comes into vogue almost predictably every three to four years, just like all-meat diets. This space is usually plagued with developers scoffing at the idea of coding in a browser, figuring that lag time and other performance problems will ruin their typing.

I’m envisioning one of those butcher charts with all the cuts of meat, except it’s a human and all their social info and personal data/records: If Facebook values your phone book at $42, or £25.24 today, what do you think your lifelong medical record is worth? The health industry is a colossal business, much bigger than internet social networking, and pharmaceutical companies desperately need the data to reduce the risk on their own drug research planning.

I’m envisioning one of those butcher charts with all the cuts of meat, except it’s a human and all their social info and personal data/records: If Facebook values your phone book at $42, or £25.24 today, what do you think your lifelong medical record is worth? The health industry is a colossal business, much bigger than internet social networking, and pharmaceutical companies desperately need the data to reduce the risk on their own drug research planning.

You can expect us to make sure we drive Office 365 everywhere - Web, all phones, all tablets, PCs. That’s our real commitment to Office 365. Satya Nadella unveiling Office on the iPad. Check out our coverage of Satya’s ascension to CEO as well.

You can expect us to make sure we drive Office 365 everywhere - Web, all phones, all tablets, PCs. That’s our real commitment to Office 365. Satya Nadella unveiling Office on the iPad. Check out our coverage of Satya’s ascension to CEO as well.

I don’t know about counterintuitive, but there was a great piece of insight that Sam Zell, the real estate mogul from Chicago, said to me that really made me rethink what a big organization is really about. He said, as an entrepreneur, [he needs] as much information as possible. In a big corporation, people use information as currency. So they trade it. The more information a person has, the more power that person has in a big organization.

I don’t know about counterintuitive, but there was a great piece of insight that Sam Zell, the real estate mogul from Chicago, said to me that really made me rethink what a big organization is really about. He said, as an entrepreneur, [he needs] as much information as possible. In a big corporation, people use information as currency. So they trade it. The more information a person has, the more power that person has in a big organization.

The influx of cash in technology is largely the result of the low interest-rate environment, Bill Gurley, a partner at venture firm Benchmark, said in a March 12 interview on Bloomberg West. Yields on 10-year Treasuries have hovered below 3 percent since 2011. “There’s a lot of capital searching for a home,” said Gurley. “Cash Flood,” indeed. From “BlackRock Backing Hortonworks Shows Startup Megadeal Era,” Bloomberg.

The influx of cash in technology is largely the result of the low interest-rate environment, Bill Gurley, a partner at venture firm Benchmark, said in a March 12 interview on Bloomberg West. Yields on 10-year Treasuries have hovered below 3 percent since 2011. “There’s a lot of capital searching for a home,” said Gurley. “Cash Flood,” indeed. From “BlackRock Backing Hortonworks Shows Startup Megadeal Era,” Bloomberg.

Nice pice on disruption fear driven tech M&A: From messaging to watches and thermostats, Facebook and Google, along with Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., each want to own the digital platform where people communicate, shop and seek entertainment. The competition is driven by their ability to pay—their combined market capitalization exceeds $1 trillion—and long memories of faded tech stars that didn’t evolve quickly enough. … The four companies are competing to control as much as possible of the tech ecosystem.

Nice pice on disruption fear driven tech M&A: From messaging to watches and thermostats, Facebook and Google, along with Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., each want to own the digital platform where people communicate, shop and seek entertainment. The competition is driven by their ability to pay—their combined market capitalization exceeds $1 trillion—and long memories of faded tech stars that didn’t evolve quickly enough. … The four companies are competing to control as much as possible of the tech ecosystem.

In the context of covering Cisco’s “InterCloud” announcement, the following is quoted: The Cisco Intercloud will be built upon industry-leading Cisco cloud technologies and leverage OpenStack for its open standards-based global infrastructure. We’ll support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud. You see that notion frequently now-a-days, the idea of OpenStack being part of a cloud. As I recall, Oracle said they had (would have?) OpenStack compatibility.

In the context of covering Cisco’s “InterCloud” announcement, the following is quoted: The Cisco Intercloud will be built upon industry-leading Cisco cloud technologies and leverage OpenStack for its open standards-based global infrastructure. We’ll support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud. You see that notion frequently now-a-days, the idea of OpenStack being part of a cloud. As I recall, Oracle said they had (would have?) OpenStack compatibility.

Yes. I’d stop. I’d make things for myself, for my friends at home instead. The bar needs to be high. I don’t think that will happen. We are at the beginning of a remarkable time, when a remarkable number of products will be developed. When you think about technology and what it has enabled us to do so far, and what it will enable us to do in future, we’re not even close to any kind of limit.

Yes. I’d stop. I’d make things for myself, for my friends at home instead. The bar needs to be high. I don’t think that will happen. We are at the beginning of a remarkable time, when a remarkable number of products will be developed. When you think about technology and what it has enabled us to do so far, and what it will enable us to do in future, we’re not even close to any kind of limit.

Buried in this piece on Cisco doing some public cloud stuff is this little description about how the shift to public cloud creates a strategic threat to incumbent vendors: Cloud computing represented an interesting opportunity to equipment companies like Cisco, as it aggregated the market down to fewer buyers. There are approximately 1,500 to 2,000 infrastructure providers worldwide verses millions of businesses; reducing the buyers to a handful would lower the cost of sales.

Buried in this piece on Cisco doing some public cloud stuff is this little description about how the shift to public cloud creates a strategic threat to incumbent vendors: Cloud computing represented an interesting opportunity to equipment companies like Cisco, as it aggregated the market down to fewer buyers. There are approximately 1,500 to 2,000 infrastructure providers worldwide verses millions of businesses; reducing the buyers to a handful would lower the cost of sales.

About 36% of all Web traffic is considered fake, the product of computers hijacked by viruses and programmed to visit sites, according to estimates cited recently by the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group. And, web advertising continues to take over US marketshare: Spending on digital advertising—which includes social media and mobile devices—is expected to rise nearly 17% to $50 billion in the U.S. this year. That would be about 28% of total U.

About 36% of all Web traffic is considered fake, the product of computers hijacked by viruses and programmed to visit sites, according to estimates cited recently by the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group. And, web advertising continues to take over US marketshare: Spending on digital advertising—which includes social media and mobile devices—is expected to rise nearly 17% to $50 billion in the U.S. this year. That would be about 28% of total U.

The truth is, IBM has little choice but to focus on cloud infrastructure and applications and big data. IBM does not sell an X86 operating system, as do Microsoft and Red Hat do, although it does have WebSphere middleware and DB2 databases that some enterprise customers want. Moreover, the current strategy of exiting the commodity hardware business that represents the dominate platform in use by corporations the world over is, ironically as well as sadly, IBM’s only option as the world’s largest provider of IT services and one of the world’s largest and certainly most profitable system software makers.

The truth is, IBM has little choice but to focus on cloud infrastructure and applications and big data. IBM does not sell an X86 operating system, as do Microsoft and Red Hat do, although it does have WebSphere middleware and DB2 databases that some enterprise customers want. Moreover, the current strategy of exiting the commodity hardware business that represents the dominate platform in use by corporations the world over is, ironically as well as sadly, IBM’s only option as the world’s largest provider of IT services and one of the world’s largest and certainly most profitable system software makers.

Embarcadero expands its DBA tools business, CA focuses more on IT ops: “We are actively managing our portfolio and investments, and the sale of CA ERwin further sharpens our focus on core capabilities, such as IT Business Management, DevOps and Security across mainframe, distributed, cloud and mobile environments,” [Jacob Lamm, executive vice president of Strategy and Corporate Development of CA] said. CA divests ERwin to Embarcadero

Embarcadero expands its DBA tools business, CA focuses more on IT ops: “We are actively managing our portfolio and investments, and the sale of CA ERwin further sharpens our focus on core capabilities, such as IT Business Management, DevOps and Security across mainframe, distributed, cloud and mobile environments,” [Jacob Lamm, executive vice president of Strategy and Corporate Development of CA] said. CA divests ERwin to Embarcadero

For me, it was a bunch of numbers. You can convince a bunch of VCs with numbers. The churn was low. The revenue was up. Talking to the customers, the sentiment was that this could grow within their companies. There was a huge market with cloud-based file sharing with both consumers but also enterprises. And, on pivoting to “enterprise”: In 2007, the consumer market was still the target at Box.

For me, it was a bunch of numbers. You can convince a bunch of VCs with numbers. The churn was low. The revenue was up. Talking to the customers, the sentiment was that this could grow within their companies. There was a huge market with cloud-based file sharing with both consumers but also enterprises. And, on pivoting to “enterprise”: In 2007, the consumer market was still the target at Box.

Also, I’ve had to accept that some emails/actions require a laptop. I’d love to keep my inbox clean from my mobile devices, but they are sometimes only sufficient for triage. Lessons from Inbox Zero

Also, I’ve had to accept that some emails/actions require a laptop. I’d love to keep my inbox clean from my mobile devices, but they are sometimes only sufficient for triage. Lessons from Inbox Zero

People are much more interested in running PaaS in-house than not in-house. We see a lot of interest in PaaS but very little interest necessarily in running PaaS on cloud infrastructures. I think broadly, this is going to be much more of the era of private cloud infrastructure as a service, more so than PaaS. PaaS is still in its early days, much earlier days than IaaS. Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO

People are much more interested in running PaaS in-house than not in-house. We see a lot of interest in PaaS but very little interest necessarily in running PaaS on cloud infrastructures. I think broadly, this is going to be much more of the era of private cloud infrastructure as a service, more so than PaaS. PaaS is still in its early days, much earlier days than IaaS. Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO

So far, those 200 organizations have enrolled more than 1,000 staff members in Mirarantis’s OpenStack training and certification program. Mirantis has trained over 1,000 people on OpenStack

So far, those 200 organizations have enrolled more than 1,000 staff members in Mirarantis’s OpenStack training and certification program. Mirantis has trained over 1,000 people on OpenStack

Earlier this week VMware announced it’s Desktop-as-Service (DaaS) offering, building on-top of the recently acquired Desktone asset. I have a 451 report for clients up. Here’s the 451 Take: VMware is launching a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering at an appropriate time, both beating Amazon to the 1.0 punch and playing into key trends that seem to be giving virtual desktops a new breath of life. There’s been a steady increase in the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, tightly coupled with the fragmentation of the PC market brought on by mobility: tablets, Apple and Android – not to mention the continued spread of the Web as a major ‘platform.

Earlier this week VMware announced it’s Desktop-as-Service (DaaS) offering, building on-top of the recently acquired Desktone asset. I have a 451 report for clients up. Here’s the 451 Take: VMware is launching a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering at an appropriate time, both beating Amazon to the 1.0 punch and playing into key trends that seem to be giving virtual desktops a new breath of life. There’s been a steady increase in the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, tightly coupled with the fragmentation of the PC market brought on by mobility: tablets, Apple and Android – not to mention the continued spread of the Web as a major ‘platform.

From Stacy’s article on SXSW.

SXSWIt’s SXSW time in Austin which is always enjoyable. Lots of folks come to town as I’m sure you, dear reader, know. It’s popular to complain. - a sentence that could stand on it’s own - about it, but I have no beef. I’m lucky enough - so lucky! - to get invited to the #meatup party each year and it’s a blast to get some free drinks and meat on top of Fogo de Chão.

[up.anv.bz/latest/an… Oh no, the original Kim Phung caught on fire! (Source: http://up.anv.bz/)

[up.anv.bz/latest/an… Oh no, the original Kim Phung caught on fire! (Source: http://up.anv.bz/)

Kay said that on average, partners that have made the transition to the cloud early with IBM are seeing accelerated revenue growth of 2.5 times the average with the cloud In theory, the cloud abhors middleman. We’ll see. Cloud partnering and channel stuff, according to IBM

Kay said that on average, partners that have made the transition to the cloud early with IBM are seeing accelerated revenue growth of 2.5 times the average with the cloud In theory, the cloud abhors middleman. We’ll see. Cloud partnering and channel stuff, according to IBM

Some pundits may argue that it is also going up against Amazon Web Services, but this is not the case: at around 5,000 Intel-powered Dell and SuperMicro servers the company fields around five percent of Rackspace’s fleet, and at most one per cent of Amazon’s. … This funding caps off a period of torrential growth for the company. In January 2013, it had about 2,000 customers and by the end of the year it was closer to 100,000, Uretsky said.

Some pundits may argue that it is also going up against Amazon Web Services, but this is not the case: at around 5,000 Intel-powered Dell and SuperMicro servers the company fields around five percent of Rackspace’s fleet, and at most one per cent of Amazon’s. … This funding caps off a period of torrential growth for the company. In January 2013, it had about 2,000 customers and by the end of the year it was closer to 100,000, Uretsky said.

One of my collegues at 451 asked if I’d be interested in taking over his column at The Register. Of course I would, that’s only about my favorite news outlet ever. My first column is up now, all about what feels to me like the re-emergence of the developer market (tools and middleware), a theme I’ve been puttering about with at 451 for those who’ve been following along. Here’s the last bit of the column:

Office 365 is already leading the charge, with a 500 percent increase in active online users over the past year and already a $1.5 billion-a-year business, making it the fastest growing commercial product in Microsoft’s history (an accolade previously held by Sharepoint). From over at Diginomica. Big growth for Office 365, the $1.5B business

Office 365 is already leading the charge, with a 500 percent increase in active online users over the past year and already a $1.5 billion-a-year business, making it the fastest growing commercial product in Microsoft’s history (an accolade previously held by Sharepoint). From over at Diginomica. Big growth for Office 365, the $1.5B business

Office 365 is already leading the charge, with a 500 percent increase in active online users over the past year and already a $1.5 billion-a-year business, making it the fastest growing commercial product in Microsoft’s history (an accolade previously held by Sharepoint). From over at Diginomica. Big growth for Office 365, the $1.5B business

We’ll offer complete visibility from application all the way to the end user. We have most of that technology today. Traditional IT management vendors are reducing investment and focus on managing IT systems inside the firewall. They’re running to the bright shiny object of cloud growth. The infrastructure that sits inside the firewall is not going away. We’ll support it while also doing cloud. We’re doubling down on that old market of on-premises IT while also working hard toward managing applications no matter where they sit.

We’ll offer complete visibility from application all the way to the end user. We have most of that technology today. Traditional IT management vendors are reducing investment and focus on managing IT systems inside the firewall. They’re running to the bright shiny object of cloud growth. The infrastructure that sits inside the firewall is not going away. We’ll support it while also doing cloud. We’re doubling down on that old market of on-premises IT while also working hard toward managing applications no matter where they sit.

We’ll offer complete visibility from application all the way to the end user. We have most of that technology today. Traditional IT management vendors are reducing investment and focus on managing IT systems inside the firewall. They’re running to the bright shiny object of cloud growth. The infrastructure that sits inside the firewall is not going away. We’ll support it while also doing cloud. We’re doubling down on that old market of on-premises IT while also working hard toward managing applications no matter where they sit.

The implication is that users/subscribers/audience members are loyal and will stay with the programming for some time. There is also a second implication that businesses which are not measured by audience size don’t have this loyal and recurring revenue base. The absence of an “audience” implies transience and impermanence and results in deep discounting of long-term viability. Which is why ecosystems are the desired business construct for technology companies. They allow a more consistent and repeatable transaction model and offer a predictability which is sorely lacking […] when technology changes rapidly.

The implication is that users/subscribers/audience members are loyal and will stay with the programming for some time. There is also a second implication that businesses which are not measured by audience size don’t have this loyal and recurring revenue base. The absence of an “audience” implies transience and impermanence and results in deep discounting of long-term viability. Which is why ecosystems are the desired business construct for technology companies. They allow a more consistent and repeatable transaction model and offer a predictability which is sorely lacking […] when technology changes rapidly.

The implication is that users/subscribers/audience members are loyal and will stay with the programming for some time. There is also a second implication that businesses which are not measured by audience size don’t have this loyal and recurring revenue base. The absence of an “audience” implies transience and impermanence and results in deep discounting of long-term viability. Which is why ecosystems are the desired business construct for technology companies. They allow a more consistent and repeatable transaction model and offer a predictability which is sorely lacking […] when technology changes rapidly.

By 2019, 67 percent of software programmers will primarily be developing in the cloud, up from 18 percent today, predicted Evans Research. Evans prediction in the tail-end of this piece on IBM going SaaS

By 2019, 67 percent of software programmers will primarily be developing in the cloud, up from 18 percent today, predicted Evans Research. Evans prediction in the tail-end of this piece on IBM going SaaS

By 2019, 67 percent of software programmers will primarily be developing in the cloud, up from 18 percent today, predicted Evans Research. Evans prediction in the tail-end of this piece on IBM going SaaS

[T]here will be classes of developers that go after Git and they’ll love Git for what it allows them to do which is to stay off the radar until their tiered promotion gets it ultimately to visibility, but there will be other shops that want to have that visibility the entire time and their compliance or governance or whatever the management driven stuff that is required will keep it around.

Commentary from 451’s Peter ffoulkes: The transformation of IT to a ‘client service’ model is notable and gaining momentum. While this is occurring in many forms, cloud-oriented projects are consolidating in an activity level at three times the level of other supporting projects, with internal private cloud projects leading the pack at 37%. Over the last year of the Cloud Computing Study there has been some pullback of public cloud activity.

[T]here will be classes of developers that go after Git and they’ll love Git for what it allows them to do which is to stay off the radar until their tiered promotion gets it ultimately to visibility, but there will be other shops that want to have that visibility the entire time and their compliance or governance or whatever the management driven stuff that is required will keep it around.

Commentary from 451’s Peter ffoulkes: The transformation of IT to a ‘client service’ model is notable and gaining momentum. While this is occurring in many forms, cloud-oriented projects are consolidating in an activity level at three times the level of other supporting projects, with internal private cloud projects leading the pack at 37%. Over the last year of the Cloud Computing Study there has been some pullback of public cloud activity.

[T]here will be classes of developers that go after Git and they’ll love Git for what it allows them to do which is to stay off the radar until their tiered promotion gets it ultimately to visibility, but there will be other shops that want to have that visibility the entire time and their compliance or governance or whatever the management driven stuff that is required will keep it around.

Atlassian released an ALM bundled centered around git recently. I wrote up a report on that release, git in broader terms, and of course profiling the current state of Atlassian. Here’s the 451 take: Git Essentials is a natural bundling move by Atlassian. The company has long been expert at tracking mainstream needs for software development teams and acted as a sort of safety bumper around the leading edge of developer practices and technologies: taking and creating early adopter technologies and making them enterprise ready.

Atlassian released an ALM bundled centered around git recently. I wrote up a report on that release, git in broader terms, and of course profiling the current state of Atlassian. Here’s the 451 take: Git Essentials is a natural bundling move by Atlassian. The company has long been expert at tracking mainstream needs for software development teams and acted as a sort of safety bumper around the leading edge of developer practices and technologies: taking and creating early adopter technologies and making them enterprise ready.

Atlassian released an ALM bundled centered around git recently. I wrote up a report on that release, git in broader terms, and of course profiling the current state of Atlassian. Here’s the 451 take: Git Essentials is a natural bundling move by Atlassian. The company has long been expert at tracking mainstream needs for software development teams and acted as a sort of safety bumper around the leading edge of developer practices and technologies: taking and creating early adopter technologies and making them enterprise ready.

Secondly, when evaluating new IT hardware and software assets for potential adoption, you need to institute a much stronger requirement for programmability and open APIs. Complete automation of your infrastructure requires programmatic access, and it’s simply insufficient to only have control via graphical interfaces. This isn’t just about provisioning and configuration support via such APIs, you also need to ensure that vendors are providing reliable APIs to get sufficiently detailed status.

Secondly, when evaluating new IT hardware and software assets for potential adoption, you need to institute a much stronger requirement for programmability and open APIs. Complete automation of your infrastructure requires programmatic access, and it’s simply insufficient to only have control via graphical interfaces. This isn’t just about provisioning and configuration support via such APIs, you also need to ensure that vendors are providing reliable APIs to get sufficiently detailed status.

Secondly, when evaluating new IT hardware and software assets for potential adoption, you need to institute a much stronger requirement for programmability and open APIs. Complete automation of your infrastructure requires programmatic access, and it’s simply insufficient to only have control via graphical interfaces. This isn’t just about provisioning and configuration support via such APIs, you also need to ensure that vendors are providing reliable APIs to get sufficiently detailed status.

My team has a new report up on Mirantis, with updates on their momentum and an overview of what’s in their 4.0 OpenStack distro release. Here’s the 451 take, our brief opinion on the news: Mirantis reported more bookings in the last quarter of 2013 than all of 2012 – its growth by revenue, employees and overall business highlights the company as a leader among OpenStack pure-play vendors. Mirantis seems well positioned for an evolving OpenStack ecosystem and market, but the transition from services and support, which has been its specialty, to product subscription models may be challenging.

My team has a new report up on Mirantis, with updates on their momentum and an overview of what’s in their 4.0 OpenStack distro release. Here’s the 451 take, our brief opinion on the news: Mirantis reported more bookings in the last quarter of 2013 than all of 2012 – its growth by revenue, employees and overall business highlights the company as a leader among OpenStack pure-play vendors. Mirantis seems well positioned for an evolving OpenStack ecosystem and market, but the transition from services and support, which has been its specialty, to product subscription models may be challenging.

My team has a new report up on Mirantis, with updates on their momentum and an overview of what’s in their 4.0 OpenStack distro release. Here’s the 451 take, our brief opinion on the news: Mirantis reported more bookings in the last quarter of 2013 than all of 2012 – its growth by revenue, employees and overall business highlights the company as a leader among OpenStack pure-play vendors. Mirantis seems well positioned for an evolving OpenStack ecosystem and market, but the transition from services and support, which has been its specialty, to product subscription models may be challenging.

Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae.

Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae.

Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae.

I noticed there a few subscribers out there, so I should start writing. "This whole discussion of of application development in the cloud and creating applications"I try to travel less now-a-days with a 5 month and 4 year old, not to mention a wife who enjoys my company. Nonetheless, I was off to IBM Pulse earlier this week in Las Vegas. It’s their Tivoli conference, and plenty fun, professionally, now that they’re cloud crazy.

When I spoke at HeavyBit sometime ago on how to deal with analysts, I meet a several interesting development tool folks. One of them was Rainforest QA. I did a recent write-up of the company, available to 451 subscribers (a free trial is just a lead-gen away!). Here’s my take on the company: As we opined last year, software development has changed dramatically, for the better, in recent years. The rise in demand for mobile and Web applications has been fueled by the broad availability of cheap, fungible infrastructure in the form of the cloud – seeding the ground for the code-slinging set that’s seeking to inject software into the world’s every nook and cranny.

When I spoke at HeavyBit sometime ago on how to deal with analysts, I meet a several interesting development tool folks. One of them was Rainforest QA. I did a recent write-up of the company, available to 451 subscribers (a free trial is just a lead-gen away!). Here’s my take on the company: As we opined last year, software development has changed dramatically, for the better, in recent years. The rise in demand for mobile and Web applications has been fueled by the broad availability of cheap, fungible infrastructure in the form of the cloud – seeding the ground for the code-slinging set that’s seeking to inject software into the world’s every nook and cranny.

When I spoke at HeavyBit sometime ago on how to deal with analysts, I meet a several interesting development tool folks. One of them was Rainforest QA. I did a recent write-up of the company, available to 451 subscribers (a free trial is just a lead-gen away!). Here’s my take on the company: As we opined last year, software development has changed dramatically, for the better, in recent years. The rise in demand for mobile and Web applications has been fueled by the broad availability of cheap, fungible infrastructure in the form of the cloud – seeding the ground for the code-slinging set that’s seeking to inject software into the world’s every nook and cranny.

My colleague Dennis Callaghan wrote up an update around CopperEgg, the APM tool purchased by Idera in July of 2013. While you’ll have to be a 451 client to read the full report (or sign up for a free trial), here’s some excerpts: Now under Idera, CopperEgg has added real-user monitoring and repositioned itself as an application performance management SaaS vendor. And the 451 Take: We’re glad to see CopperEgg running fairly independently within Idera, though we’ll be interested to see how Idera can bring some of its and Precise’s IP to bolster CopperEgg, particularly in database performance monitoring.

My colleague Dennis Callaghan wrote up an update around CopperEgg, the APM tool purchased by Idera in July of 2013. While you’ll have to be a 451 client to read the full report (or sign up for a free trial), here’s some excerpts: Now under Idera, CopperEgg has added real-user monitoring and repositioned itself as an application performance management SaaS vendor. And the 451 Take: We’re glad to see CopperEgg running fairly independently within Idera, though we’ll be interested to see how Idera can bring some of its and Precise’s IP to bolster CopperEgg, particularly in database performance monitoring.

My colleague Dennis Callaghan wrote up an update around CopperEgg, the APM tool purchased by Idera in July of 2013. While you’ll have to be a 451 client to read the full report (or sign up for a free trial), here’s some excerpts: Now under Idera, CopperEgg has added real-user monitoring and repositioned itself as an application performance management SaaS vendor. And the 451 Take: We’re glad to see CopperEgg running fairly independently within Idera, though we’ll be interested to see how Idera can bring some of its and Precise’s IP to bolster CopperEgg, particularly in database performance monitoring.

The result is plain to see: Caring about the product means that it can be priced at a point which consumers care to pay. @asymco

The result is plain to see: Caring about the product means that it can be priced at a point which consumers care to pay. @asymco

The result is plain to see: Caring about the product means that it can be priced at a point which consumers care to pay. @asymco

Companies with cash flows are valued on those flows. Companies without cash flows are valued on usage. Co’s with both have usage valued at 0 — Horace Dediu (@asymco) February 19, 2014

Companies with cash flows are valued on those flows. Companies without cash flows are valued on usage. Co’s with both have usage valued at 0 — Horace Dediu (@asymco) February 19, 2014

Companies with cash flows are valued on those flows. Companies without cash flows are valued on usage. Co’s with both have usage valued at 0 — Horace Dediu (@asymco) February 19, 2014

A recent IDC survey of 202 large companies already experimenting with Hadoop found that 32 percent had moved it to production environments, and another 31 percent are in the process of doing so within 12 months. Hadoop moving into production

A recent IDC survey of 202 large companies already experimenting with Hadoop found that 32 percent had moved it to production environments, and another 31 percent are in the process of doing so within 12 months. Hadoop moving into production

A recent IDC survey of 202 large companies already experimenting with Hadoop found that 32 percent had moved it to production environments, and another 31 percent are in the process of doing so within 12 months. Hadoop moving into production

It’d be loopy, in a fun way, to see a renewed interest in Power, esp. from “commodity hardware” cloud people. Interest from new places in Power chips

It’d be loopy, in a fun way, to see a renewed interest in Power, esp. from “commodity hardware” cloud people. Interest from new places in Power chips

It’d be loopy, in a fun way, to see a renewed interest in Power, esp. from “commodity hardware” cloud people. Interest from new places in Power chips

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch] Senior Dancy and myself are back to talk about life in a too connected world and oblique strategies for coping with the world outside out head. As ever, very soon, there will be a proper podcast. In the meantime, check out the video above, and here’s some show notes: The Facebook culling, by Kim - this is a good metaphor for how I feel like I should be thinking about work Shingy Meetings in real-life vs.

As I mentioned, a few weeks back I was in a recorded “think tank” put on by Dell which was, largely, about the changing nature of IT and how CIOs could go about managing it. For those who don’t want to nuzzle up to a 3.5 hour recording (perhaps with a six pack and some chips?), Dell has pulled some highlights: “What do customers expect in an application today?” IT is facing competition for the first time ever The Web Of C-Level Relationships The Willy-wonky of Servers talks about “persistently, ubiquitously connected to the network era” And check out Barton’s omnibus overview.

Over the last decade, through a series of successful moves, Icahn has become the sole force behind Icahn Enterprises LP, a diversified holding company that puts him in command of roughly $24 billion in capital. “As essentially the wealthiest individual hedge-fund manager of all time, he is in an extremely rare position,” explains Brown. “Nobody can tell him what to do or what not to do.” … “Tech companies have gotten away for far too long with far too much cash on their balance sheets,” says Kedrosky.

maniacalrage: When you’re about to have a baby, people always say the same things: “Oh, get ready to never sleep again!” “Just wait until he starts walking, then the real challenge begins!” “Kids are annoying, who wants one!” And while some of that is true (walking definitely presents challenges) and some… Getting Ahead

Approximately one-third of our top 50 customers in the Americas have Hadoop in production now, with the other two-thirds in various stages of evaluations. —CEO Mike Koehler Hadoop growth measured by Teradata disruption

The majority of developers still make less than $500 per app per month, but the overall “app poverty line” has moved from 67 percent to 60 percent, according to Vision Mobile’s Developer Economics Q1 2014 report. The analysis firm researched data from more than 7,000 app developers from 127 countries, from the United States and China to Kenya and Brazil. The money in apps - $500/month

“All the secrets of the Marvel Universe, now in JSON format”

From El Reg’s Gavin Clarke: Let’s begin by saying money was not the problem that needed solving: on that, the world’s largest software company is printing cash. … That means everything Nadella does now is about execution, not innovation. That makes Nadella’s story as CEO one of sales and expanded market share. We, 451, have a quick piece from the day of and I just submitted a longer piece yesterday (along with Carl Brooks), hopefully published soon.

These are the most important three chunks from Satya Nadella (Microsoft’s new CEO) memo: Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation. … Our job is to ensure that Microsoft thrives in a mobile and cloud-first world. … I believe over the next decade computing will become even more ubiquitous and intelligence will become ambient. The coevolution of software and new hardware form factors will intermediate and digitize — many of the things we do and experience in business, life and our world.

We spent part of 2012 and all of 2013 building a private cloud in Virginia, Washington, and mostly Texas. This was a big bet with over $4 million in capital lease obligations on the line, and the good news is that it’s starting to pay off. On a cash basis, we spent $6.2 million at Amazon Web Services, and a mere $2.8 million on our own data centers. The business impact is profound.

A fun phrase from Gartner to label ERP systems that can’t be evolved fast enough to do what businesses want. See “anti- Agility.” “Postmodern ERP”

As usual, TPM is extensive, starting with: IBM is selling off the System x business, presumably because it is not profitable, but also because it is something it can sell while at the same time getting approximately 7,500 employees off its payrolls. Lenovo’s Peter Hortensius, who is president of the Think Business Group that sells servers and storage into enterprise accounts, said that buying the IBM System x business accelerated its plan to become a dominant system supplier by about five years, and would actually boost Lenovo’s profits once the deal is done.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch] Connected Culture and Oblique Strategies episode #003 is up, in video form. We’re working on the audio only podcast and all that, but you can see the three videos we’ve done so far. Here’s episode 001 and episode 002. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

DrunkAndRetired.com #183 episode up, in video form. Here’s the audio only, and remember, you can subscribe to the podcast feed to get the audio versions of each episode downloaded automagically. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[new.livestream.com/accounts/… This week I was lucky enough to be invited to a Dell hosted think-tank discussing how the application needs of companies are changing. You could also phrase it: “how is all that cloud stuff changing how CIO’s run their company’s IT?” It was a great session, driven by the discussion of the CIOs on the panel and well seasoned by vendors and hangers-on like myself. There’s also a bunch of stills here.

Dealing with industry analysts, for startups from Michael Coté Earlier this week I had the privilege to speak at HeavyBit, a developer centric incubator run by some ex-Heroku (and other!) folks. First of all, the premises of HeavyBit is awesome: for as important as developers are, there’s not enough attention paid to companies that are building developer products and services in the investing and incubation scene…so, let’s do that. If you look at the HeavyBit portfolio, it’s a nice collection of interesting developer-centric tools.

“In many cases in the big companies and all the small startups, your Github profile is your resume,” explained another former Amazonian. “When I look at developers that’s what I’m looking for, [but] they go to Amazon and that resume stops … It absolutely affects the quality of their hires.” I’ve been reading The Everything Store, the recent business history of Amazon. Given the culture there, it’s not too shocking to read that Amazon is not big into developers marketing themselves and getting involved in “the community,” as it were.

Big Blue has seen revenue in its System and Technology Group drop throughout the year, with the division finishing out fiscal 2013 down 18.7 per cent from the previous 12 months. Software and middleware revenues and sales in the Global Business Services unit rose during the year, but Global Technology Services and Global Financing also dropped or stayed flat. Meanwhile, things are looking not so bad for IBM’s converged infrastructure product line, as TPM writes:

When I spent time with other entrepreneurs, the feeling was ‘go public’. Now you have ‘stay private longer’, because then you can invest, innovate. The minute you go public, you have this incredible pressure to increase earnings every single quarter, quarter after quarter. I am not saying that is all bad. There are companies that are perfectly good for it, but it has a real downside as well. Privately innovating instead of publicly growing

The company plans to open 15 new data centers this year, more than doubling the cloud capacity it acquired when it purchased SoftLayer last year for $2 billion. It plans to combine the new data centers, the existing SoftLayer data centers, and the data centers it already ran before the SoftLayer purchase into a single operation that would provide public and private cloud services to its customers, as well as provide services for internal operations.

Nice anecdote about iPads going from zero to full use in mainstream-sounding use cases: I’m not a “tech” guy, but wanted to give you a perspective from a person who works for a fortune 500 company. I recently returned from a National Sales meeting, and was amazed with the iPhone market share within our company 95%+. Not to mention that every sales and marketing employee is given an iPad for “work” use.

So… screw the contrarians, it sucked. Standing In Line, Tim Bray

Paul Krill asked a few questions about the future of PaaS last month for an omnibus appdev article of his (it’s a nice round up!). Here’s the only slightly edited full reply I sent him: Q: Does 451 Group see 2013 as a banner year for PaaS? If so, why? PaaS has always had the issue of being “big next year.” The nature of PaaS has shifted around so many times that it’s little wonder it’s yet to achieve escape velocity.

You know, $100m actually seems pretty good for something so obscure and weird.  IBM Chief Executive Virginia “Ginni” Rometty has told executives she hopes Watson will generate $10 billion in annual revenue within 10 years, according to an October 2013 conference-call transcript reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. She set that target after the executive in charge of Watson said its business plan would bring in $1 billion of revenue a year by 2018.

GitHub Traffic Analytics service gives developers insight into interest in their projects Paul Krill asked for some quick input on GitHub’s newly released analytics. Here’s what I sent over for his story: As the blog post says, it does look like fun, though pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. GitHub has been a major driver of getting the development community to care more about social interactions and collaborations, here, tracking who’s looking at your code and where they’re coming from - standard web analytics stuff.

The app economy shows that there are big opportunities in “digital pennies” and that the figures are beginning to match even the “analog dollars”. In fact, I suspect eventually digital pennies will dwarf analog dollars. The trouble is that these pennies will not be earned at the same control points. Bits are already big bucks. They’re just not the bits we are used to. “Digital pennies”

After seeing one of the other SDN forecast studies referenced here, one of my 451 collegues sent some finding from our recent (August 2013) survey on software defined networking usage:

TheInfoPro survey has adoption at a much lower level. Wave 10, based on 154 interviews and published August 2013, has it at 16% in use or in plan and 77% not in plan (7% didn’t know the answer).

The InsightsOne group has offered predictive analytics for consumer companies. It finds patterns from multiple sources of information. For example, Hasan explained how its analytics might help provide patterns in data from a fitness monitor but also health claim information. With that encompassing profile, a company may provide deeper intelligence insights. One use-case area: For example, there is the increasing amounts of data that people and machines create.

Cloud startups like Dropbox pose a problem because they are viral in their sign-up and billing. This is what has given them a foot in the door at SMBs and the departments of big companies, and resulted in CIOs’ business-collaboration platforms becoming based on Dropbox before they know it. Also, some good insights into IBM go-to-market thinking around software. Bottoms up, viral spread still works

“Red Hat’s open source business is strong enough that CentOS is effectively a mindshare force multiplier rather than a RHEL competitor,” noted Ryan Paul, Ars’ former open source guru. And, making it harder for Oracle too. Pretty good explanation of the Red Hat/CentOS kumbaya

FORBES estimates that 50 million people currently use Snapchat. Median age: 18. Facebook, meanwhile, has admittedly has seen a decline among teenagers. Its average user is closer to 40. … “I can see why [SnapChat is] strategically valuable,” one leading venture capitalist tells FORBES. “But is it worth $3 billion? Not in any universe I’m aware of. Profile of SnapChat, and turning down billions

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch] I’ve spent years puttering around at the “infrastructure layer” in IT: programming, systems management, cloud, all that gunk. From what I can tell much of the growth in IT is being driven by companies wanting to engage in “social” more. What is “social,” though? Indeed, that’s one of the things this podcast will try to figure out (hopefully with as much delightful rat-holing as Horace). Also, we’ll discuss my need for slippers that masquerade as socks so I can get them past my wife’s 2nd floor blockade.

Investment is coming from exploiting analytics to make B2C processes more efficient and improve customer marketing efforts…. The focus is on enhancing the customer experience throughout the presales, sales and post sales processes. Gartner’s IT spending forecast

The technology industry is in the business of creating products and services that either enable new activities or make existing activities less expensive. Venture capitalists are in the business of funding entrepreneurs who run experiments to try to create these new products and services. I believe the only way the technology industry can offer meaningfully improved financial services is by building new services that don’t depend on incumbent companies.

[L]ess than 30 percent of the 321 IT professionals surveyed have deployed or plan to deploy SDN in the next year. Add on another 40 percent that have no plans to implement SDN at all. SDN adoption expected to be slow

I worry far less about accepting a group that does badly than I do about rejecting one that does well. One that does well, sufficiently well, would pay for hundreds of other start ups that return nothing. Paul Graham