“That doesn’t remotely mean that Microsoft is dead, but it has to work out how to use the cash and market position of the legacy monopolies to help it build new businesses." Source: 16 mobile theses

“That doesn’t remotely mean that Microsoft is dead, but it has to work out how to use the cash and market position of the legacy monopolies to help it build new businesses." Source: 16 mobile theses

“That doesn’t remotely mean that Microsoft is dead, but it has to work out how to use the cash and market position of the legacy monopolies to help it build new businesses." Source: 16 mobile theses

“At IBM we believe there are really three key languages that are going to be needed for the future around cloud and mobile: Java, Node.js/JavaScript and Swift,” Phil Buckellew, vice president of enterprise mob Source: IBM Focused on 3 Major Languages: Java, Node.js and Swift

“At IBM we believe there are really three key languages that are going to be needed for the future around cloud and mobile: Java, Node.js/JavaScript and Swift,” Phil Buckellew, vice president of enterprise mob Source: IBM Focused on 3 Major Languages: Java, Node.js and Swift

“At IBM we believe there are really three key languages that are going to be needed for the future around cloud and mobile: Java, Node.js/JavaScript and Swift,” Phil Buckellew, vice president of enterprise mob Source: IBM Focused on 3 Major Languages: Java, Node.js and Swift

“As for the Pivotal partnership, Ford will use Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and big data suit e to build its connected vehicle program. So far, Ford said it has sped up software development times from months to weeks using agile techniques." Source: Ford teams with Pivotal, bets on Cloud Foundry

“As for the Pivotal partnership, Ford will use Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and big data suit e to build its connected vehicle program. So far, Ford said it has sped up software development times from months to weeks using agile techniques." Source: Ford teams with Pivotal, bets on Cloud Foundry

“As for the Pivotal partnership, Ford will use Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and big data suit e to build its connected vehicle program. So far, Ford said it has sped up software development times from months to weeks using agile techniques." Source: Ford teams with Pivotal, bets on Cloud Foundry

Satisfying the mythical auditors is often one of the first barriers to spreading DevOps initiatives more widely inside an organization. While these process-driven barriers can be annoying and onerous, once you follow the DevOps tradition of empathetic inclusion — being all “one team” — they can not only stop slowing you down but actually help the overall quality of the product. Indeed, the very reason these audit checks were introduced in the first place was to ensure overall quality of the software and business.

“The unicorn thing, I’ve been saying for a while now, is not great,” Benioff told Stephanie Ruhle on Bloomberg GO earlier this week. “The reason why it’s not great is not necessarily that these companies are not worth this much money or whatever — we don’t actually know because they’ve manipulated the private markets to achieve these valuations.” … “There is no reason why these companies who claim to be worth billions of dollars and making billions of dollars to stay private,”

“The unicorn thing, I’ve been saying for a while now, is not great,” Benioff told Stephanie Ruhle on Bloomberg GO earlier this week. “The reason why it’s not great is not necessarily that these companies are not worth this much money or whatever — we don’t actually know because they’ve manipulated the private markets to achieve these valuations.” … “There is no reason why these companies who claim to be worth billions of dollars and making billions of dollars to stay private,”

“The unicorn thing, I’ve been saying for a while now, is not great,” Benioff told Stephanie Ruhle on Bloomberg GO earlier this week. “The reason why it’s not great is not necessarily that these companies are not worth this much money or whatever — we don’t actually know because they’ve manipulated the private markets to achieve these valuations.” … “There is no reason why these companies who claim to be worth billions of dollars and making billions of dollars to stay private,”

“Global analyst firm Ovum forecasts the global spend on middleware software is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.8 percent between 2014 and 2019, amounting to $US22.8 billion by end of 2019." Source: ​Middleware-as-a-service turns enterprise integration on its head - Reseller News

“Global analyst firm Ovum forecasts the global spend on middleware software is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.8 percent between 2014 and 2019, amounting to $US22.8 billion by end of 2019." Source: ​Middleware-as-a-service turns enterprise integration on its head - Reseller News

“Global analyst firm Ovum forecasts the global spend on middleware software is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.8 percent between 2014 and 2019, amounting to $US22.8 billion by end of 2019." Source: ​Middleware-as-a-service turns enterprise integration on its head - Reseller News

Round up of marketshare and commentary on the Apple Watch from Horace’s Apple Watch conference. 80% of wearable market, they say. Source: Apple Watch by the (estimated) numbers, and 11 claimed myths about the wearable

Round up of marketshare and commentary on the Apple Watch from Horace’s Apple Watch conference. 80% of wearable market, they say. Source: Apple Watch by the (estimated) numbers, and 11 claimed myths about the wearable

Round up of marketshare and commentary on the Apple Watch from Horace’s Apple Watch conference. 80% of wearable market, they say. Source: Apple Watch by the (estimated) numbers, and 11 claimed myths about the wearable

“According to a new IDC Spending Guide, worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) will grow at a 17.0% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from $698.6 billion in 2015 to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019.” I think IoT is becoming mor like IoEverything. Source: Internet of Things Spending Forecast to Reach Nearly $1.3 Trillion in 2019 Led by Widespread Initiatives

“According to a new IDC Spending Guide, worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) will grow at a 17.0% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from $698.6 billion in 2015 to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019.” I think IoT is becoming mor like IoEverything. Source: Internet of Things Spending Forecast to Reach Nearly $1.3 Trillion in 2019 Led by Widespread Initiatives

“According to a new IDC Spending Guide, worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) will grow at a 17.0% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from $698.6 billion in 2015 to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019.” I think IoT is becoming mor like IoEverything. Source: Internet of Things Spending Forecast to Reach Nearly $1.3 Trillion in 2019 Led by Widespread Initiatives

“Fitbit with 22.2%, Apple with 18.6%, and Xiaomi with 17.4%. Of course, in such a new product category, market share can be volatile, but they are far ahead of the No. 4 player, Garmin (4.1%), which largely caters to hard-core runners." Source: Wearables marketshare from IDC

“Fitbit with 22.2%, Apple with 18.6%, and Xiaomi with 17.4%. Of course, in such a new product category, market share can be volatile, but they are far ahead of the No. 4 player, Garmin (4.1%), which largely caters to hard-core runners." Source: Wearables marketshare from IDC

“Fitbit with 22.2%, Apple with 18.6%, and Xiaomi with 17.4%. Of course, in such a new product category, market share can be volatile, but they are far ahead of the No. 4 player, Garmin (4.1%), which largely caters to hard-core runners." Source: Wearables marketshare from IDC

Pretty good benefits/problem list, plus commentary on the “autonomy” angle. Source: Microservices Beyond the Hype: What You Gain and What You Lose

Pretty good benefits/problem list, plus commentary on the “autonomy” angle. Source: Microservices Beyond the Hype: What You Gain and What You Lose

Pretty good benefits/problem list, plus commentary on the “autonomy” angle. Source: Microservices Beyond the Hype: What You Gain and What You Lose

“Apple watches now account for more than five per cent of app usage, giving customers access to real-time flight status, gate information, a countdown to the departure time and the weather at their destination." Source: Usage of Apple Watch by British Airways Passengers

“Apple watches now account for more than five per cent of app usage, giving customers access to real-time flight status, gate information, a countdown to the departure time and the weather at their destination." Source: Usage of Apple Watch by British Airways Passengers

“Apple watches now account for more than five per cent of app usage, giving customers access to real-time flight status, gate information, a countdown to the departure time and the weather at their destination." Source: Usage of Apple Watch by British Airways Passengers

“The roughly 60 or so publicly traded software companies hold more than $380B in cash and short term investments on their balance sheets. Though Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Oracle possess 75% of that cash, 14 other companies have cash reserves of greater than $500M." Source: Tech companies that are likely to acquire startups in 2016

“The roughly 60 or so publicly traded software companies hold more than $380B in cash and short term investments on their balance sheets. Though Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Oracle possess 75% of that cash, 14 other companies have cash reserves of greater than $500M." Source: Tech companies that are likely to acquire startups in 2016

“The roughly 60 or so publicly traded software companies hold more than $380B in cash and short term investments on their balance sheets. Though Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Oracle possess 75% of that cash, 14 other companies have cash reserves of greater than $500M." Source: Tech companies that are likely to acquire startups in 2016

HEB is the mega grocery chain, operating in much of Texas. It’s a sort of “mini-globalism” for them to sell globally. A lot of the local, in store brands they have are the kinds of things people visiting home would stock up on when they went back north or abroad, so there’s probably a good market for shipping. Also, I’ve always heard that they’re so big that they can control distribution and pricing of things regionally, like soda, so maybe they can get prices low enough.

HEB is the mega grocery chain, operating in much of Texas. It’s a sort of “mini-globalism” for them to sell globally. A lot of the local, in store brands they have are the kinds of things people visiting home would stock up on when they went back north or abroad, so there’s probably a good market for shipping. Also, I’ve always heard that they’re so big that they can control distribution and pricing of things regionally, like soda, so maybe they can get prices low enough.

HEB is the mega grocery chain, operating in much of Texas. It’s a sort of “mini-globalism” for them to sell globally. A lot of the local, in store brands they have are the kinds of things people visiting home would stock up on when they went back north or abroad, so there’s probably a good market for shipping. Also, I’ve always heard that they’re so big that they can control distribution and pricing of things regionally, like soda, so maybe they can get prices low enough.

It looks like we’re cool to drink coffee. Source: How coffee loves us back - round-up of positive coffee studies

It looks like we’re cool to drink coffee. Source: How coffee loves us back - round-up of positive coffee studies

It looks like we’re cool to drink coffee. Source: How coffee loves us back - round-up of positive coffee studies

“According to IDC, the market will reach $576 million in revenue this year – up from $475 million in 2014 — and hit close to $1 billion by 2019.” That’s a really small market to be operating in, no matter what your marketshare. Also, check out the quote from Rhonda at 451! Source: Why CA left the DCIM market

“According to IDC, the market will reach $576 million in revenue this year – up from $475 million in 2014 — and hit close to $1 billion by 2019.” That’s a really small market to be operating in, no matter what your marketshare. Also, check out the quote from Rhonda at 451! Source: Why CA left the DCIM market

“According to IDC, the market will reach $576 million in revenue this year – up from $475 million in 2014 — and hit close to $1 billion by 2019.” That’s a really small market to be operating in, no matter what your marketshare. Also, check out the quote from Rhonda at 451! Source: Why CA left the DCIM market

Survey commissioned by IBM to find out what makes mobile apps great. Then, of course, it seeks to tie more success (revenue) to that greatness. n=“1,000 consumers in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and India." Source: Forrester/IBM Report: ‘Great’ apps monetize five times better than good ones

Survey commissioned by IBM to find out what makes mobile apps great. Then, of course, it seeks to tie more success (revenue) to that greatness. n=“1,000 consumers in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and India." Source: Forrester/IBM Report: ‘Great’ apps monetize five times better than good ones

Survey commissioned by IBM to find out what makes mobile apps great. Then, of course, it seeks to tie more success (revenue) to that greatness. n=“1,000 consumers in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and India." Source: Forrester/IBM Report: ‘Great’ apps monetize five times better than good ones

While employees are feeling more and more computer literate, they’re valuing the IT department less. Once again, IT has to reestablish itself as a source of innovation instead of cost-cutting, light-bulb illuminators. “Keep moving and get out of the way,” and all that. n=" online survey gathered data from 1,000 employees in Western Europe from organizations with more than 100 employee." Source: Gartner Survey Reveals Western European Employees View IT as a Technical Resource, Not a Digital Advisor

While employees are feeling more and more computer literate, they’re valuing the IT department less. Once again, IT has to reestablish itself as a source of innovation instead of cost-cutting, light-bulb illuminators. “Keep moving and get out of the way,” and all that. n=" online survey gathered data from 1,000 employees in Western Europe from organizations with more than 100 employee." Source: Gartner Survey Reveals Western European Employees View IT as a Technical Resource, Not a Digital Advisor

While employees are feeling more and more computer literate, they’re valuing the IT department less. Once again, IT has to reestablish itself as a source of innovation instead of cost-cutting, light-bulb illuminators. “Keep moving and get out of the way,” and all that. n=" online survey gathered data from 1,000 employees in Western Europe from organizations with more than 100 employee." Source: Gartner Survey Reveals Western European Employees View IT as a Technical Resource, Not a Digital Advisor

“Worldwide PC shipments totaled 70.7 million units in 3Q15, up 8.6% sequentially but down 11.1% from the previous year.” Source: PCs: 3Q15 Update from IDC

“Worldwide PC shipments totaled 70.7 million units in 3Q15, up 8.6% sequentially but down 11.1% from the previous year.” Source: PCs: 3Q15 Update from IDC

“Worldwide PC shipments totaled 70.7 million units in 3Q15, up 8.6% sequentially but down 11.1% from the previous year.” Source: PCs: 3Q15 Update from IDC

Tech & Work WorldHow Microservices Fixes the Slow Train ProblemI write little columns for the internal Pivotal newsletter we have sometimes. Here’s one that’s about to go out. The ideas of “dependencies” and “coupling” are important touch points for understanding and conveying the software delivery benefits of a microservices approach to architecture. “Coupling” between services means that changes to one service have a big impact on another service. Coupling is considered bad in software architecture.

This week is a lull in travel. I’m closing out the year by going to lots of DevOpsDays (Charlotte, where I’m speaking, and Silicon Valley next week), a few internal summits, and my first Gartner show, where I’m speaking in a sponsored slot. Tech & Work WorldShameless Self Promotion“You should put that on The Slide” – Software Defined Talk #47 - us three are pretty busy now so our schedule is irregular, but here’s the latest.

Tech & Work WorldNo CommentBig news for the company I work in this week. Sadly for my desires to write about and link to interesting stories on it, I have to take a pass. It’s bad form for employees to comment on any of this stuff; and since I worked at Dell on strategy and M&A for software and cloud, it’s double a bad idea. There’s a lot of good write-ups out there, enjoy them.

Tech & Work WorldI was at Spiceworld, briefly, last week. This is Spiceworks’ big user, annual conference in Austin; they have one in London as well. I’ve followed Spiceworks for many years (from RedMonk to 451 Research) and have always liked their IT management approach: their business model is to be the Facebook of IT by giving away the systems management software for free and then selling access to the users to advertisers, vendors, and others.

Healthcare Shift to the Cloud Quickens

As software eats the world, this kind of mismatch between “fail fast” and “must be perfect on day one” will happen constantly. NHS Health Apps Library full of data-spaffing apps, claims studies

Exclusive: Citrix in last-ditch attempt to sell itself - sources

“We’ve come to understand that productivity software is always evolving, and it’s our responsibility to bring the customer along a journey of constant improvement as opposed to dropping major releases every few years.” Two points: That stance is fun: we need to put in new features, and we need to educate users about them. This is a tricky position: users don’t know what they want (when they want to stay the same).

Working at home, with a family, is a challenge, as this nice overview piece at The Register goes over. You think you’re trading all those interruptions from co-workers talking about the sportsball or just complaining about the daily grind, but you’re actually trading in for a different set of co-workers, your family. And their requests for your attention are harder to stonewall than chatty cube-mates. And then there’s the whole “out of site, out of mind” effect with management at work.

“Last year [2014], about 40% of all the orders generated on homedepot.com actually finished in one of our orange box stores. Customers find it incredibly convenient to be able to pick up a product when they wanted to. They didn’t have to worry about whether or not it was on their doorstep. And so that is a great opportunity not only to sell more product, but to drive traffic to our stores, sell them additional product when they come in and pick that product up.

I followed up my recent column on DevOps ROI with a podcast on the topic. Back from the podcasting dead, I called up Ed who is actually a real, live “finance person” to walk through what ROI is and how you’d calculate it for something like DevOps. As ever with Ed, it’s a great conversations. Check out the episode listing over on the Pivotal blog for full show notes and the feed to subscribe to if you want more from my Pivotal Conversations podcast.

10th State of Agile Survey

“cut another 30,000 jobs” - shedding droves of people happens at big tech companies a lot. I always wonder how their system got so inefficient that they hired this many extra people. It’s a strange problem once you start thinking through it: each of those hires was thought to be needed to be profitable, and now all the sudden they’re not needed…? Hewlett Packard Enterprise to cut 30,000 jobs

Kubernetes Has A Ways To Go To Scale Like Google, Mesos

There’s just as much pull for DevOps in government as there is in the private sector. While most of our focus around adoption is on how businesses can and are using DevOps and continuous delivery, supported by cloud, to create better software, many government agencies are in the same position and would benefit greatly from figuring out how to apply DevOps in their organizations. Just 13% of respondents in a recent MeriTalk/Accenture survey of 152 US Federal IT managers believed they could “develop and deploy new systems as fast as the mission requires.

How do I Contain This Virtual Machine?

The Most Recommended Brands 2015

I’ve done M&A pitches for UI companies before. They’re hard. For IBM, Node.js Creates a Microservices Middleware Layer

‘It operates on key-value-pair data while the familiar Unix tools operate on integer-indexed fields: if the natural data structure for the latter is the array, then Miller’s natural data structure is the insertion-ordered hash map. This encompasses a variety of data formats, including but not limited to the familiar CSV. (Miller can handle positionally-indexed data as a special case.)’ About Miller

Atlantis: The DSSD, data centre disk killer rising from the deep

Check in on how the IT department thinks it’s doing, minus custom software development. Infrastructure Readiness? It’s time to get realistic

Microsoft and Docker Preview Windows Server Containers

CBP’s Wolf Tombe: Mobile, wearable technologies will advance mission

How Homeland Security’s CBP Turned $335 Million Budget Cut Into Cloud Opportunity « Breaking Government - Government news, analysis and commentary

Okta Raises $75 Million, Boosting Valuation to Nearly $1.2 Billion

“Despite its uncertainties, the federal government wants to get to the cloud; in fact, it wants to double current progress. According the survey, only 23 percent of federal infrastructure services have moved, or are in the process of moving, to the cloud. The goal is 43 percent by the end of this year. That’s not going to happen” Why Federal Government is Still Behind the Cloud Curve

The recording for my talk at DevOpsDaysDays Chicago is up. As I mention in the opening, it has some material from my previous talks but is also pretty updated with new tips and tricks, as it were. Here’s the slides if you like that sort of thing. (And, here’s the clown zombie, from Day of the Dead.)

Want IoT? Here’s How a Major US Utility Collects Power Data from Over 5.5 Million Meters - High Scalability -

Including an estimate (11.5m?) of the number of developers globally. Application Developers Alliance

A good overview of what marketing does and should be doing. It especially applies to commodity markets and for products that have little “real” differentiation except in the mind of the buyer (cars, beverages, raw materials, etc.). Fashion (low and high) would be an interesting case. When Marketing Is Strategy

Everything announced at VMworld 2015 so far

’“Google is not an enterprise company and we are trying to become cognizant of what the enterprise needs,” Craig McLuckie, Google’s product manager in charge of its Kubernetes and Google Container Engine' Google Hopes Open Source Will Give Its Cloud A Path To The Enterprise

SaaS Seen Driving Enterprise Software Sales

“IDC states that worldwide RDBMS revenue will grow to 41B by 2019. And, 5.7B of that will be public cloud RDBMS. So, while RDMBS revenue will grow at 4.0% CAGR, the public cloud CAGR will be 50.3%!” Datical is Cloud Native - with database market sizing numbers

I’m always wanting to do a talk or write a series of items on the white-collar toolchain, or surviving in big companies. Here’s one principal about presentations in corporate settings. Slides must stand on their own Much presentation wisdom of late has revolved around the actual event of a speaker talking, giving the presentation. In a corporate setting, the actual delivery of the presentation is not the primary purpose of a presentation.

“‘We’ve gone from signing about $1 million in new business every month to $1 million every week,’ [Mirantis] CEO Adrian Ionel said recently.” You could do some spreadsheets if you spitballer non-new business and estimated when the switch over happened. Something like $12m to $20m a year? Mirantis funding, revenue estimate

Our Guide to Central Texas Barbecue - Texas Monthly

Verizon Selects Mesosphere DCOS as Nationwide Platform for Data Center Service Orchestration - MarketWatch

“The challenges are cultural, organisational, and technical. According to the 2015 BCN Annual Industry Survey, which petitioned over 700 senior IT decision makers, over 67 per cent of enterprises plan to implement multiple cloud services over the next 18 months, but close to 70 per cent were worried about how those services would integrate with other cloud services and 90 per cent were concerned about how they will integrate those cloud services with their legacy or on-premise services.

No. 1703: IBM 360 Computer

Pivotal CEO change, chart on enterprise mobile app desires

bliki: AlignmentMap

BMC has apparently acquired app monitoring startup Boundary | VentureBeat | Dev | by Jordan Novet

“As of early June, Mesosphere said Yelp is launching more than 1 million Docker containers a day using its framework. Shah said this week about 20 percent of Yelp web sites are running on DCOS.” Docker Deployment: A View From the Trenches

Donkey teamwork What’s the point of it all? Why are we doing this? These questions pop up frequently in IT teams where the reason for doing your daily activities — like churning through tickets, whizzing up builds, or “doing the DevOps” — seems only that someone, somewhere told you to do it. If you’re in this situation — you have no idea how your activities are helping your organization make money — you should stop and find out quickly what your company’s goals and strategies are to make sure you’re not wasting time.

Why Docker is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production

“When Apple moved to bare metal with Mesos, one of the big reasons why they did it was, first, they did not need the virtual machines and, second, they got a big performance improvement. The virtualization tax that we often talk about is very real and for Apple it was on the order of 30 percent. Removing it meant Apple could run Siri jobs 30 percent faster, which is a really big deal.

“Together, the teams were able to reduce deployment times from 14 hours to 14 minutes, facilitated by Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s integration with Jenkins and Gradle build systems. Since this pilot, Pivotal Cloud Foundry has had zero downtime. It is being maintained by just two operators, using their preferred tools: Logstash, DataDog and PagerDuty. Furthermore, it runs in Axel Springer’s chosen datacenter on European soil.” Axel Springer | Case Study | Pivotal

“Provisioning applications that required manual steps and operations that used to take weeks or months, can now take minutes or even less in order to stage and provision new applications.” Philips | Case Study | Pivotal

Software is infinitely flexible. It can be changed right up to the time the product is introduced. Sometimes it can be changed even later than that with things like software or firmware upgrades, websites, and software as a service (SaaS). Software does have its disadvantages, too. Accurately scheduling long-term deliveries is difficult, and more than 50% of all software developed is either not used or does not meet its business intent.

“Organizations increasingly find it difficult to be proactive against competitive pressures, which is resulting in their mobile apps becoming tactical, rather than strategic,” said Mr. Leow. “We’re seeing demand for mobile apps outstrip available development capacity, making quick creation of apps even more challenging. Mobile strategists must use tools and techniques that match the increase in mobile app needs within their organizations.” And: “Gartner believes organizations will improve their in-house mobile development skills over time, but currently only 26 percent of organizations are adopting an in-house-only development approach, while 55 percent are successfully delivering apps using mixed sourcing.

The attention economy and the implosion of traditional media

“[T]ake a shot when the secret word ‘dearth’ is mentioned.” What is DevOps? Industry Experts Explain | SolarWinds

You Have Caused Confusion And Delay | Reaction Images | Know Your Meme

14 months down to 6 months, 16 staff down to 8 staff: “[w]hen planning the first product developed on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, CoreLogic allocated a team of 12 engineers with four quality assurance software engineers and a management team. The goal was to deliver the product in 14 months. Instead, the project ultimately required only a product manager, one user experience designer and six engineers who delivered the desired product in just six months.

ChicagoI’ll be at DevOpsDays Chicago in a few weeks, August 26th to 27th. If you want to go and haven’t registered yet, you can use the code PIVOTAL10 to get 10% off, which gets it down to like $170 or something. It’s excellent value for a tech conference, plus you can see me speak and staff a booth! While I’m up there, on Aug 26th, I’ll be speaking at the local Cloud Foundry Meetup.

“With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, deployment timeframes have been reduced by 75 percent, accelerating deployments from a month to a week, and there is room to reduce cycles further.” EMC Documentum/Enterprise Content Division | Case Study | Pivotal

Trying to figure out the various lines of business I. Google. Google Losing $8B to $9B on Side Projects, Estimates Morgan Stanley

n=250 survey that shows people want more from IT, but they feel IT is not up to the task: “A mere 43 percent agreed their IT department were successfully becoming more strategic, responsive, and valued as a partner; 58 percent rated IT as poor or making only moderate steps, the report said.” IT: Think Digital, Think Business, Think Big

“respondents from a recent government study who have already used PaaS say they save 47% of their time, or 1 year and 8 months off a 3.5 year development cycle. For those who have not deployed PaaS, respondents believe it can shave 31% off development time frames and save 25% of their annual IT budget, a federal savings of $20.5 billion. As well, 90% believe PaaS is critical to data center consolidation goals.

“They initially planned for a 6 month pilot. With Pivotal’s help, we had Pivotal CF running in a surprisingly short period of time. It was installed within days. This is how modern applications should work! Then, our customer deployed a single customer-facing app to production. Instead of 6 months for the pilot, they decided to move beyond the pilot to a full roll-out after only 3 months. Now, we are in the process of ramping up 5 or 6 more applications.

Activist Investors - Andrew Lerner

“It predicts that global SMB IT spend – defined as firms with between one and 999 employees - could reach $597 billion this year, equating to an average of $700 per full-time employees and just over $8,000 per SMB business.” Global SMB IT spend heading towards $600 billion

The 7 “Deadly” Wastes That Could Cost Your Company

The Case for Cloud Foundry | @CloudExpo

“deployment timeframes have been reduced by 75 percent.” EMC Documentum Goes Cloud Native With Pivotal Cloud Foundry

RSA chief uncans insurance giant’s mega IT infrastructure review

“Show Me The Money!” - Delivering DevOps Value

Don’t just put old wine in new bottles, figure out if there’s something better than wine too: “How much of the current excitement – and achievement – of digital government is about making the old product better? And what might the new product be which will change the idea of government altogether?” The digital transformation illusion

“I got plenty of things wrong in the article, but I think the ensuing ten years have shown that the piece was fundamentally on target in predicting the rise of what we now call the cloud.” The end of corporate computing (10th anniversary edition)

VCE Study Makes Case for Converged IT

A Value Framework that Works for Transforming Your Application Portfolio | EMC

Bits or pieces?: An introduction to Wardley (Value Chain) Mapping

Cloud Native Application Platforms – Structured and Unstructured | Wikibon.com Cloud Native Application Platforms – Structured and Unstructured | Wikibon.com

“For those not familiar with the concept, microservices is essentially a software architectural design pattern. The fundamental premise of microservices is that value can be unlocked through decomposing large, monolithic legacy applications into a set of small independent, composable services that each can be accessed via RESTful APIs.” Five Things You Need To Know About Microservices | EMCInFocus

“Finally, CIOs need to understand if the juice worth the squeeze.” Modernizing Business-critical Apps for the Cloud- EMCInFocus

What’s Your Application Transformation Strategy? | EMCInFocus

“If a woman comes across as angry or critical, she is rated as 35% less competent and worthy of $15,088 less in pay than a woman who doesn’t rock the boat.” Getting Mad at Work Can Cost Women $15,000 in Annual Pay

The Lean Machine: Bringing Agile Thinking to the Database

When To Use Containers Or Virtual Machines, And Why

Healthcare survey in cloud use

Follow-upThe piece on “cloud journeys” I excerpted from last time is now posted. Tech & Work WorldCloud NativeI’ve been writing some pieces on “cloud native” of late. It’s a term we’ve been using at work to describe what we’re all about. Here’s an excerpt from an internal newsletter piece I drafted today: You’ve probably coming across the term “cloud native“ frequently. James Watters has an excellent post on the topic, but I wanted add some background for y’all here.

Mapping the Cloud Native Journey | Pivotal P.O.V.

The Forklifted Application | Pivotal P.O.V.

Welcome To Your Cloud Native Journey (Part 1) | Pivotal P.O.V.

Why EMC May Soon Buy Out – Not Spin Out – VMware

Why Must I Use Cloud Foundry’s Bosh? I just Learned Chef/Puppet!

2nd Watch Survey: Big Data, IoT and Cloud are Driving Digital Marketing

Recently, for my column over at FierceDevOps, I opined about doing ROI for DevOps. This topic comes up a lot as I note in my Pivotal post on the topic. Here’s a summary/excerpt of the three ways of thinking through it: 1.) Bottoms-up ROI: We know everything and have put it in this spreadsheet …if you have a good handle on the costs during some period of time where you were doing DevOps, and the gain that resulted from that period of time, you could come up with a bottoms-up ROI analysis.

“Twenty years ago, 61 percent of the Internet’s 35 million users were based in the U.S. Today, the U.S. accounts for less than 10 percent of the 3 billion connected people worldwide. There are now 650 million Internet users in China (compared with 280 million in the U.S.) There will be as many as 550 million connected consumers in India by 2018 (more than double the current number).” The Need for U.

“The site reports it hosts 25 million source code repositories, and has 10 million registered users and 33 million unique monthly visits.” No word in the article in revenue or enterprise sales. Git a load of this: GitHub now valued at $2 billion

Some charts on cloud platform and cloud project spend. Global Digital Infrastructure Alliance > Reports > Cloud Platform Choice: A Crucial Strategic Decision

“With this agreement, ActiveState loses the product it’s best known for. Copeland wrote that ActiveState will continue as a company, focusing on other products including ActivePerl, ActivePython, AvtiveTcl and Komodo IDE. He will stay with ActiveState rather than join HP. ” Next step in HP’s Helion transformation: Buy Stackato

Across “100 C-Level execs” usage at their company: “When it comes to the actual usage of open source software (OSS) in large enterprises, only 21% of them use it across the enterprise and 25% have deployed it in a business unit. The other 54% are either at the planning phase (21%), or use it for Internet-related programs (13%) or are running a pilot program to evaluate it (20%)” Open Source Usage in Large Enterprises

HP buys platform partner Stackato to beef up cloud development stance

“Puppet alone provides the basis for the majority of OpenStack deployments, at 56 percent. Puppet plus deployment tools that utilize Puppet (e.g., Mirantis Fuel, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, PackStack) provide the basis for 72 percent of all production deployments.” Reflecting on the OpenStack Kilo Summit and Looking Forward to Liberty

Analyst Watch: Macro confusion about microservices - SD Times

Building Microservices with Spring Cloud and Docker

HP acquires ActiveState’s Stackato PaaS business - VentureBeat

Randy Shoup on Microservices, the Reality of Conway’s Law, and Evolutionary Architecture

The Implications of Cloud Native

It will take some time to realize the full vision. Why CNCF? Why now?

Digital tech, not digital ads, is the way ahead says Starbucks CEO

Go ahead, be sarcastic Go ahead, be sarcastic | Harvard Gazette

Rackspace CSO: Work Together To Overcome Cloud Security Uncertainty

A regional deli supply company upgrades its legacy ERP system, which includes much custom coding from RPG to PHP: “The core ERP system includes product processing, sales analysis, and financials. Much of it was developed in-house, with the financials a customized version of packaged software from a vendor no longer in business. The system is very stable, according to Wolinsky.” TheLegacy ERP Conversion Under Way At Dietz & Watson

“In software, companies selling to IT have raised the most capital, then marketing, then HR, which is close consistent with software outcomes.” Why Consumer Startups Dominate the Megaround Market

Zorawar Biri Singh lands Cisco CTO post as firm shuffles its top brass

New Influence Quadrant shows ‘powerhouse’ firms in trouble

The Life Cycle of Programming Languages

Just in case you need a quick read on EAM. Fulfilling the promise of enterprise asset management

Get your lurn on - this weekend!Do you want to bone up on your product management skills? Check out this two day workshop from Craftman PM. I used to work with Prabhakar and he’s anything but boring when it comes to opinions around product. Check out more details, and if you use the code COTE when registering, you’ll get $250 off! Follow-upW AustinAs I mentioned last time, we stayed at the W in downtown Austin last week.

HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt and put on this tie • The Register

“IDC predicts the cloud computing market to reach about $70 billion this year and the number of new cloud-based solutions to triple within the next four to five years….the biggest cloud computing verticals worldwide will be discrete manufacturing, banking, professional services, process manufacturing, and retail. IDC expects the five verticals to represent 45 percent of the market’s total spend.” IDC: Industry-specific solutions to drive public cloud computing

“Dell Cloud Manager v11 features new state-of-the-art distributed blueprint support based on the TOSCA standard, simplifying portability and management of cloud applications and services throughout their lifecycle. New support for Windows Azure Pack and enhanced support for Microsoft Azure give Microsoft customers the first independent unified solution to centrally manage their combined private and public cloud environments. New automated scaling and recovery capabilities also provide added efficiency, helping to better satisfy service level requirements.

“For Q2, AWS brought in $1.82bn in revenue, which was 81.5 per cent higher than in the second quarter of 2014. The division’s operating income, on the other hand, was $391m, a 407.8 per cent annual gain.” Shamefaced Amazon admits to actually MAKING MONEY as cloud biz blooms

Accenture makes third digital acquisition in a month – buys Chaotic Moon

DevOps Gaining Traction In The Enterprise

A few weeks back I was on a panel for a Solarwinds conference (done all online, in Solarwinds style, of course). Check out the recording a above (or just a 1 minute excerpt if you don’t have time). There’s also an article covering the discussion. For some reason we started talking a lot about QA, which was odd, but turned out to be interesting. The audience for this was made up of Solarwinds custoners who are not exactly the types in charge of managing custom written software (my primary criteria for “should you care about DevOps), but from the live-chat there were some…and a pretty broad interest in the topic, in addition to complaining about Windows patching and n00bz users.

“By making Bluemix available this way, IBM will equip the developers of tomorrow with the capabilities and skills to join the workforce and create enterprise-class cloud applications at consumer scale, the firm said.” IBM open sources apps in the cloud to boost software development

Shows declining revenue for tech giants. Cisco CEO: ‘Brutal’ Times For IT Coming - Business Insider

Pivotal and Cloud Native Java – ADTmag

“One of our biggest assets … is that we’re highly compatible with what you already have, so we focus solely on .NET and Java. They’re the two most important stacks within the enterprise.” Apprenda Raises $24 Million, Makes Added Container Support a Priority

It’s fun seeing non-tech companies do this stuff. Also: “what’s in your dashboard?!” Capital One Out to Display its Geekdom with Open Source DevOps Dashboard

“Is that all?” - a good primer on how to read a press release. Container Competitors Google, CoreOS, Joyent And Docker Join New Linux Club As Kubernetes Turns One - Forbes

“I like to express it like this. Every team that develops with agility follows these steps: 1. Know where you are; 2. Take a small step towards where you want to be; 3. Evaluate what happened; 4. Repeat.” Increasing your Agility: An interview with Dave Thomas

Kubernetes container tech hits v1.0. Is that a Tectonic shift I feel?

Welcome to the age of cloud-native computing

Doing an RFP via a project in github instead of a Word doc. Behind the scenes of 18F’s agile contract

Not enough involvement and acceptance for operators, it says. Goodbye, OpenStack | /archives/…

“Just looking at the stats for The Verge, our mobile traffic is up 70 percent from last year, while desktop traffic is up only 11 percent.” The mobile web sucks

Some metrics and practices used for releasing, and QA’ing. The Practice and Future of Release Engineering

Dell is closely studying the EMC playbook

I’m getting the feeling that “on-demand” is the new synonym for “out-sourced,” but, like, highly automated with no middlemen and a mobile app. 35 Startups Providing Infrastructure For The On-Demand Boom

Little check-in on IBM cloud strategy with OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and misc.: “Perhaps more importantly IBM was explicitly positioning to the effect that not all workloads are Cloud Native, 12-Factor etc. Enterprise developers are not used to building or running stateless apps.” IBM Cloud: it’s the infrastructure, stupid

“You don’t actually send email or make a spreadsheet - you analyze, delegate, report, confer, decide, track and so on. ” Office, messaging and verbs — Benedict Evans

Reborn in the cloud Reborn in the cloud | McKinsey & Company

It’s mostly links this week, with a big add video ad for my pal below: Get your lurn on [player.vimeo.com/video/121… Do you want to bone up on your product management skills? Check out this two day workshop from Craftman PM. I used to work with Prabhakar and he’s anything but boring when it comes to opinions around product. Check out more details, and if you use the code COTE when registering, you’ll get $250 off!

Hopefully they’ll have the recording of the DevOps panel I was on up soon. thwackCamp 2015 - [Industry Experts Panel] DevO… | thwack

Think you can show DevOps ROI? Think again “What is the ROI for DevOps?” is a question that has been tossed my way frequently of late. There are numerous reasons why this is at the same time an absurd but also important question. Modeling DevOps ROI is absurd because predicting the gains and costs of a process, let alone one as new as DevOps, is difficult and dependent on all sorts of unique variables per organization.

Docker and the Three Ways of DevOps Docker and the Three Ways of DevOps Part 1: The First Way – Systems Thinking | Docker Blog

Docker and the Three Ways of DevOps Part 2: The Second Way - Amplify Feedback Loops Docker and the Three Ways of DevOps Part 2: The Second Way – Amplify Feedback Loops | Docker Blog

How Docker has made life awesome for SOASTA DevOps | SOASTA How Docker has made life awesome for SOASTA DevOps | SOASTA

Rackspace to sell support for Azure, meaning they’re not just about OpenStack. In its Transition to a Service Company, Rackspace Embraces Azure

More for the “Amazon competes with everyone” file. Amazon moves nearer Platform as a Service concept with new developer tools

It’s nice how they turn it around at the end. Here’s why you should expect airline disruptions to get worse

I’m in transit between Minneapolis and San Francisco right now. The MSP airport is delightful, with a long mall at the base and concourses reaching out, it seems civilized. Follow-upI had lunch with one of you today who said, “looks like you started up the newsletter,” to which I replied, “well, if I can send one more out and then not do it the third time, then yes.” So, here’s number two.

They say it’s an anomaly, high dollar and all that. Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Declined 9.5 Percent in Second Quarter of 2015

“Holy platform power, Batman, we just invented PaaS!” TechReckoning Dispatch, Vol. 2, No. 9. July 8, 2015

‘Unlocked Appliances come start at six compute nodes and 12 TBs of usable storage and go all the way to 24 compute nodes and 24 TBs of usable storage. Put two together and Mirantis says you’ll be able to run “over 1500 virtual machines and 48 TBs of usable storage.”’ Mirantis climbs aboard converged infrastructure bandwagon

GigaOm Research to relaunch, using the same federation model and such. Rebooting Gigaom Research

You have to read it a few times, but I think dude just pooped on OpenStack: “At some point in the future, it would be good to see other open-source frameworks take a run at OpenStack, since today I feel like they [OpenStack] are the only game in town,” Uretsky said. “We come from the open-source world and would like to be able to contribute a project that actually delivers real value.

Seems like the Nokia acquisition was a bad idea? “As a result of the cuts, Microsoft said it will record an impairment charge of approximately $7.6 billion related to assets associated with the acquisition of the Nokia business in addition to a restructuring charge of approximately $750 million to $850 million.” Microsoft Targets Hardware Business With 7,800 Job Cuts

Aggregation is the New Virtualization: How Microservices Are Taming Distributed Computing | Andreessen Horowitz Aggregation is the New Virtualization: How Microservices Are Taming Distributed Computing | Andreessen Horowitz

HP leads booming $6.3bn cloud infrastructure market HP leads booming $6.3bn cloud infrastructure market - IT News from V3.co.uk

Microservice Trade-Offs (Weekend Reading — The Developer Walk of Shame) Microservice Trade-Offs

Spring Boot and Dropwizard in microservices development Spring Boot and Dropwizard in microservices development

Create your own sublime plugin to get rid of smart quotes. Sublime Forum • View topic - Straighten Quotes option?

The Case for Startups to Make Radical Transparency the Top Priority - First Round Review The Case for Startups to Make Radical Transparency the Top Priority - First Round Review

Who is the Go Developer? - The New Stack Who is the Go Developer? - The New Stack

“There remains a confusion between Docker the company and Docker the technology. I like how the chart (right) maps out potential areas in the Docker ecosystem. There’s clearly a lot of places for companies to monetize the technology; however, it’s not as clear if the company will be able to secede lucrative regions, like orchestration, to become a competitive landscape.” As Docker rises above (and disrupts) clouds, I’m thinking about their community landscape

“Only 20% of mobile developers target enterprises, but 46% of them makes over $10K per month, versus 19% for consumer-oriented developers.” The other thing to note is how close we are to having “mobile developers” just upgraded to simply “developers.” Just out: [Mobile] Developer Megatrends H1 2015

Beards considered a career retardant: “For men, that may mean getting rid of a beard or mustache, since almost one-quarter (24%) of these managers objected to facial hair.” Other fun facts like don’t be a sour-puss. Want a promotion? Cheer up and be on time

A little while back I did an email interview with Ray Wang from iThome Weekly, in Taiwan. It’s a little piece about DevOps getting more and more into the enterprise. To read the Google, robot translation, it looks like I did some things “single-handedly,” where in fact I was one of many hands. As always, here’s the original email exchange we had: Q. You mention about software-defined business in your article, can you tell more details about what is software-defined business?

It’s been forever since a memo! Here’s this week’s. I’ve tried to craft a work-flow that will allow me to collect links I want to share, in addition to shameless self-promotion and the occasional commentary in here…and actually send these out weekly. We’ll see what happens. TravelI’ve been traveling a lot recently and have more coming up. The main thing is going to lots of DevOpsDays. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to speak at them, but the main part I like is talking with old friends and meeting people who are trying to sort out what exactly DevOps is and if/how it applies to them.

Occasionally, @TheRegister comments are more interesting than the whacky icons that marbled their jolly girth: Docker death blow to PaaS? The fat lady isn’t singing just yet folks • The Register Forums

Nice talk from James Lewis on doing a microservices approach to solving a banking system problem. Micro Services: Java, the Unix Way, 2013

What’s Pivotal Cloud Foundry have to do with continuous delivery? Fresh off presenting at a recent Jenkins User Conference on that topic, I ask Karun Bakshi to go over his presentation. We discuss how Pivotal Cloud Foundry helps enable continuous delivery and also some of the “deleted scenes” from his talk. The Agility Frontier - Continuous Delivery and Pivotal Cloud Foundry

“They started with 95 percent resource utilization in maintaining legacy processes, and a mere five percent of resources free to invest in new innovation. By the end of their transformation, just three years later, the percentage of resources available for new innovation was up eight times to 40 percent. In addition, with the introduction of automation, low-value and frustrating efforts such as manual testing, porting code, etc. were reduced to a bare minimum.

The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2015

I was asked to talk to do an internal, “brown-bag” style talk at a company this week. I chose to do a slightly more technical-oriented version of the talk I tend to give, commentary and pointers on moving your orginization over to relying on more and more custom written software to run your business. Here, I give a brief business context and then throw out three areas to start focusing on if you’re interested in cloud, DevOps, and all this nonsense.

My second column from FierceDevOps is up. It’s essentially a write-up of my DevOpsDays Austin talk (see slides here): a quick check-in on how DevOps is doing (good!) and my advice on what it can do to keep being successful. Check out the piece, tell me what you think!

Can DevOps declare victory yet? Not quite, but soon. Figuring out when a technology inflection point happens is always hard, if not impossible, in real-time. It’s easy to point backwards and say when ERP, agile software development, the Web, business intelligence, mobile or cloud suddenly became “normal.” I think DevOps is right at the door of that point, and as some recent Gartner predictions have proffered, we could see something like a quarter of all large enterprises using DevOps next year.

Chris Kemp speaking recently: “Openstack is not a product, it is a collection of projects designed to be productised,” he said. The companies making that effort today, he said, are focusing on large-scale opportunities. “Customer participation drives the change that customers want,” he said, and with not many users deploying OpenStack to date there’s therefore not much impetus for change or innovation. What is OpenStack?

And, when I actually think about what is going on, I’m using Microsoft Outlook on my Apple iPhone to read my Google Gmail. I’ve used it since back when it was Acompli. It’s good stuff! I’m looking forward to the desktop Outlook working well in OS X (I run the preview and last I checked it didn’t work with GMail, need to check again). What a world! Outlook is a good, mobile email client

Quick overview of the new OpenStack version. OpenStack Kilo Rolls With Network, Storage Upgrades

I’m always wary of discounting Office: the closer you are to the corporate world, the more you appreciate its reach, but on the flip side, the further away I get from that world the more I appreciate how much of Office’s importance is based on habit rather than need. Ben Thompson in his April 30th, 2015 newsletter.

Microsoft Corp. wants to reach annualized revenue of $20 billion in its corporate cloud business in the fiscal year that ends in June 2018. At the moment, it’s: The company last week said it has a current run rate of $6.3 billion for the cloud business, which includes its Azure data-center services and cloud versions of Office software and customer management programs. Microsoft targeting $20bn cloud business by 2018, currently at $6.

From the perspective of the xMatters engineering team, Serediuk and Dunn-Krahn told me they see themselves as a service provider helping the business and customers to achieve their goals. They got those super short pieces over at FierceDevOps. Organizational change is only first step to ensure DevOps success

According to data compiled by Pew Research for its annual State of the Media report, awareness of podcasts grew significantly last year. One-third of all Americans now say they have listened to a podcast; 17% said they had listened to one in the last month alone, as of January. You know, over whatever the survey base is (US), but Pew is pretty legit. Podcasting has something like 17% market penetrarion

From the data I have seen the number of production OpenStack deployments worldwide in 2014 was on the order of hundreds – not thousands or tens of thousands. Some criteria for “should I use OpenStack” as well. Is OpenStack a Success?

“But microservices want to bring you into tomorrow,” says Winterberg. “Microservices add a bit to the category concept, defining a service over all application layers, including the UI. So people already doing SOA may gain a kind of new freedom by adopting microservice ideas.” That freedom includes technology independence and an alternative to aging technologies, because individual services within an application can be gradually swapped out for those based on more-modern technologies, without having to replace the entire application.

The growth story was, like Amazon, all about the cloud. Ben Thompson on his latest newsletter, on Microsoft’s earnings.

My most recent Pivotal Conversations podcast is up. In it, I talk with Chip Childers of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Check out the show notes for a full transcript, or just take a listen.

The Flywheel Model differs from the Traditional Model in one fundamental regard. The enterprise sales team is exclusively inbound. They are explicitly denied the option of seeking business outside the customer base, and must gin up business from only existing customers. The enterprise sales team is an up-sell and cross-sell team. In fact, so is the mid-market sales team. Only the SMB marketing team is permitted to acquire new leads.

“The second-most-important category of business priority for 2015 and 2016 is technology related. This is the highest position we have ever seen for technology in this survey and it’s our firm belief that CEOs are more focused on this area than at any time since 1999,” said Mr. Raskino. “When we examine the subtext of the responses, the purpose of CEOs’ interest in technology becomes immediately obvious. Over half of the responses relate to revenue- and growth-related technology issues such as multichannel, e-commerce and m-commerce.

A number of trends in media have left most news sites catering to a new kind of reader. According to the stereotype, this reader doesn’t visit news home pages, relying on starting points like Facebook instead. This reader sees news as just another category of entertainment, an escape or time-killer, and believes “important news will find me”, not the other way around. News sites modeled on this reader are pressured to produce ever more content and expand well past their core competency, even when they start with a clear focus and dedicated readership.

Microservices is a modern take on software architecture, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using APIs. These services are small, highly decoupled and focus on doing a small task. The rise of Docker, the proliferation of third party developer tools and the increasing reliance on the cloud all play into the growth of microservices. Ben Kepes

At $13.4 billion in 1,020 deals, the first fiscal quarter of 2015 clocked in the most first-quarter funding since 2000. Investors threw 26 percent more money into deals than they did in the first quarter of 2014. How much of that is software and tech? The funding software companies received compared to startups in other sectors has doubled in the last decade, from 21 percent in the first quarter of 2006 to 42 percent in the first quarter of 2015.

The workers were told, essentially, that they were to be rewarded for collective achievement rather than individually. So instead of maximizing individual satisfaction, which often comes through competition with other people, employees considered their impact on colleagues. The theory, which plays out in the results, is that with relative rankings, top performers reduce their effort to avoid hurting their co-workers’ egos and to prevent schisms in the team. That’s kind of sweet actually.

Men apply for jobs when they meet 60% of the criteria, while women wait until they feel they meet 100% of the criteria. Words matter. Thinking about how you talk about jobs if you want more women to apply. – disambiguity

Even if folding your arms feels comfortable, resist the urge to do so if you want people to see you as open-minded and interested in what they have to say. That one’s the worst! I want to cross my arms all the time to relax but I know that with all the pop-psychology over the years everyone “knows” that means bad things. Dude just wants to relax his arms.

Interesting inquiry with internal IT dept of a major cloud provider that wants to use AWS, and not their own company’s cloud service. Old ways - and here, new! - of doing service management are just not cutting it. This is the state of IT everywhere

There’s a leap once he starts talking about crotches, but the rest is pretty interesting and helpful for thinking through making resilliant businesses. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Silicon Valley is coming. There are hundreds of startups with a lot of brains and money working on various alternatives to traditional banking. The ones you read about most are in the lending business, whereby the firms can lend to individuals and small businesses very quickly and – these entities believe – effectively by using Big Data to enhance credit underwriting. They are very good at reducing the “pain points” in that they can make loans in minutes, which might take banks weeks.

In answering what Red Hat has to offer partners, CEO Jim Whitehurst says: So when we talk about containers, we talk about, here’s how, if a customer wants to implement containers, you can offer solutions to help them do that. And when we want to talk about OpenStack, well, here’s how you can offer an OpenStack solution in a supported way to run production applications. Here’s how you can actually deliver products and services around DevOps with our OpenShift and PaaS offerings.

Also in 18 months, Fathers said, vCloud Air will have around 100,000 customers, up from the current “thousands”. Winning more customers will come down to increased interest in hybrid cloud, but also the addition of the NSX network virtualisation product to vCloud Air. vCloud Air Momentum

Fun with market sizing I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with cloud market-sizings, and occasioanlly on them. They’re always a bit whackadoodle and can be difficult to pull apart. But, so long as they’re consistent year of year, they do give a good intedication of momentum and a comparision to other markets. This is what you should be using emerging technology marketsizing for: just indications of which way the wind is blowing and how strong that wind is relative to other breezes.

(I originally wrote this April 2015 for FierceDevOps, a site which has made it either impossible or impossibly tedious to find these articles. Hence, it’s now here.) Quick tip: if you’re in a room full managers and executives from non-technology companies and one of them asks, “what kind of company do you think we are?”…no matter what type of company they are, the answer is always “a technology company.” That’s the trope us in the technology industry have successfully deployed into the market in recent years.

I’ve finally been able to realize that “maximizing” an experience is very different than eating/drinking/trying everything you’re given. If you’re privileged enough to have free food and drinks in front of your often, them’s words to live by. My One Year Anniversary Of Living In Hotels Full Time

View this on the web In this episode: who comes up the ApacheCon booths, a seemingly coordinated conversation about tech bubbles, and “how to eat.” The Cloud Foundry Summit is coming up on May 11th and 12th, in Santa Clara. It’s a great chance to dive into Cloud Foundry ecosystem both on the technology side and to hear how organizations are using Cloud Foundry to become Software Defined Businesses. Register now with the discount code COTE and get 25%, which will bring the price down from $250 to about $187.

The CEO of America’s biggest bank is worried about tech startups

Tim Bray explores why programmers so often start sentences Ed with “So…” On “so”

More on HP’s cloud re-positioning: “HP is not leaving the public cloud market,“ said HP in a statement to CRN that mirrors a statement given earlier this week to VentureBeat. “We run the largest OpenStack technology-based public cloud out there. This has to do with not competing head-to-head with the big public cloud players.” They’re going “enterprise” that is. And if you pay attention to analyst predictions and their surveys of what companies say they want to buy (mostly private and “hybrid cloud”), that’s likely OK.

I wasn’t told this was an option: “we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub.” The Psychology of Your Future Self and How Your Present Illusions Hinder Your Future Happiness

Here’s the tiny quote: “We thought people would rent or buy computing from us,” said Bill Hilf, the head of HP’s cloud business. “It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head.” I feel like there’s a lot of nuance to add that’s missing. However, analysts seem to think this direction is pretty correct. If there is a particularly weak spot for HP, it is in better enabling companies to write their own software applications, an increasingly crucial part of corporate tech where HP does not have much of a track record.

I think SUSE is the gem in that crown, at least last time I heard their y/y momentum numbers. Micro Focus guillotine will fall more frequently on Novell necks • The Channel - The Channel

Global cloud and data center-delivered managed network services doubled in size from $1,384 million in 2009 to $2,606 million in 2015, according to a report from Statista, a New York City research firm. While those seem like impressive growth numbers, the MSP Alliance has estimated managed services revenue generated by cloud and managed service providers (MSPs) in North America during 2014 equaled $154 billion. In addition, 451 Research predicts that the value of managed services from cloud service providers will grow from $17 billion in 2014 to $43 billion in 2018.

I find your lack of documentation disturbing. Lean Documentation, some tips

Java and JavaScript very popular. Coupled with the Eclipse community survey and the RedMonk amalgamation surveys, you’d get a good view of things. “Over 26k developers from 157 countries answered 45 questions.” Stack Overflow Survey 2015: Technologies Used, Loved, Disliked or Wanted

Follow-up, Follow-forwardThe column I excerpted from last time is up, over at FierceDevOps: Software-defined businesses need software-defined IT departments. Tell me what you think; they asked me to write a monthly piece, so I’d love to get some ideas for topics going: got any? I got some good feedback on the podcast sponsorship meanderings. Apparently, there’s pretty good money in tech podcasts. The next thing I’m curious about is if the advertising actually works…or how people even measure it.

View this on the web There’s few links today, just some pointers to now published material that I’ve alluded to recently, and some moaning on needing to be a better team-player. Follow-upWe got up to 100 subscribers, so good job there, y’all ;) As several people wrote, the word I was looking for in that discussion of lower case letters is “semiotics”, the study of symbols. The podcast I excerpted from on the operational needs of cloud platforms (and people who don’t capitalize words) is now up.

We are afflicted with the same disease. It’s hard (impossible?) to find a day job that is consuming so we look for other stuff to fill that void, which of course just makes us insane As one of my friends put it. Indeed!

I had lunch with Israel Gat yesterday. Lobster bisque in a sourdough bread bowl, to answer your first question. We were talking about the concept of a “software defined business” (and I was complaining about how HEB needs more of that, if only to get digital Buddy Bucks). The question came up, so will companies really do this “software defined business” stuff (that’s the phrase I like for “third platform," “digital enterprise,” horseman style jabber-jargon)?

Tech & Work WorldPodcasting RatesBrandon shared some podcast revenue estimates with me from the Hot Pod newsletter recently. I’m all for there being lots of money in podcasting, but they seem bonkers high: Then there’s Standard Broadcast Co., independently produced shows that hang a banner under the same ad sales network. This includes three of the most popular tech podcasts: John Gruber’s The Talk Show; Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa’s Accidental Tech Podcast; and CGP Grey and Brady Haran’s Hello Internet.

“At least half of the calls I take are clients that are either actively planning or are already actively deploying a multi-provider strategy,” said Mindy Cancila, an analyst with Gartner, Inc. based in Stamford, Conn. “I believe most organizations are going to end up with more than one public cloud provider, whether they realize it yet or not.” Two side-notes: Man, I hope we all start saying “multi-cloud” instead of hybrid cloud.

Tech & Work World“What kind of company do you think we are?”Here’s some excerpts from a FierceDevOps column I submitted yesterday. Quick tip: if you’re in a room full managers and executives from non-technology companies and one of them asks, “what kind of company do you think we are?”…no matter what type of company they are, the answer is always “a technology company.” That’s the trope us in the technology industry have successfully deployed into the market in recent years.

Follow-upIt’s been awhile, a little over a month. I hope to see y’all more regularly. I was reading the excellent TechReckoning Dispatch and thought: what the fuck am I doing over here? Tech & Work WorldMeanwhile, at work…I’ve been up to hijinks over at Pivotal. Check out my recent posts there: We did a round of briefing analysts on a bundle of announcements around Pivotal Cloud Foundry. It was fun being on that side of the table again.

After a thrilling Tweeter-thread on SOA vs. microservices, I thought I’d just playing with some old text, here: Decomposing an online store like Amazon.com, for example, into its fundamental piece parts yields a set of services - among them: a presentation service to deliver the HTML, a search service to find appropriate items, a shopping cart service and a credit card verification/payment service to check out and purchase items. While many speak of microservices purely in terms of RESTful services, it’s RedMonk’s view that RESTful services are not a prerequisite for delivering a microservices.

After two weeks away from home, I’m finally back. SponsorsThis Memo is sponsored by The Craftsman PM - Amp up your skills and get to the top at this Whole Product Workshop Feb 21–22 in Austin and Mar 7–8 NYC. Grab a spot at 10% off for just Cote Memo readers (use code: cotememo62) before it’s all gone: http://bit.ly/cotememo62 FRONTSIDE.IO - HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside.

Never mind journalism, it’s industry analysts who are being disrupted. I keep coming across a new crop of IT industry analysts who end up getting compared incorrectly to journalists. It’s little wonder as most people have little idea what an industry analyst does; it’s not like analysts, hidden behind their austere paywalls, help much there. People like Horace Dediu, Ben Thompson, and others are experimenting with ways to disrupt industry analysts.

Follow-upWe’re up to 90 subscribers and one of you went a helped out one of our sponsors (The Craftsman PM), so thanks! Tech & Work WorldSayulitaI had a nice chance to spend the week in Mexico this week. A friend of mine rented a house here in Sayulita and asked if we wanted to go along. Since I work remotely, so long as there’s a fast enough Internet connection, I’m good to go.

Follow-upIn reponse to the analyst access commentary from last time, a reader wrote in: Are you familiar with Securosis? They’re a security-only analyst firm. Their business model is pretty different – everything they publish is free, and make money through sponsorship and inquiries etc. They have a model they call totally transparent research. I don’t know how much they make – but apparently they make enough to cover themselves. Tech & Work WorldWorking at PivotalI started a new job earlier this month at Pivotal.

We’ve got a new sponsor this week, see below. There’s a 10% coupon. I’m planning on going to the event to get my lurn on. Also, I wrote this pretty fast. Pardon messups. Tech & Work WorldThe Problem with Analyst AccessOne of the core opportunity/problem diachotomies in the analyst industry is “access”: access to the analyst’s insights, access to the analysist content, and access to the analysts themselves. Gate-keeping this access is the basis for much of the business: paywalls, paying for consulting, etc.

Occasionally, my fellow analysts ask me for advice on being an analyst. Here’s an edited up version of one of my recent emails: Learn how to listen to yourself, focus You have to learn to trust your intuition about what you focus on, your own style and voice, and, most importantly for monetization, how you market yourselves. The last point is important for commercial success: in most cases, the (analyst) company you work for will do a poor job marketing you compared to how well you can market yourself.

Tech & Work WorldHaving an opinion, or notIn the types of jobs I’ve found myself in over recent years - analyst, strategist, “content producer” in the form of podcasts and blogs - you have to generate a lot of opinions. The best actually seem to really care about the things they have opinions over and can express, at length, why they think like they do. Think about the ATP crew or any of the other podcasts out there: they really care about Apple!

Follow-upThe Docker piece I mentioned last time is up. Check out the summary on my blog, and 451 clients can read it behind our paywall. Because Docker links always come in pairs, here’s the recording of the closing panel at DockerConEU, where I was one of the panelists. Software Defined Talk listeners will notice I’m wearing one of my recommendations. No Kirkland products, though, sadly. Tech & Work WorldWhatever happened to "