Month: May 2015

Becoming a software defined business

I had the pleasure of talking at a small VMware event in Madrid today on the topic of digitial transformation. I was one of three talks on the topic and wanted to highlight how Pivotal customers are doing it, with some practical tips for the audience if they wanted to do the same. It was a short 30 minute talk so there’s not much detail, but it was fun talking with folks afterwards about what they’re doing, as always.

Give me less of what I want, and more of what I need

Enterprises don’t need a more modern data center. I repeat, enterprises don’t need a more modern data center. They need to to be able to leverage a variety of data centers that support a variety of services, and they need the I&O team to provide support in order to ensure efficient and effective service delivery. The I&O team cannot be defined by the hardware they own and operate.

Public or private cloud, pick your poison – Software Defined Talk #033

Summary

This week, we talk about some recent conferences and the ages old question: public or private?

With Brandon Whichard, Matt Ray, and Coté.

SPONSOR: If you’re in Brazil, come check out the Pivotal roadshows next week in Rio on May 19th and Sao Paolo on May 21st. Coté will be covering Pivotal Cloud Foundry and becoming a software defined business, there’s also Pivotal Data folks and content!

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Show notes

BONUS LINKS, not covered in show

  • Shingy’s in play! Verizon rumored to be buying AOL – also, some brief strategy theories: “Verizon needs a large-scale, fully functional, data-driven content distribution platform and it needs it now… Verizon is nowhere near done acquiring assets to help it realize its strategic requirement to turn information into action for advertisers and consumers alike.”
  • John Chambers retiring.
  • Citrix Synergy – speaking of CloudStack… “Today it has 1,900 active service providers delivering some 500,000 apps and services.” Looks like they have some general cloud management/provisioning stuff: “Mulchandani showed off the 110-step blueprint inside of the Lifecycle Management feature of Workspace Cloud that tells it how to deploy the XenDesktop broker to a production environment, and these same blue prints can be created for other applications – including the deployment of something as complex as a Hadoop cluster if customers want to do that.” And read a general update on CloudStack from back in April, include some quotes from Mark Hinkle.
  • Rumors of Yelp on the block – “That’s about $400 million raised from investors for a company that today has a market value of $3.51 billion. Yelp did manage to make an annual profit for the first time in 2014, but it has also still reported total losses of $34 million over its history, according to its securities filings.”

Recommendations

Moving up the stack

Hashimoto suggested that prior to Terraform, there could be an incredible responsibility placed on an operations team when managing production stack, as they had to deeply understand the current cloud platform(s), determine the current infrastructure state, and calculate the resulting state transitions. Hashimoto argued that some operators or DevOps engineers may want to ‘move up the stack’ and leverage tools such as Terraform to achieve their goals, in much the same way as many developers have moved from assembly language to third-generation programming languages.

The uncanny valley of Hamburglars – Software Defined Talk #032

Summary

Is there such a thing as a too creepy Hamburgler? We think not. Also, we cover what happened at DevOpsDays Austin, the identity management gap, and rumors about someone acquiring Salesforce.

With Brandon Whichard, Matt Ray, and Coté.

SPONSOR: Come check out the Cloud Foundry Summit, a great chance to not only learn about the cloud platform but also hear about how people are using it. It’s May 11th and 12th in Santa Clara. Use the discount code COTE to get 25% of registration.

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Show notes

Bonus Links, not covered this week

Recommendations

EMC’s Marching Orders

From EMC World:

This is how we set up federation: Build a digital agenda, go to cloud, go mobile and protect yourself. These things snap together like building blocks, like Legos. (Customers) get the speed and agility of a smaller company within a bigger company. To do this is not for the faint of heart, but the philosophy is choice, not to lock you in.

Also, the piece has some figures on R&D and M&A spend, as well as revenue for recent acquisitions.