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).
Posts in "BigCo"
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.
Facebook ads don't work too well for "enterprise" types
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.
The "Enterprise Cloud"
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).
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/
Pivotal shows good momentum in helping build 'programmable businesses' (451 Report)
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.
Dell's end-user device management portfolio, KACE, has grown revenue 5x since acquisition (451 Report)
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.
How to write an executive strategy memo
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]
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.?
- The US Digital Services Playbook. What is this?
- What is DevOps? Bill says “I use the term as a tool.”
- “What is DevOps,” from June 2012
- “Revisting ‘What is DevOps,’” from June 2014
- A recent presentation on DevOps metrics.
- Also, see Jay Lyman’s take and Jay and I’s guesting on a recent DevOps Café podcast episode.
IBM Design, Process
- Bill now works in the IBM Design Group now.
- What are “Design” people like? Ideation, post-it notes, user-centric thinking.
- Three schools of process: software development, design, management consulting.
Recommendations
- Behind Human Error, second edition - how companies learn from errors, why they happen, and how to move on.
- The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error
- Moral Mazes - Coté’s favorite field guide for working at a BigCo.
That IBM/CSC partnership
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.