“We have already slashed the time needed to implement new ideas by 70 percent while avoiding hundreds of millions of dollars in costs.” M. Wes Haga, Chief of Mission Applications and Infrastructure Programs for Air Force Research Lab
Slowly but surely, the US government is improving how they do software. Working at Pivotal, I’m lucky to see some of this change and talk with the people who’ve actually done it.
Posts in "longform"
Building trust with internal marketing, large and small
Most companies don’t realize the amount of work required to fully transform their approach to creating and caring for software. Scaling up the improvements learned and put into place by your initial teams relies on building trust and understanding in the overall organization. For whatever reason, most people in large organizations are resistant to change and, what with the frequent introduction of process improvement programs, skeptical of the flavor of the week of the syndrome.
So what exactly should IBM do, and have done?
Now that IBM has ended its revenue losing streak, we’re ready to stick a halo on it:
There is no doubt, though, that there are signs of progress at IBM, which would not comment on its financial picture before the release of the earning report. So much attention is focused on the company’s top line because revenue is the broadest measure of the headway IBM is making in a difficult transformation toward cloud computing, data handling and A.
A more pragmatic morality
The capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum.
We fear change - staff resistant to digital transformation
Introducing new technology in the workplace is making the majority of people - three in five - feel anxious while the same number have concerns over whether their job is safe when it comes to tasks being automated. And half of staff express such fears about change when businesses introduce any "digital transformation" projects, the study by Goldsmiths University and YouGov found and more than a quarter of business leaders said they meet "
IBM’s new Private Cloud Stack, it’s got the Kubernetes & Containers
This week, Big Blue rolled out its new IBM Cloud Private software platform that is designed to enable enterprises to develop on-premises private cloud environments to accelerate app development and allow for easier movement of workloads between their private clouds and public clouds – not only the IBM Cloud but also those from other vendors. Similarly, IBM is leaning on open and container-based technologies for enhanced integration and portability of workloads.
Better details on the Cisco/Google partnership around kubernetes and Istio
The cloud initiative combines Google’s de facto standard Kubernetes cluster orchestration platform for managing applications and services across hybrid infrastructure with Cisco’s networking and security expertise. It also leverages Cisco’s push into hyper-converged infrastructure. Along with extending security to application containers and other micro-services, the deal would allow users to monitor application behavior running on hybrid platforms, the partners said. The other pillar of the collaboration is Istio, another open source tool released earlier this year to help manage micro-services via what developers call a “service mesh network.
People get upset when others make more money, and they don’t
Between 1990 and 2010 the rate of economic convergence across American states slowed to less than half what it had been between 1880 and 1980. It has since fallen close to zero. Rich cities started pulling away from less well-off counterparts (see chart 1). According to the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, in the decade to 2015 productivity growth in American metropolitan areas was highest in the top 10% and the bottom 20% (where, by definition, the baseline was low).
Atlassian revenue up 47% y/y
The enterprise collaboration software vendor said it earned 12 cents a share, three cents ahead of the consensus estimate. Revenue climbed 41.7% year over year to $193.8 million, also above the $185.8 million analysts had forecasted. You know what they say: developers don’t pay for anything.
Someone either needs to acquire Atlassian, it has to start acquiring companies, or if the private cloud thing becomes cemented, they need to work with the public cloud three to build out the private cloud toolchain.
Oracle’s public cloud momentum
Oracle reports its PaaS and IaaS revenue together, which makes understanding its IaaS growth difficult. FY16 to FY17 revenue increased from $0.9bn to $1.4bn, equivalent to 60% YoY growth. The company claims to have added 14,000 IaaS and PaaS customers to OCI since its inception, almost all of them existing customers of its licensed software. Oracle’s overall revenue in 2016 was $37bn, so IaaS and PaaS still represent a small slice of the pie.