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.
Posts in "longform"
"When have you crushed days into minutes for me lately, nerd?!"
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.
Cisco's 19 years of mega-growth
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:
Serena Dimensions CM starts bringing devops to its enterprise customers (451 Report)
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.
Zombies vs. Vampires - who would win?
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 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. The last is a topic I know less about than I’d like, but that never stops a analyst from talking about a topic…at length.
Pretty wide-ranging topics, but all trying to sort through what “IT” is becoming with all this cloud nonsense running around.
My connection was slow so I shut down my video. Enjoy milkman meets pie man.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
CA Technologies FY2015Q1 marginalia, experimenting with CriticMarkup
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.
Microsoft estimates it has 14% device share
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.
Recent podcasts
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.
EnterpriseWeb grows business with its enterprise- and cloud-friendly application layer (451 Report)
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.