Version 3.5 of TaskTop is a dot release with some fun stuff scurrying around in the background. Here’s the 451 Take: Tasktop has done well in recent years as a pragmatic way to connect together disparate silos in the application lifecycle development space. The approach Tasktop is taking to better unify the process of getting software out the door is unique and encouraging, as its wide array of OEM partners attests.

Mike Olson of Cloudera on the Intel relationship: It genuinely is true that the important story here is the commercial relationship we’ve crafted with Intel. We go to market together, and that’s fantastic for us both—we reach many more customers directly and through our partners. We build better software that takes advantage of Intel silicon innovations, and get it into the open source sooner. Our customers get the best product earlier and get more value from their data.

Mike Olson of Cloudera on the Intel relationship: It genuinely is true that the important story here is the commercial relationship we’ve crafted with Intel. We go to market together, and that’s fantastic for us both—we reach many more customers directly and through our partners. We build better software that takes advantage of Intel silicon innovations, and get it into the open source sooner. Our customers get the best product earlier and get more value from their data.

My report on the cloud ALM tool Codenvy is up, for 451 Research clients. You can also sign up for a trial if you want to take a peek behind the paywall. Here’s the 451 take: The idea of a Web-based IDE comes into vogue almost predictably every three to four years, just like all-meat diets. This space is usually plagued with developers scoffing at the idea of coding in a browser, figuring that lag time and other performance problems will ruin their typing.

My report on the cloud ALM tool Codenvy is up, for 451 Research clients. You can also sign up for a trial if you want to take a peek behind the paywall. Here’s the 451 take: The idea of a Web-based IDE comes into vogue almost predictably every three to four years, just like all-meat diets. This space is usually plagued with developers scoffing at the idea of coding in a browser, figuring that lag time and other performance problems will ruin their typing.

I don’t know about counterintuitive, but there was a great piece of insight that Sam Zell, the real estate mogul from Chicago, said to me that really made me rethink what a big organization is really about. He said, as an entrepreneur, [he needs] as much information as possible. In a big corporation, people use information as currency. So they trade it. The more information a person has, the more power that person has in a big organization.

I don’t know about counterintuitive, but there was a great piece of insight that Sam Zell, the real estate mogul from Chicago, said to me that really made me rethink what a big organization is really about. He said, as an entrepreneur, [he needs] as much information as possible. In a big corporation, people use information as currency. So they trade it. The more information a person has, the more power that person has in a big organization.

Buried in this piece on Cisco doing some public cloud stuff is this little description about how the shift to public cloud creates a strategic threat to incumbent vendors: Cloud computing represented an interesting opportunity to equipment companies like Cisco, as it aggregated the market down to fewer buyers. There are approximately 1,500 to 2,000 infrastructure providers worldwide verses millions of businesses; reducing the buyers to a handful would lower the cost of sales.

Buried in this piece on Cisco doing some public cloud stuff is this little description about how the shift to public cloud creates a strategic threat to incumbent vendors: Cloud computing represented an interesting opportunity to equipment companies like Cisco, as it aggregated the market down to fewer buyers. There are approximately 1,500 to 2,000 infrastructure providers worldwide verses millions of businesses; reducing the buyers to a handful would lower the cost of sales.

The truth is, IBM has little choice but to focus on cloud infrastructure and applications and big data. IBM does not sell an X86 operating system, as do Microsoft and Red Hat do, although it does have WebSphere middleware and DB2 databases that some enterprise customers want. Moreover, the current strategy of exiting the commodity hardware business that represents the dominate platform in use by corporations the world over is, ironically as well as sadly, IBM’s only option as the world’s largest provider of IT services and one of the world’s largest and certainly most profitable system software makers.