As I mentioned, a few weeks back I was in a recorded “think tank” put on by Dell which was, largely, about the changing nature of IT and how CIOs could go about managing it. For those who don’t want to nuzzle up to a 3.5 hour recording (perhaps with a six pack and some chips?), Dell has pulled some highlights:
“What do customers expect in an application today?” IT is facing competition for the first time ever The Web Of C-Level Relationships The Willy-wonky of Servers talks about “persistently, ubiquitously connected to the network era” And check out Barton’s omnibus overview.
Posts in "longform"
From a computer on every desktop to computers on everything, everywhere
These are the most important three chunks from Satya Nadella (Microsoft’s new CEO) memo:
Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation.
…
Our job is to ensure that Microsoft thrives in a mobile and cloud-first world.
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I believe over the next decade computing will become even more ubiquitous and intelligence will become ambient. The coevolution of software and new hardware form factors will intermediate and digitize — many of the things we do and experience in business, life and our world.
More on the IBM x86 divestiture rationale
As usual, TPM is extensive, starting with:
IBM is selling off the System x business, presumably because it is not profitable, but also because it is something it can sell while at the same time getting approximately 7,500 employees off its payrolls. Lenovo’s Peter Hortensius, who is president of the Think Business Group that sells servers and storage into enterprise accounts, said that buying the IBM System x business accelerated its plan to become a dominant system supplier by about five years, and would actually boost Lenovo’s profits once the deal is done.
Dealing with industry analysts, for startups
Dealing with industry analysts, for startups from Michael Coté
Earlier this week I had the privilege to speak at HeavyBit, a developer centric incubator run by some ex-Heroku (and other!) folks. First of all, the premises of HeavyBit is awesome: for as important as developers are, there’s not enough attention paid to companies that are building developer products and services in the investing and incubation scene…so, let’s do that. If you look at the HeavyBit portfolio, it’s a nice collection of interesting developer-centric tools.
Press Pass: PaaS in 2014 (Pun!)
Paul Krill asked a few questions about the future of PaaS last month for an omnibus appdev article of his (it’s a nice round up!). Here’s the only slightly edited full reply I sent him:
Q: Does 451 Group see 2013 as a banner year for PaaS? If so, why?
PaaS has always had the issue of being “big next year.” The nature of PaaS has shifted around so many times that it’s little wonder it’s yet to achieve escape velocity.
Press Pass: GitHub Traffic Analytics Comments
GitHub Traffic Analytics service gives developers insight into interest in their projects
Paul Krill asked for some quick input on GitHub’s newly released analytics. Here’s what I sent over for his story:
As the blog post says, it does look like fun, though pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. GitHub has been a major driver of getting the development community to care more about social interactions and collaborations, here, tracking who’s looking at your code and where they’re coming from - standard web analytics stuff.
Apigee adds usage analytics with InsightOne acquisition
The InsightsOne group has offered predictive analytics for consumer companies. It finds patterns from multiple sources of information. For example, Hasan explained how its analytics might help provide patterns in data from a fitness monitor but also health claim information. With that encompassing profile, a company may provide deeper intelligence insights.
One use-case area:
For example, there is the increasing amounts of data that people and machines create.
[youtube www.youtube.com/watch]
I’ve spent years puttering around at the “infrastructure layer” in IT: programming, systems management, cloud, all that gunk. From what I can tell much of the growth in IT is being driven by companies wanting to engage in “social” more. What is “social,” though? Indeed, that’s one of the things this podcast will try to figure out (hopefully with as much delightful rat-holing as Horace). Also, we’ll discuss my need for slippers that masquerade as socks so I can get them past my wife’s 2nd floor blockade.
Mostly though, it’s a McGuffin for getting to talk with Chris more.
On that note, here’s the video we recorded earlier. A podcast format with all the bells and whistles will follow.
We just having a working title now: Connected Culture and Obscure Stuff, which is much better than our original working title.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Good #DellWorld summary and take from @benkepes
Good wrap-up so far:
It’s a long list of news but I’m left wondering how substantive it will actually be for Dell as a company. I understand their new strategy of being a neutral player and offering a plethora of cloud services – but all these announcements run the risk of creating mass confusion for the customer base – with Dell’s sales force having to articulate a value proposition that differentiates between all these different partnerships, customers could well be left scratching their heads.
Good #DellWorld summary and take from @benkepes
Good wrap-up so far:
It’s a long list of news but I’m left wondering how substantive it will actually be for Dell as a company. I understand their new strategy of being a neutral player and offering a plethora of cloud services – but all these announcements run the risk of creating mass confusion for the customer base – with Dell’s sales force having to articulate a value proposition that differentiates between all these different partnerships, customers could well be left scratching their heads.