As newsletter subscribers may recall, we’ve been talking internally at 451 about how service providers could use Docker, or not. The piece on that topic is now up, and free for all to view to boot. Here’s the 451 Take: Given the gulf between the actual needs of application stacks and the ability of modern hardware to pool physical resources, there is an opportunity for providers to move IaaS forward for developers.

My report on SolidFire’s OpenStack reference architecture (RA) is now up. In addition to covering the RA itself, I was more curious to hear how the business had been going that is, “is it a thing?” As I put in my newsletter the day of the briefing, it seems like the answer is yes. Here’s the 451 Take: SolidFire’s flash-driven software-defined storage approach has always been interesting: It promises to act as a generic pool of very fast storage, supporting multiple workloads on each box, with different performance characteristics as desired.

After reading an, as ever, great, deep coverage of some new fangled piece of hardware from TPM, I got to thinking: I don’t really know how hardware analysts approach their craft. What framing and context do they use to understand, evaluate, and judge any given chunk of hardware? I’ve never been much of a hardware person (which was an odd strength while I was at Dell, being that I was there to work on software strategy).

A report I wrote on Intigua is up now. Here’s the 451 Take for y’all now: Intigua has always been a company with a difficult marketing proposition, having started off as a packaging and deployment balm for systems management agents. While there is certainly utility to ‘managing the managers,’ a broader positioning and purpose was clearly needed. Intigua’s new positioning as an enabler of cloud management APIs looks encouraging, and if the company can extend into ‘orchestration’ as a consequence, it can start addressing one of the major gaps of large enterprises that are ‘going cloud.

Back in my RedMonk days, I spoke with Zenoss a lot, so it was nice to finally catch-up with them again. They’re moving up-market and adding spending much time beefing up their back-end to handle the resulting, larger scale demands for a systems management platform in the enterprise space. The full report is available for 451 clients, but here’s the 451 Take: Zenoss has been undergoing much change in recent years.

Citrix has a new DaaS service provider survey out. I’m often overly harsh on virtual desktops and, by extension, DaaS. I’m always curious who actually uses this stuff, so the vertical breakout is interesting: The largest number of service providers who responded listed financial services, healthcare and manufacturing as the vertical markets they served. This is an interesting change in the vertical market ranking compared to the December 2011 Citrix Service Provider survey.

As Coté Memo subscribers know I’ve been working on a report on Mesosphere. It now up, as alway available for 451 clients. Here’s the 451 Take: As with vendors like CoreOS, Docker and Red Hat (and the work around Google Kubernetes), Mesosphere is rethinking the infrastructure needed for cloud-native applications. We see a growing demand to rewrite and re-platform the bulk of applications existent in the consumer and enterprise spaces to fit into mobile and tablet form factors and take advantage cloud infrastructure.

I’ve been working on a large (30 pages in lovely PDF) report on developer relations and marketing, especially, though not exclusively, targeted at people like cloud and service providers who are discovering the need to cater to developers. It’s published now. As with most of my work, I’ve tried to inject a bunch pragmatic, tactical advice alongside just enough macro “trends and drivers” nonsense to make the case for why you should care and then how you should start planning what to do next.

OpenStack Dominated By Tire Kickers, Code Testers – For Now

My overview of the Red Hat Summit is up now, for clients only of course. Here’s the 451 Take: Like many infrastructure companies, Red Hat used its recent annual summit to point out the importance of developers as the driver for the next wave of IT spending: namely, developers writing new software on top of cloud platforms, often using devops-like practices. We, of course, think paying attention to this space is wise as companies seek to become digital enterprises, using custom applications and cloud-based IT to instrument and boost their business processes.