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.

So we’ve built some first-generation integration between Chef and BladeLogic 8.5, which we’re demoing in our booth for the first time here at ChefConf. You can use BladeLogic to call Chef cookbooks and recipes on a push/scheduled basis, and you can reference BladeLogic compliance policies from inside your Chef cookbooks. It’s all very early and not production-ready, but we want to put this integration front and center with the people here at ChefConf and start a conversation about how they want to blend these two approaches to a stable, managed IT infrastructure.

Brandon Butler sums up the “old” (Linux) vs “new” (middleware and cloud) revenue stream for Red Hat The company gets about 80% of its $1.3 billion in revenues from a category that’s headlined by RHEL, and those subscriptions aren’t likely going away any time soon, says Joel Fishbein, who tracks Red Hat’s stock closely as an analyst at BMO Capital Markets. … The enterprise transition from Unix to Linux is fairly mature, with revenue from the RHEL-focused main part of the business growing 13% last year, Fishbein says.

After seeing one of the other SDN forecast studies referenced here, one of my 451 collegues sent some finding from our recent (August 2013) survey on software defined networking usage: TheInfoPro survey has adoption at a much lower level. Wave 10, based on 154 interviews and published August 2013, has it at 16% in use or in plan and 77% not in plan (7% didn’t know the answer).