I wrote a brief update on Pivotal recently, the full report is available for clients. Here’s the 451 Take:
Pivotal’s connection to the so-called ‘EMC Federation’ gives it an expansive portfolio, but we believe that Pivotal’s core message reduces to, “Hello, Global 2000 enterprises. The middleware stacks you use to build and run your enterprise applications are not so good. Ours is better, so you should use it for new applications development and to rewrite old applications.
Posts in "tech"
Dell's end-user device management portfolio, KACE, has grown revenue 5x since acquisition (451 Report)
I checked in with Dell’s end-user device management folks, KACE, recently and wrote up a report. Patching and all that isn’t exactly thrilling (but, as they say, necessary), however, it’s interesting to see the momentum the acquisition has had since 2010. Because we’d been collecting revenue from KACE over the years (thanks to Dennis), we could estimate what growing the business 5x looked like.
The full report which goes over recent updates, competition, etc.
Hey, biz bods: OpenStack will be worth $3.3bn by 2018 (Register Column)
My new somewhat monthly column in the channel section of The Register is up. It goes over 451’s recent OpenStack market-sizing and relates some anecdotes about how common it is to get outside help with private cloud installs. You know, of interest to people who’d be reading up on channel stuff.
One of the co-authors of the 451 report also has a nice summary up, available for free. The folks at Piston pointed out that you could misread one of the mentions of them saying that their customers require PS work.
[audio cote.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/u…_009.mp3]
Summary
Bill and Coté discuss trying to explain DevOps, DevOps metrics, and the processes used by designers vs. software developers vs. management consultants vs. wedding planners. We also go over the recently US Digital Services Playbook, which looks pretty cool actually.
Subscribe to the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/UnderDevPodcast
Your friends @cote and @BillHiggins
DevOps, what is it?
- Observations from the field - Bill has been on a tour visiting Kickstarter, Etsy, and IBM teams - what are they doing, how is it different, etc.?
- The US Digital Services Playbook. What is this?
- What is DevOps? Bill says “I use the term as a tool.”
- “What is DevOps,” from June 2012
- “Revisting ‘What is DevOps,’” from June 2014
- A recent presentation on DevOps metrics.
- Also, see Jay Lyman’s take and Jay and I’s guesting on a recent DevOps Café podcast episode.
IBM Design, Process
- Bill now works in the IBM Design Group now.
- What are “Design” people like? Ideation, post-it notes, user-centric thinking.
- Three schools of process: software development, design, management consulting.
Recommendations
- Behind Human Error, second edition - how companies learn from errors, why they happen, and how to move on.
- The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error
- Moral Mazes - Coté’s favorite field guide for working at a BigCo.
That IBM/CSC partnership
The new offerings bring IBM solutions around SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service and BlueMix to CSC customers, including integrating them with the CSC ServiceMesh Agility Platform. The agreement will bring ServiceMesh Agility Platform to the IBM Cloud Marketplace.
More:
CSC said the IBM alliance will help the company grab a piece of Gartner’s predicted $210 billion market for application services in 2014 and help continue to pivot the solution provider around as-a-Service solutions.
How Dell segments out the server market
As detailed by Dell’s Forrest Norrod:
We typically think in big animal terms. The true hyperscale market is a very small set of customers, maybe the top seven to ten players. The scale-out customers sit below these, and include Web tech, HPC, and the large financial institutions for their quant farms. The core enterprise comes next and includes converged, high-value workloads and volume workloads, and finally there is the SMB/value segment.
Don't confuse influencers with check-signers
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.
[S]ome outfits do still see coding as a risk to be costed, rather than a realisable benefit to be paid for.
Mesosphere bringing Twitter's infrastructure secret sauce to the Global 2000 (451 Report)
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.
My big ass report on developer relations and marketing
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.