This anecdote sums up an annoying problem on cloud marketing (and product management):
At the break I chatted with a somewhat bemused attendee who had come in the hope of learning about whether he should migrate some or all of his small company’s server requirements to Azure. I explained about Office 365 and Azure Active Directory which he said was more relevant to him than the intricacies of software development.
Posts in "tech"
“You guys keep asking about that [the IPO] . . . we try to slow down. I don’t think we could move any faster, I don’t think we feel any extra impetus to move faster,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said
“There is no time in the future by which it has to be done, it could never happen, we absolutely could do that. We are in the luxurious position that we have the two founders that are still in total control of the business, so when we feel the business is ready, from the perspective of our market and culturally, we can take that step.”
Converged infrastructure to grow to $6bn in 2014
Gartner, in its “Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems” report, a copy of which was reviewed by CRN, estimated the market for integrated systems, which includes single-vendor and multivendor converged infrastructures and hyper-converged infrastructures, will grow more than 50 percent in 2014 over 2013 to reach $6 billion.
Converged infrastructure to grow to $6bn in 2014
SwiftStack 2.0, used by HP Helion, going after enterprise storage
For one, it looks like HP Helion OEM’s SwiftStack, which is a nice partnership. Two, their CEO points towards going after enterprise storage:
SwiftStack founder and CEO Joe Arnold said all enterprise applications will eventually rely on object storage to keep up with growth of data and access points required by users. ”It’s the only way enterprises will be able to compete today and in the future,” he said.
Things are going bonkers in the cloud orchistration, cluster management space
Recently we have seen Docker cluster management projects appearing which are predominantly focused on managing clusters in a single provider’s environment. Clocker is designed to deploy and manage Docker clusters in a portable and cloud provider agnostic way. Clocker can even be used on-premise exploiting an enterprise’s virtual or private cloud environment.
Along with things like MesoSphere and PaaS trying to reinvent itself all the time, this injection of Docker into the “how do I run a cloud?
The problem is not that the various visionaries have their own jargon or even that they talk in acronyms. The problems begin when they come down from the mountain and forget to translate that jargon into common language. The point is not to sound smart to people who don’t understand the concept, but to communicate that concept.
Self-service IT to bring in $10m/qtr for BMC
MyIT 2.0 started shipping at the end of April, and is already off to a fast start with nearly $5M in deals during BMC’s fourth quarter — including major telecom, financial services, transportation and consumer packaged goods customers. BMC expects MyIT 2.0 will generate $10 million per quarter in revenue going forward, with pull-through revenue for other parts of our business.
And, back in my, the company said it had over 900 SaaS customers across it’s SaaS portfolio.
The hardest thing for most first-time engineering managers is getting used to the fact that the sum of your importance is now far beyond simply the code you write or the infrastructure you design. Your job just got a lot harder, you need to balance more distractions and learn how to keep yourself out of too many critical paths. If your first answer to every problem is “I can just bang that out,” you’re probably doing it wrong. You probably have more meetings to go to, at the very least you need to have 1-1s with everyone who reports to you, ideally once a week. All of a sudden, managing your time will become one of your most critical skills.
On Distributed Systems and Engineering Management, interview with Camille Fournier in MVC
Ode to Robert Brook, in so much as aping how he uses tumblr instead of Twitter
I have been thinking about that Merlin idea: “is this the group of people I want to hang out with an be associated with?” and how it drives long term career planning. Except for me, I think it’s “ideas,” and people in so much as they’re mediums for ideas. (Things have mostly worked out for me over the years here.)
Also note-worthy: all too quickly Clay Christensen raises and scurries past an incisive point in How Will You Measure Your Life?
Red Hat updates RHEL 7 for cloud with containers, Windows support and improvements (451 Report)
My colleague Jay Lyman and I wrote up Red Hat’s recent OS release, RHEL 7. Of interest to us, of course, is the work Red Hat is doing with containers. Clients can read the full report, and here’s the 451 Take:
In order to differentiate and draw enterprise interest for RHEL 7, Red Hat is wise to look to new technologies, such as containerization, and make them enterprise-ready. The company will need to find new sources of growth beyond Unix conversion and Windows defection, so its effort to link to other technologies and products – cloud computing, RHEV, OpenStack, OpenShift and devops – will be critical.