They ran it at network.com:
While the Sun Grid has been an interesting alternative for large companies who might want to offload some of their workloads–such as the Monte Carlo analysis used to assess risk in investment portfolios, which doesn’t have any account information in it and is therefore not a big risk for a financial institution to let out on the other side of its firewalls–the Sun Grid is not supposed to be the utility that they use, but rather the utility that is the prototype for the ones that Sun expects its partners to build.
Posts in "tech"
Jaspersoft acquired for $185m by TIBCO
Enterprise software vendor TIBCO has acquired Jaspersoft, an open source business intelligence company, for approximately $185 million.
One of the older charting kit companies goes for pretty cheap to an established BI (and queue/middleware) company.
Jaspersoft acquired for $185m by TIBCO
The IT growth is from new shit, IDC says
According to IDC, the 5 percent IT growth it sees for 2014 is comprised of two elements: Stagnant legacy infrastructure growth (0.7 percent) and a high third-platform infrastructure growth (15 percent). Just to bring the point home, IDC asserts that a full 29 percent of 2014 IT spending and 89 percent of all IT growth spending will be in the third platform; of the latter, a full 50 percent represents cannibalization of traditional markets.
Under Development- new podcast on software development
I have a new podcast up that’s on the ongoing topic of software development, big and small, tools and practices, news and theory, old and new. I’m co-hosting it with Bill Higgins. I’ve talked with Bill Higgins for many years, and occasionally we’ve done a podcast episode together. He was in town a few weeks back, and I thought we should start recording our conversations rather than have them disappear into the ether.
The research reported in this book … shows that in the cases of well-managed firms… . good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.
What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets. This book derives a set of rules, from carefully designed research and analysis of innovative successes and failures in the disk drive and other industries, that managers can use to judge when the widely accepted principles of good management should be followed and when alternative principles are appropriate.
From the intro to Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, which remains an incredibly provocative read after all these years. (via chaddickerson)
Indeed! If you’re like me you were reading that thinking, “what new book is this?”
Nice overview of SolidFire
A good overview of what the software-heavy enterprise storage company does, including this assessment on market segment targeting:
SolidFire is very honest about not being built for the mid-market, as it feels that most of the middle of the market is headed toward cloud providers anyhow. Some may consider this a weakness, but I consider it a great strength. It has allowed SolidFire to focus on the pain points of organizations with large storage and storage performance needs, to do so with great scale, and to do so in a way that greatly reduces operational complexity and all the mental friction that usually accompanies that scale.
In the M&A world, you kiss a lot of frogs
I like this post on what filling up the deal-flow pipeline for VCs looks like. For example, a good bozo bit heuristic:
One of the reasons that a meeting doesn’t go well is that the founding team will say they expect $50 million in revenue in 5 years, but they have difficulty articulating how they’ll get to their first $1million.
Having worked on the buy side of the table (when I was in corporate strategy, working on M&A for software and cloud at Dell), there’s a similar story for what the exit looks like.
Red Hat jumps on all the right cloud bandwagons, focusing on new application trends (451 Report)
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Yeah, this should definitely be in 3D.”
No, what he said was, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” That’s what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential, and aware of your inexperience. And that’s really tough. There are moments when you’ll have a different point of view because you’re a fresh set of eyes; because you don’t care how it’s been done before; because you’re sharp and creative; because there is another way, a better way. But there will also be moments when you have a different point of view because you’re wrong, because you’re 23 and you should shut up and listen to somebody who’s been around the block.
Life Lessons in Fighting the Culture of Bullshit, Jon Lovett
It’s a good speech, no matter how old you are, for how to cope with working with other people which, we know, is hell.
BMC BladeLogic integrating with Chef
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.