Posts in "tech"

What does IT need to start doing to become a software defined business?

I was asked to talk to do an internal, “brown-bag” style talk at a company this week. I chose to do a slightly more technical-oriented version of the talk I tend to give, commentary and pointers on moving your orginization over to relying on more and more custom written software to run your business. Here, I give a brief business context and then throw out three areas to start focusing on if you’re interested in cloud, DevOps, and all this nonsense.

Pushing DevOps to the mainstream

My second column from FierceDevOps is up. It’s essentially a write-up of my DevOpsDays Austin talk (see slides here): a quick check-in on how DevOps is doing (good!) and my advice on what it can do to keep being successful. Check out the piece, tell me what you think!

Here’s how we can help push DevOps into the mainstream

Can DevOps declare victory yet? Not quite, but soon. Figuring out when a technology inflection point happens is always hard, if not impossible, in real-time. It’s easy to point backwards and say when ERP, agile software development, the Web, business intelligence, mobile or cloud suddenly became “normal.” I think DevOps is right at the door of that point, and as some recent Gartner predictions have proffered, we could see something like a quarter of all large enterprises using DevOps next year.

What is OpenStack?

Chris Kemp speaking recently: “Openstack is not a product, it is a collection of projects designed to be productised,” he said. The companies making that effort today, he said, are focusing on large-scale opportunities. “Customer participation drives the change that customers want,” he said, and with not many users deploying OpenStack to date there’s therefore not much impetus for change or innovation. What is OpenStack?

I’m always wary of discounting Office: the closer you are to the corporate world, the more you appreciate its reach, but on the flip side, the further away I get from that world the more I appreciate how much of Office’s importance is based on habit rather than need.

Ben Thompson in his April 30th, 2015 newsletter.

Microsoft targeting $20bn cloud business by 2018, currently at $6.3bn run rate

Microsoft Corp. wants to reach annualized revenue of $20 billion in its corporate cloud business in the fiscal year that ends in June 2018. At the moment, it’s: The company last week said it has a current run rate of $6.3 billion for the cloud business, which includes its Azure data-center services and cloud versions of Office software and customer management programs. Microsoft targeting $20bn cloud business by 2018, currently at $6.

Is OpenStack a Success?

From the data I have seen the number of production OpenStack deployments worldwide in 2014 was on the order of hundreds – not thousands or tens of thousands. Some criteria for “should I use OpenStack” as well. Is OpenStack a Success?