Gartner’s @cloudpundit has a great way of summing up VMware’s future-proofing problems when it comes to their strategy. tl;dr: they need to straddle two worlds, pre-cloud and post-cloud infrastructure. When VMware says “hybrid cloud,” that straddling of “legacy” IT and “real cloud” seems to be what they mean: That brings us to VMware (and many of the other traditional IT vendors who are trying to figure out what to do in an increasingly cloud-y world).

I am going to sound incredibly churlish here but why on earth Lionel Messi could possibly like our stuff is well beyond my imagination. Flattering though it might be. The same goes for the 20 year career short order cook who posts cat pictures, the retired person who joined Facebook last week, the nurse with a heavy religious bent. On and on it went. Long ago I tried some ads for RedMonk on Facebook.

Early on, vendors who wanted to compete with AWS would speak to the idea of an “enterprise cloud.” All the US Federal activity that AWS had been up to - including that $600m private cloud for the CIA - seems to nullify most of that. I think what will be more important is targeting the type of application supported: old school, three tier app that are statefull everywhere, or cloud native, microservices apps that are stateless (shoving statefullness of to caches and databases).

Smells like Agile in 2002: Your DevOps efforts will probably fail unless your entire management team buys into the required changes, and executives recognize that they’re going to have to change the way they operate, as well. Have fun storming the castle. Anecdotally, I hear fun tales of BigCo’s being befuddled by all the changes needed here. It shows why it’s vital to prove to The Business side that it’s worth it, which is always tough for such dramatic changes.

A summary of revenue: [HP’s] software division - IT Management, Application Development, Vertica, security and Autonomy - turned over $3.91bn in fiscal 2013 ended last November, down from $4.06bn in the previous year. With software, it’s good to focus on profits as well, as the margins are much higher. A common problem with large companies is getting cross-selling, inside and out of the company: “The biggest challenge for HP Software,” Youngjohns says, “is to get access to that broad range of HP partners and resellers, people selling systems and device solutions, to convince them software ought to be part of that proposition.

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.

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.

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.