From Tim Anderson on the London IO viewing party: I found the demographics different than most IT events I attend: a younger crowd, and plenty of start-ups and very small businesses, not at all enterprisey (is that a word?) That’s, as always, the thing to track: is Google changing to get into the enterprise, or is the enterprise going to have to change if they want to make use of Google?

In case you haven’t noticed, I have a few new podcasts that have been chugging along nicely. If you like my past work at DrunkAndRetired (OK, it’s not officially “done,” but we sure as shit don’t do much there anymore) you’ll like these two: Under Development - each week Bill Higgins and I talk about the software development, with a lot of “here’s some wisdom from an old guy talk.

I recently checked in with EnterpriseWeb and wrote-up a 451 report on them. They’re an intriguing company, with big ambitions. 451 clients can read the full report, but here’s the 451 Take: In the context of our devops coverage, we often speak about the ongoing need for new application development (appdev) approaches caused by emerging drivers such as mobile, social and cloud platforms. Cloud-native apps beg for different architectures than the classic, on-premises three-tiered approach, while the need to integrate with more services than ever has been charging along since the days of mashups-cum-composite applications.

Microsoft shot for consistency with Metro, putting the square interface on its tablets, phones and PCs under something it called three-screens and the cloud. Yet Microsoft was wrong to lump PC users in with device users, as it turned out neither customers nor developers wanted Metro on their PC – they hated it. There is a notion that Metro was a failure there, which would be good to see the proof points in (low Window 8 uptake?

One of the companies I’ve followed closely over the years took funding recently, for the first time. This short Analyst Note covers the funding, including this quick market overview: We expect to see more interest in the development space, driven not only by devops but also by companies’ increasing desire to use custom-written software to expand their business. Vendors like Atlassian are also riding this wave – Atlassian reported fiscal 2013 revenue of $149m for its ALM offerings.

Lot and lots of discussion about culture and culture change. This discussion has been going on since forever, and if we are being frank with ourselves, it isn’t going to change dramatically soon. So what to do? Don’t lets make the culture change discussion stop us from doing things. Have a go, fix what you can right now. “Hell is other people,” but don’t let that stop you

More than 10 million servers in the world are managed by CFEngine today, which is around a quarter of all of the machines installed, depending on whose estimate of the server base you use. Around 10,000 companies worldwide are using CFEngine in at least 100 countries globally. CFEngine marching along

“Causal Consistency”