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?

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.

Docker blasts into 1.0, throwing dust onto traditional hypervisors

One of our new, excellent analysts Scott Ottaway and I wrote up a report on Citrix’s Workspace as a Service portfolio and strategy. Clients can read the full report, but here’s the 451 take: Citrix reported impressive double-digit revenue growth and total licenses from its cloud service provider channel. Citrix also launched multiple new technologies – XenApp, XenMobile, ShareFile – as well as announced a cloud-managed Workspace Services option that service providers or enterprises can leverage to optimize, automate and more easily manage WaaS infrastructure and users while still maintaining the end-user relationship.

Demand for software developers remains high

Office 365 makes huge sense for many organisations, and is growing fast – “the fastest growing business in the history of the company,” according to Corporate VP of Windows Server and System Center Brad Anderson, speaking to the press last week Update on Microsoft’s cloud plans from TechEd

The 451 analysis of Cloudera’s acquisition of Gazzang is up, which I co-authored. Here’s the summary: As more Hadoop projects are moving from proof of concepts into production, companies are looking to better secure the data in those ‘big data’ projects. Cloudera hopes to grease the wheels by acquiring Austin, Texas-based Gazzang, a security vendor that specializes in encryption and key management for databases and big-data workloads. The target’s technology will be folded into Cloudera’s Navigator product, and its Austin office will become the Cloudera Center for Security Excellence, further building out the company’s security capabilities.

As the company scaled, the task of administration became increasingly complex, due to “call-back soup”, a common complaint with Node.js. Call-back soup