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.
Posts in "tech"
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.
Red Hat revenues, old vs. new and early cloud momemtum
Brandon Butler sums up the “old” (Linux) vs “new” (middleware and cloud) revenue stream for Red Hat
The company gets about 80% of its $1.3 billion in revenues from a category that’s headlined by RHEL, and those subscriptions aren’t likely going away any time soon, says Joel Fishbein, who tracks Red Hat’s stock closely as an analyst at BMO Capital Markets.
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The enterprise transition from Unix to Linux is fairly mature, with revenue from the RHEL-focused main part of the business growing 13% last year, Fishbein says.
Infor ERP moving products to AWS - Press Pass
A few weeks ago, I talked with Chris Kanaracus for his story on Infor moving parts of their application portfolio to Amazon Web Services. Chris said this looked like a pretty strong endorsement for using AWS, and asked for my thoughts, which were:
Yes, this a nice vote a confidence for AWS. However, I think most SaaS companies would look at AWS as capable of being used like this. There might be questions about pricing long-term, but technologically it’s just a stack of middleware running on a bunch of servers.
VMware and Citrix team-up with Google Chromebooks to run Windows apps - Press Pass
I spoke with a couple of reporters earlier this week on the partnerships between Google and VMware and Google and Citrix around supporting Windows XP on Chromebooks. VMware has $200 off Chromebook discount for business buyers, and Citrix has a discount as well. Both are deep into vying with each other around the Desktop-as-a-Service market and interested in dominating that market which is looking to be driven by a pretty simple need: providing a way to use Windows applications on non-Windows devices.
HFT tech
To illustrate this point during the opening keynote, George Kledaras, CEO of FIX Flyer, which creates algorithmic trading platforms, talked about how impossible it is for people to keep up and used the day when the statements from the Federal Open Markets Committee of the US Federal Reserve Bank are put out. The entire cycle, from the nanosecond that the FMOC statement was released, including the transmission of trading instructions from Chicago, where the report came out, to the exchanges in New York, took 150 milliseconds.
HFT tech
To illustrate this point during the opening keynote, George Kledaras, CEO of FIX Flyer, which creates algorithmic trading platforms, talked about how impossible it is for people to keep up and used the day when the statements from the Federal Open Markets Committee of the US Federal Reserve Bank are put out. The entire cycle, from the nanosecond that the FMOC statement was released, including the transmission of trading instructions from Chicago, where the report came out, to the exchanges in New York, took 150 milliseconds.
Press Release Quotes
As an analyst, you often gets asked and paid to provide press release quotes (see some of mine here, though the I haven’t been good at saving all of them). Yes, press releases are still widely done and used. As someone who write-up the tech world happenings, I actually find them handy. Knowing how a vendor talks about themselves is actually important for analyst work, and the good press releases are more like media kits that line up all the relevant facts and links to other sources…and there’s all the bad stuff too, that’s still floating around.
PowerPoint and its infamous bullet points have been so abused in later years that the term “PowerPoint death” has become widespread, to the extent that some voices claim that PowerPoint is making us stupid or threatening our thinking and reasoning.
It’s understandable that as a reaction some very popular books published in the last couple of years about presentations focused on creating minimalist slides, with stunning visuals and little text. These decks might be appropriate for ballroom-style presentations before large audiences expecting to be motivated and/or entertained.
However, the vast majority of presentations in the business world are boardroom-style presentations in which these design guidelines have little application.
El Arte de Presentar’s review of Speaking PowerPoint. Indeed. I love that sentiment and always struggle to explain it to the children of Zen Presentation-think.