Category: longform
Essays, articles, and other original content.
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Creative People Say No
parislemon: Kevin Ashton: Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know. We are not taught to say “no.” We are taught not…
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Pivotal shows good momentum in helping build ‘programmable businesses’ (451 Report)
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…
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How to write an executive strategy memo
When you’re asked to write an executive memo, you need (to learn how) to be concise and to the point. When I was at Dell, working in strategy, I wrote many “executive memos.” One of the senior executives, including Michael, had a question about entering a market, buying a company, etc. and wanted our input…
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Dell’s end-user device management portfolio, KACE, has grown revenue 5x since acquisition (451 Report)
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…
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[Coté Memo #019] Selling DevOps, the WTF on industry analysts, champaign over health food
Meta-data Hello again, welcome to #19. Today we have 30 subscribers, so we’re +1. I’d love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and [@cote](https://micro.blog/cote). Sponsor Come check out cloud hijinks at 451’s HCTS conference Oct…
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That IBM/CSC partnership
The new offerings bring IBM solutions around SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service and BlueMix to CSC customers, including integrating them with the CSC ServiceMesh Agility Platform. The agreement will bring ServiceMesh Agility Platform to the IBM Cloud Marketplace. More: CSC said the IBM alliance will help the company grab a piece of Gartner’s predicted $210 billion market for…
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How Dell segments out the server market
As detailed by Dell’s Forrest Norrod: We typically think in big animal terms. The true hyperscale market is a very small set of customers, maybe the top seven to ten players. The scale-out customers sit below these, and include Web tech, HPC, and the large financial institutions for their quant farms. The core enterprise comes…
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Don’t confuse influencers with check-signers
Tracking the exact mechanics of bottoms-up shifts in IT is as hard as tracking “real cloud” spend, if not harder: I would listen to developers, but more likely an architect or head of development than allow the grass roots to start buying and using anything they wanted. I am not naive enough to believe that…
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“When have you crushed days into minutes for me lately, nerd?!”
Dennis reports on a refer SAP user group survey which points to difficult up-take for HANA. It seems like the primary blocker is coming up with justifiable reasons to buy and use the thing, a “business case,” as the kids say. On the other hand, the actual performance of the thing seem to be real,…
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Cisco’s 19 years of mega-growth
Since being tapped to lead Cisco in 1995, Chambers has grown the company from a $2.2 billion hardware manufacturer to a $48.6 billion network hardware, software, security and services powerhouse that’s more bullish than ever on becoming the world’s No. 1 IT company. Cisco had 3,827 employees when Chambers was appointed CEO. Today, there are…
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Zombies vs. Vampires – who would win?
One of my colleagues recently asked this question. Through a series of detailed logic-gates, we can conclude the following two scenarios: In much zombie lore, zombies don’t like to eat (long) dead things or even diseased humans (cf. World War Z, the movie). Therefore: vampires win because they’re immune. However, if the cause of zombie-ism…
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Serena Dimensions CM starts bringing devops to its enterprise customers (451 Report)
I had a briefing with Serena a short while ago around the new release of their ALM product Dimensions. They’re interesting to talk with because of their conservative customer base: so it’s a good way to track mainstream adoption of emerging developer practices. Things seem to be moving along nicely there. Since changing PE hands,…
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CA Technologies FY2015Q1 marginalia, experimenting with CriticMarkup
While reading through CA’s recent quarterly conference call transcript, I thought I’d try out an idea I had this morning: using CriticMarkup to DIY what Genius.com does: annotating content. It worked OK, except I didn’t invest time in getting the HTML output right, so it looks kind of crappy – you can see the raw…
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Microsoft estimates it has 14% device share
At it partner conference, Microsoft’s Kevin Turner portrays the company as having 14% device (PC, smartphone, tablets) share: In a world of 14 per cent device share, we have a new mindset: you have to have a challenger mindset. Everyone has to have a challenger mindset. Pretty astonishing if that’s the case, or near it.…
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EnterpriseWeb grows business with its enterprise- and cloud-friendly application layer (451 Report)
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…
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Some things that are poor businesses
Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers—obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities…
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The two cloud buyers
This anecdote sums up an annoying problem on cloud marketing (and product management): At the break I chatted with a somewhat bemused attendee who had come in the hope of learning about whether he should migrate some or all of his small company’s server requirements to Azure. I explained about Office 365 and Azure Active…
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SwiftStack 2.0, used by HP Helion, going after enterprise storage
For one, it looks like HP Helion OEM’s SwiftStack, which is a nice partnership. Two, their CEO points towards going after enterprise storage: SwiftStack founder and CEO Joe Arnold said all enterprise applications will eventually rely on object storage to keep up with growth of data and access points required by users. ”It’s the only…
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Red Hat updates RHEL 7 for cloud with containers, Windows support and improvements (451 Report)
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…
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