Category: longform
Essays, articles, and other original content.
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Coté Memo #074: \”Let’s start an anonymous club.\”
_It’s mostly links this week, with a big add video ad for my pal below:_ # Get your lurn on [[player.vimeo.com/video/121…](https://player.vimeo.com/video/121473651?color=01786e&byline=0&portrait=0](https://player.vimeo.com/video/121473651?color=01786e&byline=0&portrait=0)) Do you want to bone up on your product management skills? Check out [this two day workshop from Craftman PM](https://pgconsulting.com/workshop/). I used to work with Prabhakar and he’s anything but boring when it comes…
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There’s no easy way to model DevOps ROI
Think you can show DevOps ROI? Think again “What is the ROI for DevOps?” is a question that has been tossed my way frequently of late. There are numerous reasons why this is at the same time an absurd but also important question. Modeling DevOps ROI is absurd because predicting the gains and costs of…
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What does IT need to start doing to become a software defined business?
I was asked to talk to do an internal, “brown-bag” style talk at a company this week. I chose to do a slightly more technical-oriented version of the talk I tend to give, commentary and pointers on moving your orginization over to relying on more and more custom written software to run your business. Here,…
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Here’s how we can help push DevOps into the mainstream
Can DevOps declare victory yet? Not quite, but soon. Figuring out when a technology inflection point happens is always hard, if not impossible, in real-time. It’s easy to point backwards and say when ERP, agile software development, the Web, business intelligence, mobile or cloud suddenly became “normal.” I think DevOps is right at the door…
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The flywheel go-to-market model
The Flywheel Model differs from the Traditional Model in one fundamental regard. The enterprise sales team is exclusively inbound. They are explicitly denied the option of seeking business outside the customer base, and must gin up business from only existing customers. The enterprise sales team is an up-sell and cross-sell team. In fact, so is…
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The “purpose driven reader”
A number of trends in media have left most news sites catering to a new kind of reader. According to the stereotype, this reader doesn’t visit news home pages, relying on starting points like Facebook instead. This reader sees news as just another category of entertainment, an escape or time-killer, and believes “important news will…
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Team work bringing down the average
The workers were told, essentially, that they were to be rewarded for collective achievement rather than individually. So instead of maximizing individual satisfaction, which often comes through competition with other people, employees considered their impact on colleagues. The theory, which plays out in the results, is that with relative rankings, top performers reduce their effort…
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How the pull nature of open source changes your partner strategy
In answering what Red Hat has to offer partners, CEO Jim Whitehurst says: So when we talk about containers, we talk about, here’s how, if a customer wants to implement containers, you can offer solutions to help them do that. And when we want to talk about OpenStack, well, here’s how you can offer an…
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Software Defined Businesses need Software Defined IT Departments
(I originally wrote this April 2015 for FierceDevOps, a site which has made it either impossible or impossibly tedious to find these articles. Hence, it’s now here.) Quick tip: if you’re in a room full managers and executives from non-technology companies and one of them asks, “what kind of company do you think we are?”…no…
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Sizing the PaaS Market
Fun with market sizing I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with cloud market-sizings, and occasioanlly on them. They’re always a bit whackadoodle and can be difficult to pull apart. But, so long as they’re consistent year of year, they do give a good intedication of momentum and a comparision to other…
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More on HP’s cloud re-positioning, AWS financials
More on HP’s cloud re-positioning: “HP is not leaving the public cloud market,“ said HP in a statement to CRN that mirrors a statement given earlier this week to VentureBeat. “We run the largest OpenStack technology-based public cloud out there. This has to do with not competing head-to-head with the big public cloud players.” They’re…
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“Managed cloud” and MSP market-sizing
Global cloud and data center-delivered managed network services doubled in size from $1,384 million in 2009 to $2,606 million in 2015, according to a report from Statista, a New York City research firm. While those seem like impressive growth numbers, the MSP Alliance has estimated managed services revenue generated by cloud and managed service providers…
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Betting on the Software Defined Business for growth
I had lunch with Israel Gat yesterday. Lobster bisque in a sourdough bread bowl, to answer your first question. We were talking about the concept of a “software defined business” (and I was complaining about how HEB needs more of that, if only to get digital Buddy Bucks). The question came up, so will companies…
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s/SOA/microservices/g
After a thrilling Tweeter-thread on SOA vs. microservices, I thought I’d just playing with some old text, here: Decomposing an online store like Amazon.com, for example, into its fundamental piece parts yields a set of services – among them: a presentation service to deliver the HTML, a search service to find appropriate items, a shopping…
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The new industry analysts, again
Never mind journalism, it’s industry analysts who are being disrupted. I keep coming across a new crop of IT industry analysts who end up getting compared incorrectly to journalists. It’s little wonder as most people have little idea what an industry analyst does; it’s not like analysts, hidden behind their austere paywalls, help much there.…
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Advice for being an industry analyst
Occasionally, my fellow analysts ask me for advice on being an analyst. Here’s an edited up version of one of my recent emails: Learn how to listen to yourself, focus You have to learn to trust your intuition about what you focus on, your own style and voice, and, most importantly for monetization, how you…
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Docker: IaaS or PaaS? Reflections on DockerCon EU (451 Research)
As mentioned in my newsletter recently, I typed up a think piece on Docker (the company and the emerging ecosystem after it’s EU conference earlier this month. 451 clients can read it behind the paywall, but here’s the 451 Take: The ecosystem around the Docker container technology is in the process of figuring out Docker’s…
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“Hybrid cloud ROI isn’t there, and the complexity is huge.”
From Steven Sinofsky: As an enterprise, the pragmatic thing to do is go public cloud and operate existing infrastructure as legacy, without trying to sprinkle cloud on it or spend energy trying to deeply integrate with a cloud solution. The transition to client-server, GUI or Web all provide ample evidence in failed bridge solutions, a…
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Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces – think Amazon, eBay and Uber – that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to…
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Coté Memo #058: Cloud ads, amateur coffee drinkers, orchiwhu?
Follow-up Confirmed: ActiveState is far from dead ;) One of you notified me that maybe coffee isn’t so bad for your health – really, who knows. I hear eating a lot of bread was once a thing too. From the article: Why the apparent reversal in the thinking about coffee? Earlier studies didn’t always take…
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