Tag: bigco
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Growing eyeballs at Facebook, some product management tips
Some intersting history of how Facebook grew users. Of course, this the case study is for a free service, that focuses on a high volume of users. I.e.: not an enterprise sales business that charges $3m+ per user-cum-customers. Contextualizing aside, there’s some good product thinking: Better know what your product is good for: Knowing true…
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More on “grim” automation – Notebook
A few weeks back my book review of two “the robots are taking over” came out over on The New Stack. Here’s some responses, and also some highlights from a McKinsey piece on automation. Don’t call it “automation” From John Allspaw: There is much more to this topic. Nick Carr’s book, The Glass Cage, has…
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Meddling with Apple and Chinese Manufacturing
A nice discussion that highlights the complexity id trade policy and, thus, rhe high risks of fucking it up. I like this critique of trade criticism: What makes Navarro’s critique challenging is that it’s not wholly wrong, at least from the American worker perspective, yet it’s not particularly actionable. So often, that last part is…
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Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.9 out
The new version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (“PCF” as folks like to say) is out. It has a whole slew of updates across the board. My selective highlights: Google Cloud & Azure support, so you’re all multi-cloud ready (still with OpenStack, VMware, and AWS support). Will run 250,000 containers concurrently; in addition to scaling based…
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Michael Dell On Leveraging Dell’s Scale To Grab Share In 2017, The ‘Golden Age’ Of Information Technology
Integration talk, plus the idea of IT becoming BT: “business technology.” Link
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2% increase in IT budgets predicted
The big takeaway is that small increases in IT budgets are the new normal. Unlike previous recoveries, we have not seen a large jump in IT spending over the past five years. So if a CIO is only seeing a two or three percent increase this year, he or she should understand that is pretty…
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Oracle losing legacy software sales, growing (public?) cloud sales
Once again, the key metric of new software license sales was off—falling 19% to $1.35 billion compared to last year, and missing analysts’ expectations of $1.44 billion. On the other hand: “Our cloud revenue will be larger than our new software license revenue next fiscal year, when the transition will be largely complete.” And: “Our…
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On-prem still a big thing, Gartner survey
only 10% of organizations surveyed by Gartner are expected to close their on-premises data centers by 2018 Much of Pivotal’s business is on-premises, very much if it. However, most large organizations I talk with really want to get to much more public cloud as soon as possible. They look to Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s multi-cloud compatibility…
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All the things from re:Invent 2016
Lots of specific middleware – like targeting mobile users – and a VPS offering, among many other things. Link
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Not actually a DevOps talk
I get asked to talk on DevOps a lot. Here’s my current (late 2016 and 2017) presentation, going over the why’s, the how’s, the technologies, and the meatware that supports including some best and worst practices based on what Pivotal customers do. See the newer slides with big pictures on most slides, and some of…
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Book Review: two DevOps books
Check out my review of the DevOps Handbook and Start and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise over on The New Stack. Unsurprisingly, I liked both of them, esp. the second: What I find so helpful, and even thrilling, about Gruver’s book, is that it’s exacting in its instructions and walks through several what-if scenarios for addressing common…
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Getting Started — picking your first cloud native projects, or, Every Digital Transformation Starts with One Project
This post is pretty old and possibly out of date. There’s updates on this topic and more in my book, Monolithic Transformation. Every journey begins with a single step, they say. What they don’t tell you is that you need to pick your step wisely. And there’s also step two, and three, and then all…
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Enterprise open source montage
I cut the below montage-y overview of the history of enterprise open source from a Register piece I’m working on. Here it is! For me, the dawn of enterprise open source was somewhere around 2001 when IBM committed billions of dollars to shoring up Linux. Around this same time, the Eclipse Foundation (also launched by…
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HPE Software sold for $8.8bn, to Micro Focus
While HPE is getting $2.5bn in cash, the whole deal value is more like $8.8bn, the non-cash being stock. More details: The Numbers “Under the deal, HP Enterprise shareholders are expected to end up with Micro Focus shares currently valued at about $6.3 billion. Micro Focus will pay HP Enterprise $2.5 billion in cash.” (WSJ)…
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Deciding where the Docker ecosystem will make money
The Docker forking hoopla is providing an interesting example, in realtime, of how open communities figure out monetization. #RealTalk: Open communities are not immune to C.R.E.A.M. One of the most important decisions an open source community makes is where and how it will make money. I always liked Eclipse’s take because they’re mega clear on this…
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Questioning DRY
tl;dr Recently, I’ve been in conversations where people throw some doubt on DRY. In the cloud native, microservices mode of operating where independent teams are chugging along, mostly decoupled from other teams, duplicating code and functionality tends to come more naturally, even necessarily. And the benefits of DRY (reuse and reducing bugs/inconstancy from multiple implementation…
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Asking questions often leads to more work, for you
Most of what we do as white-collar workers is help our organization come to a decision. What new geographies to sell our enterprise software and toothpaste in, what pricing to make our electric razors and cranes, which people to fire and which to promote, or how much budget is needed according to the new corporate…
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Avoid fence painting by assigning homework
One of the more eye-rolling tactics of white collar workers is what I call “fence painting”: an employee somehow gets someone else to do work for them. This can be as simple as coasting off budget, but the more insidious practice is to get other outside your chain of command to do work for you.…
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Dead Horse Points
In corporate meetings, oftentimes one person figures out a problem and comes up with a solution. Equally often, multiple people in the meeting like the re-iterate the point in their own words, adding 5–10 minutes more to the meeting. Once the epiphany and decision is made, everyone should just close the issue, and move on.…
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Self-motivated teams lead to better software
This post is pretty old and possibly out of date. There’s an updated version of it in my book, Monolithic Transformation. In contrast to the way traditional organizations operate, cloud native enterprises are typically comprised of self-motivated and directed teams. This reduces the amount of time it takes to make decisions, deploy code, and see if the results…
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