We spent part of 2012 and all of 2013 building a private cloud in Virginia, Washington, and mostly Texas. This was a big bet with over $4 million in capital lease obligations on the line, and the good news is that it’s starting to pay off. On a cash basis, we spent $6.2 million at Amazon Web Services, and a mere $2.8 million on our own data centers. The business impact is profound.
"Postmodern ERP"
A fun phrase from Gartner to label ERP systems that can’t be evolved fast enough to do what businesses want. See “anti- Agility.”
“Postmodern ERP”
More on the IBM x86 divestiture rationale
As usual, TPM is extensive, starting with:
IBM is selling off the System x business, presumably because it is not profitable, but also because it is something it can sell while at the same time getting approximately 7,500 employees off its payrolls. Lenovo’s Peter Hortensius, who is president of the Think Business Group that sells servers and storage into enterprise accounts, said that buying the IBM System x business accelerated its plan to become a dominant system supplier by about five years, and would actually boost Lenovo’s profits once the deal is done.
DrunkAndRetired.com #183 episode up, in video form.
Here’s the audio only, and remember, you can subscribe to the podcast feed to get the audio versions of each episode downloaded automagically.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
[youtube www.youtube.com/watch]
Connected Culture and Oblique Strategies episode #003 is up, in video form. We’re working on the audio only podcast and all that, but you can see the three videos we’ve done so far. Here’s episode 001 and episode 002.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Dealing with industry analysts, for startups
Dealing with industry analysts, for startups from Michael Coté
Earlier this week I had the privilege to speak at HeavyBit, a developer centric incubator run by some ex-Heroku (and other!) folks. First of all, the premises of HeavyBit is awesome: for as important as developers are, there’s not enough attention paid to companies that are building developer products and services in the investing and incubation scene…so, let’s do that. If you look at the HeavyBit portfolio, it’s a nice collection of interesting developer-centric tools.
[new.livestream.com/accounts/…
This week I was lucky enough to be invited to a Dell hosted think-tank discussing how the application needs of companies are changing. You could also phrase it: “how is all that cloud stuff changing how CIO’s run their company’s IT?” It was a great session, driven by the discussion of the CIOs on the panel and well seasoned by vendors and hangers-on like myself. There’s also a bunch of stills here.
(Source: http://new.livestream.com/)
One of the more concise writeups a of IBM's 2013 performance that you'll see
Big Blue has seen revenue in its System and Technology Group drop throughout the year, with the division finishing out fiscal 2013 down 18.7 per cent from the previous 12 months.
Software and middleware revenues and sales in the Global Business Services unit rose during the year, but Global Technology Services and Global Financing also dropped or stayed flat.
Meanwhile, things are looking not so bad for IBM’s converged infrastructure product line, as TPM writes:
GitHub is the developer resume, so don't screw that up for your employees
“In many cases in the big companies and all the small startups, your Github profile is your resume,” explained another former Amazonian. “When I look at developers that’s what I’m looking for, [but] they go to Amazon and that resume stops … It absolutely affects the quality of their hires.”
I’ve been reading The Everything Store, the recent business history of Amazon. Given the culture there, it’s not too shocking to read that Amazon is not big into developers marketing themselves and getting involved in “the community,” as it were.
Privately innovating instead of publicly growing
When I spent time with other entrepreneurs, the feeling was ‘go public’. Now you have ‘stay private longer’, because then you can invest, innovate. The minute you go public, you have this incredible pressure to increase earnings every single quarter, quarter after quarter. I am not saying that is all bad. There are companies that are perfectly good for it, but it has a real downside as well.
Privately innovating instead of publicly growing