“I’d like to see product managers, developers and delivery services folks active and encouraged to discuss how they’re going to adopt Compuware 2.0 in their products.” Also, see: http://www.wemakeitrockaroundtheworld.com/.
“This new [SaaS-based?] administration service provides daily activities related to the optimization, care and feeding of a Tivoli environment.” Sounds like a Spiceworks-like community around Tivoli stuff.
“We put together this cloud solution based on our Tivoli products — Tivoli Provision Manager, Tivoli Monitoring — and that’s really been the foundation architecture that we’ve been using in all our explorations of cloud computing.” See mobile talk t
After a month off, John and I finally get back. I start by asking John about the world travel he’s been doing for Tivoli training, asking what he’s been seeing in the IT management user-base in Japan, Sydney, and then Warsaw (with a little jaunt around Paris).
As Tivoli Pule is coming up this week, I ask John what he’s looking forward to, but come to find out that he’s canceled going due to all that travel. Nonetheless, I ask him to give a quick re-cap of sort of the three brand coming together at the conference.
We move into some news-y items like Zenoss opening an office in Austin, and then we I go through a review of the news from Microsoft’s Management Conference. There, it’s primarily about the System Center Cross Platform beta and Microsoft’s virtualization efforts. John asks why it’s taking Microsoft so long, and I spin up 5 theories, of which John likes “they can’t screw it up” best.
Disclaimer: IBM, Zenoss, Microsoft, and BMC are clients. For other companies mentioned, see the RedMonk client list.
Check it out: Doug is one of most accessible and “2.0″ enabled Big 4 guys out there. This post is all like, “hey, let’s talk, buddy.” Not much more of that going in that space.
“The assumption is that this approach will show the dynamic linkage between the underlying infrastructure components and business performance. In the big four’s story, such a linked view should provide business context to assess the business effects…”
“‘In last 24 hours, [I] have spoken with very senior executives for the largest tech companies in the world who view’ H-P’s buyout of the consultant and systems integrator as a move toward becoming ‘a more hostile, less friendly partner.’”
I’ve pointed to Spiceworks marketing a few times before as something worth checking out for other IT Management folks, big and small, old and young. Their product is interesting as well: essentially, a free, ad-supported product you download to do basic asset discovery, management, and then monitoring on your behind-the-firewall networks. Over the past year, they’ve been adding in more and more collaborative IT management features. First, forums where users could ask questions and trade advice. Then there was tighter integration to asking questions related to different IT assets and events.
Now, as the below preview shows, they’re working on ways to figure out applying crowd sourcing ideas to IT management:
Spiceworks has been around for pretty much as long as I’ve been at RedMonk - longer while they were in stealth mode - so I’ve been able to watch them “grow up,” more or less. Their mix of a targeting a small, underserved market, a price of “free,” and the ongoing community gardening they’ve done has grown them to over 325,000 “active users.” That’s a pretty good metric for success, and an excellent figure to shop around to Spiceworks “paying” customers, advertisers. I’d wager even people like Microsoft could figure out using Spiceworks as a channel for the System Center line without getting in the weird worry lines of competitive offerings. For example, Spiceworks still doesn’t do provisioning and updating - though it’ll tell you when you need to do it - an IT management task the Windows-heavy user-base of Spiceworks would probably look towards Microsoft to solve.
More interesting from my seat, though, will be seeing what and how Spiceworks does with their collaborative IT management efforts. There’s definitely a large pool of data to work with there and, even better, a passionate and interested community of users.
“I find it deliciously ironic, however that the GNU GPL3 has become the ‘weapon’ of choice for compelling consumers of software products into use of commercially licensed software.”
Nice sort of wrap-up of the state of being an IT management platform architect. Lots of WS’s in there. Note the cold-hard, pragmatic realism in much of the sentiment as well.
As mentioned several place, the last session at our RedMonk CommunityDay track was on RIAs. It turned into a fun and heated discussion. Thanks to Rachel Hill and Josh Marinacci, there’s a video of it available. The audio isn’t perfect it being all off the camera mic and in a giant room, but if you’re really interested you can pick up enough:
Also interesting, and with better audio is the “RIA debate” video (check out Carlos popping up in there):
Check out Sam talking towards the end about how “cloud” stuff can help accelerate business build-up in emerging countries. You can trade money for time to build out your own infrastructure - HR, back-office stuff, “paper-work” - and have “the cloud” do it
“We think we are a serious player in this game,”said Larry Orecklin, the general manager of the Windows enterprise and management division. “We want to become the systems management platform [in the enterprise].”
Figuring out how to measure the success of an CMDB install. Seem like a difficult nut to crack as you need the top, user-facing layer as well. Nonetheless, some good thinking.
“[A]lmost one in six households (15.8 percent) are wireless-only, meaning that at least one family in the household owns a wireless phone but there is no landline telephone.”
“Using FireScope’s new CMDB, IT organizations gain real-time visualization and documentation of their infrastructure along with a complete view of the interrelationships of the software and systems impacting those operations… “
More interesting than the approach is what do afterwards: “How can we Use each Strength? How can we Stop each Weakness? How can we Exploit each Opportunity? How can we Defend against each Threat?”
2007 IBM announcement about their cloud computing stuff. Sounds grid-y. “Cloud computing is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services.”
John Willis posted the below a little while ago. It’s sort of worth watching if only to see what the top brass on polar opposites of the tech world do when they’re on the same stage, crushing on each other:
Cloud computing is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services.
I get the feeling that “cloud” really means “middleware for SaaS,” which essentially means “stuff you sell to enterprises and ISVs.” How’s that one run up the pole?
Also of note: it sounds like IBM runs Google’s pay-roll or some part of GOOG’s ERP. Oooo! Burn!
Brazil launching its own sovereign wealth fund (read: has money to burn)
Why’s this matter for IT-land? Companies like Sun and others are gambling on emerging “leap-frogging” economies like Brazil to fuel their sales. Countries that sudden find themselves rich need IT junk and they need it fast.
On the other hand, there’s a chance to completely leap-frog the need for infrastructure and just go wireless with SaaS/cloud stuff. I honestly have no idea what that means, but my gut tells me it means something. Insert now cliché story of cellphone use in the third-world here for more pondering.
The Emperor carries no ID
Lastly, Ars brings this delightful tale about all of the US states ignoring a federal mandate to consolidate ID cards. In the States, for those who don’t know, each of the 50 states (and also territories and military IDs, no doubt) issues a drivers license and these are used as the primary means of identification (along with your federally issues social security number and, arguably, email addresses in the consumer space).
I don’t know the specifics, but the states were supposed to do something to make all these 50+ IDs more similar, compatible, if not the same. The 50 states completely ignored the mandate, and did nothing.
There are several take-aways here:
In case you didn’t know, Americans are live in fear of a single ID. I don’t know what our deal is, but we just quake in fear that we’d have one ID card, like it’d be the sign of the beast or something.
Take the enterprise architecture perspective: this is a great example of failing gracefully. The central authority mandates new policy - technology even - which the rest of the organization didn’t follow. Despite the complete failure of the “new technology” roll out, everything worked just as well as it did yesterday.
Vendors still have 50+ deep pocket customers to sell to instead of having them consolidate down to 1.
Man, if we can’t get this solved, how are we ever going to have web-wide SSO?
