IT Management Podcast #21 – Clouds are Stupid, Windows on EC2, Cloud Revenue, Reporting in IT Management

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This week, John “The Cloud to Everyone’s Silver-lining” Willis and I start out talking about the recent spate of cloud-bashing, from Messieurs Larry and Stallman. Partly in response, I point out a nice piece from Savio Rodrigues in reply to all this trough of disillusionment talk. Bouncing off some Gnip gnews, I ask John about the revenue for things like Amazon EC2: can you really survive off $0.40/month/customer? We also discuss the implications of Windows running in the cloud, on Amazon EC2.

Mid-way through, we’re joined by Zenoss‘s Brandon Whichard. We start out discussing the idea of “market-places” that I’ve been seeing getting attention of late (see yesterday’s debriefing that mentioned Zoho marketplace). Brandon points out the common theme here: the return of making money off software.

Having worked with Brandon over the years, I ask him for his take on IT Management (he having departed into Identity Management for 4 years and recently come back). After John asks about the next part of the enterprise stack to be commoditized, we get into a lengthy discussion of reporting in IT Management: it never seems to do perfectly what users want, why is it that?

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Disclosure: Zenoss is a client, as are Microsoft and IBM. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.