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Being in Brussels for Tivoli training (see waffles above), I ask John to give us his usual take on the character of the IT Management people he’s encountering on the road. We both agree that the European IT Management folks he tends to deal with tend to be extremely straight-forward, at least compared to the sugar-coating goodie nice-guys we’re both used to in America.
While there isn’t a lot of news to cover for this episode, I ask John to walk us through troubled economic times he’s been through in the past. More so than just targeting the effect on IT – and how IT can survive bad money times – I ask him how it effect IT Management.
After discussing that topic for the bulk of the episode, John gives us his take on the Novell plans to acquire Managed Objects and I reprise my analysis of as well. We also talk about the virtualization numbers out on Microsoft’s market share in that space, and John tells us about the uptick in PowerShell he’s seen, at least in one study.
Somewhere along the way we end up talking about BMC’s IT Masters acquisition of a few years ago, the new Hadoop startup (Cloudera – we outta get those guys on), Rackspace’s cloud announcement, and a few more items.
Disclosure: IBM is a client, as are Microsoft, ManagedObjects and BMC.
I didn't have time to listen to this whole podcast tonight, but I did enjoy the section on dealing with economic downtimes in IT. A couple points I definitely agreed with: temporary hiring freezes definitely create opportunities for independent consultants. I tell some of the SAP folks I talk to that now is a good time to contact those companies that always wanted to work with you but couldn't because you didn't want a perm job with them. 🙂
Second, also agreed that these tighter times can create interesting "bottom up" opportunities and it's a heck of a lot better to innovate something that isn't totally approved of by the chain of command than to hunker down and hope the pink slip doesn't visit your cubicle. And yeah, now is certainly a good time to outwork those around you, or at least out-innovate. Bad time to be goofing on the water cooler talking about your fantasy football league's misfortunes.
This was the first podcast I had listened to from this series and I will check out more, I like the relaxed conversational feel quite a bit.
Jon
Hey Jon I am not sure I agree with you. In many cases consultant budgets are the ones get cut. In the long run when firms start rehiring i agree consultants will be in good shape.
Jon: I'm glad you liked the episode. We'll see you around next episode 😉