IT Management & Cloud Podcast #42 – Good Old Fashioned IT Management

Update: I had the filename all whacky but have fixed this now. The podcast download was working, but the direct link and player below were broken. Everything works now. Here’s the episode.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week, traditional IT Management seems to dominate our discussion, which is kind of refreshing for how much glad talk we’ve been doing of late. We discuss:

• IBM Impact has been going on this week in Las Vegas. After explaining what that is and skirting around our light coverage of it (neither of us was there, though RedMonker James Governor has been there all week) we discuss how IBM acquisitions have been generalizing the conferences. This also leads us into a discussion about conferences in general I’ve been having a lot recently: large vendors are looking to get into doing more, smaller conferences. John reports on hearing about how the crowds went wild at the prospect of “never having to install WebSphere again.”
• “Enterprise” means (a.) complexity and high performance, but also, (b.) accepting and dealing with old stuff, legacy.
• This gets us into talk of disruption – Kindle driving more book sales – but can tech companies defend against tech disruption.
• Nagios forked to ICINGA. GroundWork’s take, and the Open Sourcers’ Dilemma.
• SpringSource buys Hyperic – John and I go in-depth, covering who SpringSource is and the happy-path for IT department shopping at SpringSource + Covalent + Hyperic. The general up-shot between the two of us is pretty positive, actually. Coté is wrangle up some scheduling to talk with SpringSource, so perhaps there’ll be an update/clarification.
• Citrix Synergy was also this week in Las Vegas – there’s a helpful links wrap-up page from them. Their Dazzle cloud service-catalog (as we understand it) looks interesting. Also, on the cloud front, it sounds like they’re adding Application Virtualization into their cloud bucket, C3.
• Coté is a judge for the Microsoft Azure contest, which should be fun for seeing the types of applications people will be building on Microsoft’s PaaS. Also, see Jeffrey Schwartz’s story on the topic. (For more on Azure, check out the interviews from MIX09.)
• John re-caps what he’s heard about the Federal Summit on Cloud – he strongly recommends Ruv’s write-up. As he said over in Twitter, “I can’t believe how high a priority cloud computing is for the new IT agenda in Washington. The fact there is a Cloud Czar says it all.” Of note is that the (US) government now has a definition of for “cloud computing.”
• Tap In Systems – we’ve both been hearing about this outfit. RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady is setting up a briefing with them, so perhaps we’ll have more to report next time.
• Conformity – identity life-cycle management for SaaS applications – more details here.
• Spiceworks 4.0 – in alpha now, very interesting: help desk, portal, network map.
• John notices an ousting at SugarCRM, of John Roberts – I get John to explain what SugarCRM does.
• Phurnace migrations – this gets us to talking about IBM in Amazon EC2. John likes the pay-as-you go pricing that’s relatively new.
• We recap the (in)famous McKinsey cloud report.
• John will be at Interop – embracing the cloud, cloud summit session. May 19th and 20th.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, Spiceworks, Hyperic, SpringSource, and GroundWorks are clients.