I met up with DataStax earlier this week, a company building a business around the Apache-licensed Cassandra key value store. the company is very bullish about the European market for non relational database technology generally, and Cassandra specifically. One swallow does not a summer make, but a couple of swallows and the weather might just be improving. Last week I hung out with Basho, a RedMonk client, which is also building a business on a key value store in the shape of RIAK.

I found the DataStax story interesting because it confirms so many things that RedMonk has described and predicted over the years. The fact that DataStax is moving to harvest opportunities in a market already created by open source, is very different from the traditional approach to building a European beachhead. In the age of open source first, developers make the market, and then commercial firms come in after the fact to sell associated services to keep ops people happy. So DataStax claims its really fulfilling demand rather than trying to create it. The initial investment is in sales so the play is in Stockley Park.

Basho on the other hand has set up in my stomping ground, Shoreditch, Where The Developers Are. The firm has sales and technical evangelists on the ground, and serious plans to grow the team, which could double or triple in the next 12 months.

One thing I find interesting in talking to both companies is they are going after Oracle directly rather than orthogonally. And apparently customers are responsive. Another company that selling against Oracle is 10Gen, which is also investing in Shoreditch, the epicenter of the London startup scene. One homegrown entrant in Shoreditch is Acunu, a storage management company making a play as a Cassandra packager.

Demand is growing for Oracle database alternatives. Enterprises see what’s happening on the web, and want to do the same thing. Many successful web companies could not scale using Oracle because of the licensing fees, not the technical architecture. This is Oracle’s soft underbelly.

Every industry has a problem stymied by expensive relational databases- take telcos and Call Data Record analysis. Or financial services compliance- where today expectations are for 5 years of risk data to be processed every day. Before the crash 5 days was considered reasonable.

Oracle’s most recent results were not great. And now nimble well capitalised aggressive competion is going after the core franchise… not just in Silicon Valley, but in Europe, in the world of telcos and financial services. The NoSQL market is still not well understood- graphs/key value stores/document databases- but its gaining traction in the enterprise.

photo by Lapatia

“We did this with Linux, we did this with Eclipse, we aid this with Apache”
– Robert LeBlanc, IBM SVP Middleware Software

OpenStack was founded in July 2010, when Rackspace Hosting and NASA launched an open source project to support cloud computing services for storage, compute, block and object storage and so on. With the rise of Amazon Web Services as the defacto cloud standard, everyone else was desperate to get behind an alternative. OpenStack was the answer, and it immediately exploded. Everyone wanted in, which is not always a good thing.

OpenStack continues to evolve, but it hasn’t been clear who the winners would be. Last week one of the obvious prospects, IBM, significantly stepped up its play to “own” the standard. At IBM Pulse 2013 executives kept banging the drum for OpenStack. Wheras in 2012 IBM rhetoric was that devops was a combo of Tivoli and Rational, something dramatic had shifted in the interim.

Pulse this year seemed like an event marketing an open source stack first, IBM products second. IBM was in full market-making mode. And as RedMonk has said many times before, when IBM says a technology is ready for the enterprise, then by definition it is. What company has made more money out of Java and Linux than anyone else? IBM, in terms of surrounding services. HP had stolen an early lead in OpenStack, but IBM seems to have wrested it back. IBM is going to deprecate some of its technologies in favour of OpenStack.

Who else makes money from Java and Linux? Why Oracle of course. So this week it was interesting to hear that Oracle is acquiring Nimbula, a talented engineering company that recently announced it was going to take the OpenStack pill. On the news I tweeted:

The Eye of Sauron Turns Upon OpenStack. Oracle responds by acquiring Nimbula monk.ly/ZIzt8n

— monkchips (@monkchips) March 13, 2013

I have had some pushback. Saying Oracle was buying a team, buying a platform, was not going to adopt open source for cloud. But I suspect that I am right. Oracle won’t be able to make a proprietary cloud management play, but it will be able to make a solid product play to embrace OpenStack.

With respect to the Sauron reference, I was actually talking about IBM as Sauron. Not in terms of evil but in terms of the Unblinking IBM; when Big Blue sets its mind to something, it is remorseless. IBM and Oracle control Java in some respects, carving up the market between them. This could be a market that shapes up in similar ways.

All that said, if Oracle was anxious to nail OpenStack it might have made more sense to acquire, say, Piston Cloud. Perhaps that’s a deal for another week.

disclosure: IBM is a client.

At the Cloud and Infrastructure Optimisation session at IBM Pulse 2013 this morning Jay Snyder, director of platform engineering at Aetna, gave as good a definition of DevOps as I have heard.

What does DevOps mean? Jay said:

“it’s a way to make the developer experience better. How can we help developers to build better apps? it’s about putting more power in the hands of the developer via automation.

We built something we call Developer Cloud. We virtualised the client… and put in the cloud. Then we took the runtime and put it there too – so we got consistency of development across QA/dev/test and production.

Developers get a fully functional environment in minutes.

1. how to make the developer experience better
2. how do we give our business execs choice? if they want to work with 3rd party app providers, with us providing value ads in terms of management… the same cloud infrastructure applies.

One of the keys was breaking down silos. Typically the Unix guy does his thing, The web guy does his thing. the database guy does his thing…. instead Wo we said you’re all cloud engineers.”

It’s great to hear a traditional IT organisation at a company like Aetna gets it. Its very refreshing to hear an IT executive talk about better serving developers, rather than just taking a top down operations approach.

To better understand this phenomenon, you should check out New Kingmakers, a book by my founding partner.

It’s also worth noting Aetna used an IBM stack to deliver this internal PaaS like infrastructure.

In case you missed it. I am an investor, advisor, and I guess cofounder of a coworking space called Shoreditch Works. I am still full time at RedMonk  and totally committed but I also have a local itch to scratch, and coworking is a great place to learn from developers. So on to the topic of this post.

Proposed changes to national UK planning laws are designed to make it far easier to change commercial properties into residential ones. At first glance the changes make sense in a nation of over-expensive housing… but any national policy change is likely to have unintended consequences.

“New planning measures will ensure empty and underused offices can be swiftly converted into much-needed housing to make the most use out of previously developed land.”

It’s hard to understand how a policy designed to support community and localism removes any control of planning from local authorities. One of the few powers local authorities have left after years of government centralisation is now also being removed. London boroughs are in a double bind, because they are largely exempt from new laws designed to support regional development.

In this case, the emerging Tech City cluster, building rapidly around Shoreditch, could be in jeopardy. Am I biased? Absolutely – as cofounder of a coworking space called Shoreditch Works we’re doing everything we can to support early stage startups succeed. Do I want to be competing with the London Loft Company? Hell no. But the real point here is that the reason the cluster kicked off is because we could find reasonably priced places to work. The kind of people building economic success here are not tied to the area – they chose it.

RedMonk was on the original Tech City map seven years ago because i found a place above a pub to work, and Dopplr joined us. These kind of spaces are likely to disappear pretty quickly if the loft conversion companies have carte blanche to cherry pick the best spaces to turn into expensive flats. Sterility though rarely drives economic vibrancy.

I want to make it clear that we’re not anti-housing. But we are very much about mixed use. You could say Shoreditch Works would likely to follow the Jane Jacobs model = The Death and Life of Great American Cities. That is, choose life. If Shoreditch specially and Hackney can’t support startups, then an awful lot of people will have to leave London for Berlin or Dublin.

Which means, regardless of the national merits of the changes to planning policy, we strongly believe that Hackney Council should be able to get the exemption it currently seeks. So the UK can benefit from economic growth in Tech City and Hackney at large.

There is an online petition here. But also, please help by signing this petition, deadline today, please print scane and send to: [email protected]

Rt Hon Eric Pickles MP
Secretary of State
Department of Communities and Local Government
Eland House
Bressenden Place
London
SW1E 5DU
United Kingdom

Secretary of State

Changes in Permitted Development Rights – office use to residential use

My company would like to write in support of Hackney Council exemption bid for the Changes in Permitted Development Rights – commercial to residential use

I strongly believe that this legislation will have a major impact on Hackney’s business community and the local economy – sitting as it does right on the City of London’s fringe. Many of our business locations would be adversely affected by this policy as the area is coveted as a residential location. This could put our business at risk and may potentially lead to forced relocation and loss of jobs for local people in an area where unemployment is already high.

We also believe that it is important to keep a proportion of the local building stock as a business district to ensure a balanced and mixed community; something that the Department of communities and Local Government actively promotes.

We strongly urge you to agree a full exemption for Hackney to ensure that the area remains a thriving business location making an important contribution to the economic prosperity of the Country.

Yours Faithfully

IBM is making a big splash today on mobile computing. Apparently the firm is doubling its investments in mobile. Beyond that headline is an interesting story.

While the IBM press release of course lists quite a few products in the new initiative, the reporting by Bloomberg really piqued my interest.

The company plans to announce today that it will combine a set of technology tools, accumulated from 10 acquisitions since 2006, into products and services for business customers looking specifically for help with mobile computing. The branding push, called “MobileFirst,” is the company’s “stake in the ground” as its clients shift their workload to tablets and smartphones.

So a messy portfolio, built through acquisition, needs cleaning up. Sounds like a job for Phil Gilbert, GM of Design at IBM, the guy that previously led a rationalisation of IBM’s business process management tooling.   Phil recently took on responsibility for design across the firm, and he recently presented at our Monki Gras conference. Video of his talk will be online soon, but let’s just say he knows a train wreck when he sees one. Gilbert doesn’t think beauty is only skin deep – products need to be redesigned and significantly rationalised. Any doubts into Phil’s appetite for quality should be assuaged by his investor status at Handsome Coffee Roasters, one of the best coffee roasting firms in the world. When I mentioned Handsome to my barista he was deeply impressed…

I believe we’ll see significant change in the mobile portfolio in a short space of time, with more agile development methods, plenty of customer engagement from design through the development process, 3 month milestones, with designers leading project teams. 

As I argued here, it’s Phil’s job to increase IBM margins by helping the firm build products that are easier to use.

MobileFirst is a really big deal, because it doesn’t come alone. Mobile first means Cloud First. It also means Social First. It also means Big Data First. API-first. You get the picture. When a customer has a problem they think is a mobile problem, it turns out its a Cloud-hosting problem, and so on.  Every mobile engagement IBM does with a client is going to have significant pull through in other areas. In that respect IBM’s mobile commitment is somewhat like its Linux commitment back in the day. IBM won’t make money directly selling a mobile operating system (it will leave that space to the likes of Google), but in associated revenue streams and product lines.  

The commitment to mobile will be transformational, not just for IBM, but for its customers too. And of course business process transformation is something IBM is well set up to benefit from. So high value services, and profitable, well designed product lines – that would really change the IBM model.

From a developer perspective I noticed a new partnership with AT&T in mobile – the Worklight mobile app IDE will now natively support AT&T’s cloud services APIs. This is an interesting story in its own right. AT&T recently showed clear intent to make a substantive push into API-first business by hiring another Monki Gras speaker alumnus, Laura Merling, a super smart cheerleader of the API economy, and effective team and product lead to run its API business.

I would like to see a lot more in terms of DeveloperFirst for mobile from IBM, and will be keeping a close eye on this.

I have been doing a sponsored series of videos with IBM for a while now- under the title Opinionated Infrastructure. I have been looking at a bunch of topics- automation, simplification, the importance of design in tech today. Well tomorrow my founding partner Stephen O’Grady is making an appearance and we’re doing a deep dive into some of our thinking on Analytics, next gen database architectures, the in-memory tech evolution and so on. Yes I will be using the word Big Data- indeed here I explain How to Not Define Big Data.

The format is a Google Hangout with me, Stephen, and the following panelists:

• Trident Marketing CIO –  Brandon Brown (@bbrownrdu)
• One Tree Co-Founder, Business Strategy Director – Panos Konstantindis (@panoskds)
• Revolution Analytics VP of marketing and community – David Smith (@revodavid)
• IBM OLTP and Data Warehouse Competitive Analyst – Dwaine Snow ( @DwaineSnow)

Talking to topics like

• What can we do now that we couldn’t do before? How do alliances, capabilities and integrations of technology allow us to derive new business value?
• Where do many companies stand today and how do they close the gap on where they need to be? How quickly can that gap be bridged?
• What new things are required? Do we need new infrastructures, software, languages, etc.?

I am looking forward to show because RedMonk itself is making the transition to become an analytics company. We live and breathe this stuff. Hadoop isn’t something other people use – its a critical part of our infrastructure. I look forward to hearing more about how IBM is working to help its customers integrate Hadoop into their data infrastructures.  

Its not often you get me and Stephen on the same show, so you should participate.

Options for participating

• You can watch the video chat live on the Expert Integrated Systems YouTube channel and use the#ibmpurechat tag in Twitter to ask a question or make a comment.
• Or join us on the Expert Integrated Google+ page to express a point of view, ask questions and discuss with others on the Google Hangout as the panel convenes live.
• Also we invite you to register for the chat on our Facebook page and G+ page.

How to Join a Google+ Hangout

1. You must have a Google+ account.

2. Add expert integrated systems to your Google circles and follow the event on our page.

3. Or, simply watch the live broadcast on our YouTube expert integrated systems channel.

In case you missed it, Monki Gras is back again this month.

We plan to explore Craft that helps scale Technology, or Technology that helps scale Craft. What are the limits of a craft-based approach? Does quality have to suffer as businesses scale?

We believe people, rather than industrial processes, create the best outcomes in software development. Monki Gras celebrates both tech craft and craft beer – and craft coffee of course. From agile to new application lifecycle management, devops to distributed development, developer relations to Social IT, Github to governance, we’ll be looking at what makes organisations effective in building products and services that users love.

You should come if you’re interested in how and what developers are thinking, and what cultural hacks they’re using to build great products people love to use.