Recently, I say down with Tabrez Syed of Spiceworks to go over their most recent version, Spiceworks 4.0. In introducing himself, Tabrez speaks to the mixed role he has at Spiceworks, a combination of traditional product management and the newer practices of community management. As we discuss Spiceworks more, it's interesting to see how these two roles play out. To that end, I ask Tabrez to give us an overview of Spiceworks itself. More than just the asset discovery, monitoring, help-desk, and reporting, Spiceworks also incorporates the thriving community (over 700,000 users) around the product.

Focusing in on the community aspects, I ask Tabrez to characterize the folks in the community: what types of IT shops and organizations are they? Being in the small and medium business category, these folks are often balancing both the technical requirements and small pools of cash and time.

We then go over the new features in Spiceworks 4.0. Starting with help desk improvements., Tabrez goes over the workflow changes to enable better colloboration and covers the email "command line" functionality they've added so that users can work with tickets on their phones. He also goes over the user-centric portal that Spiceworks 4.0 offers, giving the start of a knowledge base and a way to encourage self-service IT. Finally, we go over one of the most highly requested features, the network map which shows a visual network topology.

Also, check out the demo.

Disclosure: Spiceworks is a client.

While at the Silverlight 3.0 launch event last week, I had the chance to talk with Microsoft's Brad Becker, who you might recall from a past RIA Weekly episode. We start out with a quick overview of the announcements on Silverlight 3.0 and Expression, and then get into the details of each.

Starting with the whole collection, I note that there seems to be a definite "Silverlight stack," composed of the Silverlight runtime, VisualStudio, and then Expression. As Brad ads, IIS and Windows Media are in there as well.

These last parts of the Silverlight stack, get us into a discussion of the video features in Silverlight such as Smooth Streaming. I was curious to hear what the experience was like for getting video hooked up into Silverlight, so I asked Brad to give me an overview. Shiftly slightly to the non-video part of Silverlight, we then discuss the interactive widgets that you often see around video examples, be they ways for users to interact with MGM's Stargate application, NBC Sports broadcasts, or with HSN to look at products being sold.

Moving onto the more application-y side of things, I ask Brad to go over the non-video functionality in Silverlight 3.0. In addition to the usual gaggle of developer-centric .Net pull-along, Brad starts out telling us about the Out-of-Browser functionality in Silverlight 3.0. In a round about way, I then ask Brad why people would want to use Out-of-Browser: what are folks using it now motivated by? Brad starts by talking about giving customers "one click access" to you application and content, throwing out one of the customer cases from that morning, Accenture's BusinessTV. For folks delivering software, Brad says, the value is in knowing one technology base – .Net – to cover a wider gamut of deployment options: a desktop app and a web app.

Brad then goes over another customer case from the morning, Continental's use of Silverlight to modernize one of their call center application for reservations.

I then ask Brad to go over SketchFlow, included in Expression. While it's a very visual tool, he does a good job of going over the functionality, reasons for using it, and how it fits into the design workflow.

Having gone through all of this, I ask Brad to tell us how Microsoft has packaged it all up for purchase and use. He gives us the overview and pricing that had been covered that morning.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client and sponsored this video.

While at Velocity 2009 this year, I had the chance to sit down and talk with Cloudera's Jeff Hammerbacher. We talked all about Hadoop, how it's used, and how the company he's at, Cloudera, is fitting into the Hadoop community.

We start out talking about the reception of Jeff's Hadoop talk at Velocity and then very quickly get into a discusion of what Hadoop is and the types of applications that use it. Remembering Jeff's (brief) Wall Street background, I ask him how he went from Wall Street to Facebook, which starts a discussion of the differences between financial analysis and web company data analysis.

I ask Jeff if Hadoop is just an open source implementation of existing closed source ideas and products. His answer is no, that it's something completely new. And though they're not sure what to call the category it fits into, they've been watching users of Hadoop swap it into traditional workflows and use it for new ones. This leads me to ask what the data inputs and outputs for Hadoop typically are: are they mostly databases, logs, or what? And how do users consume the data work-loads that get send through Hadoop? Jeff goes over some interesting examples.

We talk about Jeff's sense for how many people are using Hadoop. He says "on the order of 100's" are using it production, with an order of magnitude more playing around with Hadoop. Looking forward, Jeff goes over some application types that we might see using Hadoop in the near future.

Next, we get into a discussion of what the company Cloudera's relation to Hadoop is and what the corporate goals are. As Jeff starts to say, most Hadoop use in the web world at the moment, so they're hoping to not only bring Hadoop to the more enterprise installs, but be an advocate in the Hadoop community for those uses.

I then ask Jeff what the emerging cycle of Hadoop adoption is for organizations. As with much open source, he begins, it starts with developers electing to use it, largely, on their own. As these applications move from "desktop computing" (some spare boxes) to production, operations typically gets involved to make sure the whole Hadoop-based stack stays healthy.

Many of the questions Cloudera gets about Hadoop are around the hardware specs for Hadoop clusters and applications. So, I ask Jeff to go over the typical, if not best, server configurations and specs.

Looking forward, I ask Jeff to tell us about the product road-map for Cloudera: what are they looking to do in the near future? Much of their efforts are in the area of making Hadoop more usable and, with things like monitoring, making Hadoop easier for IT departments to consume. At higher-level, Cloudera is figuring out how to deliver "warehouse scale computing" beyond the walls of Google, who recently quipped the term.

Closing out, Jeff briefly discusses the high probability of commercial competitors to Hadoop and Cloudera emerging, and the virtues of Hadoop being open, vs. closed source.

Disclosure: Cloudera is a client and sponsored this video.

While at RSC 2009 this year, I talk with IBM's Grady Booch, who you might recall from our discussion at RSDC 2009.

We start out talking about the carpet design in the room, a sort of "early, gothic, bordello." Next, we continue a conversation we'd been having before filming about, in Grady's words, "the presence of software abundance in the face of economic scarcity," which raises the question, as Grady puts it: "how does one attend to economic scarcity in the face of software abundance?" Put another way, software can be an easier to get resource than others in tough times to get an edge in business.

Launching off from this discussion, I wind my around asking Grady about the business/IT alignment talk that I've been having with other IBMers at RSC 2009.

Next, having over-heard Grady talk with someone in the hallway about time management issues being a big deal for him now, I ask him for any coping tips he might have to share with other people who has these problems – like everyone in the modern work world. As part of managing his time better, Grady says he's done around 50 presentations in SecondLife in the past year. Keying off this, I ask him to tell us what's been going on in SecondLife in the past year or so.

Generalizing this a bit, I tell Grady that I'm usually a very plain text oriented guy so I often don't "get" people's desire to use visual communications like video. Nonetheless, I was interested to hear what he thinks things like SecondLife and video conferences add; his answers are pretty compelling.

We then wrap-up by talking about an IBM Research project called MASTOR that Grady showed off during his keynote.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

In this interview from RSC 2009, I talk with IBM's Neeraj Chandra, who you may recall from two previous interviews at RSDC 2008 and Innovation 2008, last year.

We start out talking about what exactly a "Smart Product" is and how Rational fits into the overall IBM "Smart Planet" vision. Here, the discussion gets into one of the recent Rational tenants: businesses should not only be looking to software for differentiation and value, but are indeed forced to.

The question then, is how IBM helps companies do this: the goals are, of course, desirable, but the devil is always in the details. Part of the story here is the need to bring more discipline to the software creation process as it raises is criticality to the business.

While the IT-side of the equation has to change, there's also much needed from the business side. We discuss how the business-side needs to change and adapt to these scenarios as well. Neeraj points out that much of this change is enabled by upping the collaborative aspects in the overall Rational portfolio – enabled, of course, by the Jazz platform.

We get back to to how business strategy and objectives map down to IT and the development of software – I ask Nerraj to go over how bodies of practice like Rational's MCIF are used to map between the two sets of objectives.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored these videos.