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The Trough of Cloud – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #65

OLPC and type-writer

This week, John and I hit up on some larger IT news and themes: cloud hype and worry, the HP/Microsoft announcement from the week previous, Lotusphere as a SaaS bellwether, CloudCampHaiti, and more.

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Show Notes

Full Transcript

(I didn’t go through and double check this, so if something looks weird, check the audio -Coté.)

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! It’s the 22nd of January, 2010, and this is the IT Management & Cloud Podcast, Episode 65. And just a minor correction upfront here. Last week was not Episode 69, it was episode 64. So don’t get all upset that you have gone back in time and you are hearing an old episode, because this is an episode that hasn’t existed yet, until we keep recording it now and then publish it.

And as always, I am your timeline confused co-host Michael Coté, available at peopleoverprocess.com, and I am joined by the other co-host.

John Willis: John M Willis at johnmwillis.com.

Michael Coté: So I have been out on some vacation most of this week John, so despite having a handful of little bullet points of things that have happened relevant to the topic bucket of this podcast, I in general don’t know what’s going on. Did anything like earth shattering happen this week?

John Willis: I don’t think earth shattering, but interesting stuff I took some notes of, some good stuff, good stuff.

Michael Coté: There was, the EU finally approved the Oracle buying Sun, which will have sort of wide ranging implications eventually. But the only thing I have seen about that — well, I think the official news is that China and Russia, and I trust people still have to approve it, but everyone seems to think that that’s not going to be an issue.

And then there’s some, as the register put it, a marathon long five-hour call on January 20 something about what Oracle is going to do with the portfolio. So I think next week is when we will get official word number 1,764 about what’s going to happen with that.

John Willis: I saw something that Jonathan Schwartz sent out an email to everybody, like get ready, get rid of the word Sun or something like that, it doesn’t exist anymore. I am kind of paraphrasing, but it was one of those, hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Michael Coté: Yeah, you know, I was reading the European Press and the American Press to an extent is always — Detroit is always like one of their darlings, as we have talked about before. There’s sort of like, every quarter there’s a writeup of how Detroit is just this mystery of economic meltdown.

I started reading a current thing, that was nicely about Michigan instead of Detroit, from The Economist, and they were talking about how in the 20s Detroit was a big booming place and you get jobs and all this. And I was thinking, it would be fun; fun, it might be depressing for some people, but it would be a fun sort of like future fictional exercise to like write a story, pretty much pantomiming that one, but to have it be about the tech world or whatever. Because basically it’s a story about how the American auto industry just is in the tank, and it would be interesting to look at the parallels, know to be lazy about, and also make up some stuff.

But think about what it would look like if the tech world was basically like Detroit is now. Like if Silicon Valley and Seattle and things like that became sort of like Detroits of the tech world in the near future sometime.

I got off on this tangent from talking about Sun and Oracle, because I was thinking, well, it’s kind of natural, companies get absorbed and everything, but Sun has been around for a long time, and it’s one of the older ones that’s being absorbed by something else.

John Willis: Yeah. But that would be interesting, Silicon Valley being like a — they have, what’s the space, the guy who did ‘Roger & Me’?

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s right.

John Willis: The old Oracle building.

Michael Coté: Michael Moore, right?

John Willis: Yeah, the glass broke on the Oracle building.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. But you know like —

John Willis: Larry Ellison’s house up for sale.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Instead of his first film of this future documentary being ‘Roger & Me’, like Michael Moore’s could be like Larry & Me, or something like that.

John Willis: Larry and Me, yeah.

Michael Coté: But, yeah, I mean it is kind of — like it got me thinking a little bit this morning, and then I stopped thinking and went back to work, but imagining about like what the sort of constraints are about the U.S. high tech market that keeps it the way it is rather than imploding like the car industry.

To be fair, I think the car industry was around a lot longer than the tech industry has been around before it started crumbling and imploding.

Anyways, I don’t really know what those — and by constraints, I guess we would also use the word, what the lock in is — what the lock in. People are kind of locked into U.S. big existing tech companies, and so it’s curious why they haven’t started buying the analogous Toyota or whatever and what’s kind of going on. So anyways, it’s an interesting thought exercise.

John Willis: Yeah. I mean, this is not an error, but I am going to go ahead and speak up anyway. But if you look at Israel, they are a good example, I think, of coming up a lot with innovative ideas. But I think — I did some consulting in Japan a couple of times, 05:10. There was a guy, we became friends, and he was an American that had married a — he worked over there at a Navy base for like ten years and he had married a woman from Japan, and he was raising his kids in the local school system.

He told me a lot about how – you know there it’s very — the education is very engineering. Maybe that’s not the way to best describe it, but it doesn’t really promote kind of creative thinking, you know what I mean?

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: And I think that’s one advantage we do have over here is that, we do — maybe our education isn’t the greatest in someways, but I mean most people — I think you get a lot of entrepreneurism because and I think there’s an adventure still, there’s this idea of adventurous and —

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, that’s always been the hi-techs’ defensive answer. It reminds me also of a — while we are free associating here at the beginning, it reminds me of, NPR has this great podcast series called Planet Money, where they basically, for dummies like myself, they basically explain sort of like economic phenomena, and it’s actually pretty interesting.

They had one recently where one of the host was off in Denmark for that big Copenhagen hoopla a while ago, and he did a lot of interviews with people about — apparently Denmark is like the highest taxed place in the world, the Western world or the world or something, I mean, I don’t know what their taxes are.

So he talked with lots of people about, what they thought about the taxes, and what the taxes do. And it was interesting in talking to several– like there wasn’t really anyone he talked with who was like the kind of anti-tax people we would encounter in America.

Like most everyone was like, yeah, we get taxed a lot and we get a lot of stuff for it. There was like consequences, and someone was like, yeah, of course I would like to have more money and not be taxed, but I don’t know, they were kind of nonplussed about it.

And then he was talking with like a Danish economist about it, and he was saying — and the Danish economist — the good quote he got from him was basically like, there’s really no like geniuses or like business billionaires in Denmark, I mean, it doesn’t really happen, we are just kind of upper, middle of the road, if you will. I mean, if you are going to be like an exceptional, outstanding person, you kind of go somewhere else, because this isn’t really the kind of place that encourages genius, like billionaire mentality. That was an interesting sort of another consequence, and he was comparing it.

And then there was a sea captain who was comparing it to America and saying, if you go to America, everyone is like chasing the dollar and the buck and everything, which can get exhausting. But on the other hand, a system like that does tend to breed people who are more entrepreneurial or whatever. Which, I guess you could say maybe is more — I am always suspicious of that argument just because, I don’t know. I don’t know why I am suspicious, but it seems a little — there’s something slightly wrong with it, but I don’t quite know what it is, because so far it’s proving itself to be true, I guess.

I don’t know, I am always looking for the insider thing that’s actually locking the hi-tech world into the U.S. market, rather than letting it leak out to the rest of the world.

John Willis: Yeah. Well, the interesting thing too is, I have hired a lot of people over the years, and that most people are not — even though we are kind of more of an entrepreneurial society, the gist of the matter is, a very small percentage of people are really entrepreneurs.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, that’s the other thing. It’s funny you should say that John, because in the Planet Money Podcast the host was also saying like, can I just mention I have this pet peeve, where like every time I talk with like a European, they have this view of Americans that we are all like doggy dog and chasing the dollar and all this stuff.

And he was like, if you think about it, I only know one person who is like that, of all the people I know. And he is like granted, I work for — I am a radio guy for a public radio station, so I have this kind of a selecting group.

But it was true, there’s not that many people who are like — and I think, again, we are probably on the high-end of — we encounter a lot of people who are like that because that’s the business that we are in.

John Willis: That’s where I get — I have been an entrepreneur my whole life, but when you have got to hire people, they immediately question, well, how old is this company that you work for? They are very paranoid about all the things that they have been listening to.

Michael Coté: Yeah, they want that job security, whatever that is.

John Willis: Yeah, the job, health insurance, and everything. In the long-term, even if you have all that in place, still the size of the company just scares that guy.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Well, now that I have consumed some precious time, almost ten minutes talking about weird, obtuse topics. What don’t you start out with like what’s something that happened over the last week or so?

John Willis: There’s a couple of kind of juicy stories going, not really earth shattering, but I think that one of them was I guess — I don’t know how old this was, but we haven’t talked about it, which is, Google I guess got awarded a patent for MapReduce.

Michael Coté: Oh really, huh?

John Willis: That’s going to be pretty — yeah, I saw it on Twitter maybe a week ago or so, where people were kind of bringing it up. It never really caught on fire. I remember I was like, I better go back and remind myself. I read a couple of articles. It’s just — it’s not even like that they submitted, I mean they have been awarded the patent.

But the interesting thing I guess from the research I looked at is, I guess Google has not been kind of — they don’t have a history of patent enforcement. So maybe it was more of a protective move for them gearing at MapReduce.

And the question also came out about, MapReduce has been kind of functional program parameters, so in one way it’s hard to argue — again, it’s kind of the steering wheel concept, can you patent the design of a steering — well, actually you can.

But on one hand, you could argue that, hey, how can you enforce a patent on something that’s been around forever, but on the other hand, they did write kind of a landmark paper for doing it in large scale enterprises and everybody —

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. And it is like — I don’t want to step on the — well, you can, but I don’t want to myself step on the big dudu pile of patent stuff in software, because it’s like impossibly obtuse or whatever. But when it comes to like patents and technology, it’s — I always like to think of it as if like it’s a patent in some other field that I don’t know nothing. Like if there was some patent in like human tissue generation or something.

And I would imagine there probably are patents in stuff like this. But let’s say that someone patented it the way to like generate, I don’t know, what would be real useful, like a heart, like you could just, boom, we can just generate a heart for you and stick it in there.

As a layman, I would think like, oh yeah, that must be really complicated and they should you get a patent for that and they should get rewarded for that and everything. But I bet if you were like in, I don’t even know, in biomedicine or whatever, you would be like, oh, everyone has been 10% away from figuring that out, it’s like common knowledge. I mean, come on, cloning a heart, what are you talking about, no big deal, why is that patentable?

I tend to think that probably, and I am not in defense of software patents at all. So it’s not like I am trying to be an apologist for them, I think it’s stupid. But I tend to — that said, I can be very Janus-faced about this kind of stuff. But I think that probably software patents are similar to that, where it’s kind of like, if you went to someone and you are like, so — Google has this technology that they patented, that allows them to give you the search that you really like. Like shouldn’t they be able to patent that and make money off of it? And most people will probably say yeah. It’s like this weird dilemma, right?

John Willis: Yeah. And again, obtuse topics again, but I mean, this whole patent, something has got to — 13:12 has got to break. I mean, I have heard stories of people getting patent on genome patents, patents of disease strains. Now, drug companies can’t — they have to actually pay the patent owner before they can actually create things to help children with that disease. Something has got to change. I think technologies change, so maybe patent laws are going to have to change.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, it is like — it’s just a weird process, it doesn’t — I mean, our laws, our legal system is fast enough to like — here in Austin there is an ordinance against texting and driving, which makes sense, I guess. I mean, it’s kind of absurd that you would do the two together. So it’s kind of like — I think our legal system is fast enough to catch up with things, and it’s a real weird that the patent system — like the answer is just like, oh, it’s big government, duh, they are so slow and stupid. It’s like, that’s crap. Like if we wanted to we could reform it. Anyways.

John Willis: It’s like, I did this thing at the Atlanta Linux Fest, I was flying on Friday night, I was speaking on Saturday, and I had nothing left to read and I started reading the magazine, the Delta magazine, the one where they have all the things you can buy.

Michael Coté: Oh, the SkyMall.

John Willis: SkyMall, that’s it, yeah.

Michael Coté: Now, that is a magazine full of patentable ideas.

John Willis: But the thing is, is some of the things in there are just so freaking ridiculous. When you sit back and say, holy — like a doggie step to get on your bed.

Michael Coté: That’s hilarious.

John Willis: I don’t want my dog on my bed. There is no way in hell I am going to buy a step to make it easier for him.

Michael Coté: That’s so funny that you say that, because I was talking with like a couple of the like UK analysts that I know, a couple of years ago, and they had discovered the SkyMall in the way over, and that was the first thing that they — that for them was like the symbol of American stupidity, like retailers.

It was like, so I was looking through this one thing and they had these – they are doing this in like the refined, to me, dumb Southerner, the refined English like accent, and I see there is these stairs for when your dog can’t get up on to the couch with you. It was just like so obvious that it was an absurd notion that you would give a crap if your dog could get up on your bed or not.

John Willis: I did like a five minute Leno skit before I started; I talked about that, plus the doggie doorbell.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah.

John Willis: A little dog foot that they can hit and it rings the doorbell.

Michael Coté: That’s awesome!

John Willis: And then the other one, this was the one, it was like the car office. So it has something, hair blowing in the wind, a phone in one hand, and then just like a desk on the middle console, a computer on the back-end, the printer and a file cabinet, and she is driving. The reason I am thinking about this is, you talked about texting and driving. I am thinking, if this woman is on the road in this set up, within 50 miles of me, I want to know about it. It’s like one of those car chases, I want to be completely off the road while that woman is driving.

Michael Coté: You see, those things need to come with a Twitter accounts, they send out GeoTwitters that they are on their way.

John Willis: The crazy lady with the car office is on the road again, beware.

Michael Coté: So what were you doing at the Atlanta Linux thing, what was that talk about?

John Willis: I did my Cambrian Explosion thing. That was a little bit. It was about a couple of months I think, so that was a while back. But you just made me think of that with the magazine with how you can make a Jay Leno skit out of things in it.

But back to MapReduce. The other thing that was a pretty good conversation that went on was I guess last week somebody had written an article about, is Amazon oversubscribed? Did you catch any of that?

Michael Coté: No, no.

John Willis: It kind of started off with this one gentleman and he wrote a pretty detailed article about his history. He actually started out with FlexiScale, and he kind of felt that he had pushed his resources to the limit with this company, and then went to Amazon, and was using Small Instances, and then he felt that the Small Instances, as Amazon matured, were really not production ready, and they moved up to the kind of medium high CPU instances, and now they are feeling the pinch on CPU.

It all comes down to, again, this kind of multi-tenant environment, and more so in the hypervisor setting, and he was saying that, the problem that you have is you are sharing a hypervisor with other tenants, if you will, and some days you might get a diamond, some days you might not. You could have a neighbor that could be pounding you and disclosing lot of issues.

And then he also talked about the same problem happens with the network latency, depending on who your neighbors are within that server, and the VM’s ability to actually keep up with the queue.

So a lot of people responded. I mean, the question was, is Amazon kind of meeting — the original question is, are they oversubscribed, and then there were some really good arguments by Chris Hoff and Reuven Cohen on, well, yeah, I mean, maybe they are. But Chris Hoff had this argument that oversubscribing is not the same as overcapacity. Almost all industries oversubscribe, airlines. I mean, over subscription is — the trick is, how do you deal with capacity, how do you manage the cost.

So it was a really interesting debate, and Amazon said, we are not overcapacity, an official response.

But I think kind of the best thing, I don’t know who said this, is it really comes down to more that the customers of Amazon have — the big guys now are going to play. Maybe the first couple of years it was a lot of the little guys and nobody really did like massive stuff, and now you have got some large, large players.

Michael Coté: That’s a way to turn a frown upside down.

John Willis: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad thing for the customer. But the problem is, and I think — I kind of stepped through the whole thing and I was reading couple of blogs, and I did a tweet, and the bottom line is, look at your SLA. I mean, you don’t have really an SLA with Amazon. The good news and the bad news.

The good news is, you get in, you get going, you don’t have to spend six months defining an architecture or definition with the vendor and work out all these kinks. You get going. It’s the ability to do self service immediately. You can get scaled. The downside is, you better have a workflow that accepts failure.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. I mean, it’s like, eventually we have to get to the Trough of Disillusionment John with this whole Cloud Computing thing, and that’s a —

John Willis: We are going to have a party when that trough comes man.

Michael Coté: We will have the disillusionment party, come to the trough.

John Willis: Yeah, the trough. Party like it’s 1999.

Michael Coté: And then we will start having trough camp.

John Willis: The trough camp, that’s what — I was just going there next, the trough camp.

Michael Coté: I will have to go — I will look up that stuff. We will have to put links to it in the show note once I find it. But yeah, that is — in theory — like it kind of gets back to when there was the whole like danger problem with Microsoft, which was a bit of a scandal, but then did seem to resolve itself eventually, which was kind of an interesting retrospective on that.

But a bunch of people on T-Mobile lost all of their cellphone data because it was hosted in the Cloud, and then there was — going back and forth about it, if there was a backup or not. Then if I remember it turned out that a couple of weeks later there was a backup, so people could get their stuff restored.

And then in the meantime, everyone was — it was a big, big news story that the problem with the Cloud is it was unreliable essentially.

So it is kind of like — there are always these questions of — I know what I was getting at. It was funny, because it was kind of like the response — it was a very sort of philosophy or religion sort of discussion, where people would say, doesn’t that show that the Cloud is dangerous, and then the answer was implicit. I am not going to answer your question. The question I am going to answer is, no, this is not supposed to happen with Cloud Computing. And it was just like a battle of definitions of what Cloud Computing was.

So it is kind of like, you are not really supposed to be able to go overcapacity, but there are real physical limitations to what can actually happen.

I guess, you would think, someone must have done some analysis, because it’s impossible, so maybe they haven’t, but someone like IDC probably has some idea of like how many MIPS or how much computational resources there are in the world everyday. And then you could kind of chart out what kind of data centers for Cloud stuff you would need to actually handle that kind of computational stuff, and see if it was actually possible. And then throw in some crazy numbers in the spreadsheet about optimization and deoptimization and see what happens.

John Willis: Yeah. A lot of people, the detractors are like saying, VMware, how could — maybe this is the point where they should use VMware. It’s more sophisticated.

I think there are things — so some people blame it on Xen. The truth of the matter is — and I think Reuven had a good point, that Reuven Cohen said that the — the vendor has to come up with a way to kind of tier resources for clients, and clients that want more guarantees are going to pay more. And that hasn’t really been Amazon’s model, but I mean, I guess the question really becomes if you want true production like capabilities.

But again, I think it does, and I know I am ranting, but I think it does come back to today, the places like Amazon, and Amazon being the 800-pound gorilla, that I think the way to use production environments in Amazon — and clearly it works for test, you can deal with those kind of situations of latency and test QA development.

But if you are running production applications in there, then you really have two choices. One, deal with it, because you don’t really have an SLA. Or two, design your architecture so that those things don’t affect you, you know what I mean? But lying about it when you don’t even have a SLA in the first place, that’s kind of silly.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah.

John Willis: That’s why you did it in the first place, but anyway.

Michael Coté: So you had like an online CloudCamp thing this week too, right?

John Willis: Yeah. So that was cool. We did this CloudCamp Haiti. Basically it started with a tweet from Reuven Cohen that said, I wish there was a way to help — this was like last Thursday, I wish there was a way to help do more for the Haitians, with all the pictures we see. That was actually before the whole text thing came out over the weekend, text to 90999, whatever it is.

So I just pinged him back or VMed him back and said, hey, let’s put our heads together if you are serious about this. And that turned into an email to Dave Nielsen who runs CloudCamp, and literally within a couple of hours of just that first tweet, we had already kind of organized how we were going to move forward. And Dave put up the Camp Haiti page and the Eventbrite owned illustrations, and we were in business on Friday. In less than 24 hours we had it up and going

Just be tweeting we got three or four — in fact, I think all the sponsors came from tweeting. We made it real simple. You pay $25 for attendee, $50 if you wanted to be kind of a nice guy, and then $250 for a logo sponsorship. And we raised around $5,000, so less than a week. This Wednesday we had this online CloudCamp Haiti, and we actually — over the weekend we decided to theme it on how the Cloud can help. It really went pretty well. I mean, we had some people you know, Sam Ramji, guy at, what is it, Sanoa?

Michael Coté: Sanoa.

John Willis: Sanoa, Sanoa, sorry. Yeah, I guess he was at Microsoft. I didn’t even realize he was now at Sanoa.

Michael Coté: Yeah, he is like the VP of Product Management or something along those lines.

John Willis: Cool! Yeah. He did a great presentation on how can we help in Haiti. He just talked about API — you have talked about Sanoa before, kind of the API, the end all APIs.

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: But it was cool, we talked about how API is for crisis, and portals and things like that could enable or help. And even better than that was the — one of the groups that we got in touch with early was called CrisisCommons, and they are running crisis bar camps all around the world.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, I heard about that on the radio, that’s interesting. Yeah.

John Willis: Yeah. So that guy, one of those guys came on and talked on our session. And him and Sam were kind of going back and forth about — I mean, it was really very — again, all it really was originally was just to raise money, to see if we get folks to raise money. But the conversation was really interesting.

You had Sam talking about — they looked at the APIs and they talked about — there was one API called the People Finder that they had built at Katrina time. So this CrisisCommons has been around for a while.

And then he also said that, basically what CrisisCommons does is they get together, and they are hackers that solve problems for crisis. Like one of the camps developed a language translator from pre-old English and apparently nobody had ever built one of those.

So it was interesting to hear kind of Sanoa talking about how can we create like this pool of disaster based APIs related — then we had Rackspace, this Bret Piatt from Rackspace came and gave a great presentation, again, how Rackspace is doing things with the Rack Gives Back. But also some of the — the kind of themes that kept coming out is, what can the Cloud people do? Maybe to find best practices. Be a little bit more prepared with APIs that could help, and then possibly some of the vendors, like Amazon or Rackspace or RightScale or Canonical to donate resources.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember hearing stories about what the people are trying to get — you have infrastructure problems whenever there is some disaster, like you need roads and water and electricity and communications and phone. And I remember, this was one of the first times I was listening to the news about some catastrophe somewhere, and in addition to all that they kept saying Internet, and I was thinking like, oh, I bet that is required nowadays. Like the way you basically respond to anything, you probably need Internet somehow.

So having sort of Cloud-based resources would fit well, because you certainly can’t like even fly in like a container data center or something. But if you at least have a connection, then hopefully you can host your data center somewhere that’s more secure. And then also you can have more people helping you out it would seem, because they don’t all have to be on location, they can be remote, and be happy in their remote place. So that sounds like it was nice.

John Willis: It was fun. It was actually — it turned out — like I said, the conversation was the icing on the cake, because we even did talk. We had discussions about dropping a pod in there that used like a mesh network and maybe connected back to some Cloud. I mean, it was really — we have got all the audio up, I will send you a link on that.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah. Well, also this week, in the non-humanitarian world, Lotusphere was earlier this week, and well, I didn’t go to it, two of the other RedMonk guys, Stephen O’Grady and James Governor, they both went to it.

They had some — I mean, I think the — there is only really two things I wanted to mention. We talked about Lotus a little while ago when I came back from the IBM Software Analyst Summit. I mean, the basic summary of — Lotus is a pretty impressive sort of a — to be frank, they have been kind of like a little boring for many years here.

b But they are finally doing a lot of new things that have — they are finally pulling a lot of stuff that you see happening in the public collaboration space and social networking, and actually releasing business versions of it, sort of going beyond the research and development, which they always have plenty of interesting stuff for.

That was one of the things they talked about at Lotusphere that both Stephen and James wrote about, which of course I will link to in the show notes, was they have this thing called Project Vulcan, which is basically — it’s great, because it’s basically like, finally they have this channel or this way, and they being IBM, to kind of not really have full products that they have released, but let people start to use these things that they have in development, and they have got from research and things like that.

So it’s kind of like, when you go to Gmail or you go to Google Apps, they have this Labs thing that you can opt into and you can use experimental things or whatever. And it’s nice to finally have a channel like that open for Lotus stuff, because they do tend to have a lot of interesting things. And the problem with getting your hands on Lotus stuff is it seems difficult, so the easier they can make it, the better.

They definitely have — Lotus has a ton of SaaS hosted stuff nowadays or Cloud hosted, if you prefer, which I think is equally interesting.

And then the other thing I was going to — they talked about this with us at the Software Analyst thing, but it was under NDA at the time. But they have a pretty impressive like customer win with Panasonic, where they are starting out with I think a 100,000 employees or seats using their LotusLive thing for email and calendaring and stuff. And then they are going to expand it to like around 300,000 or something using their Lotus Connections thing, which is basically all the new fun stuff on the Internet for behind the firewall and the social networking space.

I didn’t really see it firsthand, like Stephen and James did, they have some more interesting, and probably well-rounded commentary. But it’s been surprising over the past few months to see the Lotus actually doing what seems reasonable, rather than being like a old company.

John Willis: I played around with some of the prototype stuff that they had before they turned that into LotusLive, and it definitely was pretty cool. I mean, for an enterprise that’s not going to go out and get Drupal tomorrow, and make that an enterprise implication, I mean LotusLive is probably a great bet.

Michael Coté: I think it’s interesting for like — obviously, it’s interesting for Cloud stuff, but for the good old fashioned IT management, it’s interesting to kind of look at that as — to think of it both as — to use, what do they call it, the SWOT analysis, to kind of figure out what the opportunities and threats are to your own sort of IT management world.

Because essentially what IBM is offering is finished applications that don’t really need to be managed. I mean, they still need to be managed in an administrative sense, but not in like a systems administration sense. You don’t have to run around your own and do this. You just need to make sure people aren’t spending too much money in provision account.

There’s a lot of identity management that goes on, and so, now that, to your point, it would shock all of us, not because — not for technological reasons but for cultural reasons. If it was like, JP Morgan standardizes on Drupal or whatever, that would just be crazy. But it wouldn’t be so shocking if it was like, oh, this big bank, just like with Panasonic, they are now going to just use LotusLive, just hosted collaborations stuff.

So it’s interesting if you are like an IT staff person, or even some vendor selling into IT to think about, well, what does that mean? I mean, if we didn’t have this thing about, oh, I have to run it behind the firewall, then how does that change what you are doing?

I think it’s kind of like the discussion about, what if we had a Detroit sort of scenario for the hi-tech world, and like, what if the rest of the world just suddenly became as innovative and creative and entrepreneurial as America, then what would we do? How do we bridge the chasm, if you will?

John Willis: It’s funny, IBM is pretty — sometimes you will watch them and people complain about IBM, but sometimes you can be in awe of their brilliance. If you look at kind of a little bit of a cynical view, they sit back, they wait, they watch, they absorb everything. Like their Cloud, their kind of infrastructure in the service Cloud space, they just sit back. Same thing with LotusLive, I think when they looked at it, they saw that there was a train wreck coming in this whole collaboration space, with things like Drupal and Alfresco and all those things, and they better do something fast. This just shows how — when they want to move fast, they are IBM.

Michael Coté: You are right.

John Willis: And clearly, I love the Drupal, the Alfrescos, and all that stuff, but again, I have been in LotusLive, I think I even have an account, and it’s — I can’t find too many complaints with it, all-in-all. And then you throw in the fact, what you just said is that, it’s kind of administrator bulletproof, you know what I mean?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: So I don’t have to worry about, with the Open Source guys, I am into a little bit of infrastructure management.

Michael Coté: It’s the classic fast follower thing. I mean, that’s a phrase both IBM and Microsoft love using, just to describe that they may not be like innovating on the bleeding edge, but once something is shown to work, then they quickly catch up with it.

It’s also good, like I have a briefing later today with one of our more recent RedMonk clients, this outfit called WaveMaker, which is more in the rich Internet application, it’s more in the application development space than IT management and Cloud but —

John Willis: I thought those were the guys that make those jet skis.

Michael Coté: Exactly, the Seadoo 2000.

John Willis: That’s right.

Michael Coté: Well, they have a interesting platform-as-a-service sort of — kind of sort of thing, if you will, that they have had for a couple of years, and it’s always had this issue of like, well, that’s a cool technology, and it’s based on Open Source Java stuff, and it seems like technologically it would totally make sense, but it just doesn’t seem like the mass market is like ready for that necessarily.

They have actually been around for a while and had some interesting successes, but I was thinking like, with WaveMaker and other people, there is all these people who have been — they have been waiting for someone to kind of like — for one of the elder companies to basically make it cool for mainstream IT buyers to like buy into Cloud based stuff or whatever it used to be called.

I mean, that is also the wider thing that’s interesting about stuff like having Panasonic have up to 300,000 users on a Cloud based service essentially, is that, you basically remove that artificial barrier to people using it, and then people might start saying, well, okay, maybe we should use this WaveMaker thing, or this whatever thing, or whatnot. I mean, that’s another sort of silver lining thing there. But we will see if that happens, if there is market making that gets helped out, and then we will have to find something new to talk about John, because this would just be normal.

John Willis: Dev/Ops man, it’s the IT manager and Cloud and Dev/Ops.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. We will call it, what to do with the skeleton that’s left of the IT department after the Cloud has totally won.

John Willis: No, that ain’t happening. If you look at now this whole discussion, I think the backlash on the over subscription, overcapacity, but still, we have a long way to go before that — there is even this discussion now, I don’t even want to get into these arguments, because it wastes so much time, but now there is this whole backlash about, there really never was elasticity. Because there is not infinite elasticity, everybody is like down on the elastic computing.

Again, I think Chris Hoff did a great — one thing I have learned, don’t ever argue with Chris Hoff on Twitter, you will lose, you will lose, just be careful with people, you will lose big time.

But I’d like to — he made this argument that over-subscription is not the same as overcapacity, and I totally agree with that, and I want to say — if I had energy I would say, elastic computing is not the same as Internet elastic computing. Making this argument that, oh, you guys who say computing is going to solve the world, it’s like, it’s not a binary thing.

Yes, we all agree that Cloud Computing is not infinitely scalable, yes, and the over subscription issue has pointed that out. There are some brick walls out there. But it’s still — I mean, they can’t do AnaMod type implementations, you know what I mean. There is — people that have really — it has helped their business because of elasticity, dynamic elasticity.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, speaking of the dev op sort of thing, there was another thing. I was interested enough in this that I took a couple of few minutes out of my little vacation midweek, and I talked with Microsoft and Intuit had an announcement. It’s basically just a partnership announcement. Actually, I got a podcast up since last we talked going over what’s called the Intuit Partner Platform, and I should disclose that they are a client, and they paid for or sponsored, as we like to say, this podcast.

But this podcast that I am mentioning is, it’s just an overview of their platform-as-a-service offering. To give the summary of it, essentially you have got a bunch of people using like QuickBooks, and this is just a service. QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop, and this is a Cloud based service, a platform-as-a-service, so that you can add — you can basically make little plug-ins or extensions or applications that layer on top of that user base, if you will.

It kind of like, in Salesforce you can develop on top of Force.com, and you can create things that add onto the Salesforce application. So anyway, that’s what IPP, as it’s called is.

They had an announcement that they have a nonexclusive partnership, but there is basically this partnership they have with Microsoft to have Azure be like the Cloud of choice, if you will, to help in developing things on top of this platform, if you need to have some other place to run your code, if you will.

The thing that’s interesting — the thing that’s more than just like a press release about it is, there is a Visual Studio plug-in, which is the development tool of choice for the Microsoft world of course, there is a Visual Studio plug-in and extensions and stuff, that bring in all the APIs and libraries and stuff you need to do your Intuit Partner Platform coding.

The other thing that’s interesting about IPP is that there is actually a marketplace there, an apps store, if you will. They have — I think, if you go back — you can go checkout the podcast where I am talking with the Intuit architect. They have like 30 or 35 apps so far listed in there. It has been out less than a year, but you can actually write an application and then just start selling it through Intuit, which is an exciting thing for developers who are into that kind of thing, but I think it’s worth — like when I was talking with him — what were you saying there?

John Willis: I was going to say, I heard Microsoft tried to buy them and then it got chucked out.

Michael Coté: Yeah, definitely. I almost wanted to joke with them, now that you guys don’t have money, I guess you guys could be friends again, because they killed off their Quicken competitor, Microsoft Money, if I remember.

But Azure is still like — I am always confused about this, and I always have to go look it up, but it’s not quite fully baked yet or in generally availability, if I remember. I think it’s still due out some other time, I could be completely wrong.

But anyways, like I was telling them, the thing that’s from an industry perspective that’s interesting about this is to see the same old topic I always have about the Cloud, is to see like normal, boring applications start getting deployed on the Cloud. And that’s definitely what Intuit deals in, it’s just like small and medium businesses who are keeping their books in QuickBooks. I mean, there is nothing — there is no rocket science or like glitziness about it, but it’s certainly like a huge business and a very necessary one.

It would be great to see a lot of Cloud stories like, oh yeah, there is like 5,000 little mainstream businesses running stuff in the Cloud at the moment or whatever, and so forth and so on. So it will be interesting to see if anything kind of comes with that as far as cases of just normal software being run on it.

John Willis: Yeah, like a 42:38, like a Force.com stuff.

Michael Coté: Yeah, exactly.

John Willis: The whole ecosystem going there. The first time I heard about Intuit, I was like, what? It’s baked. When guys like Intuit are saying they are — but as it was explained by you and that guy Alex, I kind of get more of a feel like where it could go and make sense.

But as far as Azure goes, I love your instruction last year when Mark Benny got sick, he called it a Zune.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s right. That was very clever.

John Willis: That was pretty clever. So I don’t know, we will see. I am kind of having a little bit talking about LotusLive and all this stuff, so I am going to find the perfect software and webcast. I have had — GoToMeeting just seems a little clunky and then WebEx is —

Michael Coté: I will tell you what RedMonk always endorses, and they are a client of ours, so whatever. But we always try to get people to use Adobe Connect, and what we tell them is, first off, it seems like it’s a bit more expensive, and I haven’t looked at pricing recently, but it is a bit more pricey if I remember. But at RedMonk, I am on a Mac and James Governor is on a Windows platform, and Stephen O’Grady is on Linux, and that’s the only conference thing that we ever use where we really never have problems. Other ones — it’s possible to get WebEx and GoToMeeting running on most all platforms, you just have to figure it out.

John Willis: Well, GoToMeeting, everybody that was on the Mac the other day for this CloudCamp, every time I tried to do — to take over, they pretty much crashed.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, I will be really curious to hear what you say, because —

John Willis: Well, you know what I want to look at, I mean honestly, and I know it’s not fully baked yet, but I think it fits the theme of my new company, I would love to try to get Dimdim.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah.

John Willis: I mean, they are very competing price wise. I think it’s got a good story being in Open Source, very open. I am sure it’s going to have a lot more hiccups than the big guys, but I would love to try and start with it.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that was one of the other things that if I had been at Lotusphere I would have wanted to check out is there is — I have seen some IBM Research sort of presentations about this thing. I forgot what it’s called, but it’s like, they have some fancy pants, and I mean that in a good way, like webcasting stuff, that basically records it for you and then tries to do a transcription. It has a nice recording where it tracks the transcription and stuff like that, because having done a fair amount of webinars in the past, like you go look at the recordings that webinars have and it’s just terrible.

Like if you try to actually make some modern sort of social artifact, some thing, some piece of content out of a recorded webinar, it’s so tedious. Like it’s these weird — it’s just as weird like early 2000 technology that’s being used for that. So I am always eager to see something that makes like a very rational sort of recording.

If there was some webinar platform that basically you would like call in and it would record it and do like a follow along transcription; that’s kind of an extra sort of thing, but just something — and then had like a podcast feed that came out of it. I mean, that would be like rocket science for the state of the art of webinar science.

But it’s sort of like, obviously that’s what you want, is like, you are going to have all these — first you want all the stuff to manage, like having hundreds, hopefully for you, hundreds of attendees watching the live sort of thing and show a presentation and have multiple people and have chat and the questioning, and all this hoopla. But then it’s really — the stuff that’s missing is all the post stuff, where — and then you want to just have it like automatically blog it, make multiple formats for podcast, and audio only one, like an MP4, iTunes friendly, all this stuff, and then just like, boom, make your podcast for you. So it’s annoying that, that stuff is not easier.

John Willis: Yeah, that’s too bad.

Michael Coté: But then again, I guess to be fair, people like RedMonk can charge a premium for doing things like that.

John Willis: All that work.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Ho, ho, ho. So I only had one last thing I was going to mention. I don’t know if you have more stuff, but there was also like — this was last week, there was a whole bunch of hoopla around this HP Microsoft.

John Willis: Hoopla, hoopla.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

John Willis: I love that one. That’s from — I wish they could — Tim Robbins movie, ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’.

Michael Coté: That’s right. You know John, I only say hoopla a lot because I know you like it. It’s all fun.

John Willis: Okay, that was good.

Michael Coté: But I wrote up a little quick analysis of it and talked to a couple of reporters here and there about it. Did you see the HP/Microsoft BFF announcement?

John Willis: No, I haven’t had a chance to catch up, but I would like to hear your —

Michael Coté: It’s funny, like if they hadn’t like hyped it so much I don’t think it would have gotten so much coverage, but speaking at the middle level, it’s an excellent study, and very successful, like contemporary social media and PR like, I don’t know, jobbing, crafting, if you will.

Because they sent out an email to the press and analysts, and it was like, oh, we have got a big announcement, whatever, come attend this, and then there was little releases about that. So everyone was like waiting with bated breath to see what it was, which means — if you think about it, this is like a great PR move, which means that the initial seeders who are going to start talking about it have sort of set aside this time to commit to it. And so even if it’s bad, they are going to write about it, because they don’t want to take — they don’t want to suck up that sunk cost. To basically be like, oh, we spent all this time about this thing that was big, and they are going to publish on it, usually you don’t spike something like that. And it wasn’t as terrible an announcement as that analysis was making it seem to be.

But anyways, and they had CEOs of both the companies having a joint press conference, so it must be big. So basically what it was, and there is a great — I keep interrupting myself here, so HP and Microsoft, they had this announcement that they are going to spend, I don’t know, $250, $300 million, I forgot the exact figure, I think it was $250 million, on this ongoing partnership.

And basically, the way I summarized it in my head is, they are each other’s preferred Cloud partners, pretty much, and next generation infrastructure partners. And they actually do have some, what I would call, sort of like metal to glass sort of optimization stacks of software, that is going to be optimized and is optimized, I should say, to run on HP hardware with HP favored virtualization, and running your Exchange Server, for example, on HP is optimized out there was a — which I guess is great, it’s good for them.

And then further down the road there is stuff around Azure, and HP and Microsoft being Azure buddies. And then it sounds like, and it wasn’t quite spelled out this explicitly, but it sounds like, whatever sort of private Cloud stuff HP and Microsoft come up with, that they will basically be partners in delivering this private Cloud thing, which, I think that angle is in this glass half full analysis, as I like to call it nowadays.

That is a good opportunity for both of them, because they do complement each other when it comes to private Cloud. I mean, HP doesn’t really — they don’t have — they have a lot of management stuff obviously, but there is some point where they kind of stop having stuff, and at that same point is sort of what Microsoft has. I mean, Microsoft doesn’t have hardware or storage or networking or all this business. So it seems like it would be interesting for them, whatever it is they will be working on with each other.

Now, the glass half empty analysis is just a bunch of big announcement about really nothing except these optimized bundles we were talking about.

And also I think, Tim Anderson, who is a UK freelance guy, who writes for The Register and some other people, he actually — I have noticed like the British tech journalists are very good at this. They have nice long memories, which you don’t always see in the rest of the analysts in the tech world. But he drudged up this partnership announcement from like five years ago that Microsoft and HP had to spend like $300 million around something, and he was kind of like, so how has that one been working out?

But yeah, I mean, I think, it’s also kind of like — it’s also a sign of the time. It’s kind of signaling also from an industry perspective of the whole private Cloud thing. Like every vendor is trying to figure out what they are going to do with private Cloud stuff. I think HP and Microsoft have kind of like told you what their sort of general thing is. They may not actually have like a roadmap or a direction, but basically it’s going to be, those two guys are going to be working together.

And so other people, like IBM and Cisco and VMware and Dell and these other people need to like buddy up and figure out what they are going to be doing and so forth and so on.

Like I was telling a reporter, I mean this is all like — this is what I sit around and do all day is analyze silly interesting stuff, so of course that’s what I ramble on about.

But the other thing that it sort of represents is that, the sort of established partnerships that used to exist are really up in the air, especially because of Oracle and Sun, and then VMware and things like that. And so we are at this point in the cycle where everyone is trying to like grab their niche. It’s like musical chairs, we are all dancing around at the moment, and people are about to sit down at some point, and we are trying to figure out — and everyone wants to make sure they are not the dude without the chair. And I think that’s when it comes to partnerships, that’s what you see going on a lot.

John Willis: That’s funny, that’s funny, musical chair.

Michael Coté: So that’s why you have like — that’s why like we have talked about, and that’s why you have weird things like VMware buying Zimbra and SpringSource. I mean, whenever you have stuff like that happening it means that we are playing musical chairs at the moment, and people are trying to see where — they are trying to lock down their next 10 or 15 years of revenue, based on the partnership assignment that they get, de facto wise from the industry.

John Willis: Yeah. In someways, I mean I — where I want — the place I should be, because it gets me closer to enterprise systems management more than private Cloud. Cloud is really interesting, but at the end of the day what’s interesting to me and my whole life has been IT management, IT infrastructure, and enterprise systems management.

But I really do think that one of the things that kind of pulled me away from private Cloud is, it’s going to be a bloodbath. You have got the Eucalyptus, which is racing to get on the radar, but giants like VMware are just getting really close, couple of releases away from being — I say today VMware is —

Michael Coté: Let’s pause it while we try to get John back. Alright, we got John back, so you were saying, I think you were talking about —

John Willis: I was saying that the private Cloud space is just really looking like a bloodbath, because you have got the kind of adopters, early adopters like Eucalyptus and OpenNebula, but you got VMware, probably two releases away from being, what I would call, real Cloud.

I mean, I have talked to enough people now — I talked to a guy the other day at one of our local Cloud groups, he is a big VMware guy, he was like, they are knocking on the door. vCloud is going to be your stuff.

VMware is going to be very close to — to me the real Cloud is, get everything you want through self service APIs. APIs that can be driven, that can be provided as self service. Eliminate people. So you get your resources without the people.

VMware is really close. GoGrid just announced — they broke out of their software now, they are going to have a private Cloud. FlexiScale has announced that they have broken off their software; they are owners of private Cloud.

God forbid, I have said this a couple of times on Twitter, Amazon decides to do that, all hell will break loose, people will go crazy. And you have still got IBM waiting in the wings to do something really huge. I personally don’t want to be in the private Cloud business.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is the direction things are going. It’s kind of like Token Ring versus Ethernet, right? And you want to make sure that you are not the Token Ring essentially, when Ethernet finally wins out.

I mean, there is that degree of proprietariness, I guess, about all the different private Cloud stuff going on. There’s a lot of bets on technologies people are increasingly being forced to make, and they are going to have to go with it, and then hopefully theirs wins out.

I think that analogy works pretty well, if I don’t say so myself, because it does seem like, you are not going to want to get stuck with the Betamax essentially to mix technologies. I mean, it’s going to happen, because I am extremely suspicious that this private Cloud stuff is going to be compatible in the same way that Ethernet or networking equipment would be. So I am sure there’s going to be people who get a bunch of Betamax and they are like, oh crap, or even worst, there will be people who buy laser discs and then those guys —

John Willis: Yeah, laser disc. Well, I noticed even in the video stores now have — for a while there my local video store had like almost a third of the store, the Blu-ray stuff, but now it’s back down to one rack. So I don’t know. That means that those things that seem really good, like those laser discs, my brother-in-law had, he was like, he invested heavily in those things.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, it seemed pretty cool at the time, right?

John Willis: Sure did, those big spindles with the — but the whole standard thing, I mean, there are folks like Simon Wardley of Canonical, and Eucalyptus that are betting on that Amazon will be the standard.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. No, I think in the public Cloud it’s a whole different conversation, because it’s —

John Willis: Yeah, but I mean — because there will be a standard, and it wouldn’t really matter private or public, it won’t really make a difference.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, that’s true, you are right, you are right.

John Willis: So again, the more, going back to the telephone analogy, there are a lot of servers involved in that process of making a call, and I think this whole argument, what is a private Cloud, is it private Cloud, is it public Cloud, will go away at some point.

Michael Coté: Oh man, that reminds me — to free associate again, that reminds me, I was watching, what was it? What was the show? It was one of these terrible horror movies that Kim and I always rent. It was an old one from the 80s. A very typical plot. There is a sorority house; stop me if you have heard this one before, and there’s just some one killing the sorority sisters essentially.

And anyways, the whole point is — I think it’s from 78 or 79 or something like that, and it actually has the lady who played Lois Lane is the character in it, and it’s hilarious, because at some point they are tracing the phone, and unlike in most movies where it’s just like, you don’t really see the actual tracing going on, I guess they thought it would be more dramatic.

I guess this was — remember that movie, ‘The Conversation’, with Gene Hackman, that was like an excellent nerd movie at that time, because like, it was basically ‘The Conversation’, if I remember the name of the movie. It was basically, this guy was just a phone tapper, and so he would like tap phones and do microphones, but they really went into detail about all the little 70s gizmos and Apex reels and stuff he would use to do this tapping. So maybe, I don’t know if it was influenced at all on that.

So anyways, they are tracing the phone call of this psychopathic guy. And it’s great, because they actually go down to like the switching station in the movie, and they have like — it’s like a data center, but it’s mechanical, and there’s these little things going, like as phones are going. So he has got to keep the guy on the line so that he can hunt down the exact little exchange he goes to. They have to do this several times.

But it was pretty awesome to actually look at like, I don’t know, they were probably embellishing it a little bit, but to think like, holy crap, that’s how stuff actually use to work.

And it’s kind of analogous, like you were saying, to like Cloud stuff is, having these loud data centers and weird cables everywhere, and then the client humming just like a big — a data center as a computer at some point.

Man, I will have to look up that movie. I mean, I am not recommending that anyone go see it, it was totally —

John Willis: Some horrible movies can be great, right?

Michael Coté: That’s right. So the last thing we should mention, unless you have some other stuff is, next week is going to be the most fabulous conference ever, OpsCamp, next Saturday, in Austin, Texas, on January 30th.

John Willis: Operations is not — I told somebody this morning on a call I had and they said — and I said, operations is hot, and they said, well — and I said, it’s getting hot. He says, it’s already hot. I said, well, it’s getting blazing hot. Watch out. Move aside Cloud. It’s operations.

Michael Coté: I am going to do a little push to round up some non-vendor people, here in Austin, to get them. There is actually like — there is only like 27 tickets left, which is excellent. Big, nice attendance.

John Willis: Yeah. I think we are bumped out though.

Michael Coté: I want to see if I can get just like some users, if you will, to kind of come in. It looks like there is actually a fair amount of them coming, which should be good.

John Willis: I mean, it look tremendous, it’s awesome, it’s got a good mix of some players like Debb (?), got some good people like Andrew, and there is Scott and Adam.

Michael Coté: Yeah, and we will see, it’s an open format, but I was thinking if I can get the right kind of attendees; I have one person I have, one person I know who is coming. One of my old friend, Zane Rockenbaugh, the proprietor of Liquid Labs, which is www.liquid-labs.com.

Anyways, he is one of these guys who has had something that we would call a Cloud based infrastructure for years and years, and he sells it to local community banks, and it’s basically a hosted thing. I was thinking, if I could get someone else kind of like him, who has been doing the ops and the development and the running of the Cloud based thing for customers. And I was thinking it would be interesting to have a panel that was kind of like, how you got your — just tell us the story of how you got your customers happy with that, and how you have been managing it, and things like that.

Because Zane is an interesting example, because he is the epitome of what you would call a micro ISV. Like he has been the one person who has been involved in his company forever, and he has had up to like three employees at some point. But he has been successful enough over, man, I guess like almost ten years now, to basically run his own business. And it’s based of off.

Like he used to have a T1 coming to his house, that he ran his own little data center to run his stuff essentially, which is not quite — I mean, it depends how you look at it, but basically he was selling to his customers, and they weren’t running on premise stuff, and they were just running it all as a service to do pretty serious stuff, to do fraud detection.

So it would be interesting to hear how he got small town bankers, who were very paranoid about any sort of new technology, to basically sign up for Cloud based computing stuff, and if I can get a few other people to talk about that. I am always interested in the cultural shift of this stuff. But we will see what people end up talking about. There is a wide variety of folks coming.

John Willis: Cool! Yeah, OpsCamp next week.

Michael Coté: And we will definitely — there’s going to be tons of people there and we should — we will have to set aside some time to record like a special podcast with — like there would be Zenoss people there, and there is even, the VP of Marketing from GroundWork is listed as showing up, and Luke from Reductive Labs will be there, and someone from Opscode will be there apparently.

John Willis: Yeah, Adam Jacob, Andrew Shafer, all these guys.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, maybe I will have to find several times to pull people aside to have a little podcast and panel discussions on things.

John Willis: No, it’s going to be fun. It’s the first one — I was just saying to Mark Hinkle, he is working on — we got a nice catch, with a nice OpsCamp.

Michael Coté: Well, I recently got my haircut, my short thing, so I won’t need a hat for two or three weeks now, because my hair basically manages itself John, but it will come in handy. Something happens, I don’t want to brush my hair, I need a hat.

John Willis: Caps are cool man. The inaugural OpsCamp cap.

Michael Coté: There you go. Well, with that, unless there was anything else John, I think —

John Willis: No, that’s all I got.

Michael Coté: I think we will wrap up. So we have had plenty of exciting content in this episode. Oh, I also mentioned that, this morning I just put up a transcript for the last episode. There are no SLAs necessarily with the transcription service we use, but hopefully it’s kind of like a week lag time for transcripts, but if you have listened to this, you probably don’t need the transcript, but it’s there nonetheless.

John Willis: Cool!

Michael Coté: So we will see everyone next week, and hopefully we will see some of you at OpsCamp next Saturday.

John Willis: Yeah, sounds cool.

Michael Coté: See you everyone then.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned, such as Microsoft, IBM, HP, Intuit, etc.

Comments Off on The Trough of Cloud – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #65

Categories: Enterprise Software, IT Management Podcast, Systems Management.

By cote
— January 25, 2010 at 1:53 pm