Episode 002 – DevCampTivoli, DMTF, Open Source Spending Bonanza, BSM & Open Source

This week, we’re lucky enough to bring an episode recorded face-to-face. John came to Austin for barcampESM, so we recorded this up in his hotel room with a mute Doug McClure thumbing through trade-rags in the background and watching the “priceless” moments. As I was leaving the “studio,” oddly enough, a hotel dude came by to drop off some cookies. What up with that?

You can download the episode directly or get it by subscribing to the podcast feed.

As an admin note, for those who’d like to just subscribe to the IT Management podcast, I’ve created a new feed that will download only those episodes.

Show Notes

My notes this week will be much more clipped than last week – hopefully I’ll be responsible enough to fill them out later.

First, we talk about some DevCampTivoli news. Namely, John explains why he thinks they’ll be successful in getting the “closed source” people to contribute. More importantly, he points out, they’re going to skip all the time to install and setup the software in question by using virtual images.

We then get to a conversation about CIM and other DMTF standards. John says he found a nice looking application modeling standard that appears to have disappeared. I ask John what the deal has been with the industry not widely using DMTF standards, and this launches into a nice tale of old, starting with Tivoli, going through Microsoft, and ending with Dell. I spend sometime explaining how Microsoft’s CIM involvment might be the groundwork for their DSI work. As I mention to John, it looks like the DMTF’s Winston Bumpus will be at barcampESM, so perhaps we can get some DMTF talk going on. Also, see the interview I did with Winston a little while ago.

We also continue our discussion of cloud computing, talking about 3Tera briefly and then discussing John’s use of EC2 in training and for running his website.

Finally, we end up by talking about the biggest open source news of the week, Sun’s $1B buy of MySQL. Being the IT Management podcast, we dig around for how this could effect the open source companies in IT Management. In summary: if there’s an open source buying frenzy, it’ll be good for some of those guys.

More importantly, we reach back to a conversation we had at lunch about how open source IT Management folks respond to the question: “what do you do for BSM?” Most of them, John says, seem to be at the dashboard level of BSM tooling. We then talk about what the open source and closed source folks in IT Management have to offer each other. The open source folks, as they’ve shown, can move incredibly fast and innovate both when it comes to technology and business. The closed source folks have maturity and stronger BSM folks. Back to the “2008 will be big for open source,” both of us say how we hope at least one of The Little 4 and Big 4 get together and see what benefits can be had by combining the best of both worlds.

As we mention in the podcast, we’re going to try to do some recordings at barcampESM – hopefully John’s panel at least.

The name of the virtualization company in Austin who’s name I forgot is Surgient. Also, in the area of names we forgot, thanks to Damon Edwards for the kind words on episode 001.

Disclaimer: Sun and MySQL are clients, as are IBM and Microsoft. Check RedMonk’s client list for other clients mentioned in the podcast and above.