A Whole Bunch of Little Stuff

Today’s proved to be an exciting day so far:

• I caught up with an old friend from the Mesa/FX days, John Arley Burns. It turns out he’s had a lot of experience in his current job testing out open source systems management tools, so we had a lot of dork-talk over some Kim Phung.
• James and I talked today about more fully defining a “log monitoring and management” area in systems management. People like LogLogic, LogRhythm, and Splunk would fit in here. It’s the whole “why can’t I just get a Google search box for that“ pattern, but with a lot more than just search. The interesting angle is coming at systems management from a slightly different angle than the usual “pull a bunch of metrics” from target devices. Logs have much more rich data than a graph line of available memory or CPU processor time. Harnessing that richness is a whole new realm of exciting software
• RedMonk showed up pretty high on a “influential analysts” chart. As James said, “I don’t know anything about the methodology but I really like the graph.” ;>
• My call to start a conversation about “Enterprise Agile” has gotten a good amount of response, and even a post on another blog: definitely enough to keep the thinking and posting going.
• Though I’d long ago given up on bringing Steve to The Dark Side, he’s given me a glimmer of hope with his latest post ;> Not to mention that he’s right on. His “X is a Feature” series garners a strong “YUH!” rating.

Here are some summaries of posts I haven’t gotten around to making that I want to get out there before they rot in to do land:

• I’m rev’ing up a research project on open source systems management tools/applications. If anyone has input — on the “vendor” or “customer” side — I’d greatly appreciate it. As many of you know, I worked at BMC on the PATROL Express/BMC Performance Manager line of products for just under 4 years, so this space is ever fascinating to me.
• Has Google built their own behind-the-firewall developer ecosystem? One of the key benefits of OSS is being able to harness the long tail of developers: that is, you can get the skills and passion you need from anyone in the world if they want to work with you. My sense is that the Microsurfs era Microsoft had this, except within their corporate walls. My sense is that Google has gone on a hiring spree to create a similar behind-the-firewall developer ecosystem. Hence the stereotype of NIH and the ivory tower.
• Will Java emerge (or is it already) the back-end for AJAX applications? Several people I’ve talked with point towards this, but it’s way to early to say anything definitive.
• We need to do this for the Austin tech community: an Austinist for dorks in Austin. Which is just the tip of the ice-berg for a more general need: whurley (who’s turned out to be a super-swanky dude) and I were talking yesterday about the lack of a strong tech community in Austin and, more generally, in Texas. The point isn’t that we have a crappy one here, the point is that we want an even stronger one. Put another way, people like him and me would have met long ago if we had a stronger community. I’d like to get involved with him and others to start enriching our community down here. BarCampAustin could be a good place to start this ball rolling. There’s plenty of quality people in these here parts, we just need to build the lattice for them to hang-out on. In case you didn’t know, dear readers, I’m a native Austinite, so you’ll see me get all excited about promoting my city. If you’re interested, leave a comment, send an email, etc.

Update: as Duncan calls out, be sure to see the comments in James’ post on the HFN data and Steve’s followup post for more discussion on interpreting the “influential analysts” chart. And, of course, it would have been better link-love to point out that the data came from HFN, such are the informalities of blog posting from time-to-time.

Disclaimer: Microsoft, LogLogic, Sun, and BMC are clients.