While we “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, I come across many interesting numbers each week. Here are some:
Scaling Languages
Fun facts I learned about Scala today: FourSquare was moved from PHP to Lift in 90 days.
Snorkle
Today, Oracle supports more than 345,000 customers in more than 145 countries as a leader in delivering database, middleware, applications, and infrastructure software. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle plans to transform to a systems company by engineering and delivering integrated systems – from applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together, so customers do not have to do it themselves.
The PDF this excerpt comes from is good reading if you’re into the whole Oracle buying Sun scene. It has some notes on Oracles intentions with Java, MySQL (see Stephen’s recent opus), Glassfish, Netbeans, Solaris, and so on.
10 years later
#ApacheCon by the numbers: 2 days of training, 10 conf tracks, 74 sessions, 3 keynotes, 1 Hackathon, 12 meetups + 1 Big Birthday Bash!
I’m at ApacheCon the first part of this week, in lovely Oak-land. It’s worth considering what’s been going on over those 10 years and what’s to come. In a video interview I just did here in the 10 year film series they’re putting together I said I was looking forward to the ASF and others figuring out how to handle open source as it goes mainstream (or is “dead” or “boring” as you might snark it). Greg Stein mentions the idea of managing a 10, 20 year old project in the video above, and I think that’s spot on.
More important is to always adapt and change to what the community wants instead of getting stuck in the original ways of doing things – being reactionary. The Shackles of Success don’t only apply to commercial companies, bro’.
Recession Telemetry
Our latest Intuit Payroll survey findings are out, and the results give me hope. While unemployment figures have reached a 26-year high, 44 percent of the 1,000 Intuit Payroll customers we surveyed said they plan to hire new employees within the next 12 months. Now, don’t get me wrong — we here at Intuit are not uncorking the champagne bottles quite yet. But we do think this is at least one sign that the clouds are beginning to part.
Via Alex Barrnett.
Where are the mainframe kids when you need ’em?
Forty percent of the datacenters surveyed said they still operate mainframes today, and the median number of mainframes at those facilities is two. Of those using mainframes, 46 percent, or almost half, said they’re considering replacing one or more of them in the next two years.
Back in 2006, after the latest IBM System z analyst conference I wrote:
From that comes our emphasis on lowering the barriers to entry: the micro and small buyers in the long tail don’t have the time or money to spend on learning or purchasing traditional enterprise software and hardware. While mainframe sales account for “about half” of IBM’s profit, that base is steadily shrinking. More importantly, IBM has effectively maxed out the current mainframe market: there’s not many more sales in the current customer base.
Those two things mean one thing: it’s time to get new customers, new types of customers.
Since then, I’ve been half-jokingly saying that IBM should just start shipping mainframes around to round-corner, cool kids conferences for a sort of “come and meet the mainframe!” or “have your picture taken with the mainframe!” events. Most people have never been right next to a mainframe, touched one, let alone knowing worked on one.
I still think it’d be a good idea: they’re impressive beasts and even the most unibodied-out hipster-nerd would be fascinated to actually see one.
Packets, man, packets
Cisco, which is based in San Jose, Calif., has also forecast that by 2013, video will account for about 60 percent of the data traveling across mobile networks.
iCash
According to eBay CEO John Donahoe, shoppers have already spent about $400 million on the popular commerce site using the company’s free iPhone application. Ok, the shopping part of eBay’s business brought in $1.4 billion in revenue just last quarter, but who would have predicted around half a billion dollar in sales a year would be recorded through the eBay iPhone app when it debuted on the App Store?
Disclosure: Intuit is a client, as is IBM.
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