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Dell led 2010 SMB PC share according to new Spiceworks research

Spiceworks posted an analysis of PC (laptops and desktops) market share drawn from it’s its 1.3M user-base today. This kind of Big Data based analytics is a rosey looking future for IT folks looking to get real, “numbers” analysis on what’s going on out there. Previous to this, the company has been putting out more formal (PDFs!), interesting research in it’s “Voice of IT” section: the quarterly “State of SMB IT” has had interesting figures on SaaS and cloud spend, as well as IT spend in general.

The Findings

In their data-set (machines “in the Spiceworks network”), Spiceworks found that, world-wide, Dell lead laptop and desktop market-share world-wide with 42.1%, followed by “other” at 32.1%, HP at 21.7%, and Lenovo by 4.1%. In the US, Dell dominates even more with 54.3% share.

There’s some estimates on how much revenue these numbers bring in, with a note that just a 0.1% growth rate probably means $100M extra a year for HP and Lenovo.

Check out these visualizations:

Dell 42.1%, Other 32.1%, HP 21.7%, Lenovo 4.1%

Dell 54.3%, Other 23.9%, HP 18.4%, Lenovo 3.4%

For comparison, check out Ars Technoca’s summary of Gartner and IDC market-share numbers for US and worldwide PC sales (their US figures don’t have Lenovo, but do have Apple). It’s a bit different, I assume throwing in “enterprise” with SMB, along with “consumer.” Here’s quick-and-dirty comparison of the 3Q 10 world-wide share and Spiceworks 2010 share (see the raw data if you really care):

Ars 3Q 10 vs. Spiceworks 2010

Background

Spiceworks has grown that impressive community of 1.3 million “IT pros” using their eponymous, free IT management platform. The target is primarily small and medium shops, though depending on what you think of “enterprise” the platforms seems to support larger networks. They can offer the platform for free because the company takes privacy scrubbed data about each users networks and aggregates it together to sell these hard-to-reach “eyeballs” to vendors and others. More than ads, there’s interesting “sponsored” features/plugins, like being able to monitor email inboxes in Rackspace or take advantage of Intel vPro functionality.

I’m not sure exactly what data Spiceworks gets, but it’s a nice swatch of hardware and software assets. They’ve been very cautious to respect the privacy concerns of users, of course, but with a combination of looking over that aggregate data and also doing polls of their user-base, they’ve been able to put out some useful data.

Disclosure: Spiceworks is a client, as is Dell.

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Categories: Systems Management, The Analyst Life.

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By cote
— February 8, 2011 at 4:43 pm

ExtraHop – Brief Note

Brief notes are summaries of briefings and conversations I’ve had, with only light “analysis.”

ExtraHop Screenshot

ExtraHop sells a hardware appliance for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) from the inside of the firewall, monitoring network traffic to find applications slowdowns and other problems, firing off alerts to admins after diagnosing these problems. If you’re interested in hunting down alerting on poorly performing application and diagnosing what’s wrong with them, these guys have something to offer. Recently, ExtraHop announced a partnership with Keynote Systems: Keynote’s web transaction monitoring would observe web apps from the outside of the firewall, while ExtraHop would do the behind-the-firewall, “back-end” monitoring. See their blog entry on the partnership as well.

There’s two appliances available, the EH2000 and the EH5000 which, as you can guess, do less and then more amounts of analysis, gated by gigabits (3 then 10) of traffic and number of devices (300 then 1,000).

Some key take-aways:

  • Most people are skeptical of “magic” performance boosts from APM appliances like this. But, because of the ease of getting up and running – you essentially plug the ExtraHop pizza box in, it auto-discovery different applications and nodes, and then goes to work monitoring and alerting, pulling the info it needs from network traffic – a two week or so PoC is pretty good at winning people over.
  • To that point, ExtraHop’s Jesse Rothstein alluded to how “it works better” is possible for the ExtraHop devices: in addition to the software they write, advanced in multi-core and cheaper storage allow them to do real-time network analysis that wasn’t possible previously.
  • SaaS providers who, of course, need good APM for their network delivered applications are good customers for ExtraHop.
  • Check out the brief write-up of Alaska Airlines use from Beth Schultz.

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Categories: Brief Notes, Systems Management.

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By cote
— February 8, 2011 at 2:08 pm

Openwashing – Press Pass

I talk with the press frequently. They thankfully whack down my ramblings into concise quotes. For those who prefer to see more, I try to dump publish slightly polished up conversations I have with press into this new category of posts: Press Pass.

Klint Finley over at ReadWriteWeb asked me a few weeks about “openwashing,” a fancy way of saying “open source software that isn’t really open source enough.” He wrote a nice, brief piece around that topic, “How to Spot Openwashing.”

Here’s the brain-dump I sent him on the topic:

How does openwashing end up happening?

The motivations tend to be one of two things: ignorance of how “open source” should work and look, and/or, profit-motive. There’s another variance we’ll call the “oops, that didn’t work” recovery.

Just not doing it right

Having worked with many companies over the years on going open source (see our report “Going Open Source”), many of them are just not cognizant ahead of time of the missteps that can be made. There’s so much arm-chair lawyering in open source (trade mark, assigning IP, patents, etc.) that it’s easy to overlook or simply not realize how much legal-thinking going open source requires. And if you do something wrong there, then once someone wants to accuse you of not being “real open source,” they can go after that fine print. Of course, as Oracle’s recent trade mark based flap over Hudson shows, those fears can be real: just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, as they say.

You can’t buy iPads, let alone food, with “free”

The profit motive is more what vocal folks in this space don’t like. Some would argue that the “open core” model (the software’s foundation, its “core,” are open source but you pay for additional functionality) is open washing (not me), and it can start to paint a picture of open washing models: a company open sources something, but keeps another part closed source, and usually you have to spend money on that closed source to get maximal value out of the open source. This can be just fine, or terrible – it all depends on the communities expectations and how useful the open source software is on it’s own. Clearly, if you’re peddling “cripple-ware” as “open source,” there’s something wrong going on.

Also, in this category are bundlers, or packagers, of open source. A company will take an open source project and wrap it inside a closed source ball. The more intellectually dishonest will try to ape the open source ideas, while the others (BSD and Apple) will completely drop any idea of open, just taking the code. Again, if the overall product is what users and customers want, it’s not really a big deal. Most software that exists today probably includes a lot of open source: commercial software companies would be crazy to skip on the free, high quality software out there and, instead, spend their own time and money to replicate and maintain it.

Controlling Open

Another one is to open source a small part of an overall platform, but still keep the important parts closed source. A more common occurrence is to open source a project and then have only people from the original company work on it: the project never allows anyone outside to become part of the project. Here, the “patron” organization wants to motivate involvement and use by open sourcing (saving marketing and partnering pay-off/revenue share budget and energy) but wants to keep control and code. Some could argue that Sun-cum-Oracle’s refusal to grant a TCK license to the ASF is an example of this – as with all examples, there’s lot’s of nuance that makes it a square concept in a round hole.

Open Integrations

A sort of “open useless” variant of open core happens frequently too. Lots of IT Management vendors did this is recent years: they’d open source integrations between closed source software and make big fan-fair about doing open source. As software moves more and more to SaaS and cloud, expect to see a lot more of this: the SaaS application is closed, but we’re open source friendly when it comes to integrating with it. You have a sort of “open source as cloud bait” thing going on there. There’s already a lot of hand-wringing over how “open source” companies like Google and Facebook are and what it means for them to open source little bits here and there, but not entire applications. Overall, I’d say people (developers) like it, or at least don’t care so much. Another good example is the very closed world of Apple iOS (whose benchmark for “openness” is, apparently, Microsoft Windows) vs. the more open world of Android.

Open Secrets

The other thing you’ll see often here is that a project will be very secretive about what they’re going to work on next. Their road map is not open. It’s always professionally funny when I sit in an NDA briefing with someone working on, ostensibly, an open source project/product and they tell me I can’t talk about future plans. If you open source something, it really should mean more than the source: your community, if you’re lucky enough to have one, wants to know everything, including future directions. The secrecy around Android is a good example here.

“Oops that didn’t work”

The last point is the “oops that didn’t work” effect. Over the past 10+ years, companies have open sourced many things. For whatever reasons, many of these projects don’t work out. Some of them were simply “open dumping” (to use a Marc Fleury term, I believe). Others just weren’t interesting enough to build up a community (remember when there were 5,000 wiki stacks in the mid-2000’s?). And a rare few were simply good enough and didn’t need more work (some SNMP stacks seem to fit in here). Clearly, Nokia thinks that Symbian needs to be less open source.

Another thing you’ll see happen is a company changing the open source licensing to prevent competitors or others from taking revenue from the product. The company may open source some product, find that someone else has commercialized it, and then in freaking out change around the license to prohibit that. This happens more than you might think.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client, as are many companies using various degrees of “openness” and open source.

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Categories: Open Source.

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By cote
— February 7, 2011 at 10:40 pm

Links for February 4th through February 7th

Energizer Industrial AA Batteries

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— February 7, 2011 at 10:35 pm

Puppet Enterprise – Brief Note

Brief notes are summaries of briefings and conversations I’ve had, with only light “analysis.”

Define, Simulate, Enforce, Report

Puppet Labs released a major product last week, Puppet Enterprise, an integrated bundling of the open source automation platform, Puppet, and several of the other tools needed to get up and running fast. The Puppet Enterprise release is firming up Puppet Lab’s efforts in the mainstream world of enterprise datacenters and IT.

While they have plenty of cases of round-corner cool kids using their stuff – Zynga, Google, etc. – the majority of customers (as distinct from “users” who may or not pay) for any IT Management space are far from anything thrilling that ends in “.com.” I say this as someone who actually covers this space and likes it: personally, I don’t think it’s “boring,” but it’s not iPhone vs. Android, if you catch my drift.

Still, you out there know, dear readers, the model-driven automation space that Puppet helped pioneer is actually very exciting: there seems to be genuine innovation that leads to better IT Management going on in that market.

Polishing Puppet

The idea of Puppet Enterprise is to bundle up SLA’ed support options along with a certified, bundled stack of all the stuff you need to get up and running with Puppet. Having this “polished,” productized version of the open source platform is welcome, of course. It’s one thing to download the open source bits and cobble them together for free, and a nicer, though not-free experience, to have things all arranged for you.

The promise of Puppet and other next generation, model-driven automation tools on the market now is to speed up the time it takes to provision and update IT resources. Get new servers running, manage the software on desktops, and otherwise get a machine from bare-metal up and running with all the software and configuration needed to start using it. When talking with Puppet’s CEO on this release, he told me that one customer had seen Puppet made their configuration rates 53 times faster. If you can speed up the process of configuration management that much, you, the IT folks, buy yourself a lot of time to (a.) do other, more important things, and, (b.) amaze The Business at how fast you can actually spin up new resources for their use.

Closed source conversions, but open source-y developers types are interested in Chef

Pricing is for a 12 months subscription and starts at $2,475 for basic support and 25 nodes ($99/node), goes up to $215,950 for 2,500 nodes and 24/7 support ($86.38/node), and then goes to “call us.”

Momentum

I’ve been covering Puppet, and ReductivePuppet Labs for a long time, since it was a two man shop. They continue to have good momentum and, anecdotally, it seems to be growing in the enterprise space. Here, the projects are to replace older, more expensive, automation suites from BMC (BladeLogic – by coincidence, El Reg reports today on a recent cloud-y win for Blade) and HP (OpsWare). Indeed, Luke Kanies (Puppet Labs CEO) went over a few cases from customers who’d converted, usually following the bottom-up approach to open source: while going multi-month evaluations and bake-offs for closed source automation suites, a admin would try out Puppet and have everything up and running before the ink was dry on the PoC (a dash hyperbole on my part there, of course).

One of the interesting enterprise-y side efforts of a model-driven automation approach, Luke said, is getting a much more accurate CMDB, or at least asset database: because the tool (here, Puppet) strictly enforced the configuration each node has (the “model”), you sort of know exactly what each node has on it. Drift will occur, of course, but that’s what the “enforce” part is about. No doubt, this is not perfect, but I suspect it’s “more perfect.”

On the other hand, and also anecdotally, I’ve noticed that some developers and other round-corner cool kids have been evaluating Chef to replace their Puppet installs. There’s been interesting ISV and cloud vendor interest in Chef vs. Puppet as well. To some extent, this is the non-paying customer pool (versus “enterprise” who pays if there’s something to buy, like Puppet Enterprise), but it is a challenge for Puppet Labs.

More

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is a client, as are several of their competitors such as OpsCode, IBM, Microsoft, and some others.

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Categories: Brief Notes, Cloud, Enterprise Software, Open Source, Systems Management.

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By cote
— February 7, 2011 at 1:30 pm

NitroSphere – Brief Note

Brief notes are summaries of briefings and conversations I’ve had, with only light “analysis.”

Nitrosphere promises to increase the WAN performance of SQL Server databases with technology that fixes inefficiencies in the communications stack (the NitroAccelerator product). These same, or similar, enhancements are also used to do better compression and backups of SQL Server databases (the NiroCompressor product). There’s also the potential for performance enhancements like this to degrade performance so, as Mark Wright said, during the briefing, they check in on performance to avoid being more of a problem than a help. The scenarios here are having distributed SQL Server databases, over different, perhaps far-flung locations, or just having remote workers who need to access a SQL Server database over the network: perhaps insurance agents working from home, Fred Johannessen said. Pricing starts at $2,499 per server with some clients free.

Clearly, there’s good prospects in Azure and other cloud-based SQL Server applications that are look for quick and easy performance boosts. Early cloud developers often complain about network latency, even within nodes “in” the same cloud. Having a quick way to speed things up is always nice. As James mentioned during the call, the vast world of SharePoint has to be some sort of alluring hills as well.

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Categories: Brief Notes, Systems Management.

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By cote
— February 7, 2011 at 10:59 am

Links for February 3rd through February 4th

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— February 4, 2011 at 4:10 pm

Cool stuff going on in software project management, or, "Innovations in Requirements Management for Better Feedback and Better Software" – Upcoming Talk

Bedtime for bonzo

Next week, I’ll be giving a short talk online, as part of a “super-cast”, on what I see interesting and helpful going on in the Application Lifecycle Management space. Loosely, when I don’t want to kill myself with enterprise-y phrases, I think of this as all the junk an organization needs to help manage the process of getting software out the door (or over the pipes, as it were), hopefully good software that people like using.

Here’s the abstract of my talk:

It’s been a long time since technology and process innovations have allowed development teams to change and improve the way they deliver software to their users. Agile software development was the last major change: the further evolution of those and other practices, along with recent innovations in cloud computing and other areas, have given teams even better ways to manage the requirements and features delivered to users. This talk focuses on using those innovations to not just “track and capture requirements,” but to create and deliver better software for your users.

I’ll be talking about agile software development, feedback and Frequent Functionality (a good way to make your requirements gardening better), dev/ops, social programming (e.g., GitHub), SaaS toolchains and cloud development suites, tricking developers into micro-managing themselves and doing “dashboards,” and the usual governance and controls that always seem to tag along with ALM.

Registration is free, so if you’re interested, go over there and sign up. After my talk, there’s some interesting looking talms from MKS and Jama Software.

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Categories: Agile, Conferences, Programming.

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By cote
— February 4, 2011 at 4:08 pm

Links for February 1st through February 3rd

Between the Swan and Dolphin

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— February 3, 2011 at 6:10 pm

Data Center Spending and Economic Conditions

As part of the SearchDataCenter.com Advisory Board, I recently answered the question “How do you see economic conditions changing for data centers today versus late 2008?” The follow-on question was “How do you see data center strategies or operations changing to meet today’s economic conditions?” Here’s part of my answer:

To hear some of our clients tell it, as older high priced IT management systems are rolling off maintenance agreements, IT shops are evaluating new, cheaper options, be they closed source, open source or SaaS (Software as a Service). There’s a certain ‘what have you done for me lately’ feel going on in purchasing. Elder companies (incumbent vendors) are retooling some offerings to SaaS form-factors to meet some of those demands, while others are less tactical in their response.

In general, myself and the other advisory board members were optimistic, but there was some gloom and doom. Check out the full answers over there.

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Categories: Systems Management.

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By cote
— February 3, 2011 at 5:02 pm