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links for 2007-07-27

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— July 27, 2007 at 1:19 am

Quick Notes on the IT Management Vendor-scape

GroundWork’s Harper Mann saves me the trouble of blogging an email I sent in responseto a question of posed by Denise Dubie, via frequent AR IM buddy Ray George, which essentially boiled down to: what’s it look like for non-Big 4 companies getting into Big 4 IT management space? Here’s my off-the-cuff-y response, re-blogged for your pleasure, dear readers, with some added comments and links:

Microsoft is definitely a contender, though 1-3 years out. They’re in year 4 of their 10 year plan. That said, their plan seems good. Once they ship a hyper-visor with all their OSes AND get that widely spread, things could get very interesting and in their favor. [MS Softricity and rPath style virtualization/appliancing are of interest here as well.]

I don’t know enough about Oracle to comment. I know they ‘do stuff’ in this area, but they’re rarely at the top of my mind except in the ambitious area. The problem with application companies doing IT management is that they favor their stack instead being truly heterogeneous. Microsoft wrestles with this problem as you can imagine. IBM is an interesting exception, but they’re such a mega-company that you have to look at their different software brands (DB2, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli) as being part of a holding company. While Oracle and SAP are huge, they tend to try and stick all their software under one tent/architecture (i.e., Fusion and NetWeaver) rather than take the more loosely coupled approach that IBM does.

Obviously, I think the open source folks, such as GroundWork, Zenoss, and Hyperic, have a chance to be one of these ’emerging management challengers’ as well. I suspect that if/when one of them becomes successful, there’ll be a lot more sniffing around for acquisition by one of the Big 4. [See yesterday’s note on open source revenue jitters.]

EMC, by way of VMWare, is another interesting one. Whoever controls the majority of virtualization technology in the future will have a huge chance for doing a lot of IT management tooling. We’ll see what happens post-IPO.

Symantec is interesting, but I think they’d need to partner acquire, or be acquired by someone to fully built up their presence. They have mega-brand value in the mid-market with their Anti-Virus and Norton brands. That brand value could be extended if there was a good mid-market technology and execution. [Who doesn’t find comfort in those crossed arms?]

The major potential threat to IT management is a mass move to SaaS based applications. While it’s sort of pie-in-the-sky, to my mind, the only ‘real’ thing holding back large enterprises from going SaaS is a culture change. If the collective pool of enterprise thinking suddenly thought that SaaS was OK, I could see lots of people switching over email, ERP, and other things. [Listen to Monkcast #4 for more.]

This is the sort of dream we have every 5 years or so (we called it ‘ASP’ and ‘managed service’ last), so we’ll see how this go at it goes. The keys this time are (a.) getting companies to accept simple solutions rather than feature-ful ones, and, (b.) a possible generational shift in what ‘IT means’ once all the MySpace/FaceBook/WhizBang 2.0 people enter middle-management or, at least, start more heavily influencing IT spend. [Just don’t fall into the “those crazy kids and their gadgets” trap.]

Disclaimer: GroundWork is a client. As are Microsoft, IBM, and Zenoss.

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Categories: Enterprise Software, Systems Management.

By cote
— July 26, 2007 at 12:03 pm

links for 2007-07-26

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— July 26, 2007 at 1:18 am

BMC's Developer Network and Open Source Announcement

Today, BMC’s Open Source Dude, William “whurley” Hurley released BMC’s Developers Network site which includes an open source section. Both are interesting in the respect of filling large holes BMC has had ever since I’ve known them: establishing a common community for developers and open sourcing more of it’s own software. As has been noted, and as with HP, sure, BMC uses and participates in open source, but as of yet they haven’t committed much along the lines of assets, time, or money to it.

James has a nice and concise post on the topic for those who don’t like plodding through the below ;>

What it Is: Community and OSS Adaptors

You can see the various developer communities available in this poll: the Remedy AR community, devcon, and a few others. The top sites are not too “thriving,” though I’ve noticed that certain product lines in BMC’s portfolio tend to do all right. In short, BMC’s developer community sites have not been so hot over the past few years. The explanation is that BMC hasn’t had the sort of maniacal focus on developers in recent times that people like me like to see software companies has, at least online.

Talk.bmc.com, launched when I still worked there, was nice and shocking at the same time because it was such a new web thing for BMC to be doing. And while BMC-ites like Anne Gentle have been thinking about using wikis for sometime, from what I can tell, there’s still no BMC wiki for layering on additional documentation and best practices to BMC products and the community.

The point of laying this out isn’t to say that BMC is fuddy-duddy when it comes to “2.0” concepts and community building (which it was), but more to give enough context to see why having a central developer community site is a big deal and step for BMC.

Open source, of course, is also a big deal coming from any of the Big 4 IT management vendors. As mentioned earlier this week in the context of HP, none of the Big 4 have moved into the “mature” stages of open source. IBM is sort of the lead here with it’s involvement in Eclipse Aperi, but as far as a major event of becoming a patron of an existing, successful IT management open source project or starting their own major project, I don’t believe the Big 4 have crossed that line yet.

Now, BMC’s open source offerings are adaptors to it’s closed source software, which is sort of the path of least resistance. I’m sure getting even those projects out there in a culture that’s still closed source was a momentous task. It’s easy to poke sticks at big companies when it comes to open source, but in reality, open sourcing anything at a closed source company is a big effort.

Open Sourcing More: the BPM SDK Scenario

That said, what I’d like to see are complete products being open sourced: components that can be used on their own or at least used as components in other software. For example, the BMC Performance Manager SDK (which I worked on, to disclaim) is a prime target for open sourcing. The BPM SDK are the libraries, configuration methods, and runtime needed to do all the low-level monitoring and (eventually) management. That is, the BPM SDK is the sort of gate from Everything Else into the rest of the BMC product line (along with other low-level “agents”). “Gateway technologies,” those at the edge of your product line’s reach, are perfect thing for companies to open source:

  • Revenue is usually not directly delivered by low-level, technologies, though revenue is certainly made possible. In the world of IT management, the “low level” is the agent (be it “agentless” or “agentful”). Technologically, that layer is commoditized. While a vendor can provide value in scaling and performance here, there really is very little “secret sauce” at the low level of IT management anymore. As a customer, actually spending money on that level is anachronistic for the most part. The real value is in what you do with all the data and management capabilities: orchestrating, automating, reporting on IT, or otherwise making decisions based on what these lower levels are telling you. Note the cash paid for recent acquisitions like Opsware, RealOps, and ProactiveNet. In each case, these are parts of the IT management stack that do more than monitor and basic reactions: they actually “figure out” what do based on all that data.
  • As with any plugin architecture, the more outside people contribute to that layer, the more sales chances there are for the “parent technology” (here, the BMC product line). This is the share-cropper/co-creation/Metcalf’s Law notion that we all get excited about. Call it what you will, the point is that the more attention and code you have from outside developers, the more value in your over-all product line and brand. And a business can profit from that attention and those extra hands.

In short, you give away the roads and sell the houses.

Other Options

BMC, like most of the elder companies, has a vast product portfolio. There’s plenty of chances for open source dumping as well — taking old products and open sourcing them. “Open source dumping” is a derogatory term, but really, the practice can deliver on one of the goals of FSF-style open source: allowing the end users to control “their” code and, thus, their use of it. Product lines like the PATROL Agent and the Knowledge Modules are probably ripe with sub-systems, if not themselves, that BMC could hand over to the community instead of taking on all the work themselves.

When it comes to the older products, I suspect BMC would be pleasantly surprised to find communities of people who wanted to keep the technologies alive rather than migrate to other technologies. And while it may not be beneficial for BMC to do all the maintenance on it’s own — as closed source — it would probably be beneficial for all involves, vendor and customers, to open source them, BMC providing project management and otherwise “certifying the product” and the community providing most of the development and QA.

And I’ll throw a crazy one out there (crazy based on it’s revenue as I understand it): how about the CMDB? Could one come up with a plan where-in open sourcing it would actually be more profitable than keeping it closed source? It’d certainly be mud in the eye of the rest of the Big 4 and CMDB vendors. In BMC’s case, there’s the AR system, the runtime framework underpinning many of BMC’s highly successful products like Remedy and the CMDB. Less dramatic, I suspect the CMDB Federaton would benefit from an open source project or two. Here’s one idea.

To get into Microsoft-land, how about PowerShell adaptors and scripts, or some SML/SDM-oriented projects.

And whatever happened to Marimba?

Like I said, BMC has a lot of products that look juicy for open sourcing. Which usually leads to…

Open Source Revenue Jitters

Existing open source IT management vendors have benefited from an even more aggressive approach to open source: open sourcing whole products, not just “gateways.” The advantage here is that potential customers and user can “try and buy” rather than go through the enterprise sales-cycle. And while Spiceworks isn’t open source, it’s rapid rise to over 100,000 active users and the resulting monetization of that new channel was a result of similar low barriers to entry.

Part of this ability has to do with ease of install and a quick feedback loop to seeing value in the product. Some of this can be chalked up to be new product lines that have yet to be laden with the difficulties of long-lived, successful code-bases. That’s sort of an unfair gimmie.

The other, more important, part has to do with open source licensing and the low-barrier to entry distribution effects that follows. Of course, I’m ever skeptical of just how much revenue a software company can make from this model.

Could Hyperic, Zenoss, and GroundWork achieve the same quarterly revenue that BMC or other Big 4 do from license and maintenance sales of closed source products? Important to note in that question is that if the answer is “no,” that’d be by no means failure on any of those companies part: instead it means that closed source companies are either over-charging or otherwise figuring out how to get more money that isn’t based on selling the “true value” of the software and it’s use in license and support costs.

Open Source and Enterprise IT Management Revenue

I’m a firm believer that software, like cars, looses it’s value rapidly over time. The way the software is used, the data and process it enables, and the exit costs are the real value and prohibitions from “paying less.” Open source has a weird way making all those values transparent to customers rather than hiding those value evaluations behind licensing and support costs. Of course, the way “real” enterprise software sales occur is anything but “sticker price.”

Big enterprise negations for software pricing — licensing, support, or whatever — are more along the lines of “how much do I have to pay you to ask me ‘how high?’ each time I say ‘jump?'” With that understanding, I’ve been slightly perplexed by the fear of open source that large, closed source enterprise software vendors cultivate: enterprise customers are more savvy than to think that making that initial copy of the software is what they’re paying for, where the value is. They’re paying to get the vendors attention for features, support calls, and otherwise outsourcing the development and running of that software to the vendor when that customer’s in-house staff can’t “take care of it.”

Enterprise software spend is all about spending money to get the vendor to do what you want, when you want it. The same rules can apply if the product is open source or closed source.

Of course, there’s also providing IT management as a SaaS. So far, few Big 4 IT management vendors have moved beyond the notion that SaaS for them is bonkers (Sun is coming around). But, once you screw with the distribution and deployment angle like that, open source is sort a moot point.

BMC & Open Source: Keep Running

So, as you might guess, my advice is for BMC to be even more aggressive with open source. Move before someone else does and steals the first mover advantage. IBM as a company gets open source and could create the will to go nuts with open source in IT management. CA and HP: I’m not too sure about at the moment…but they could Black Swan it up just as easily as anyone else if their will and culture changed.

As I said about HP and open source earlier this week, the fastest path is “acquiring” an open source project, which is more about hiring the projects key developers. There’s also open sourcing existing projects, which is a longer, tougher haul, but has a better potential pay-off. Doing both is good stuff as well.

BMC’s announcement is a great step: excreting the will as a company to pull of such a thing can be flood gates towards more complete open sourcing. As I said when BMC hired whurley:

I know whurley is up to the task: like the open source world itself, the man has no end of energy and drive. whurley also brings a rich set of connections into the open source world that — in my experience at least — has been lacking in a formal way at BMC. My hope is that BMC will give him the room and permission to “make it happen,” and hiring him is certainly a signal in the right direction.

Indeed, those words still apply now that the first step is handled.

(Oh, and allow me to say congrats on choosing the BSD license. As I’ve said before, personally, I’m a BSD man, so it makes me happy to see people choose it ;>)

Disclaimer: BMC is a client and I used to work there. IBM and CA are clients, as are SpiceWorks, GroundWork, Zenoss, Sun, Eclipse, and Microsoft. Check out the list for ones I missed.

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Categories: Community, Marketing, Open Source, Systems Management.

By cote
— July 25, 2007 at 2:39 pm

Java's Fear of Commitment

The relative verbosity of programming languages isn’t the interesting thing; nor is typing doctrine. What’s interesting is the culture of frameworks and what different communities deem valuable. My sense of it is that on Java, too many web frameworks – think JSF, or Struts 1.x – consider the Web something you work around using software patterns. The goal is get off the web, and back into middleware. Whereas a framework like Django or Rails is purpose-built for the Web; integrating with the internal enterprise is a non-goal. —Design for the Web

Java is a general purpose, object oriented programming language. It’s roots in early 90’s object oriented theory, more importantly, the desires and goals of that theory can’t be overlooked when asking why Java is the way it is. The culture of Java design is to push out commitment to a given way of doing things (an “implementation”) as much as possible. In Java culture, dependencies, esp. conceptual ones, are nasty and to be avoided. They’re taboo, even.

The VM

The virtual machine architecture it, itself, the first embodiment of this: rather than benefit from direct access to the underlying operating system and executables there, all access to the OS is mediated via the VM and libraries. It’s considered bad form to actually have to know what OS or even machines you’re running on. There’s good reason for all this, of course, in that you magically swap out the OS or setup and not have to re-code things.

QA loves it when you do that!

Libraries

Nothing represents Java’s distaste for implementation dependency more than the older libraries in Java that follow a plugin architecture. Take JAAS or JNDI, for example. The general functions are abstracted into a handful of classes and interfaces that don’t actually do anything: they just model the possibilities. With some weird wiring up of implementations, you can actually interact with LDAP servers and get things done. The same applies to, for example, XML parsers, transaction engines, and all matter of places.

And thanks to all those layers of abstractions, if you want to magically swap out your LDAP servers to something new (OpenID?), you can just do it!

Again, QA loves it when you do that. They embrace it!

UIs, including the Web

Java’s take on UIs is much the same. You never know when you’re going to want to swap out your UI, so you better work with an abstract layer to buffer you from dependency on any given UI. That Swing based app needs a web UI? No problem, just edit that XML file. Magic!

QA especially likes it when you change the UI.

Sarcasm Check: All this Swapping Out

Now, I’m being glib about all this swapping in and out of things. There are some things that it works well for in Java — file systems, sorting algorithms, collections, and all sorts “low level” API things. At the framework and application layer, however, I think the notion that abstraction help you is largely crap:

  • By the time you’ve written your abstraction layer, you’ve essentially written your own framework. Chances are, you’re not a good framework writer, and it’s going to suck, and you’re going to realize that one or two versions down the road and re-write it.
  • New frameworks and ways of building applications will come along that you want to use (web applications, clustering, Ajax, mobile access) that don’t readily map to the metaphors, idioms, and expectations of your abstraction layer. At this point, you’ll get upward leak as the new things you want to do are bolted onto your abstraction layer.
  • The chief reason it’s crap, and to Bill’s point, is that you’ll always be sacrificing fully taking advantage of things you’ve abstracted away, or making them harder.

To be fair, I’m jaundiced when it comes to heavy abstraction, ladened with the unreasonable exception that most everything will be re-written sooner rather than later. This is probably due to me having worked in less than ideal conditions in the past, so for those of you working in what would be to my experience, relative nirvana: hats off!

If anything, I would concede that abstraction is better left as the coda to a round of development. Again, if you’re smart enough to do design up-front: hats off, dear reader! Your ‘umble servant is not so.

Java Applications vs. Web Applications

More pertinent to Bill’s point of ETags in Java, the problem is that Java developers are building Java applications, not web applications. As such, your concern is doing things the Java Way, not the web way. You trust that by doing things in the Java way, Java will help you avoid the long term problem of maintenance and changeability. The strict practices of Java won’t let your code cement and take ages to update and will prevent your code from becoming incomprehensible piles of tangled wire.

(I could go off on a long tangent about that being the last, and often over-looked, point of good software development, but I’ll keep it short: making it so that, come version 5 of your software, you can easily add in new features with out taking a long time and costing a lost of money. Unless you end up staying at the same programming job for more than 2-3 years, this point is really irrelevant, so most people could give a damn.)

It seems to me that people building LAMP, Ruby, django, or other applications think of themselves more as building web applications with whatever technology tools they need to use: web services, cron jobs, MySQL, ruby, PHP, python, maybe some Java: whatever. What matters is getting the web application working.

People who using Java see themselves primarily as building Java applications that happen to have a “view” (as we OO head-jobs would call it) that’s the web. Our primary goal is the metaphysical and headless application, not the delivery mechanism. Hopefully you can get a sense for my view of Java culture at this point: it’s more concerned with keeping the concepts, work-flows, and design of the application pure and tidy than optimizing the delivery mechanism, or implementation. Them UML diagrams should look good.

Again, Java’s belief is that this will save you in the long run, which may be true. I have not coded in Eclipse, but those who do, like Mik Kersten, tell me that Eclipse’s object oriented nature over the long haul has paid off when it comes to adding in seemingly “simple” features like hyperlinking to any piece of text in the UI.

Ultimately, Java is a culture that emphasizes knowing less rather than more. Anything you know and act on in your application is a dependency that can cost you time and money in the future. Better, the thinking goes, to deliver less and be able to sustain it over the long-haul than to deliver more and run out of code energy in long run.

People Are the Ultimate Leaky Abstraction

Obviously, all of this is a generalization. But, I think it’s handy for sorting out the difference between Java programming and web application programming. The allegiances for each are to different philosophies driven by the goals of the developers (to stereo-type: long term maintainability vs. ultimate end-user experience), and the resulting cultures and, thus, applications, are starkly different.

The people you choose and the resulting technology they choose will result in wildly different applications than another set of people. That, dear readers, is the ultimate leaky abstraction.

Disclaimer: Eclipse is a client, as are MySQL and Sun.

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rev="post-899" 25 Comments

Categories: Development Tools, Java, Programming.

By cote
— July 25, 2007 at 10:00 am

links for 2007-07-25

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— July 25, 2007 at 1:18 am

The End of the iPhone Bubble: Too Bad, So Sad

July 5th, 2007:

Analyst estimates for iPhone sales in its first weekend run as high as 700,000 units, beating many investors’ expectations, and some now expect the momentum to continue. The device went on sale last Friday.

July 24th, 2007:

AT&T—the iPhone’s exclusive carrier—said it activated 146,000 iPhones on June 29 and 30, a number that disappointed investors following some analyst forecasts that Apple would sell 500,000 or more iPhones in its first weekend.

The news interrupted a steady rise in Apple’s stock price that started with the iPhone’s release. The 18 percent surge generated $18 billion in shareholder wealth.

On Tuesday, Apple shares fell $8.81, or more than 6 percent, to $134.89, wiping out more than $7 billion of Apple’s market value.

Does this mean the price will go down by July 2008 when my Verizon (hate them!) contract is up? Plz advice.

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rev="post-897" 2 Comments

Categories: The Analyst Life.

By cote
— July 24, 2007 at 7:48 pm

Using moo.com Cards

Two Business Cards

I’ve been using moo.com cards for sometime now. They differ from “normal” business cards in two ways, as seen above:

  • They’re narrower, about half the size.
  • You can put a different picture on the backs of each card.

The price is currently 100 cards for $20, not including some $4-5 for shipping from London to Austin.

The Benefits

I like these cards a lot, and they’re well worth the trouble to create and pay for them.

The primary reason that I like them is that they’re just cool: selecting my own, full color pictures to have on the back is fun and the size is fun too.

In my work, people are always exchanging business cards, and anything out of the ordinary is exciting because so little is out of the ordinary in the world of business cards. What been especially fun is finding that I’ve “infected” someone with using moo.com cards. This morning I found out that one more person I gave one to started using them as well. I get countless people who get a little fit of mini-depression when they say “well, I’d get these, but my company won’t let me get ‘non-standard’ cards.” Too bad for that company as these cards are, as I said, very memorable and remarkable. Each time I give them out I end up in a 2-3 minute conversation about just the cards; once people flip them over, I often end up talking about the picture on the back.

There’s a fear of offending the fuddy-duddier people out there with stuff like these cards which is pretty unfounded. In consulting, the fear would be that you’d give this card to someone, they wouldn’t take you seriously, and then you end up loosing money because they don’t hire, help, or otherwise engage with you. Now, maybe if I put nudies on the back, that’d be the case, but so far no one has given me the “what, are you a joke?” response. Quite the opposite in fact.

I’ve also received moo.com cards from several people in the mail for wedding save the dates. That’s a nice use!

Ordering the Cards

I’ve ordered several batches of the cards. The first batch came out with the é screwed up, but moo.com quickly and for free did a re-print. As with most * 2.0, small, online shops, their customer service is awesome. Subsequent batches were just fine.

What to Put on the Card

I decided to put “normal” info on the car: my name (bold), company name, URL (bold), email address, and phone number. Since I work out of home, I don’t really have a mailing address, and, really, in hi-tech mailing addresses are kind of silly for cards.

Selecting Pictures

You can select the pictures that show up on your moo.com cards from several sources, I choose using flickr as I put all the pictures I care about into my flickr account.

The first time I did it, I used the painful selection and crop tool that moo.com provides. This is the worst part of the whole process as selecting and cropping takes a long, long time in the Ajax form and, worse, it tends to error out for me. So, I’ll spend 30-40 minutes selecting pictures, click “done,” and it’s all like “oh, sorry, this crapped out.”

The first time, I finally got this work by using Safari (I think). The second time, I instead made custom images to the specifications moo.com suggestions. They make those format guides kind of hard to fine — I’ve had to tell other people who couldn’t find one, but for graphically dumb people like me they boil down to making images that are 1024×443. You can, of course, orient the pictures however you like: landscape or portrait to use the printer terms.

Batch 2 of moo.com cards

In the first batch I had far more different pictures than in the second batch. To be frank, I got tired to making each image, so I stopped after 20.

For the second batch, I selected less pictures of myself and family and more of my co-workers and just funny things. And dogs, though I tried to cut back on those. Basically, I followed the “kill your darlings rule”: even if I thought it was a nice picture, I tried not to include it because, frankly, looking at other people’s banal “family photos” is actually pretty boring. You want something interesting, hopefully that makes someone say “WTF?”, long for tasty burgers or a drink, or laugh.

Once I created those 20 pictures, I uploaded them to flickr, then used moo.com’s flickr tag search to bring them up, and that was pretty much it.

For the next, 3rd batch, I’m hoping to add new photos I’ve taken or found since then. That’s a major fun part of moo.com cards: getting different “series” of them.

Thankfully, moo.com has added an account feature since I ordered my first batch when they opened. This should make it easier to just order up a new batch (with some additions) in the future.

Hacking the Front Picture

The one trick I’ve figured out is customizing the picture on the front of the cards. Last I ordered them, if you use flickr as the source for images, moo.com uses your buddy icon as the picture on the left front of the card. As a business card, what I want here is the RedMonk logo. So, I just changed my flickr logo to the RedMonk logo when making the card — and kept it there until I received them in the mail — and it showed up on the final cards as you can see.

Really, I think it’s pretty silly that they don’t let you upload a logo.

Other moo.com Products

Notecards

I don’t really have the need for the notecards, but I can see that they’d be nice for making post-card or other things to mail out. I don’t really mail things out though, so no use for it yet.

Maybe Holiday/Christmas (post-) cards?

Stickers!

I’d heard rumours from people in London that moo.com was fixin’ to print stickers. Checking their site today, it looks like they’re shipping stickers. I’m eager to check these out for my own use for my DrunkAndRetired.com podcast and for RedMonk. Free shipping in July! I’m sure with a little craftiness, hacking them will be fun too ;>

My Advice

I’d say get some: they’re cheap and they work as far as helping meet people and, as weird as it sounds, have fun with business cards. If your company wants you to use their official cards, great, use them. But order up some of these to use as well and then at least give them to “the cool people.” They’ll appreciate it. And if the business card brand-police come stompin’ around, so you’re out of $20s.

If there’s no brand-police around, then even better for you: you can just order some up and start having fun with the usually mind-numbing artifact of business cards.

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rev="post-896" 6 Comments

Categories: Ideas, Marketing, The Analyst Life.

By cote
— July 24, 2007 at 4:28 pm

links for 2007-07-24

rev="post-895" 1 Comment

Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— July 24, 2007 at 1:22 am

HP Acquisition Day: Opsware and Neoware – And the Larger Issue of HP IT Management Offerings

Four years ago we spent 70% of our R&D dollars on hardware, but last year that 70% was dedicated to software. —Mark Hurd, CEO, HP

HP is on the path to acquiring two more companies today: Opsware and Neoware. I don’t have a well reasoned analysis at the moment for you, but here are some off-the-cuff thoughts:

  • If Opsware’s Run Book Automation (not just monitoring, but actually doing stuff with IT) works as well as Opsware’s recent growth and The Hype would seem to indicate, strapping together HP’s existing IT management assets along with Opsware under the OpenView brand would be might powerful marketing. OpenView is still a good brand name, though, perhaps, an aged technology. Using Opsware and other recent acquisitions to pull a product line refresh, a la BMC PATROL-to-BMC Performance Manager could be both technologically and market wise successful. We’ll see.
  • Us IT Management wonks are always talking about how HP is getting serious about software, that is, IT management software. Software has always been the odd man out at HP, but obviously HP is spending to change that: Mercury, today’s two, and others.
  • The M&A speculation fun-hogs among us like to throw in pereinial favorite BMC, but there are other, sort of “second tier” IT management companies as well.
  • Virtualization – HP has done work to create The Problem of Virtualization (“like bacteria in a petri dish”), perhaps this is now The Solution that you, with The Problem, can buy.
  • Not knowing Neoware well at all, the first thing I think of is comparing Microsoft Softricity’s “application virtualization” to it. Sure, it’s not the same technologically (from what I know of Neoware), but the end result could be the same…?
  • I hadn’t thought about it ’till know, but the question of SunRays comes up here as well. The problem there was (the perception) of having to buy Sun hardware, but it seems like if the “application virtualization” idea takes off, Sun could profit from some after-glow marketing quite well if phrased right.
  • Special mention goes to the city Neoware is based in: “King of Prussia.” Whao!

The Wider Angle

The big picture here is HP building up a complete, refreshed IT management product line. Clearly, HP is going for the Big 4 dream of providing an ITIL implementation, which is fine and good, really. Until a black swan comes along and changes the agenda from ITIL, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of market for that message.

Missing

There are some missing items from what I know of HP’s IT management strategy, however:

  • Open source – I’m not sure if HP’s feelings about open source in IT management are out in the open yet. Several months ago, at an HP event, Steve said:

    Nowhere, interestingly, as one of the Forrester analysts and I discussed earlier today, did they utter the words “open source.” Not once that I caught. Nor, as you might deduce from that omission, the word “developer.”

    (Form HP software exec, Nora Denzel’s interviews with Investor Business Daily and Dave Rosenberg are interesting, tangential background data-points.)

  • SaaS – both when it comes to providing IT management as a service (a la FiveRuns, Klir, Service-now.com, and friends), but, more importantly, providing the tools for managing SaaS installs (the latest addition here being eVapt with others skirting around that I need to look more into). I had a brief moment of excitement when I read Opsware as Opsource.

The open source hole looms larger in my mind than the SaaS one. While I think providing IT management as a service is something that the Big 4 will be slow to reap the benefits of (based on my past experience at BMC and on my current read of the Big 4’s SaaS ambitions), providing IT management for SaaS is more of a medium- to long-term bet that the Big 4 could, if they found themselves in a sudden pinch of successful companies, acquire to fill out the bullet point.

Open source in IT management, on the other hand, is looking to be a Big Deal in the next year or so. Figuring out how to incorporate open source into an existing, closed source company without getting revenue jitters isn’t as easy as acquiring a bullet point: it’s wider, deeper change that requires planning and, more importantly, time for successful culture change.

So, the afore mentioned “IT wonks” will no doubt be watching HP more. We’ll be seeing what OpenView 2.0, so to speak, looks like.

I like Jason’s good round-up as well.

Disclaimer: FiveRuns, Sun, and fellow Big 4 members BMC, CA, and IBM are clients. I’m friends with one of the founders of eVapt.

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Categories: Enterprise Software, Marketing, Open Source, Systems Management.

By cote
— July 23, 2007 at 5:38 pm