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Links for June 19th through June 21st

Nau's Enfield Drug

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— June 22, 2010 at 7:47 am

Links for June 16th through June 18th

Wayne Perry

Chillin’ with the mainframes.

The Links

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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By linkposter
— June 18, 2010 at 1:06 pm

The New Polymath – Book Review

A new trying to make innovation important again by showing how much is actually going on.

At one of the first analyst events I went to I got a lesson in analyst cynicism that’s stuck with me. After a day of the vendor presenting I asked a much older analyst what he thought of the day – just making small talk, really. “Well,” he began, “I haven’t really seen anything innovative and new.” I asked him the last time he had and he citing a chip from several years back.

I was stumped because I didn’t really think that level of innovation was really the point of the enterprise vendor we were talking with: making money selling and servicing (mostly “old”) technology was their strength, not inventing the next Internet.

And that’s about where we are now with many IT vendors: they’re not expected to dramatically innovate and come up with groundbreaking technologies that “change the world.” Apple leads in out in the consumer world, and people used to expect Google to stumble into innovation every-now-and-then. But the existing “elder companies”? They mostly get sinkers when they use the word “innovate.”

Expect Innovation

Vinnie Mirchandani’s book, The New Polymath, is a relentless narration of companies, vendors, and others trying to go against that technology innovation boredom and stagnation. It boarders on rocket car impossibility at times, but it’s depressingly one of the few books I’ve read recently that wants to really accelerate things beyond the status quo. The last one like that was probably Nick Carr’s The Big Switch.

I know Vinnie as one of the guys you get when you’re doing some enterprise software deal knife fighting with vendors. He’s the kind of guy who’ll say “instead of spending $30,000 to hire The B-52s for this conference, they should charge less for their software.” So his brutal optimism in The New Polymath was unexpected and provides a nice contrast.

In a sense, this book is more of a velvet knife: instead of just complaining about price and lack of innovation, it shows companies what they should be doing and expect from technology. The numerous profiles and cases show companies large and small innovating, and the framework towards the end tries to tell you how it’s done (the choice of BP in this context is unavoidably tragic, but shouldn’t detract from it).

There’s the usual framework for Evil Caniveling it into innovation – drive fast, jump high, but always wear a helmet – wrapped up at the end. Really, though, the point of the book is: get off your ass and innovate.

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Categories: Book Reviews, Enterprise Software, Ideas, Reviews.

By cote
— June 16, 2010 at 10:09 am

Links for June 14th through June 15th

FUD Ham

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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By linkposter
— June 15, 2010 at 10:24 pm

Open Government in Your Pocket

When I walk into the election booth this coming Fall, I’d love to take out my iPhone, open The Magic App, and click “locate me” to zero in all that data, election coverage, and endorsements for candidates and issues I see on the ballet. Maybe I could even take a short quiz to find my preferences – with questions specialized for my location, of course. There’s plenty of voter guides as always, but I haven’t found (or really looked, to be honest – maybe y’all will tell me what’s out there!) for a mobile app that’s the equivalent of Yelp for government. I mean, if it just told me my voting location, that’d be massive.

It’s harder to hate what you understand

In addition to voting, it’d be great to see the effects of government around me. “This road was funded by your country,” or, “this exit ramp was funded by your congress member.” You could call this features, “what have you done for me lately?”

Or, for the arm-chair auditors out there, when walking around all the State of Texas office buildings, I could get info on what they’re actually doing in there, how it effects me, what the total salaries and budget for those buildings are. “See that building, they account for and spend over $50 million a year.”

There’s a huge amount of data about government that’d be fascinating to have on my phone, as I saw, Yelp-style. Government, esp. local and State government is often obtuse and you get a lot of people not really appreciating the good things they do. Like those exit ramps that let us easily get off the highway to a new outlet mall. As I like saying, one citizen’s pork-barrel spending is another citizen’s delicious bacon.

The Citizen Cloud

While such an app would have excellent utility for each individual, aggregating the data about what each user does becomes even more interesting and valuable:

  • Tracking which locations people look-up voting info in would give you an idea of how many people were voting and where. I’m no demographer, so there’s all sorts of problems here I’m sure: only a specific type of moneyed person would have a smart-phone and take it to the booth and know how to use it. But, with a bit of demographic data, I’m sure it’d be interesting, novel data anyhow. Get them to give you their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter account, and you can build up all sorts of profiles.
  • If people wanted it, they could even share their vote (or just that they’d voted) in the app, on social networks, or where-ever. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here in America talking about how you voted is like talking about your salary: it’s a taboo that helps all but the people keeping actually quiet.
  • Tracking where people look-up “what have you done for me lately?” information might get you a sense of “hot spots” and places where voters are curious about the role of government. This could play to “both sides” of the government space: those who want to find waste and those who want to celebrates providing services. Indeed, you could see how individual elected officials would love this data: how active is my constituency, and how curious/aware are they of what I’ve done for them?
  • The Pothole Reporter – several apps in the private and public sector exist to track problems. AT&T has it’s dropped call reporter, some communities have “pot-hole reporters.” Taken individually, this kind of stuff gets ignored (I’m sure citizens don’t want to fund the salaries it’d take to look over each reported issue). But, aggregating them together gives government more data to sift through. And, it gives the anti-government folks poop to hurl at “an apathetic government.”
  • In all of these, you could take the simple “Like” concept from Facebook and allow people to Like or Dislike whatever artifact they’re looking at. Gauging sentiment about the government’s services and such.

With much of this meta-data, doing predictive analytics is the next step. What can you predict from poll turn-out? People simply telling you how they voted? A candiate can concentrate fund raising in geographic areas with a high number of “likes,” and at the same time try to bring in some pork bacon for those areas that have a negative sentiment.

Mashups and Money

And then there’s lacing in taking pictures and video, or sound recordings. Essentially the equivalent of Zillow (a mash-up prettying up piss-boring property tax records) for all that open government data and citizen created government data.

Of course, politicians, causes, comities, and anyone else accepting money could have “click here to give us some money” buttons. Tied with a person, location, and a topic, in addition to providing money, these contributions would give even more data to understand what citizens wanted: “Here’s $20 for your campaign, please fix this pothole on my street.”

A particular segment that could benefit from all of this are main-stream media organizations. Newspapers, magazines, and even TV folks have reams of current and historic reporting and data having to do with politics. For media folks looking to be relevant, this type of open government app moves them into that bi-directional relationship with their customers (“news readers”) that seems to be lacking. And, the fact that people are willing to pay for smart phone apps is encouraging: it’s better than the “nothing” of the web.

For example, in my state, the Texas Observer would be well positioned to tell the left what was going on in many state-wide and local elections – and they could figure out interesting things to do with the meta-data. I don’t know the demographics of the Observer but I’d wager a killer app would introduce a slew of new, younger readers. Of course, outfits like The Texas Tribune have an ethos that fits perfectly with open government in your pocket. They already do fascinating things with open government data, and bridging to that two-way relationship would give them even more raw material to work with.

I’m my own Big Brother

Sure, there’s all sorts of privacy issues, Big Brother spying, and no doubt regulations and laws that marble through stuff like this. Still, one of the more frequent reasons I see people getting dissatisfied with government is simply not knowing what the hell the government is doing, let along “understanding,” whatever that may mean. I think most everyone has a sort of Yes, Minister view of government, except in the US it’s crossed with sex-scandals and marginally ethical money-filching revolving door officials.

“Sunlight,” as they call making government more transparent, isn’t a cure-all. Once you know more, you have to actually do something: be that motivating the government to do what you want or, if you are the government, figuring out what to do and actually doing it.

People spend an awfully lot of time in Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and things like Gowalla, proving that there’s plenty of raw time and will to play around with your mobile while you’re out and about (or those services at your desk). As politics comes to the forefront with the US’s mid-term election, it’d be great to get Gowalla badges and Foursquare mayorships for giving a damn getting involved in the process. Beyond those simple steps, apps that augmented citizens interaction with their government would be a welcome open government innovation.

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Categories: Ideas.

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By cote
— June 15, 2010 at 10:11 pm

More useless platitudes – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #73

Tricycle on the road

This week, John and Coté cover the upcoming cloud week (Velocity, Structure, dev/ops days), Microsoft TechEd, opening the cloud for Java, and a few startup updates.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Show Notes

Disclosure: Microsoft, OpsCode, dto solutions, and Zenoss are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other relevant clients.

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Categories: Conferences, IT Management Podcast, Java, Systems Management.

By cote
— June 14, 2010 at 4:44 pm

Better Junk Mail – Quick Analysis from the Enterprise 2.0 World

New Liver

With Enterprise 2.0 this week (where I’ll be for an afternoon and a few evenings), there’s plenty of social networking integration for business buzz going around. Essentially, over the past year there’s been a (relative) slew of offerings that allow companies to integrate with social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, and often seek to lace in social networking aspects into other offers.

Social CRM

The Altimeter Group has a nice paper, and category, touching on much of this: Social CRM:

[C]ompanies need an organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web – giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.

Social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts – instead it adds more value. In fact, Social CRM augments social networking to serve as a new channel within existing end-to-end CRM processes and investments. Social CRM enhances the relationship aspect of CRM and builds on improving the relationships with more meaningful interactions. As the “Godfather of CRM,” Paul Greenberg notes, “We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction – or the data associated with it… Social CRM focuses on engaging the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s (i.e. Social CRM is) the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

Self-service Sales Funnels

Google Moble Ads keep getting weird

The interest in Social CRM is a lot more, well, CRM-oriented than the data-mining aspects I’m interested in, but it’s different faces of the same opportunity. In these things, I tend to play a seemingly Debbie Downer role with my line that “all roads lead to better junk mail.” I’m not actually one of the Adbuster faithful here, but I do think it’s important for people to realize what sites like Facebook &co. are enabling businesses to do and the free, self-service sales funnel labor “consumers” are doing for large companies.

In whatever this space is called (it’s definitely something in the “Enterprise 2.0” orbit), the ability to connect to existing social networks and web sites is spreading more virally than SharePoint. Merely “connecting” to sites isn’t the main thing: bi-directional integration and sucking out customer/user data is the real cream in the chocolate egg.

There’s really no end of vendor offerings in this space. Offerings like the “coming soon” Salesforce Chatter kind of shoe-horn here as well as things like Jive’s “New Agenda for Social Business”. While folks like Eloqua, Loopfuse, and even traditional web analytics folks like Adobe Omniture are (or should be) all circling around this like hungry vultures. There’s plenty of companies I’m leaving off, check out the Social CRM paper for a metric butt-ton of them.

Why Now

"Bluedouche"

There’s several things going on here to enable this:

  1. A good saturation of consumers and customers in sites like Twitter, Facebook, and other places – these are people who are spending money with companies that are the potential customers for vendors in this area.
  2. All of the demographic data (location, background, affinities), photos, and relationship tagging is creating the best junk-mail targeting cloud ever know and companies want to mine the crap out of that data to sell more to their customers
  3. The wide spread use of open APIs and data standards (de facto and otherwise) are enabling technology companies to wire together their software with these online sites, making it technologically and economically feasible for folks like Jive to suck in all that social data.
  4. Finally, the most speculative thing: there’s just something about Apple’s iPhone and iPad innovations that makes people believe that IT can actually help grow their business now-a-days. This a is huge shift from the “IT is a black-pit of budget send and I have a 500 meg email quote to-boot” attitude that’s existing for a decade or more.

Throw in the slight opening of budget coffers in 2010, and it’s a good time for the better junk-mail segment of Enterprise 2.0.

Internal Uses Too

And this is just a take on companies using social business software like this for external social network use, to profit from their customers. There’s a whole slew of other things they could do with their own employees, business partners, and competition.

The negative side is Big Brother monitoring. It goes way beyond finding people who goof off during work hours: the classic “I hate my job/boss” firing, tracking “inappropriate” behavior (we can’t have our employees posting pictures of themselves getting wasted), detecting when people are job hunting (when they update their LinkedIn profiles), when personal matters may effect work (getting married, pregnant, all those “evil” things), hunting down casual industrial espionage (your Intel employee is a little too buddy-buddy with AMD people)…and so on.

The positive side is more along the lines of companies realizing the smarts they have in their employees heads and the horizontal connections – and then, of course, re-orienting work to take advantage of them and (we’d hope) figure out compensating employees beyond the org. tree. HR departments has a real chance to shine here as something way beyond “the people we pay a lot to hand out our vacation calendar.” And, for secured, SaaS offerings like Yammer, it’s just a brain-dead cheap way to increase knowledge sharing and collaboration, vague-yet-important as those two areas are.

Many of the evolving, Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms like Salesfore Chatter, MindTouch, some Lotus offerings, etc.) fit here.

Turning expensive information into free information

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
—Stewart Brand’s full “information wants to be free” quote, 1984

Back to the external social business mechanics: the main point is that many companies are realizing that the self-service demography and categorization people people do in social networking sites is a gold-mine for doing excellent junk mail: selling more stuff to customers, keeping existing customers happy, getting new customers, and gathering the intelligence needed to keep doing all of those.

The fantastic (or depressing part if you’re from the throw a brick through the McDonald’s window, No Logo crew) is that your customers provide the most expensive, valuable, and difficult to attain types of information for free. Users of social network sites are self-segment and declare their interests to merchants, micro-targeted down to the individual, all for free.

Put another way, you’re just data.

(The above is massaged and blended from a reply to Katherine Noyes for her piece on Jive.)

Disclosure: Salesforce, MindTouch, IBM, and Microsoft are customers. See the RedMonk client list for other relevant clients.

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Categories: Collaborative, Enterprise Software, Marketing, Quick Analysis, The New Thing.

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By cote
— June 14, 2010 at 1:28 pm

Links for June 12th through June 14th

HoC data-center

A little something extra…

As some folks know, I lived in a hippie co-op during college. It was pretty fantastic as far as friends and the actual time spent there – I met my wife there!

I setup the first house-wise Internet, before wifi was common so we had to drag cables around for those who wanted it. In retrospect the worrying about $70 or so a month is quaint, huh? This past Friday, we went to visit one of our friends who’d moved back in for a month before a European biking tour. I happened to open up the closet next to my old room and see they’d expanded the House of Commons “datacenter” (picture above) out pretty well, including some legless fairies to watch over the uptime.

The Links

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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By linkposter
— June 14, 2010 at 9:43 am

Everything but cloud at Microsoft TechEd 2010

TechEd Hands-on Labs

While it was hard to keep the cloud out at Microsoft TechEd 2010, there were several topics that weren’t primarily focused on the cloud, though they might have laced it in. Here’s a brief rundown:

Visual Studio

During the opening keynote, Muglia and co. showed a nice demo of Visual Studio getting a little dev/ops friendly: deploying to clouds directly from Visual Studio. The idea wasn’t really to deploy production, but to deploy to test and QA clouds. Also, the bug recording feature was a nice application of cloud-inspired technologies into the development process.

Silverlight back-burnered

In previous years, Silverlight has had a significant part in TechEd. Not so much this year. To be fair, Microsoft’s PDC and MIX conference are more the spot for that. Though TechEd usually does a good job at lacing in development and operations concerns together, this year’s cloud focused made it sway more operations.

Silverlight did show up in excellent data visualization and BI demos: something resembling DeepZoom was used to nice effect to explore large sets of data, in this case, DVD sales. Also, of course, Silverlight was mentioned in the context of Windows Phone 7.

Windows Phone 7

Onboard the Creole Queen docked booze cruise, I met with some Windows Phone 7 folks who were, of course, enthusiastic. They had their concerned split between consumer and business use. The platform itself is looking impressive, but Microsoft has a terribly difficult path ahead of them.

The team was doing a good job floating FUD on Apple (closed and whacked language to develop in) and Android (just “the other white meat”). Their attitude about the phone as a remote control for the cloud (I can still never remember who came up with that metaphor) was nice and welcome.

We’ll see what happens with Windows Phone 7 once it gets out more, there are marketplace(s) (or ways to make money on apps), and wide availability. It seems like it’s destined to be a damn fine business phone for those on the Microsoft stack: the problem will be using consumer sales and desire to drive corporate IT procurement plans.

As I tell most all mobile and developer people now-a-days, the primary strategy is to allow developers to find the shortest path between compile and cash. The phone play is all about bubble-think, and there’s plenty of developers who didn’t get burned last time that’ll be real goers.

Desktop Management, VDI, Application Virtualization

TechEd Analyst summit gift

While desktop virtualization has seen a huge rise in vendor interest over the past year, all the cloud talk pushed it off the agenda. At past events, application virtualization was a huge topic for Microsoft.

Among other “good old fashioned IT management topics,” I talked about this with Anders Vinberg on the topic. Microsoft is still very interested in it.

One of my pet thought exercises at the moment is to think about doing away with desktop management in the corporate world: if you can’t manage you’re own desktop, you’re fired. That’s of course exaggerated to prove a point, but I do feel like “desktop management” as we know it is just a really expensive hack to put up with crappy operating systems and an assumed (and allowed for) lack of computer literacy among the workforce.

Also, of note, he has an interesting 2009 presentation somewhat on the topic: “What Could New-Era Corporate Systems Management Mean For The Home? And Vice Versa?”

Modeling

A large part of Microsoft’s 10 year vision for IT Management transformation – the Dynamic Systems Initiative, or DSI – is modeling out IT assets, services, and so forth. This is the stuff of much DMTF and XML efforts and pops up in such thrilling spaces as SNMP MIBs and WMI.

In past years, part of the vision for modeling was the finally get those damn developers to properly instrument and model their software. They would seem the best positioned to know what you’d want to monitor in production and ways of fixing it. They wrote the stuff after all, right?

Far from it. As Bob Muglia pointed out, until he made developers play a larger role in supporting their software in production (thanks to cloud deployment models) they never appreciated the need for good management features in their software. Drawing from my person experience as a developer who was put on a 3rd-level support tour, until you have to support your code in production, you just don’t understand enough to care about that stuff.

“I used to think that models were done by developers,” Muglia said in response to a question by Ray Wang on the topic, “I now know that (most) models are done by IT.”

PowerPivot

Perhaps the most interesting innovation coming out of STB now is PowerPivot. It’s a cliché “on steroids” product for Excel. The king of numbers handling and data analysis (by volume if anything) is Excel, which can buckle under the big data loads needed and lack in the helpful & pretty visualization users are beginning to expect.

PowerPivot is looking fantastic, actually. RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady regularly writes up Big Data topics (e.g., coverage on big data and the future of spreasheets) and we all spend a lot of time thinking about this kind of BI for the masses stuff. Crossed with the “infinite” computation ability on the cloud and all the open data (or at least structured and accessible) that’s starting to emerge, offerings like PowerPivot are looking tasty.

When talking about TechEd this week with James Governor, PowerPivot was all that came out of his mouth.

Microsoft SaaS

Microsoft has been somewhat quietly building up it’s SaaS offerings, like most vendors (go and ask CA Technologies about their SaaS stuff – you’ll be shocked).

The Business Productivity Online Suite (or “BPOS” which “consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online”) offering has been going strong now with numerous user seats sold. Microsoft also released it’s “Office does Google Apps” offering (“Office Web Apps”) this week.

It’s always fun to see the kind of customer ping-pong and new signups that plays out in these things.

Not to be forgotten, the upcoming Windows Intune SaaS offering is an interesting desktop management service targeted at SMBs, shops with 50-500 PCs.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client and paid travel and expenses for TechEd. See the RedMonk client list for other relevant clients.

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Categories: Conferences, Development Tools, Enterprise Software, Systems Management.

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By cote
— June 11, 2010 at 4:11 pm

Links for June 7th through June 11th

Watermelon

A little something extra…

Someone told me recently that the energy management interfaces (typically access to such parameters over SNMP from a MIB, to jangle the wording around a bit) on most hardware was not good and far from open. To access the most of the information you’d need to monitor and then manage power use, you had to use more closed methods. Apple was praised as having “everything” available over SNMP, but not so much with others.

I’ve been looking to verify this. If it’s true, it’s (a.) a damn shame, and, (b.) something to encourage hardware makers to do.

What’s your take?

The Links

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— June 11, 2010 at 3:16 pm