Rich Lechner came on GreenMonk to talk about Energy Management and change management in rolling out Green SOlutions

While our audio recording equipment was having a nap at CloudCampAustin, I whipped out the video camera to talk with Michael Wilde of Splunk. Being at CloudCampAustin, we end up discussing how Splunk fits into all this cloud computing stuff: here, the point Michael lays out is that you've still got basic IT infrastructure to worry about and shift through, namely logs.

Having worked at Tivoli in the past, I ask Michael to compare the traditional, Big 4 way of doing IT Management with how folks like Splunk and other "Systems Management 2.0" (to use an old moniker) folks do it. It's sort of a best-of-breed vs. unified suite discussion. Him living in Dripping Springs, I ask him about a new vodka from there I've been seeing around Austin.

Disclosure: Splunk is a client.

I get Splunk’s Michael Wilde to talk about CloudCampAustin as a excuse to show off one of his corny iPhone apps.

When I was in San Jose recently, I had the chance to talk with Travis Van of ITDatabase. Travis gives us a quick overview, laced in with some nice demos of ITDatabase in action. They provide a tech news search engine that has all sorts of analytics about who's writing about what, at what frequency, and all sorts of other interesting meta-data that folks in PR and in-house marketing teams might be interested in. Personally, I like to go in there and do ego searches for RedMonk and myself 😉

Disclosure: ITDatabase is a RedMonk client.

While at EclipseCon, I had the chance to talk with Genuitec's Wayne Parrott. I wanted to use the time to get a full overview and update of the various Eclipse-based products and projects that Genuitec puts out and is involved in, and we sure did that.

We start out with an overview and history of Genuitec, but then quickly get to the product lines that Genuitec has been building on-top of Eclipse for some years now: the MyEclipse line, MyEclipse Blue, Pulse, and their new work in the mobile space.

After going over MyEclipse, we talk about Genuitec's Pulse product and service that handles plugin management and distribution of RCP-based applications. Used for more than just Eclipse-based IDE configuration, Pulse is also for Eclipse RCP based application configuration and deployment.

Hoping back to the MyEclipse family, we then talk about MyEclipse Blue. Wayne goes over its history and then discussed the feature set, such as how MyEclipse Blue layers on-top of existing RAD or WSAD projects.

We then talk about Genuitec's efforts in the mobile web development with their Mobile Web Studio tool. Driven by their customer's desires to develop for the iPhone, Genuitec has been working on a commercial tool built on an open source project to aid with web-based iPhone and mobile development. That week, they'd introduced the open source component, the Blinki open source project (formally known as "Firefly"). While the focus of Genuitec's Blinki contributions are around WebKit tooling for the iPhone, Wayne says that they've been talking with other handset folks like RIM for possible, future versions.

Disclosure: Genuitec is a client and sponsored this vide.

When I was at EclipseCon this year, I sat down with Oliver Wolf from Sopera.de to talk about the newly announced Swordfish, SOA project. Having talked about Swordfish before in RedMonkTV, I ask Oliver to quickly catch us up since last we talked. They've announced their release date (which has occurred since this was filmed), including all the compliance and IP cleaning.

Oliver then gives us a very quick overview of Swordfish: a runtime for implementing SOAs. I then ask Oliver what Swordfish's "take" on SOA is, that is, what's it's general philosophy, so to speak of what the definition of an SOA. As Oliver explains, it starts from a decentralized ESB.

We then discuss what this decentralization means for Swordfish's various SOA components. I then ask how Swordfish came to be and where the project is now.

Getting back to the type of SOA that Swordfish embodies, I ask Oliver what types of workloads Swordfish is suited for. Having announced Swordfish at this year's EclipseCon, along with more than five sessions on the topic, I ask Oliver what how it's been received and what people have been asking. Finally, I ask Oliver to tell us how Swordfish fits into the overall Eclipse Runtime strategy.

Disclosure: The Eclipse Foundation is a client, sponsored this video, and paid T&E to EclipseCon.

The second installment of Rich Lechner’s monthly appearance on GreenMonk TV – this time we are discussing Smart Buildings.

In this interview from EclipseCon, I talk with multi-RedMonkTV guest Jeff McAffer, one of the leads on the Equinox project. Having spoken with him about Equinox many times before, I start by asking him to give us an update on what's been going on in Equinox-land of late. In doing so, we speak about how Equinox is related to the OSGi Enterprise and other specifications. Also, Jeff mentions the p2 and other sub and related projects. Since there's always great interest in it, I ask Jeff to give us more details on p2, esp. how it can be used to assemble and deploy different packages of Eclipse components, for example, of Eclipse IDE plugins.

Getting back to the server-side aspects of Equinox, I ask Jeff to tell us how Equinox has been fairing out in the field. He goes over a long, impressive list of middleware and application server projects and products that are using it. Next, I ask what the experience to transitioning to OSGi-driven development has looked in practice.

Finally, since we last talked Jeff has moved from IBM to his own company, Code9, and then to EclipseSource. I ask him to tell us all about that.

Disclosure: The Eclipse Foundation is a client, sponsored this video, and paid T&E to EclipseCon.

While at MIX09 this year, I had the chance to talk with Microsoft's Patric McElroy. We start out talking about how Microsoft data services map into cloud computing. While we discuss how existing technologies and techniques are migrated to Microsoft Azure, we also talk about the new functionality that comes with being hosted in the cloud: e.g., self-service provisioning, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and scaling data up (performance wise) to meet high data demands.

I then ask Patric if there's cloud technologies and techniques that they're pulling back to on-premise software. There's some interesting tooling and provisioning tasks he tells us about. We also discuss how the role of the DBA may or may not be impacted in the Azure world. We wrap-up by talking about ADO.NET Data Services (or "Project Astoria," as I remember it), primarily how the RESTful entity mapping framework fits into Azure.

Disclosure: Microsoft covered Tamp;E for MIX09 and sponsored this video.

A recorded rehersal of a talk on Cloud Computing and it’s potential effects (good and bad) on Linux. The final version of this talk was given at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on April 9th, 2009. For a write-up of the talk, see my entry over at PeopleOverprocess.com.

While at MIX09 accompanied by a rockin' sound-track from the Rock Band mega-stage down the hallway, I talked with Prashant Ketkar about Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure.

After nailing down the proper pronunciation of "Azure," I ask Prashant to give us an overview of Azure. We then get into a discussion of the PaaS aspects of Azure and the overall ecosystem that may develop including partner opportunities and roles. I ask Prashant what the developer experience is like: that is, getting started with using Azure. We then briefly touch on the slightly different development concerns when deploying to the cloud.

Finally, we go over the current feature set of Azure and look outwards at it's road-map, some items of which will announced this coming summer, esp. the pricing structure for Azure.

Disclosure: Microsoft paid T&E to MIX09 and sponsored this video.

While at MIX09 this year, I had the chance to film three different interviews with Microsoft folks. The first of these interviews is with Microsoft's Steven Martin wherein we go over the bevy of announcements this year: Expression Blend, Silverlight 3, Media Server and Video, Web Platform, Web App Gallery, cloud computing with the Azure Services platform, just to name a few.

Our discussion starts around the Web Platform and the installers that were released at MIX09. We talk about they fit into the full management of an applications life-cycle. We then get on to discussing the support for PHP and many PHP applications in Microsoft's Web Platform. This leads naturally to a discussion of the the App Gallery where Microsoft is hosting community projects, many of them open source, that can be added to the Web Platform.

Getting into cloud computing and Azure, we next talk about the different deployment options (or runtime environments) that divide up Steven's world: the local host, in a data center, to a hoster, or cloud, here, Azure. This last runtime environment gets us into a discussion of why you'd use cloud computing and, implicitly, a discussion of what Microsoft's understanding of "cloud computing" is.

Silverlight, Microsoft's RIA and multi-media platform, is the next topic of discussion. Here, we talk about the the out of the browser experience, synchronizing across different applications, and a few other topics.

Disclosure: Microsoft sponsored this video and is a client.