This is the first part of three of an overview of GroundWork Open Source Monitor 5.2 with GroundWork’s Richard Trezza and David Dennis, moderated by Cot

Once again, I ad the pleasure of talking with Erich Gamma, currently lead of the IBM Rational Jazz project. We catch up on the recent developments in the Jazz world, discuss managing large, geo-distributed teams, and then talk about the upcoming release of Rational Team Concert, based on Jazz.

We start out discussing the different parts of Jazz as I observe that I tend to think of Jazz as one unit when, in fact, there are several sub-systems that would seem to be emerging as Rational products. I then ask Erich how people have been using Jazz.net as it's become more open. On the topic of Jazz, Erich then talks about the use of dashboards and other report-like features in Jazz to help monitor teams with an eye towards improvement.

Following up on a discussion in Open Season #13 about geo-distributed teams, I ask Erich to give us his quick-take on how you take a small, local team to a large, multi-site one. He suggests using people to spread the team practices and culture, sort of virally spreading good project management and also says that iterations are key to getting such large teams breathing and synched up.

We then discuss how people can get ahold of Jazz and what the terms are for continuing to use Jazz after the beta trial. For commercial users, that use is unknown, but IBM has recently committed to providing Jazz for free to open source projects and (some?) universities.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, as is Eclipse who's EclipseCon conference we filmed this at.

While at EclipseCon 2008, I had the chance to talk with Christer Larsson on Makewave, the folks behind the Knopflerfish OSGi runtime. We talk about some of the scenarios that Makewave’s customers use OSGi for and then jump into an interesting overview of how OSGi got to where it is today.

While at EclipseCon 2008, I had the chance to talk with Joachim Ritter and Roman Roelofsen of ProSyst. As we discuss, ProSyst works with OSGi from the classic mobile space to the more recent server-side.

In the second part of this two part interview, I continue talking with David Dennis, Senior Director of Product Marketing at GroundWork Open Source. Here, we go over a general overview of what GroundWork Monitor is, namely, an integrated combination of different open source IT Management projects and stacks. As David notes, they’re no limited to working with just open source stacks, being able to integrate with any piece of IT Management software that has an interface and/or API. We also go over new features and improvements in GroundWork Monitor 5.2. Of most interest to me are the scripting or “management” functions built into 5.2’s UI.

In the first part of this two part interview, I talk with David Dennis, Senior Director of Product Marketing at GroundWork Open Source. GroundWork has a new release, so I take this time to ask David how GroundWork’s been doing and what type of deployments they find themselves in, that is, where GroundWork is fitting in in the overall IT Management stack. David uses a brief explanation of the theory of comparative advantage to explain GroundWork’s theory that other IT Management vendors are looking to move up the data center management stack, leaving monitoring and management for others. We close out this first part by discussing how open source IT Management folks can fit into their idea.

At the tail-end of SXSWi in Austin, Ryan Stewart and I wrap-up what we've seen and done at SXSW, more or less relevant to RIA land. As we note, the main thing at SXSW is hanging out with people during the day and late into the night. Indeed, I didn't even manage to go to any sessions.

We also talk about the theory that Microsoft could use Silverlight to make parts of the web "go dark" for Google (thus, harming Google's revenues). We then get into a discussion of people making money selling RIA applications, sort of micro-ISVs if you know that term. Finally, we end up with tips and tricks for SXSW, imploring all of you, dear listeners and watchers, to come next year.

Also, we spend some time talking about the character of the folks at SXSW: in summary, they're ready to get down to business, no need for the beginner level stuff, which explains some of the crowd rebellion people saw this year.

Disclaimer: Adobe and Microsoft are clients. See the RedMonk client list for more clients mentioned.

In this screencast, I talk with 6th Sense Analytics‘s Jared Richardson about the 6th Sense product for collecting and learning from development team metrics. He walks us through different scenerios for tracking down how time is actually spent in development and talks us through how that knowledge can be used to create a better and more productive development experience. He also shows us how 6th Sense integrates with Atlassian‘s JIRA to stream line this process and help everyone establish realistic, fact-based project management.

While at Adobe Engage 2008 Cot

John Willis moderates this panel from barcampESM '08 in Austin Texas on the topic of monitoring, if it matters, how it connects to "higher level" IT management ideas, and overall discusses the current state of monitoring in the IT management world.

The panelist are a nicely diverse set from Zenoss (Erik Dahl), OpenNMS (Tarus Balog), IBM Tivoli (Heath Newburn), and BMC (Chip Holden).

Disclaimer: IBM, Zenoss, and BMC are clients.

While at the Eclipse Runtime Summit, I had the chance to talk with Iona's Eric Newcomer (CTO of Iona, Co-Chair, Enterprise Expert Group, OSGi Alliance, and well respected enterprise coding guy) about the emergence of OSGi as a server-side, or enterprise technology.

We discuss how OSGi came to be a technology of interest in the enterprise space, and move on to the formation of the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group. Eric goes through a high level list of what the "enterprise" here means: mostly the usual suspects of security, adding distributed functionality, messaging, scalability, and performance.

I ask Eric about the process that the OSGi Alliance uses and we discuss the interesting role of the full time spec writer that the OSGi Alliance uses. As Eric outlines, there's a process pretty similar to the JCP process, where the deliverables are a specification, a reference implementation, and TCKs to verify implementations.

We then discuss the overall idea of componentizing Java – what OSGi bundles and modules seek to do. As the Java world is pretty well split between Sun and OSGi's ambitions here, we touch on Eric's thoughts there and a little bit of the historic background between the two parties.

Finally, we end up with a rough road-map for the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group and Eric's thoughts on the Eclipse Runtime Summit we'd both just attended.

Thanks again to Eric for the interview ;>

Disclaimer: Eclipse is a client and sponsored this video. Iona is also a client.