In this interview from RSC 2009, I talk with IBM's Neeraj Chandra, who you may recall from two previous interviews at RSDC 2008 and Innovation 2008, last year.

We start out talking about what exactly a "Smart Product" is and how Rational fits into the overall IBM "Smart Planet" vision. Here, the discussion gets into one of the recent Rational tenants: businesses should not only be looking to software for differentiation and value, but are indeed forced to.

The question then, is how IBM helps companies do this: the goals are, of course, desirable, but the devil is always in the details. Part of the story here is the need to bring more discipline to the software creation process as it raises is criticality to the business.

While the IT-side of the equation has to change, there's also much needed from the business side. We discuss how the business-side needs to change and adapt to these scenarios as well. Neeraj points out that much of this change is enabled by upping the collaborative aspects in the overall Rational portfolio – enabled, of course, by the Jazz platform.

We get back to to how business strategy and objectives map down to IT and the development of software – I ask Nerraj to go over how bodies of practice like Rational's MCIF are used to map between the two sets of objectives.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored these videos.

While at RSC 2009 this year, I talk with IBM's Ken King, who you may remember from our discussion about the Telelogic acquisition at last year's RSDC.

I ask Ken to give us an update on the Telelogic company integration – the Blue Washing – since last we talked at RSDC 2008. We then talk about how Telelogic's origins in the systems space helps address part of IBM's idea about Smarter products and connect to the Rational vision of making software a strategic asset.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

I recently spoke to Amit Chatterjee, CEO of Hara Software about the new company

In this screencast, Acquia's Brian House goes over Acquia Search. We start out with an overview of Acquia, providing commercial support for drupal in addition to products and services like search. And then we quickly jump into the meat of the demo, the search service that Acquia offers around drupal. Bryan demonstrates the faceted searches and other "blocks" that help supplement and narrow down the raw search results. Through these browsing features, Bryan points out, site owners can do a better job of exposing the content they have, potentially driving in more traffic and usage. I ask Bryan what types of web sites this search applies to, public only, or private behind the firewall drupal installs? This discussion prompts me to ask Bryan about the use of drupal behind-the-firewall they're seeing.

In the second part, we get into the administration tool where facets, blocks, and other search configuration takes place. Here, we go over the basic configuration of search, but then get into the settings for weighting taxonomies, creating the "did you mean" configurations, and placing the related blocks in the site.

Finally, we wrap up by seeing how all of this works on a real site, Bryan's own site, The Beer Observer.

Disclosure: Acquia sponsored this video.

At the Sapphire 2009 event in Orlando Chad Leonard gave us a demo of some interesting software for utilities which addresses the cost to serve model and CO2 reporting

At SAP’s business conference, Sapphire 09 in Orlando Florida, I sat down with SAP’s James McClelland to discuss SAP’s role with respect to utilities.

StreamServe are a new client for GreenMonk so we invited Mike Balin, their Snr Dir of Strategic Marketing and Sustainability Initiatives to come onto the show to talk about some of their sustainability solutions.

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.