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Links for February 4th through February 8th

February 8, 2010 – 6:18 pm

A little something extra…

Today’s extra is a video from OpsCamp Austin 2010. It’s from a series Damon Edwards did which was both fun, a nice format, and interesting – see the first round and then the second collection.

In addition to talking about delivering smaller “apps” vs. “applications,” I go over some ways that open source projects can work better with analysts:

3 Questions with Michael Coté at OpsCamp Austin 2010 from dev2ops.org on Vimeo.

I realize there seems to be a lot of “how to work better with analysts” stuff going on this links – just a coincidence!

The Links

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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The return of good, old fashioned application development

February 8, 2010 – 5:07 pm

Don't call it a comeback

Over the past few years, roughly, the discussion of software development has been stuck on the back-bench in favor of the swirl of virtualization, cloud computing, and then iStuff. As I pointed out in my presentation on Agile development and cloud computing to the Agile Austin meeting last week, cloud computing is largely an operations story. Public and private cloud technologies and practices have tended to focus themselves on optimizing data centers, not so much software development. And with virtualization, the story is all about operations, long ago having left the “virtual labs management” angle in the comfortable dust of past year’s portfolio positioning.

(There’s a notable exception here by a cluster of startups who’re focusing on the tools needed to do cloud application delivery, folks like Reductive Labs, dto solutions, OpsCode, and others.)

Just recently, I’ve noticed more attention to how application delivery is effected by cloud computing. Much of it is simply getting back to the job of delivering SaaS instead of only on-premise offerings. This cheers me up to no end as I think much of the cloud (and mobile) focus has distracted from moving the business software vendors to SaaS-models, an evolution that should widely benefit the customers and users of that software.

Questions to start asking

How do you start to think about software development in a cloud-y world?

  • What are the new features delivering across the cloud enables? What does it mean to: deliver a new feature whenever you like (whether your customer likes it or not); deliver different features to different groups of users and test which one is “best”; open up APIs that anyone can integrate with; give your customers “unlimited” processing and storage; allow your users to aggregate configuration and usage patterns and “learn” from each other rather than reinvent the wheel; etc.
  • How does your software development process change to match your new delivery platform? How do you manage: delivering 52 features piece-mail, one a week, instead of in one big “release” a year; feed that user tracking into your product management and UX decisions; treat operations staff as part of your team (or take on their job in delivering over the cloud); manage the community that hangs off the open (or not so open) APIs that your customers come to rely on; track the usage and value (to you and your customers) of features over the course of years; keep a separate “portfolio” of products when your customer sees them all coming from the same URL; what would it mean if you delivered an “app” that existed for just 4 weeks; etc.

Above even these questions, is a more basic one: are you a software vendor, or a developer working on in-house software? Vendors, whose job is to make money from software, have much different ways of dealing with these questions than in-house developers whose job is to service their organization making money with software.

If you’re charged with software development, which ever side of the fence you’re on, as we start finish hammering out the operations concerns for all this cloud computing hoopla, it’s a good time to start figuring out the new features you can start delivering to customers and how your iteration-to-iteration process has to start changing.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs and dto solutions are clients.

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By cote | Posted in Cloud, Development Tools, Enterprise Software, Programming | Comments (0)

Links for February 2nd through February 4th

February 4, 2010 – 3:18 pm

A little something extra…

One of my friends in PR recently asked me what for the general outline I expect to see in an analyst briefing. For all the briefings I get, there’s a pretty standard outline to start with:

  • History of company – but keep it brief: we don’t care too much. And when it comes to the team, as all that fine print says, “past performance is no guarantee of its future success.”
  • The technology itself – while knowing the “problem” and your “solution” is good, we’re pretty damn interested in what the actual gorp is itself.
  • Why people buy it, or will buy it – named references if possible.
  • Why it’s better than the past and existing offerings – it better be a better mouse trap, or a trap catches an animal that’s never been trapped before.
  • Go-to-market strategy – direct, partners, resellers, over web, field sales force, or mix and match! We want to hear how the company is going to make money so it can become a stable company instead of a flash in the pan that sucked funding dry.
  • Road-map and next strategy.

On a the topic of dealing with analysts, you might also be interested in my aptly titled “Dealing With Analysts” presentation from 2008: I tried to give a pretty frank overview of what tech companies should be looking to accomplish when working with, or at least “encountering” industry analysts.

The Links

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Agile Infrastructure – a presentation

February 3, 2010 – 11:41 am

Last night I spoke at the Austin Agile monthly meeting on the topic, broadly put, of how cloud computing starts to effect and benefit Agile software development. While I don’t have a recording (I biffed recording my rehearsal of the presentation, tragically, which I’d usually post here), the slides are above.

Aside from quickly going over cloud computing as it’s understood now, the main points I tried to make were:

  • The cloud discussion so far has been mostly an operations story. While public web companies have spoken to development concerns a bit, the discussion of what cloud computing means for iteration-to-iteration development hasn’t really started as hot and heavy as the talk sys admins get into.
  • You Agile developer types should get more friendly with operations types.
  • Make sure your code works in the “sloppy” nature of cloud computing.
  • Figure out if a PaaS, as weird as it may seem (not “owning” the entire stack), is a better way to deliver to your customers.
  • Look towards user analytics to track what users are actually doing in your application, and feed that back into product management decisions. More far-looking, see if you can do something with the aggregate of that user tracking. Fellow RedMonk Stephen O’Grady generally calls this “telemetry” and writes frequently about it, as in this piece from late 2008.

The audience was sizable and nicely engaged with questions throughout and afterwards – thanks for having me! (And a special thanks to Israel Gat for boot-strapping the arrangements awhile ago.)

I’ll be speaking along the lines of this topic at the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference this April. I’m curious to hear more about what developers – “Agile” or not – are finding in their cloud adventures. Leave a comment, or otherwise contact me if you’re up for chatting.

Disclosure: several folks mentioned in the presentation are RedMonk clients, see the client list.

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By cote | Posted in Agile, Cloud, Systems Management | Comments (5)

Links for January 29th through February 1st

February 1, 2010 – 7:46 pm

A little something extra…

While us IT nerds were having a great time at the first OpsCamp this weekend, the rest of the world was once again obsessing about the future of the web, manifested this time in the iPad’s lack of Flash support.

On this topic, I’ve had several conversations already about The Fate of the Web. Ultimately, this one is tough because the people who’ll determine if Apple’s closed model works or not are consumers, not developers or “enterprises,” who’ve traditionally determined the fate of new technologies and technology philosophies. Sure, the applications available are important, but it’s tough to believe in the rationality of “the actor” here. Judging from the quality of TV and “entertainment” that those consumers put up with, we’ve got a rough ride ahead.

The other interesting angle here is the role of devices vs. the traditional PC. How much power do desktop/laptop scenarios have here? In essence, the desktop is too good at what it does: other than running iPhone apps, it’ll run anything, so it can’t use the exclusion of technologies (e.g., lack of an open way to distribute applications) to muck with the future.

The Links

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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OpsCamp Debriefing – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #66

February 1, 2010 – 4:53 pm

OpsCamp Austin 2010

After the fun and successful OpsCamp Austin 2010, John, myself, and several others chime in on how it went and what we talked about. We recorded this in the bar/coffeshop next door, so it’s a bit loud, but the recording is nonetheless understandable.

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:

Thanks to everyone – organizers and attendees – I had a tremendous amount of fun and it was professionally helpful.

Check out John’s post on the topic for more of an overview – and we’ll see what the transcription service can make of this one ;)

Disclosure: Groundwork Open Source, Zenoss, IBM, Spiceworks, and several other people mentioned or related to these conference are clients. See the RedMonk client list.

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By cote | Posted in Conferences, IT Management Podcast | Comments (3)

Numbers, Volume 40

January 29, 2010 – 5:02 pm

Korea Garden

Early Numbers on Windows 7

Consumer sales of Windows 7 buoyed Microsoft to report record earnings, even after deferrals were figured in. Microsoft reported net income of $6.66 billion, or 74 cents a share, on revenue of $19.02 billion, which included $1.71 billion in Windows 7 deferred revenue for the quarter.

As part of that announcement, Microsoft reported that it has sold more than 60 million Windows 7 licenses to date. The combined Windows and the Windows Live division had operating income of $5.39 billion on revenue of $6.9 billion, compared to the year-ago quarter’s operating income of $2.71 billion on revenue of $4.06 billion.

As I was quoted in a “what’s the future of Microsoft” piece in Redmond Magazine:

“It’ll still be a long time before Windows is knocked out as the dominant operating system,” says RedMonk analyst Michael Coté, arguing that the fat-client model is safe for now. “Thinking of work and personal life without laptops and netbooks and desktop computers is far-fetched. We have multiple generations of users who are trained to use Windows.”

If Windows 7 proves to be a success — and so far it’s off to a roaring start — Coté doesn’t believe that most people will leave Windows anytime soon.

Begging the question, what does “soon” mean. I guess we’ll have to see.

As another data point, in a Spiceworks Voice of IT report I’ve been looking over, they say that 20% of SMBs have accelerated their timetable for upgrading to Windows 7 and that for the smallest firms (those with less than 20 employees), over 40% plan to start upgrading within the first 90 days post-launch.

iFlash

It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple’s DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers.  And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.

That didn’t go too well

In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall…

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class. …The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million, according to Mr. Jimenez. With those 35 people, they’ve grossed about $9,000.

Agile is now officially “boring”

Forrester surveyed nearly 1,300 IT professionals and found that 35 percent of respondents stated that agile most closely reflects their development process, with the number increasing to 46 percent if the definition of agile is expanded to include practices such as rational unified process or spiral….The favored agile methodology, scrum, was used by nearly 11 percent of respondents.

Splunk

From the email summary of this press release:

In addition to adding 650 new customers in 2009, while the economy was floundering, Splunk achieved 125% year-over-year growth. Success crossed the globe – from the US to Kuwait — and spanned both customers and additional headcount.

Follow the Revenue

According to [Appcelerator]’s recent poll of Titanium developers, 90 per cent said they planned to develop an app for the Apple tablet over the coming year. This makes the tablet more popular among developers than Blackberry, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile, or Symbian handsets.

Of the 554 developers who responded to the poll, 58 per cent said they were “very interested” in building for the Apple tablet. Only the iPhone and Android scored higher, with 86 per cent and 68 per cent, respectively. The next closest platform was the Blackberry at 21 per cent.

Some developers may be guessing that Apple’s device is on the way, but others may know it, after signing NDAs with the Cupertino cult.

Beyond Code

In 2007–as you can see from the
chart below – Google spent a total of $1.52 million, which rose to $2.84 million in 2008.

And the 2009 total? Just over $4 million, according to the Lobbying Disclosure Act Database….

In 2007, Microsoft (MSFT) spent $9 million, which fell slightly in 2008 to $8.9 million, before dropping to $6.72 million in 2009.

iPhone Piracy

From mocoNews.net:

Rhythm game Tap Tap Revenge saw 2.5 million downloads in its first two months–but a million of those were pirate downloads, Tapulous business development head Tim O’Brien told delegates….“We’ve started running ads to the pirate users more aggressively. Some of those users, because we sell virtual goods, have become high-volume users.” Now Tapulous has 25 million unique users and has been profitable since June.

You may recall a friend of mine commented on the piracy he saw with his iPhone game.

Dumb Pipes

Phones in LGA

Skype has soared in popularity since it started in 2003 and boasts about 548 million users worldwide, more than Facebook Inc., MySpace Inc. and Twitter Inc. combined. Skype earned $165 million in operating income in 2009, a 42 percent jump from 2008, Thomas Weisel Partners LLC estimates. If Skype increases its profits to $400 million by 2013, it could go public at a valuation of $4 billion, says Bard, who specializes in IPOs.

If you’re a telco, you have to be asking yourself if you can operate plain old voice with that kind of income, and also make The Mythical Shareholder happy enough to keep your stock price up. There’s you’re dumb pipes challenge, assuming you can smack Skype and get them stunned long enough to grab your part of the phone pie.

Indeed, check AT&T’s 2009 forth quarter revenues: $30.9 billion. Or even Verizon’s $1.1 billion for the same quarter. Good luck getting that with a Skype model.

Google in Five Bullets

  • Pro forma EPS totaled $6.79. This was slightly below our $6.85 estimate.
  • Net revenue grew 13% sequentially. This was slightly below our expectation for 17% Q/Q growth.
  • Paid clicks grew 13% Y/Y. This was slightly lower than our estimate for 16% Y/Y growth. CPC improvements were roughly in-line with our expectations.
  • US revenue was up 11% Y/Y. This was slightly ahead of our estimate calling for 9% Y/Y growth.
  • EBITDA margin came in at 63.1%. This was well ahead of our expectation for 61.9%

From the ever bloggy Kedrosky. Also, see Cade Metz’s coverage of Google’s numbers over at El Reg.

Reds-Under-the-Bed

The FBI report estimates that since 2003, the Chinese Army has specifically developed a network of over 30,000 Chinese military cyberspies, plus more than 150,000 private-sector computer experts, whose mission is to steal American military and technological secrets and cause mischief in government and financial services. China’s goal, says the FBI report, is to have the world’s premier “informationized armed forces” by 2020. According to the bureau’s classified information, the Chinese hackers are adept at implanting malicious computer code, and in 2009 companies in diverse industries such as oil and gas, banking, aerospace, and telecommunications encountered costly and at times debilitating problems with Chinese-implanted “malware.” The FBI analyst would not name the affected companies.

Bonus!

6 weeks til MEAT up at fogo!

Disclosure: Microsoft, Splunk, Adobe, and other relevant folks are clients.

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Links for January 27th through January 29th

January 29, 2010 – 4:29 pm

A little something extra…

I somehow forgot to post the link yesterday, oops!

There’s been a lot of follow-on from the Oracle+Sun event earlier this week. Stephen has a nice Q&A up on it now, and you may recall my quick analysis on the topic.

A reporter asked me what the most significant part of the whole shindig was for middleware, SOA, and that slice of IT. Here’s what I said:

Oracle’s desire to sell integrated stacks is huge for middleware. In its most generalized form, “middleware” exists to deal with integrating together heterogeneous systems and much of the “pain” of dealing with it comes from working through, around, and with problems at the “edges” of architectures, that cross project or vendor lines of control. While a fully integrated offering may address those problems by eliminating those edges, the trade off is limited choice of technology – that could be good, bad, or meaningless depending on the development team’s needs. The big question going forward will be if Oracle will continue to encourage the heterogeneous architectural philosophy that Java has had for a long time, or go more with the philosophy that Java became a reaction to: Microsoft.

The Links

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Interesting geek survey from SXSWi 2010

January 28, 2010 – 12:24 pm

2010 SXSW Interactive Festival / Pre-Event Registrants Survey

I filled out an interesting pre-event survey from the folks at SXSW Interactive this morning. In exchange for my free labor – no problem, glad to do it! – I thought I’d record the questions. They’re actually pretty interesting. Seeing the results would be even more interesting. Check the flickr set of them, sprinkled with some commentary here and there.

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By cote | Posted in Conferences, The Analyst Life | Comments (0)

Links for January 26th through January 27th

January 27, 2010 – 6:58 pm

A little something extra…

Next Tuesday I’ll be giving a talk about Agile Operations at the Agile Austin meeting. Israel Gat had a nice teaser on the topic.

I was noodling out one part of the talk, the other day and found myself typing up one of those weirdly aggressive mini-screeds I do from time to time:

One meaning of “Agile” is to do less, more frequently. Code is the least of your problems. You have to worry about marketing, fax machines, testing, running the software in a cloud world, etc.. What has development done recently to help the company make money? Is there a unit test for making your quarterly revenue numbers? Don’t be Detroit autoworkers, transit workers in San Diego. Chances are, you can should be doing more, and you’re not going to get paid for it. A tragic tale: good managers are programmers who no longer code.

That’s one of my common software development themes: don’t get comfortable, keep your head out of the sand, keep moving. The silo of “development” is the current sand bank, and forcing yourself to deal with “those damn sys admins” is the current rally cry. And it goes the other way too: often more viciously if the IT staffer isn’t ready to pounce.

I’ll see if I can work out the masculine fightin’ metaphors for the talk, the annoy me too ;>

The Links

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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