John and I spend most of our time recounting SCALE and Tivoli Pulse from last week, leading a discussion about companies large and small having to worry about more connected infrastructure. Also, a couple of acquisitions of note from last week.

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Show Notes

• iPad talk
• US/Canada Hockey game
• John goes to SCaLE – infrastructure stuff mixed with Linux passion. Facebook gave a good overview of their setup.
• Facebook: Hadoop, Hive for log scrapping stuff for management. There’s also Nagios and cfengine. Why do they use custom stuff vs. off the shelf?
• Tivoli Pulse – “Integrated Service Management” – mashing together of Rational/TeleLogic and Tivoli/MRO visions – managing everything, even its software. 5,500 people there.
• Beyond the “Obama Check” vision, how was the “grunt” stuff? John says he saw 3-4 private clouds from banks and energy companies running pretty good stuff.
• BoA and JPMC setups for using private cloud – motivated by being able to reclaim resources, self-service.
• John’s two questions: What’s your ration of sys admin to servers? Of those sys admins, how much time do they spend “in the muck” vs. adding “true business value”?
• CA buys 3Tera – one of the long-standing cloud “arms dealers” goes to a member of the Big 4.
• Citrix Online buys Paglo for GoToManage – MSP interest seems on the up; Coté goes over the Citrix GoTo strategy for Paglo.
• NoSQL Boston – March 11th, still a pretty good conference for catching up on new things.
• Coté goes on a vision quest about the internet of things blowing up in the mid-market. Now all we need is easy capital and funding. Arrayent is someone interesting here. Looks like we’ve swallowed this whole IBM Smart Planet vision thing.
• John gets the Scoble experience.
• ITSM Weekly The Podcast – good stuff if you like this kind of thing.

Transcript

(As always, I don’t fully check out and correct transcript for this show, so if we’re saying something nutty below, be sure to check the audio before you think we’ve gone off our meds.)

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! It’s the 1st of March, 2010, and this is the IT Management & Cloud Podcast, Episode 68. This is one of your co-hosts, as always, Michael Coté, available at peopleoverprocess.com. I am joined by the other co-host.

John Willis: John Willis at johnmwillis.com.

Michael Coté: Ever since you got on the Mac, johnmwillis.com, I think your audio quality has gone way up.

John Willis: You may be right.

Michael Coté: It’s the premium of quality, that’s what you get with the Mac.

John Willis: I am still trying to figure out how to use this crazy thing.

Michael Coté: Like, after talking about how this is quality, I bet there is going to be something wrong with the recording when I check it afterwards. My voice is going to come through like elephants or something like that. That will be fantastic.

John Willis: Sounds good now though, sounds good.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: We might get an A+ rating from the SplunkNinja.

Michael Coté: You know, let’s start out with something completely off-topic for IT Management & Cloud.

John Willis: Sure.

Michael Coté: What do you think about this whole iPad like problem, stink up, what’s going on here? What’s your opinion of the iPod, iPad, whatever the hell it’s called?

John Willis: I think it’s cool. I mean, I don’t know. I would probably get my wife one. I mean, I think — I have talked to a few people and I am not — this isn’t my space of expertise, but I think that what’s cool about it is like, it’s the computer for people who don’t own computers. It’s kind of like the iPhone.

My wife’s brother’s wife, so my sister-in-law, I guess, she hardly ever uses a computer, but she has an iPhone, she loves it. And then she got a Kindle, and I am sure she will be dumping that one.

So I think for books and just accessing web apps and stuff like that.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, I had the, I guess, chance is a good way of putting it, I had the chance to basically use my iPhone for most of my work for a couple of days last week, because I didn’t want to take out my laptop. I have talked about this before when we used to talk about Netbooks all the time, about a year ago, and it’s just almost there for like a device you can work on, or someone like me can work on for like two days, where I am not programming or I am not sitting and producing content for like a four-hour stretch, right?

There is a lot of my work that’s basically like checking email, scheduling things, talking with people through email, and doing like short bursty things, if you will. And man, it’s just like so close to the iPhone, it’s so close to doing that. The thing where it breaks down is, if you have to schedule a meeting, like it just is terrible for that, bouncing back between your calendar and stuff like that.

And then also, if you need to — like despite what commercials kind of show you, like there are some good commercials about, we had our iPhone on our family trip and it was perfect. I checked into my airplane on the way and I found a place for the kids to buy candy.

John Willis: Right. And while you are driving at 70 miles an hour.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Like if you need to like book a hotel, it’s actually pretty terrible. Like, if you are lucky enough that the one hotel you want to book at has an iPhone interface, it’s kind of good, but then still, anyways — I think really, for me, like what it gets down to, and this is like the thing on the iPad that makes me suspicious of it, since it’s just a big iPhone, multitasking is what I would really want.

Or even if it wasn’t multitasking, like really fast app switching. Like if I could switch between my calendar and my email as fast as I can switch on my desktop, then most of my complaints would go away.

There is also a lack of spellcheck in applications I find really annoying. But I did find out — I use Evernote quite a lot nowadays, and ever since I got the iPhone 3GS, the newest iPhone; my old iPhone was terrible, it was just too slow at doing most anything. I will just blink and make that statement. But now I have the new one, I use Evernote all the time, it’s great. I highly recommend Evernote.

I would type stuff in there and there wasn’t a way to undo things, which you need a lot, because it’s easy to screw up typing. But then someone reminded me, in Twitter, that you can shake to undo text, which is pretty awesome, I had forgotten completely about that. But that actually — you can shake to undo and then if you shake again, it will offer you the chance to redo it, which I think is great.

But anyhow, the big stink up about the iPhone is basically that — I mean, the iPad, there’s too many Is, there is not like Flash on it and that causes all sorts of Open Web consternation and things like that. Is it a FlashPoint, is that what they call that?

John Willis: Yeah. But watching movies on it would be pretty cool.

Michael Coté: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, like we watched a lot of the Olympics recently on TV, and it would have been nicer to have like — TV is a shitty way to watch video nowadays.

John Willis: I am not there yet. Did you watch the hockey game yesterday?

Michael Coté: No, no, but I was talking with — I always say their name wrong. You might vaguely remember them, they are pretty low profile, these guys, Versiera.

John Willis: The Vegans?

Michael Coté: No, Versiera, and they are a Canadian company that does interesting IT management platform, and I was talking with Frank from Versiera. Anyway, he is a Canadian. I think he is up in Toronto, and he was asking me if I had seen the game. He gave me a recap of it, but that’s the only knowledge I have. I hadn’t had the chance to catch up on it. But how was it?

John Willis: Oh, it was great. I mean, I have been a hockey fan most of my life. I don’t pay as much attention to it these days, but it was just — U.S., which was really not even supposed to be a great team this year, as opposed to Canada and Russia. U.S. beat Canada early on in the qualifying rounds. Canada had to play a bunch of extra games. It was just U.S. meeting Canada in the finals, in Canada, home ice. I mean, it was just — it was –

Michael Coté: Yeah, and then Frank was saying there was like last minute overtime and all sorts of stuff.

John Willis: Yeah, they do sudden death. So they tied. So yeah, so the U.S. came back, got it from, what was it, was it 3-1 or 2-1, I don’t know, but they scored the tying goal like 28 seconds left in the game, which is like amazing. It was one of the best hockey games I have ever seen, and I remember seeing the Lake Placid, U.S. beating Russia.

Michael Coté: Was that the ‘Miracle on Ice’?

John Willis: That was the ‘Miracle on Ice’, yeah.

Michael Coté: The NBC announcers couldn’t go like 30 seconds without mentioning, the ‘Miracle on Ice’.

John Willis: This was pretty darn exciting. It was pretty exciting. So that was hockey. IT Management guy, Podcast fan, hockey fan.

Michael Coté: So also last week, I missed going out to Pulse, I couldn’t make it this year. But you actually went to two shows last week. You went to SCALE, which was in the weekend, and then you also went to Pulse. So I was excited to record this week so you can tell me what happened at both of those conferences. They are both events that I was envious of you being able to go to.

Well, let’s start out with SCALE and then we will get into Pulse. So what is the deal with scale first off?

John Willis: SCALE is what, the Southern California — it’s a Linux — it’s their Linux, but it’s a huge conference. I guess it’s a regional Linux, but it was — they had a four exhibit room — Southern California Linux Expo. But their expo floor was as big as some big damn conferences I have seen. I mean, they had like rows of booths, and like lots of companies.

In fact, it’s funny, because lot of weren’t 8:17 open source, which I thought was kind of funny. But yeah, it was definitely — I mean, it was a great show. I mean, I will definitely go next year.

Michael Coté: So I always wonder, a lot of IT management vendor folks that I know, they end up going to a lot of Linux conferences. Do you think — are Linux conferences about Linux or are they just about like infrastructure nowadays?

John Willis: It’s across the board. I mean, they had — there is a lot of geek Linux stuff, guys trying to jam some type of tool on a box that shouldn’t even be running anymore. I don’t know. There is definitely a lot of weirdness. It’s the classic Linux, people dress up, and some really oddball things you see.

I mean, one of the sessions that was awesome was, Facebook gave pretty much — they walked through their whole stack, open source stack, and what they use each component for, all these tools that’s here. They basically walked through a good hour of what Facebook does, what open source stack tools they use, and then they answered questions at the end too. So that was very cool.

Michael Coté: Any interesting revelations about what they use?

John Willis: No, I forgot all of them; it was cool stuff though.

Michael Coté: Fantastic!

John Willis: So I will leave you up for that. Facebook uses, and I am not going to tell you.

Michael Coté: So as far as like our whole Cloud dev/ops, kind of like crazy automation sort of stuff, was there interest in the audience for that kind of stuff, or was it still kind of leading edge business?

John Willis: There was a Puppet Session and it was pretty crowded. So there is a lot of interest — it’s kind of like OpsCamp in a way. I mean, if you throw up a monitoring or a configuration management session, people will come see it, but it’s just — but there was like Facebook, there was — some guy got sick and I was able to give presentation on Opscode Chef, so that was kind of cool.

I was hanging out with Mark Hinkle from Zenoss, so he had let me come in on their community day to give a presentation. Then he introduced me to, which was the Friday before, but then he introduced me to one of the guys that was running the conference, and I just mentioned, hey, if anybody gets sick, which usually somebody does, and sure enough, somebody couldn’t make it, so I got a Saturday slot, giving a presentation. I got a pretty good crowd.

Michael Coté: Well, that’s 10:49.

John Willis: Yeah. Well, you have got to be ready to run. But Facebook, I was kidding about Facebook. Facebook, it was very cool. They went through like — everybody knows they are a PHP shop, but they had — because of scalability, what they do is they let all their guys, their app developers, develop in PHP still, and they have an open source tool called HipHop that converts it into C++. So they have this stuff around conversion.

And then, they talked also about this tool that I had followed a while back called Scribe. I thought they had canned it, but they use it for — it’s kind of like their Log Scraper program, kind of like Splunk.

But what they do is they feed it into Hadoop. So they had all their Syslog going in through their Scribe to Hadoop, and then they use Hive, which is that SQL abstraction. So it was pretty cool.

Then they talked about how to use memcache. They use memcache like real heavily, which is no surprise.

Michael Coté: So are they using like Hadoop and Hive for management or for the application part of it?

John Willis: They use it for a lot of things. I mean, the one they talked about specifically was for management of log; bring information out of logs to detect, which would be clearly an operational IT management function, but it’s — so they use Scribe/Hadoop/Hive, but apparently they said that a lot of their analytics is Hadoop/Hive across the board, so all the feeds that go into Hadoop and use Hive.

And the thing about Hive is, I had asked the guy who was like managing it, why didn’t they use cascading, which is a really cool abstraction, and he said that they like Hive because its got the — actually, they hadn’t heard of cascading, but the thing is, is that the SQL — the Hive is kind of a 12:44 SQL interface for Hadoop, and it works real well with their analytics guys, because SQL against MySQL; that’s the only thing they run, like a thousand MySQL servers.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I think that’s the — it’s interesting you come across companies like Facebook and they seem to cobble together their own management infrastructure, if you will, rather than necessarily — I don’t always hear a lot about off the shelf IT management stuff being used, like it’s usually a combination of open source stuff.

I am always curious — I don’t know, I mean the assumption — there are two assumptions I always make and I have no idea if they are true.

One is like, like you are getting to, it’s a scale sort of thing, where like the scale wouldn’t work with other systems, but then that doesn’t — I don’t know if that necessarily holds water, because supposedly at enterprise scale, all sorts of systems work. But I think it seems to be more of — I kind of theorize that what they are interested in monitoring isn’t really a standard thing to be monitored, if you will.

So you can’t just go buy, I don’t know, Facebook MySQL log monitoring off of one of the big four, whoever, for monitoring, although I don’t know.

The other assumption I sometimes make is that they just make one to make it on their own rather than get it off the shelf.

John Willis: Well, it’s clear — well, I talked to one of the guys, and, for example, they use Nagios and they use Cfengine, and here they have written their own Log Scraper with Hadoop. So I think part of what you are saying is true, that it’s that kind of Google, the way Google does is completely different than everybody else. And there is no doubt, I am sure Facebook does it different than everybody else.

But there are basics of IT management, and I think that what they wind up doing more than anything is the holy grail, that the enterprise has a hard time getting to, which is taking the tool, getting what it does. And I am sure that, like in the case with Nagios, and they probably had to add some secret sauce to make it scalable for Facebook, but today it’s about getting the raw data and turning it into meaningful data.

So I think that’s their secret source is, they are probably better at — I mean, when you get to the point where you are moving log data, 15:06, you better have an idea of what you are looking for or you are really just wasting your time.

Michael Coté: Yeah, this is one of the interesting things, back at OpsCamp that Mark Cathcart, who is at Dell now, he was kind of — he was asking questions, it was some sort of statements implicit in them but also making statements. So Mark Cathcart used to be at IBM, and he had been there for a long time, and now he is over at Dell and he is basically working on like Cloud scale systems for Dell, as he was saying at OpsCamp.

And he was asking some interesting questions about, what are you interested in monitoring, and how far down does your root cause analysis go, and all these very traditional IT management stuff. And what he was saying is that, in the role he is in, in designing systems for Dell that are used sort of — not that they are used at Cloud scale but they are used for Clouds or for Cloud scale stuff, is that, people want to have really cheap boxes that are very replaceable, and so at some point, at a box level, they are not really even interested in figuring our what’s wrong with the box.

So the kind of traditional metrics of like processor, and he was even kind of joking like fan and temperature and things like that, like people don’t necessarily care about that, they care about some other sorts of metrics.

I mean, he was kind of asking the crowd like, what are those other metrics that you are interested in? What are the things you are interested in? And maybe — and this is all just me theorizing off the top of my head, maybe that’s the reason you see a lot of custom IT management in high scale public website stuff is, they don’t really care about traditional metrics that traditional IT management cares about, they care about these other metrics that aren’t really collected in the traditional way. So that’s why they have to rig up their own Hadoop and Hive infrastructure to get, I don’t know, whatever wacky Facebook — whatever the service management metrics are that Facebook uses to judge, that their service delivery is using, it seems to me is maybe what they are pulling from.

John Willis: Right. But I think — I mean, again, part true on both Mark and/or your assumption, I mean partly, I think that it’s — yeah, clearly nobody cares about — if you are running at scale infrastructure, a fan, I mean, the Cloud doesn’t — there is no fan, right? I mean there is, but it’s not something you are ever going to get.

But even if you are running like Cloud scale Dell equipment, so you are buying pods from Dell, and even in there, a fan is more like the guy who has to replace light bulbs. I mean, so that’s not the guys who are trying to do SOAs, right? I mean, he might have his own SOAs for making sure that not too many of those fans flow.

But I do still think there is a lot of traditional data, even at scale, that becomes important, that does get cleaned into, in the case of, their Scribe, which is an aggregator for Syslog.

And even like, for example, they use Nagios. So in a lot of Nagios, I am sure they are getting a lot of traditional stuff from Nagios, along with their secret source, but they are real — the other thing I asked them about, like for event management, that’s a black hole in open source, there really is no real at scale, something like what IBM has with their Micromuse OMNIbus technology, that’s an at scale event aggregation tool. So that’s what Facebook said, that they wrote their own.

Michael Coté: You should have told them to check out RiverMuse.

John Willis: Yeah, okay, yeah, sure. Well, I mean, that’s a possibility. But I think — yeah. But apparently they found on their own that they — again, there was kind of like, in the open source world there is nothing really, really great for log aggregation and there is nothing great for source aggregation.

So I think to me, again, I think it is — there definitely are some — maybe I am rambling here, but I think there are some type of data points that are unique, but all in all, I think the real magic, if there is magic in these places, is have it aggregate a lot of the common and the detailed stuff together.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Did they talk anything about like the — I am laughing, like trying to pick up, but like the service desk they use or any sort of that other process stuff?

John Willis: That would have been a really good question, yeah. No, at the end I was really trying to pound out some of the ones they didn’t cover, like, okay, what do you do for this? I mean, we have got to go now. Alright, just one last question.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Like on the Agile Executive Podcast, we finally had John Allspaw, who used to be at Flickr, now he works at Etsy, and so we had him as a guest just to talk about dev/op stuff, and to talk about the same stuff he is known for talking about, doing ten releases a day and how the developer in the operations team like get to doing that.

I went back and watched the Velocity presentation he did last year. And it was actually like, I had kind of forgotten how detailed and good that talk is, because it really is, like a lot of the talks, including a lot of rambling on that yours truly does, the sort of like — they sort of lack for actual details of how things are running, it’s more aspirational and whatever, hand-wavy, as James Governor would say.

But in their talk, there is a little bit of that, but it mostly gets to like, here is exactly how we do it, and there is actually like screen shots of the process and the tools and everything that they use.

And they didn’t really get into detail of tooling the process they have, but you can kind of pick out from the different tools they use, the actual sort of like release management tools that they use, and the process that they use and everything. And there really wasn’t any of the — I mean, they were essentially using bug trackers and customized stuff to do their release management, keeping track of the configuration that they are in, and the release, and incoming tickets and stuff like that.

So I mean, that’s another area where, I am trying to figure out the connection of traditional IT management into this new way of running infrastructure. There doesn’t seem to be.

ITSM, or IT Service Management, doesn’t seem to have sort of like thrown enough grapples over this sort of canyon here.

John Willis: It’s interesting that you should say that, because at IBM Pulse last week, in the keynote, that was one of the themes that the Rational guys were talking about, is marrying development and operations together. Now, I didn’t see a whole lot of examples of how they plan to do it, but that was a theme.

It was interesting, because it was really — I mean, it was the same message that we are hearing at the dev/ops in the small place, the dev/ops community or agile operations. So they were saying the same terms, but I think they realized, the world is changing and Rational is kind of that area where — that’s their continuous integration or development process, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah. And that would be the, I think — I actually, while I didn’t get to go to Tivoli Pulse, the analyst people, they are always really nice, they put together like an hour-long preview of all their conferences, so I watched the recording of that. And it sounded like that the phrase they are using is Integrated Service Management, it’s like their theme.

And since you were actually there, I will just lay out like what I gathered from the preview. It sounds like what they have done, and by them I mean — it’s interesting, a lot of IBM is like this nowadays, a lot of IBM software, and to some extent the systems people are like this, but instead of really speaking about Tivoli as a separate entity, a lot of the conversation IBM has nowadays is about rolling up everything, all of the different brands, if you will, into more of a unified message.

So while people like Rational; ever since Rational acquired Telelogic, Rational has really been on this messaging or positioning themselves to sort of like, what would you, how would you put it, sort of like complete management of software throughout all parts of your business, if you will, and tracking how that software goes through.

So Telelogic was a company that basically did — it was kind of like the Rational of the embedded and systems world. So Rational is for places that are purely like software that runs on computers, that does software stuff, as we would know it. Whereas, what Telelogic does was stuff like software that runs in cars, or software that runs in devices. So software is kind of secondary to the hardware that its running in.

So Rational acquired Telelogic, I don’t know, two years ago now. And Rational’s messaging has been a lot more — they always talk about, hey, cars are more complicated than the mainframes and rollerballs and stuff like that. Cars are like, what was that Danny Sabbah said at Pulse, cars are like data centers on wheels or whatever.

So Rational’s messaging is all about software. This is the summary of it, software is everywhere and you have to manage the creation, deployment, management, and then the loop going back on itself. You have got to manage the life cycle of software, and that’s what Rational does.

John Willis: Dude, I am going to summarize this for you. It’s the Obama check. When they bought MRO, and I don’t know if that was before this technology, they wound up getting into a world they never realized that they could do, and it’s basically management of cities and management of — because MRO brought them into a world they never dreamed, which is a kind of physical asset, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. Totally.

John Willis: Yeah. So you start combining the fact that you can manage all the assets of a corporation, physical and software, or IT related, and then you can start managing the software development process of everything, including the software that goes into a computer and a car, now you have got big game, now you can –

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s exactly the confluence of nice purchases and everything. So yeah, like you were saying, on the Tivoli side, there is a similar — MRO is a similar purchase, which bought the Maximo. Now, at least the main thing you hear IBM people talking about, coming out of Tivoli is, Smart Cities and smart this, the majority of that stuff is all the Maximo MRO stuff that gets them into that.

And then, the aspirational thing is like, essentially, if everything is IP addressable or somehow network addressable, then it’s just like managing a data center. You have the same foundation.

Anyway, that was the impression that I got of Pulse was basically the marrying together of that Telelogic Rational messaging and the MRO Tivoli messaging to kind of be like — that hints the Integrated Service Management, but — was I kind of on about what they were talking about?–

John Willis: Yeah, it’s funny — well, first up, at Pulse there is really kind of at least two conferences going on, and then there is maybe three, I don’t know, but there is clearly the whole MRO — they had 5,500 people there this year.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: It’s the biggest one they have had in a long time. The MRO Group, they just bring in — there is a lot — they got a huge customer base when they acquired that company. So there is like a whole — like it’s at the MGM Grand and like the second floor is like a different conference. So it’s pretty much MRO, and it’s all that physical asset and it’s that big picture and that kind of stuff. There was probably a lot of Rational presentations, but I didn’t see — maybe not, and most of the ones with MRO is about IT service management, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: And then you had kind of the Cloud sessions going on, and then you had really just kind of bread and butter Tivoli, you know what I mean? That’s a big part of the conference. So like, yeah, they have this kind of theme message when they start-off the conference about the Big City, we are going to manage cities, and the whole — but then, there is a whole — at least a third of the conference is just focused on the bread and butter Tivoli technology, like monitoring, provisioning, configuration management, and there is really no — I mean, as much as they want to talk about the vision, there is very little connection between the grunts who are just trying to get self-service provisioning of servers and the grunts who are trying to do monitoring on a day-to-day basis and trying to make that all fit together.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean, on the other end of the spectrum, for all the Obama check stuff we were talking about, there are people who are like, hey, how do I manage 5,000 Xen hypervisor instances?

John Willis: Yeah. There is a whole core of people that just come to do that.

Now, the good thing is that the Cloud sessions, like last year when we went, they had just come out with the Tivoli Software Automation Manager, and I thought — I was very impressed as a first cut as what I would call a Cloud broker.

So people make fun of, myself included, periodically about IBM and their Cloud, but I mean the bottom line is, I saw three or four private Clouds from large companies, banks and energy companies, that are running reasonably sophisticated Clouds; now, some better than others. And you could argue that it’s not really a Cloud or there is no such thing as a private Cloud, it doesn’t matter, right? BoA says they are running a private Cloud. If you want to argue with them all day long, you will get no money from them and you will –

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. It’s sort of like — it’s not really interesting how definitial they are being, it’s more interesting what they are doing with that. I think now, like increasingly private Cloud means taking advantage of cloud technologies, right?

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: What that ends up looking like is sort of irrelevant, what’s interesting is that you are doing something new and different, and it may not — anyhow.

John Willis: It’s interesting that, like there was at least — like CenterPoint Energy, CSC, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase, all gave presentations on –

Michael Coté: Oh really, they got BoA and JPMorgan?

John Willis: Yeah. So I am saying, last year was a lot about, what is TSAM, and this year there was a lot of really good customer presentations on where they are on the Cloud roadmap and what they have done and what they have accomplished. It was excellent, I mean, to see how the enterprise is dealing with Cloud.

Michael Coté: So since they had some big name enterprises there, I mean, what — this question comes up a lot, and I was actually talking with someone in Twitter about this recently. So what were the justifications for doing private Cloud stuff versus public Cloud? Did they mention that kind of stuff or –

John Willis: Yeah. No, in fact, JPMorgan Chase was a good one for that. In fact, the two best ones, in my opinion, were the Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.

JPMorgan Chase was interesting like, he listed like the reasons, the motivations for getting into Cloud. What was interesting, the main motivator or the main reason they got into this Cloud thing was for server reclamation.

So everybody thinks about provisioning, they said, I will be honest with you, yeah, they did have provisioning time lapses, with VMware, it was like two weeks, and now they are down to two minutes or could be longer, depending on how it’s handled from a service request standpoint, like is there approval process or what.

But the point is, that wasn’t really — like at the end of the day, that wasn’t killing them. I mean, it may have made business easier for them, but what was killing them is, it just never got servers back, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah.

John Willis: I had never really thought of that, that was — that we just don’t reclaim services; in this case, servers, but the efficiency they gain by putting a process in place where you do get them back, and it’s the Cloud thing. People with virtualization typically ask for something. Like with Bare Metal, you never get them back. So just moving Bare Metal to Cloud virtualization or — not just virtualization but a Cloud, and what you mean by Cloud is really self-service. You have this ability to – Bare Metal just stays there forever, everybody is afraid to take it back, how do you –

Michael Coté: So does that go into the column of like cost savings, or is it like — I mean, the idea of being able to reclaim servers is great and everything, but like what benefit do they get from that? I mean, to ask a perfectly naive question, but what were the reasons that they wanted to reclaim servers?

John Willis: Well, because you are just wasting resources. I mean, you know that you are over-provisioned. We always talk about being over-provisioned for underutilized servers, but this is a 32:46 where you are completely over-provisioned, because you don’t even know what you have out there that you can get back, and even like virtual instances, without a Cloud-like system.

So really what they have done is they put a front end, self-service interface in front of virtualization and provisioning of virtualization. By putting a schedule in place, it does two things, right? One, it gives people the feeling that after they have tried it a few times that if they give it back, they can actually get it again. You know what I mean? Which is, about the self-server scheduling thing is like, you get it and you say, oh, don’t give it back, you will never get it again, it will take forever to get a new one.

Whereas now, there is this confidence that I can say, well, I need it for like two weeks, maybe it will last three weeks. I am pretty sure that if two months from now I need it again, I can get it, because they have been pretty efficient when I ask for it. That starts like really zoning in on the wasted, whether it’s virtual servers, which really equates to hardware at the end of the day. You get a more efficient use of your whole infrastructure, because now you are actually getting resources back and throwing them back in the pool.

Michael Coté: So were they using like Tivoli stuff to do all that, or did they go over kind of –

John Willis: Yeah, they actually used the Tivoli Software Automation Manager. In fact, somebody asked me, we had a good discussion. I said, that really is a Cloud broker, and they are like, we have been thinking about renaming it. I am like, well, call it Tivoli Cloud Broker, because it really is a Cloud broker.

But JPMorgan Chase actually wrote the original prototype with TSAM, so conjunction with IBM. So they have been working on this project for quite a while. But yeah, they did use TSAM.

The other thing they said I thought was — I mean, this is kind of common, but this kind of falls into the space that I am in, which is that the — one of the things that you have, particularly with development, I heard this at SCALE too, there was a guy giving a presentation on provisioning services.

The thing is, is that image management can be a pain in the butt, right? But we talk about image 35:10 and we think of it from a catalog problem, but actually it’s a development and a bug problem, right? Like the slightest little difference between an image, when it’s out in production, could cause a difference in the way the code works, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean, every time you hear of some big dot-com site coming down it’s — not every time, many times when I have been looking at this recently like it’s always some configuration problem, which is kind of funny. And whether that’s inconsistent configuration or a configuration someone sort of didn’t realize was out there doing something wrong.

John Willis: Yeah. And that’s where you get into this kind of idea that — and they weren’t totally up to this place, but they decided that one of their problems is not having consistent images. So I saw this with like all of the guys, the CSC and the BoA, trying to kind of move towards this, just enough operating system and building on the fly. You know what I mean? So that you really do have control.

If you are always building the image the same way, then the likelihood of a configuration option being different — they are not quite there yet, but that’s the theme of what we are doing at Opscode and Luke is doing at Puppet is, infrastructure is code, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah. It’s like the throw it out the window test, right?

John Willis: Right, it’s the throw it out the window test. So they are all realizing that, and it’s funny, but they are kind in the early stages of that, because none of them are really doing — they are still just really taking images, but they are being really strict about the base images and what goes on at this point. You know what I mean? And in most case — in all the cases of like JP and like CSC, I think, most of those guys are still in, this is a QA/dev problem. You know what I mean?

Michael Coté: Yeah. No, I mean they want to make sure it works when they roll it out to production, which is fair. That’s not really too shocking.

John Willis: But BoA was really interesting, because apparently, I got to talk with BoA guys quite a bit, and the thing is that, there are a lot of interesting things happening there, is that, BoA actually has a better vision for Cloud computing than most enterprises I have talked to, because most enterprises still think the public Cloud is the bogeyman, at least from an inside the glasshouse perspective.

We know that a lot of corporations are going out and using Amazon, like there are marketing groups, and people throwing out Facebook apps for 37:48. But the glasshouse is still like, oh, public Cloud, we have got to be careful. With BoA, apparently it looks at the Cloud as a three-tier structure, as private, local infrastructure, or a private internal Cloud, private external Cloud, and then public Cloud.

But what was really cool is, they are actually — they are not going to abandon — it’s hilarious. A lot of companies — and I preach this when I talk to bigger companies, when I get the opportunity is that, embrace the fact that there are people in your company using public Cloud. Most companies ignore it like, okay, well, we don’t have a process for that, we don’t know what to do. We will make believe it’s not happening, and we will go with this, nothing in our company can go outside our firewall, but meanwhile there is –.

BoA is taking a realistic approach and said, alright, you know what, we are going to embrace everything and we are going to apply; you would have loved this presentation, so Guy was basically their service management guru, their top kind of idol guy. He went ahead and he mapped, for this three-tier structure, they are still evolving, but he mapped all their service management pillars, their iPhone structure or process that they have defined for how it’s going to work with all three types of Clouds.

Michael Coté: Right, right, right, that makes sense. So it is a mapping of like existing and legacy to future, if you will, but it’s Cloud stuff.

John Willis: Yeah. Well, what was funny is that, when the first group started doing Cloud stuff in there — in fact, what happened was, I guess Merrill Lynch was a lot further along. They had done a lot of research on Cloud and all that stuff, and so when they acquired Merrill Lynch, they actually got a lot of intellectual property on how to do Cloud from Merrill Lynch.

But the thing was that — so they were first coming in they were like, the service management guys, the monitoring, all the core guys that managed everything, very sophisticated; I have done a lot of work for BoA, so I have been inside their glasshouse, but the Cloud guys are like, well, you don’t need to worry about this stuff. And we are like, well, we think we would like to worry about it. They are like, no, no, it’s cloud stuff, don’t worry about it. You don’t really need to be involved.

And the service management people were like, baloney. And they sat in on all the meetings, and as they got further along, they actually comminished 40:24 the Cloud guys, like this is IT management 101. There is no pixie dust in the Cloud.

And that’s the beauty. That’s what I thought was great about their story is that, even not me, when the Cloud first came out, I said, it doesn’t really matter in the Cloud, and I was so naive. Of course, process matters.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s the cutesy thing I always try to harp on about Cloud stuff is — and more generally, this seems to apply to lots of, what would you call it, technology process innovation, is that, you are actually applying a lot more discipline. It’s not necessarily more discipline, but you are applying better discipline than you had in the past.

And to the point of like a lot of Cloud stuff, I mean there is like — you are trying to operate at such scale and like at such dynamism, if you will, that if you don’t have discipline, like things can go really wrong.

I mean to be analogous, it’s like, since we were talking about the Olympics, I was watching all the bobsledding stuff, and the guy is like, basically, when you are going 80 miles an hour down this track, there is no room for air. Like you scrape the corner of your thing against the sidewall and like you are done, like your thing flips over and that’s it.

And it seems like that’s the thing with a lot of — like if you are going to set up something to automatically provision like 5,000 servers and do all this stuff, it’s like, there is not really a lot of room to like cowboy code it, or to like cowboy it. So you do need to have this discipline of like, when we do this button, it’s really going to work. And rolling it back is not going to be — it might be possible, but it’s not going to be pleasurable.

So I mean, I think to your point, exactly, like of course there is going to be a lot of process involved in it. I mean, there is going to be — as that old famous quote goes, a lot of effort went into making this effortless. And I think that’s what people like forget about it.

And analogously in the tech world, like agile software development is like this, where there is actually — it may look like there is not a lot of process and discipline going on with agile, but there actually is like a ton of discipline on an hour by hour, day to day level that people are doing and that kind of stuff.

John Willis: Yeah. It was funny because both sides learned from each other. So the service — the kind of brick and mortar, we have got process guys who are like, no. The Cloud guys are saying, no, you don’t worry, you don’t have to worry. And they are like, maybe — they were like questioning whether they really were being kind of onerous, or, oh, there is those guys again. But they said, okay, let’s just stick around. Let’s just go to all the meetings and before long –

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny, like you could see on both sides, like you could have the ITIL guys and they are like, well, if we are going to do release management, we need to draw up a manifest for the configuration and all the changes that are going to happen. And then on the Cloud side the people are like, oh my God, that’s so much work. We don’t have time for that and everything. What we really need to do is draw up a model of how everything is going to be done and then specify declaratively how this model is automated.

And you realize they are talking about the same exact thing. They just like — it’s just like, kind of the way they represent it to humans is like — I am oversimplifying, but the implementation is what’s different. But the front end to it, where people interact, process-wise, ends up being the same.

And there are several like Run Book or RBA and companies out there who are kind of like fast adapting to sort of Cloud ways of doing stuff. One of them that I talk to on and off is this company, newScale, who — I have only talked to them, and I have some of their customers lined up, I think, eventually to talk with, to validate it. Like I have talked with them a couple of times over the years and they have an interesting — they have kind of a very interesting realize that the RBA stuff they have, which is very classic ITSM stuff, like it fits really well, or it can be made to fit well with sort of Cloud conceptions of doing things.

And exactly to the point, it’s interesting, because they didn’t quite — what they were talking about wasn’t articulated in the way of freeing up capacity and freeing up things. But at the end of the day it became Cloud stuff for their customers, they were telling me, it became a matter of — it wasn’t so much like Cloud stuff as we would know it as like scalability and flexibility, but it was more like just a better way to manage all that crap that you have, whether it’s freeing up capacity or provisioning things faster or whatever, it was just a better way to do — it was a better implementation of service management, if you will.

I mean, that’s at the moment what it looks like private Cloud is going to look like, is just like, it’s the same old service management stuff that we are just too embarrassed to call by the same old words, because we don’t want to scare you off, but it’s just a better way of doing it than all the old way that we had of doing it. It’s a better implementation, essentially.

John Willis: Yeah, there was a –

Michael Coté: Is what becomes exciting for — that version of private Cloud, I am a lot less cynical about it than whatever else stuff I get all uppity about.

John Willis: Yeah. I mean, I — you know it’s funny, because I am — and obviously anybody who listens to me rant for the last couple of years realizes that I learned stuff and stuff that I rant at about six or eight months from now, I don’t rant as much. I mean, I used to be pretty harsh on saying that a self-service provisioning system for virtualized servers is a Cloud, because it doesn’t — it’s not like the 800-pound gorilla, which is Amazon, which is more than self-service. It’s an abstraction of hypervisors.

But at the end of the day, I mean who cares, right? It’s what you really need to get out of it. And for these companies right now — that was another thing. So we looked at BoA, one of the messages is that, we can — let me step back.

So before I went to SCALE, I had an opportunity to visit Shopzilla. I had done a podcast with their CIO, and so the day before SCALE, I was able to go out and visit their site. And they wrote their own private Cloud, but one guy wrote it in two months. It has more features than any of the open source private Clouds that I have seen before, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: It has a whole system for not only scheduling, but it does like service reaping. So like, if you have like over allocated your memory and it notices that you haven’t used half that memory, it will actually kind of help you back. If you keep a service active and it’s not active for a certain amount of time, they will send you an email saying, hey, you have got like 24 hours to deal with this. So all this, I am like, this is the pretty cool Cloud. You know what I mean? They did it themselves, one person, they use OpenVZ. So it was all on one platform, so 90% of what they run, this company runs on CentOS, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: And it’s OpenVZ, which is the open source container base Cloud or virtualization. So it was easy to build this thing, and they were using OpenVZ already, so they had a lot of their own intellectual property on it.

But the thing is like, so you go to BoA and you look at Shopzilla, it’s kind of this 47:35 and it’s complicated, and they have got a lot of stuff going on there, but the thing is, is 90% of their stuff runs on CentOS, right?

Well, BoA, I mean, gees, their stuff runs all over the freaking place, right?

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: So they can’t just like go, oh, just go ahead and throw it all on one abstraction of hypervisors, go ahead and put it on Eucalyptus or Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, they have got to figure out how to get WebSphere to run on the Cloud. They have got to figure out how to get all these classic legacy applications. So they have to crawl to build their Cloud.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I think it was October last year, Luke Kanies of the Puppet fame and I talked with the Shopzilla guys about their use of Puppet, it was Abe Ingersoll, I think was his name. But I mean, they had an interesting model of — I mean, obviously Shopzilla — I forget how many data centers they had across the globe, but they had really gotten to that point of programmable infrastructure at least for the images that they made and everything, which was interesting to hear about.

John Willis: Yeah. I spent almost a whole day with them, and it was great. I got to talk to — I am not sure, I talked to the CIO for a while, and then I talked to the guy who ran all operations. So one of the things I have been doing these days is asking people two simple questions. One, what’s your ratio of sysadmin to servers? And then of your sysadmins, how much time do they spend in the muck, versus how much time do they add true business value, kind of top line ROI to the company.

It’s interesting, I would have thought a lot of people would you give you bullshit answers or not want to answer it, but the last four or five companies I have asked that question, I have gotten straight up, in your face answers, and Shopzilla was like 100-200 49:38 and about 70% in the muck, so that’s kind of cool.

Michael Coté: Well, so speaking of Cloud stuff, I think this was last week, it was last week, the CA bought 3tera to do some of their Cloud stuff. So that was pretty exciting.

John Willis: Yeah, I totally missed that. I felt like a dote when you told me that.

Michael Coté: I have been working on a little writeup of it, so I don’t really have much of a writeup. I mean, my sort of quick analysis is, like we were joking, they bought the — they basically bought 50:15 or the assets of it, which was kind of — it seemed to be — it was sort of a pre-Cloud, Cloud infrastructure for doing the things, which is interesting, and 3tera is one of the longest — I mean, 3tera was doing Cloud stuff before it was widely called Cloud things essentially. I don’t really have a customer account for 3tera in front of me, but I mean, they seem to be a successful — they are basically a Cloud infrastructure arms dealer.

If you wanted to run a Cloud, they would sell you the software that would do that, and they seem to — I mean I — it seems like they were doing alright as far as the technology and sort of the customer base.

John Willis: Yeah. Well, 3tera, I have done — I have been promoting those guys, and I actually did some consulting for them, but they are actually — the one thing they have got is, they are not open source; I don’t know that that’s the end of the world, but their biggest sweet spot has been hosting company. So they have done pretty well with hosting companies, because it’s kind of, get your Cloud in the box. So they have had a lot of success. And then they had some big deals with some, I think some companies in Japan and stuff like that, so that probably got them on CA’s radar.

Michael Coté: Yeah. You know, a lot of acquisitions that have been happening recently have been — there is a MSP or a service provider tie in, which is of an interest in the IT management space.

I don’t really know the managed service provider or hosters, I don’t know that space extremely well, like I sort of know the vendor side, but it seems like lots of people in the IT management space, that’s where they are getting cash from and getting notice from.

There is another — also Citrix Online, which is a part of Citrix, they bought Paglo last week, and part of that was — part of the mention there was that there was a lot of MSP sort of usage of Paglo, which is one of the only SaaS based IT management platforms for monitoring out there. Tivoli Live is out there at the moment, but there is not a whole lot of other ones.

ManageEngine, the Zoho people, they have one in beta for doing SaaS based stuff, and I am sure there are some I am forgetting here and there. But anyways, they were bought by Citrix, which is interesting.

But the whole point, getting back to it, it’s interesting that MSPs are getting a lot of action out there.

John Willis: Yeah, I wonder though, on Paglo, so I checked those guys out, like I was comparing them to Splunk, I would put them close to the Splunk category, although they — Splunk says they can monitor your stuff too, but at the end of the day they are log scrappers.

But I just wonder if just that space just — they can’t get — I don’t know, I am just guessing, maybe they can’t get a second round, that the only way out of that mess is to get acquired on the cheap by somebody.

Michael Coté: Basically, there is GoToMeeting, it’s the GoTo Group, there is GoToAssist and GoTo all the stuff, so that part of Citrix, that’s what Citrix Online is, and that’s the part that bought Paglo. So it’s not like Citrix bought Paglo, so to speak.

John Willis: Right.

Michael Coté: And I think for them, I mean I think it –

John Willis: What would they do with it?

Michael Coté: Well, I think the combination there kind of makes sense, because what — according to what they have told me, to use that standard disclaimer. I mean, Citrix Online actually has had pretty good growth and revenue and usage and everything, and so what they found is in the small and mid-market. So there is a lot of people who use GoToAssist, which is basically like something is going wrong with your machine, so you want a remote login to like look at it or manage it.

John Willis: Okay.

Michael Coté: So I think with Paglo, there is a lot of opportunity for like these types of like admin people who are working in the mid-market or they might be independent, like if they could sell them Paglo as well, for more thorough monitoring, kind of like the Spiceworks crowd essentially, right?

John Willis: Right.

Michael Coté: Like these people would respond really well to having Paglo as the theory. So that’s why Paglo is being renamed to GoToManage essentially.

So the idea is, Citrix Online already has all these people who are using GoToAssist or GoToMeeting. They have got a lot of mid-market attention, right? And so they are basically buying another product to sell into that market that they have. And then it’s the same — what they are getting from Paglo is — Citrix Online doesn’t really do — they don’t really have the — they are buying the expertise of doing that kind of management.

John Willis: Right.

Michael Coté: The other thing is like the whole SaaS model works out for the way that Citrix Online wants to deliver their stuff, right? I mean, they don’t want to like having an on-premise thing to manage, at most, you have the little Paglo agent that you install.

John Willis: Right.

Michael Coté: So that’s sort of like the plan for the acquisition there. Like I was saying, I think — that’s why I was going off on this whole MSP thing is because — this is a similar thing that happened when the little 55:10 four word targeted more on the mid-market than kind of going after enterprise stuff or the former little four 55:15 or whatever you want to call them, is that, it seems like there is more of a pull from — at the moment, there is this — I don’t know what you would call it, I want to call it democratization, but it’s kind of like bringing down enterprise-grade management to the mid-market, if you will, and it seems like kind of a market that previously wasn’t served too much by higher grade stuff. I don’t know.

John Willis: Well, that’s the thing. Actually, I talked to the Tivoli guys a little bit about the — I mean, the thing right now is, the mid-market is, what we class — SMB is growing like there’s no tomorrow, the kind of Cambrian Explosion, as I have described it for, just infrastructure, everybody can infrastructure now. So you are just seeing a lot more — actually, I was describing this the other day to somebody, I was telling about — explaining to them about the book, ‘The Long Tail’, because they were asking like, so why — it was actually kind of why I was so excited about our market right now, and I said, because — I said if you think about — you get ‘The Long Tail’ concept, that it was — everybody who listens to this podcast surely would get ‘The Long Tail’, right?

Michael Coté: Sure.

John Willis: We had a little cliff, but now we turned it into a long tail, in terms of consumable items. But what I was explaining is why I think infrastructure is like red hot, like dealing with — helping people become scalable for IT management infrastructure right now — because you need to take the long tail, what you really have now is all these spikes of people who never had an opportunity, now have an opportunity to not only become consumable, but they actually have the opportunity to become huge.

In other words, think of the scale now, there’s a lot of spikes in that long tail, in that, these people would never get — some guy who makes Brazilian flutes with purple and green polka dots now has a following, because people around the world can find him.

Well, it may turn out that, that might go viral, whereas nobody would have ever heard of him without ‘The Long Tail’, now ‘The Long Tail’ becomes like individual spikes of like — like Etsy is a good example. You were talking about John Allspaw, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: Great example of like a really clever idea that would have never got off the ground before kind of the Internet Long Tail consumable availability and then combine the ability to have Cloud like resources. So I think that’s why we are seeing –

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, it’s the mid-market SMB vision of all the IBM vision we were talking about earlier, where basically like, if computers are everywhere and everyone is connected, then in that same way, like every small and mid company has a bunch of infrastructure they want to manage, and so they need the tools that help them manage that infrastructure.

So if you want to be a little arts and crafts store and you have to somehow — that’s a bad example, because you just set up a Etsy thing, but whatever it may be.

There’s another example to like really go far out. So I talked with, I guess you would call them an Internet of Things company called Arrayent, I think is how you say their name. What they basically have is — so they have this little device that you hook up to, and by you I mean like a consumer. So you hook up this little device to your home Internet and it creates this like sort of, I forget what frequency or protocol they use, but they have their own sort of wireless network that, that creates for you.

And then they have these chips that will use that wireless network, so you can have — so consumer goods companies can make embedded devices that are Internet connected.

So as an example, like the first thing they worked on was this toy with Mattel that was basically like — it was basically just like a little text messaging thing that you would give to like your, I don’t know, 12-year-old or whatever, some category I know nothing about.

So instead of like giving them a cell phone that they could text message with, they would text message with this little private device network. And from an open source, like Open Web perspective, you are like, oh my God, it’s this private network and you have got to buy a device, that’s terrible, blah, blah, blah, but it gets away from the whole point of it.

The wider point was like, so never mind the toy, it was like, you can hook up your thermostat to this, and just imagine all the devices that you have, and you would buy into this Arrayent system to basically have all your devices on the Internet and connected.

Like their is the iPhone ad of like — it’s the same one, like I printed out the boarding pass and then I found a place to eat hot dogs. And the other one was like, did we forget to turn the lights off, and then there was an app that goes to like turn apps off. And so that sort of vision of having all your shit on the Internet, essentially, to curse for the second time in this lovely podcast.

I think it starts to pull a need to have more — in the mid-market, you need more management of that infrastructure. So as an example, like that’s part of what these Arrayent people do is, part of their sales pitch is like, hey, you are Mattel or whatever like layer in the global supply chain that actually makes what Mattel sells, and you have no idea really how to program Internet scale applications or even pseudo Internet scale applications, and we kind of handle all that to you.

All you have to worry about is programming to this chip and then maybe programming your software on the back end that works with this, but we will handle the scaling up and the routing of the traffic and stuff like that, whether that’s people on the way to the airport turning off their lights or people text messaging or whatever you can dream up. I mean, that is — I think that does mean that there is a lot more people who are relying on technology beyond like static web pages or Etsy sites, where they are selling stuff.

John Willis: Yeah, yeah, just across the board, yeah.

Michael Coté: And I guess being even more macro about it, if that’s the right way, what everyone’s hope is, is that now — the hope is I guess that we are sort of out of these economic doldrums, because all of this vision, it needs lot of cash. So I guess the hope is that, all of these mid-market and above companies can actually start getting loans to actually like come up with these innovations and then also will have the money to actually deploy them and run them and stuff like that.

So if capital is freed up, and we have new technology, where you could actually have all these connected things, then you have got all this crazy stuff happening. I guess that is the one dark thing is, until it’s easy for businesses to go get the loans they need to like build out these — everyone being able to turn off their lights remotely, then nothing is going to happen, but the technology is just waiting for the capital to come alive.

So there is my rosy-eyed view of the future there. I need to go give some talk somewhere, where I can run offstage quickly before people start asking smart questions.

John Willis: Yeah. Bottom line is, there is going to be a lot of new data centers, whether it be virtual cloud or whatever, that didn’t exist before, because of all these things. I describe to people what we do is, like there is — make it real simple, there is three parts to this. There is the data center infrastructure. Well, we have solved that problem. It’s VMware or it’s Amazon or it’s Rackspace. You can get resources, server resources pretty quick, pretty easy now.

Then on the other end of this three piece stick, I guess you want to call it, is the app development. Well, that is what it is. There are some kind of pushbutton built in app things, but at the end of the day people have to write code.

Then there is the piece in the middle, which is, how do you build the infrastructure, right? And we haven’t — I mean the bottom line is that, a lot of people think when you get a Cloud, that’s the pixie dust part, but the truth of the matter is, there has got to be glue to build and manage infrastructure, whether it’s monitoring, configuration management, event correlation, log scraping, log aggregation, those are all things that have to — isn’t it a great way to tie it all the way back from the Facebook discussion –

Michael Coté: We have swallowed that IBM vision hook, line, and sinker man, we are smart planetized.

John Willis: That’s right, yeah. But IBM will put an abstraction layer on top of all of this to manage it all.

Michael Coté: That’s right, exactly. So there is one other like fun thing before we wrap up, but I saw that there is a NoSQL Boston Conference, March 11th that –

John Willis: I have heard of that, yeah.

Michael Coté: I mean, I think those are — as I have told people, I don’t think that NoSQL Conferences have gone kind of sourly yet, so they are still a fun place to go to, to kind of see what’s happening in a new area of technology.

John Willis: So you are going to go?

Michael Coté: No. I have kind of limited travel at the moment, but isn’t March 11th like next week too? I will see, maybe Stephen O’Grady will go there, since he is in the Boston area.

But the next thing I am going to go to, speaking of off topic, is I am going to go to Microsoft’s MIX Conference, which is all about — it’s kind of like the front end for all of this, this blue sky we have been talking about John, like Silverlight and IE and HTML 5, it’s all the platform and UI layer stuff that Microsoft does. I will be going to that.

And then I should be able to go to South by Southwest here in Austin, which, I don’t know what’s up with these Microsoft people, they schedule — MIX and South by Southwest are kind of like the same crowd, and they schedule MIX right at the tail end of South by Southwest, which is tragic. So bad scheduling. But that should actually be a fun show.

But other than that, I have got — there’s actually like — I will have to put a link to this now, but I have a keynote about a lot of this Cloud stuff we have been talking about at the — it’s like the Enterprise Emerging Technology or an Emerging Tech Enterprise Technology Conference in Philadelphia like the second week of April, and I am giving one of the keynotes there about just what all this Cloud hoopla means for people, so that will be exciting.

But the thing I was going to ask you about is, you recently did a video with the building43 people, otherwise known as Robert Scoble. What was that like?

John Willis: It was pretty cool. So the funny thing is that, I knew a couple of guys from the Rackspace because they were at the OpsCamp Conference down in Austin. So I saw that Scoble was — he was in town for some startup conference they were having and Jungle Disk, because Jungle Disk was acquired by Rackspace. So they were like the Premium or Gold or Platinum sponsor for this startup thing.

So I saw that Scoble was going to be in town and they were going to have a Tweetup; I was like, oh man! We had a customer — I had a customer that did a presentation on how they had been using our product the week before. I posted some of that, how they use Chef, and it was really cool, and I was thinking, man, won’t it be cool if I could get Scoble to interview me and my customer?

So I went to this Tweetup thing and Scoble was there. It’s surreal. I mean, there were just people waiting in line. He is like the Beatles, I mean people just want to touch his shirt, and like, I touched Robert’s shirt, running out of the room. And I am like, oh, this is going to be a nightmare.

And I told the customer, I said to the Rackspace guys I knew, I said, hey, you know, is there any way — oh, that was the other thing, the customer was using Rackspace with the Cloud. So I was saying, hey, that’s what you are supposed to blog about. Went to Scoble, he is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, and yeah, yeah, yeah, call me tomorrow. Yeah, right?

Then this producer was over there and this producer was like, it ain’t going to happen pal, you ain’t going to. So I was with the customer, visited some bar with the customer, I said, it ain’t going to happen, it was worth a shot.

I had my Cassandra shirt on from the OpsCamp that the Rackspace guys were giving out. And all of a sudden some guy walks by and he says, nice shirt. And I turned to him and I said — he works at Rackspace. So I tell him about — that we got this — I got a customer, he is using the Rackspace Cloud and he is using our product. And he is like, hold on a second, Scoble works for me.

So he pulls Robert Scoble over to our table and he is sitting there, and they got a scheduling to do a video the next day. What was interesting about Scoble, and I will tell you about the video in a second, but when I sat — have you ever met him in person?

Michael Coté: Yeah, I met him briefly at an Adobe event.

John Willis: He started talking — I asked him questions about how does he do all this aggregation and all that. I mean, it was fascinating. You started getting a feel for why he is Scoble, you know what I mean?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: Because he said that he has like a spectrum of like 4,000 people that he basically knows, you know what I mean? He couldn’t tell them by name or anything, but it’s like he knows them on Twitter and he knows like, if they are going to say something, he knows, if it’s their spin-on, because where they come from — and he was explaining how he kind of aggregates this like large community of Twitter followers. And he is able to use that to kind of being 68:59 knowledge or kind of an Oracle, for things going on.

What was interesting also, we started talking about the iPad, and he was talking about how he envisioned using it for his kind of network of aggregating information; it was pretty cool to hear him talk about how he would maybe have kind of a multidimensional visual on the iPad that you could kind of spin around in circles, so you could have like Twitter lists and Facebook lists, almost like the Tom Cruise movie, where you can drag him in between.

Michael Coté: There’s a video from a couple of years ago where someone sat down and had him show how to use Google Reader, which is probably out of date now. But it was interesting to see, it’s sort of high stream –

John Willis: How he could do that. But yeah, so the next day they scheduled us, we got like the last time slot, it was cool. It’s kind of — it’s interesting, he is just really kind of down to earth and we got a great interview in.

So in fact, I did a bunch — they make you work for it though, because then you’ve got to do a bunch of your own. They make you do the editing, I guess, but I guess it’s kind of –

Michael Coté: Oh! Really? What platform do they use to make it let you do your editing?

John Willis: Well, it’s probably less complicated for most people, but first they wanted me to – well, so they do the video and then they had like three cameras on; one on me, one on — and then they had one camera on all of us. So I don’t know. I guess that’s four cameras. So he sends you the four-camera version and then there is everybody on it and then you are supposed to give him a video back with where you would want to put screenshots and stuff like that interjected.

So you almost have — it’s kind of build your own overlay video that you sent back to them where you kind of timed the way you want. Maybe when I am talking, I will start the conversation then I will show a screen of Opscode website.

Michael Coté: Alright! And that’s what you have to insert in?

John Willis: Right, but I don’t do a lot. So the producer guy was pretty nice. He said that if I sent him like a bunch of pictures, then he would insert them if I told him where to insert them.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, you will have to tell people what the benefits and success are for you and Opscode after doing that, because it’s always — here we are in a podcast ourselves and I think it’s sort of uncharted territory as far as like — other than like raw page views like how that translates into something that’s beneficial. I am always curious about what –

John Willis: Yeah. I will tell you it was fun, because if anything, I just got motivated then I was just really kind of spot on, on my answers and also there was a lot of fun for me just to watch it, we did it. So, yeah, it was really cool.

Michael Coté: Definitely. Well, I think that’s about it for this episode, John. Is there anything we left out?

John Willis: No, I think that’s it.

Michael Coté: I agree. Well, if there is anyone coming to South By Southwest in a few weeks, be sure to drop me a line, because I am of course here in Austin. It’s always nice to meet audience members if you will or parts of the community to use the 21st century way of phrasing it.

John Willis: Oh! You know, by the way, a lot of people listen to us. So that is kind of interesting. I ran into a lot of people that –

Michael Coté: Oh! Yeah?

John Willis: Yeah, so we have got a pretty good following of the people who go to 12:43.

Michael Coté: Well, we should use our little black shine squeeze boxes to record some of the little interviews with them.

John Willis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Coté: What are you going to do?

John Willis: What are you going to do?

Michael Coté: I am always saying I should do that and I never do it. So who am I to say that it should be done? I am shooting everywhere.

John Willis: Yeah, shooting.

Michael Coté: Alright. Well, I guess we will see everyone next time and thanks as always for listening and it’s always — as John was alluding to it, it’s always nice to hear from people, that’s always a good thing.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Well, I know one thing I wanted to say. I forgot if I mentioned this last time, but there is a new podcast from the ServiceSphere guy from Chris Dancy and he talks — he has got a people in his four episodes now and he talks a lot about ITSM and stuff. Actually, I’ve heard the first one and I will put a link to it. It’s good stuff. If you like the good old fashioned IT management stuff, we talk about here; you will probably like that podcast. So you should definitely check it out.

It’s like this guy does, his name is ServiceSphere on Twitter and he basically does — it’s hard to describe exactly what he does. I think he does like Service Desk Consulting and also helps people run service desk stuff and ITSM stuff and I am babbling at this point, obviously.

But what’s interesting is at least in the first episode I have heard so far, he has got two people who are short of in the industry and they do work and it’s funny to hear vendor side, consultant side, and then industry side people talk about stuff and it’s good stuff, good material.

John Willis: Cool!

Michael Coté: So with that we will see everyone next time.

John Willis: Alrighty.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, see the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned or related.

This week John and I talk about: the state of BSM and ITIL-think in relation to all this cloud hoopla, news from several IT management & cloud startups, BMC’s Remedy OnDemand, and how much pizza Tarus can eat in one sitting.

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

• Steel vs. Big Iron.
• BSM and ITSM at OpsCamp discussion. What’s the place of BSM, ITIL and friends now-a-days?
• Doug McClure sums up in BSM in 2009 – several startups, but not much from big vendors.
• While Coté was rolling his eyes at a BPM tool earlier this week, it does start to seem like a holy grail when you add in the fully automated provisioning tool chain. We do a lot of dev/ops blue skying.
• Nice clutch of OpenNMS news: OpenNMS user conference, May 6-7 in Frankfort, Papa John’s write-up, helping out in Haiti.
• Cloud Drama – Reuven vs. @samj.
• Tivoli Pulse coming up, trying to do more OpsCamp.
• CloudSwitch – cloud brokers with an isolation technology. Makes me think of CloudCat and going after the “easy kill” of installs.
• CloudShare – virtual labs plus analytics is an interesting, novel play here.
• Quick discussion of Remedy OnDemand.
• Amazon versioning S3 - who don’t like built in version control?
• John will be at the Cloud Connect conference doing Cloud Operations Boot Camp – March 15th. In San Jose.
• WebappVM guys launch and rename to as Makara.
• Nicira – open flow, virtual switch thingy. See Jon Brodkin’s piece as well.

Transcript

Coming soon.

Disclosure: IBM, The OpenNMS Group, and others are clients.

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 ;)

Full Transcript

(As this was in a loud room, the transcription probably has some errors, including lots of “Male Speaker.” Be sure to listen to the original audio if you think we’re saying something overly weird. -Coté.)

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! It’s the 30th of January, 2009, and this is after — what are we here for?

Male Speaker: OpsCamp.

Michael Coté: OpsCamp, down here in Austin. This is a special IT Management, having some beers edition. And this is one of your co-host, Michael Coté, and of course we are joined by John Willis.

John Willis: johnmwillis.com.

Michael Coté: That’s right. And let me take these earphones out of my ears so I stop freaking myself out.

So John, what did you think of the conference today? Did it accomplish the goals you had personally?

John Willis: I honestly think it did, I really did Michael. I think that as we sat down and we thought about this, there are a couple of things we wanted to accomplish. A, we wanted to inform the industry that there is this special type of thing, infrastructure as code, some people call it automated structure.

Michael Coté: Very automated, something or another.

John Willis: And some people call it, what do you guys call it man? You have a new name for it, this really cool thing.

Male Speaker: The model is the management.

Matt Ray: Dynamic infrastructure management.

Michael Coté: That’s Matt Ray.

John Willis: The famous Matt Ray from wacky predictions.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Also known as male speaker.

John Willis: Male Speaker of interest.

Matt Ray: But no, I am serious, I really am.

Michael Coté: I have to say, I think you are pretty good at like helping industry run this stuff there. Like I was — now that I do several of these things, I was paying attention to you and Dave, the other guy, and yeah, you really have it down well.

Matt Ray: I was thinking, ‘Wayne’s World’, did I suck? So I guess I didn’t suck.

Male Speaker: I hear the Emmys might be looking for a host like that.

Michael Coté: There you go.

Male Speaker: Well, you know what I was impressed with, like what I was talking about earlier is that, I think there was actually a pretty good mix of buyers and sellers essentially, of like vendors and actual IT people, which, even at some of the Cloud Camps I have been to, is not always the case, it’s usually kind of like vendor heavy. So it was actually really fun to hear from both sides, and to kind of see the interplay between the two sides.

Male Speaker: Well, there was a lot of passion, I mean honestly, there was a lot of — it was interesting. So today at one point I was like kind of amazed at, we are talking about the stuff I love on a Saturday afternoon. I mean, the shortest delivery, or management of monitoring, or configuration of provisioning, and here we are a bunch of geeks, which is cool. I mean, that shows that there is — I have always thought, I love this, so I have a career, but we got like 60 — I mean, I don’t know what the headcount was today.

Michael Coté: Yeah, we will have to check what it was. It was actually really impressive. I was looking at the — I had been monitoring the event sign up, which I think is always cool, like I was saying, because you can see who signed up in. I think it was like 20 people for a long time, and then it suddenly spiked through a bunch of people. So that was actually pretty nice.

Male Speaker: I think a 130 registered, I think we probably got 75 people here.

Michael Coté: I mean, so as far as the top like — I remember the topics being — like the things I went to, I think you and I only went to one or two — one thing that was the same, which is excellent coordination.

Male Speaker: You are trying to cover the whole –

Michael Coté: The very thing. So I went to the evolution of the — or Agent Evolution, which I thought was pretty fun. I mean, that ended up basically being, what are we going to monitor in the cloud, and there was a little bit of, what is the architecture of agents need to be to fit into a cloud world, if you will, and that was kind of enjoyable.

And there was kind of the ongoing doke in that session — the ongoing doke, it happened once or twice, was, that essentially like these heavyweight agents that everyone hates from the 90s, are kind of like seen to be what you need to do cloud stuff, because cloud stuff doesn’t monitor itself, kind of like infrastructure does nowadays, so you need agents to do a lot of that work, or something along those lines. And so, I think that was kind of interesting.

And the other takeaway that, I think I was saying this, so maybe it’s just — I remember only what I said, which is quite difficult. But it seems like the agents that you build have to be as equally sloppy and non-reliable with the cloud stuff that they are monitoring.

So when you have behind the firewall infrastructure, it’s more or less reliable and you know about it, so your agent can kind of act accordingly. But if you have an agent that’s monitoring some cloud stuff, it’s probably going to be up and down, you are going to lose connectivity and all sorts of crap and the transient thing, so your agent has to act accordingly. But that’s what I remember from that session.

Male Speaker: Well, for me, I wasn’t in that session, but I definitely liked GroundWorks now, because Tara, she hugged me, so it’s the highlight of my day, really, so I am really good.

Michael Coté: You meet nice people, you have nice thoughts, that’s the way it goes.

Male Speaker: So I think while you were in there, I was in a service delivery.

Michael Coté: How was that?

Male Speaker: It was pretty cool. I mean, we talked pretty much about — I tried to figure out what configuration was and what it means in the cloud and delivery of — so we had a lot of discussions about, the Amazon has set — really caught us all off guard.

Michael Coté: Right, right. Matt Ray was talking about that.

Male Speaker: Right. We are all thinking about infrastructure, most of us are doing it for many years; doing monitoring configuration provisioning. And then all of a sudden Amazon kind of comes out and says, this is what we have, and so for about a year-and-a-half or two years, we are trying to figure out, first, what is this crazy thing, and now we are looking at it and saying, holy crap, we have got to be like that.

And I think even the guys in IBM, Fritz was saying like, they have kind of put us in a position where we all have to now say, we suck at infrastructure. I mean, we don’t know exactly how they did it, but they are doing something great, and we got caught with our clothes off, and we have got to basically try to figure out how to get to that spot.

Michael Coté: Well, interjecting the conclusion, I would have a day in the middle, I think that’s the main conclusion I came to is, I think this bucket of thought, if you will — like I think the thing it really needs to do is define like — it needs to have this statement that like, that stuff in the past has broken and no longer works, and here is why our stuff works. Like here is why this stuff is like the better way of doing this, because I think it’s a little unclear like what — maybe the Cloud stuff is cheaper or whatever, but there needs to be something out of it.

Male Speaker: It’s not cheaper. I mean, I keep hearing that, and we keep circling back to that, but the reason Amazon works is because there are zero people involved with the transaction. It’s not the $0.10 an hour. I mean, that’s great, and it sounds good, and it makes sense to a point, but even if you add up the numbers, if you are running 24/7, 365, but the thing that really — I don’t think most people get why that model of IT infrastructure from a service delivery standpoint is so great, is because it is a zero touch transaction. You don’t have to deal with a person to get what you want.

Michael Coté: What were you going to say Matt Ray?

Matt Ray: I mean, zero touch, that’s awesome, but what I was hearing that really changed the game was the fact that, we no longer have to care about root cause analysis. It’s like, throw the box away, give me a new one.

Someone said, we have gone to the Windows model. It’s like, something wrong with the server, reboot it, toss it out the window, give me a new one. We are just failing forward and rolling out new infrastructure to just replace whatever was wrong.

Male Speaker: I think as John was — I mean, that’s the kind of like — there is nuance to that, but I mean, that’s the kind of like statement that I like coming out of an event like this. It’s kind of like — during today I have been thinking about, like when I was observing the Agile software developers, like kind of working out the industry, and it was full of stuff like that.

Male Speaker: Agile drinking technology.

Male Speaker: I mean, it was full of like all these statements that weren’t absolute statements, that really weren’t absolute statement, but it was more like, this is like what we are aspiring to, and kind of what we are trying to drive forth, and that’s like one of it, is in reality you are going to do some root cause analysis but –

Male Speaker: I don’t think that will ever happen, I mean honestly, I really don’t.

Male Speaker: Just like with Agile, you are never going to have 100% 8:18 that work all the time.

Male Speaker: We have always been hearing there will come a day when we won’t have to do that, and the reality is, we never get there, and that’s okay.

Male Speaker: But you will do less of it.

Male Speaker: Well, we have to understand the shift of how we do it or what becomes important, because things change. We have the luxury of having a lot more leeway about having to care.

Male Speaker: Or we can care about more important things.

Male Speaker: We can care about hiring the staff.

Male Speaker: Exactly, exactly.

Male Speaker: Hopefully, we don’t have to worry, because maybe we can — if we do –

Male Speaker: The Alabama, Texas game?

Male Speaker: What?

Male Speaker: I am sorry.

Michael Coté: A good segue from that is, for the second session I was there, was the — what was it, like the craft of being a systems administrator or something, which I thought was going to be like the usual sort of boondoggle of like philosophizing, but it was interesting to hear — like people were very involved and saying a bunch of interesting things. It was interesting to see people almost get to the point of figuring out, so if I am a [?], or I am selling [?], and then everyone uses Google Apps, what does that mean? I mean, to put it in the extremes right away.

Male Speaker: How can I make it simple enough for –

Michael Coté: Right. And then it did sort of — halfway through the session it didn’t evolve; that’s the wrong word, but it became a BSM discussion, that was basically like, why does everyone hate IT so much, and like, what can IT do to make them like us better? And then to short change it, basically you need to figure out some way to tell the business, you are helping them make or save money, which I think is always a healthy thing to always be aware of, like you always need. So that was nice.

But like there was a moment there where it was getting to that point of, what’s going to be the future of IT if all this cloud hoopla actually works out only half of the way? I think that’s a discussion I haven’t really seen IT people having, so much as developers having.

Male Speaker: In the parallel session, which was Service Assurance, we were taking about what IT did, what can we do. Because you have got this IT infrastructure where parts of it are not local. There is cloud, there are services, there are things. What can you do to avoid downtime when your transaction processor, who is not on site, who you don’t have any SLAs from, how do you handle that, how do you monitor that, and what do you do to prepare for it?

And people are like, well, I have got black holes, I have got big blind spots in my model. I don’t know what my network looks like. I don’t know what my services look like. For solutions to work well, we need better modeling, we need more synthetic transactions. We need to know where our blind spots are, so at least when these things go down, we have a quicker storage. I mean, there weren’t any great answers. Eventually it turned into a Zenoss sales pitch, so it all ended up well. We got a lot of converts, but still. Nobody had any great answers.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Like during that — on that topic, the thing I didn’t pipe up about was, system and crafting. And I was talking with Erik, CTO of Zenoss about this, like afterwards, is that, it seems like the interesting opportunity for operations people with all this cloud stuff is to actually have some thing they can bring to the table, that is something new, that can generate revenue. Like development can always bring something that helps generate revenue.

But like IT is just sort of like, it’s like a bummer. So like, it seems like, IT could say like, hey, there is this new way of running our business that may well have different thing that we can sell or different way we can make money, and that’s kind of another discussion it would be interesting to see like IT people have. Like what’s the revenue generating brand new innovation to the business that you can bring because of all this cloud stuff?

I don’t really know what that is, but that seems like an opportunity that’s there.

Male Speaker: Well, some of the other things. I think kind of early on we started out — we ran this thing as kind of a classic cloud [?], we did the lightning talk, and then we did the [?] session, and we invite people up. And we were kind of starting to get top heavy on configuration management. So I just happened to accidentally mention the word monitoring, and then the conference really became monitoring camp.

Michael Coté: That’s an interesting like division that happened, not division as in people — a separation of concern, to use some crazy phrase.

Male Speaker: I don’t remember who had the slide, but someone had a slide that on one side was management and the other side was monitoring, and it’s like, how do we bridge that gap? How do we tie those together?

Michael Coté: So what was the third and final section that you guys went to?

Male Speaker: Well, there was a sales pitch session where all the vendors — but none of us sat in on that. The session that the rest of us sat in on was

Male Speaker: Oh yeah, we were all in there.

Male Speaker: We were all in there. So there was a great session from IBM. Phil, do you want to tell us about your session? You want to introduce yourself.

Phil Fritz: Yeah. Well, I am Phil Fritz, I work for IBM. We had a session about monitoring from cloud. It was a pretty interesting conversation. Well basically, I shared a couple of initiatives we had about putting up our IT and monitoring concept on the Amazon Cloud, so folks can monitor there. You see two instances from the cloud.

Michael Coté: So what was like the good insights you got from that?

Phil Fritz: Well, there were a lot of questions about what people were using cloud for the required monitoring. There is still a — they see a lot of development tests, we use [?] for development test, but who monitors that, or how many production systems are actually on Amazon.

And for the types of folks that are doing production on Amazon tend to use smaller Web 2.0, Facebook application, guides, other pieces, they tend to use basic tools.

Male Speaker: They use a lot of IBM too.

Phil Fritz: Oh yeah. Either go without, or they just use CloudWatch or they use Open Source and things like that.

Then we also talked about the other offering, IBM provided cloud service for monitoring.

Michael Coté: Right, right, right, which is available as a video overview and demo.

Male Speaker: At redmonk.com.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

Phil Fritz: But yeah, what was interesting to hear was, the trail of dead that SaaS and systems management has left, and many have tried and died, so it’s sort of the challenge in the marketplace of, providing service and systems management tools out of the service.

Michael Coté: So were people positive about SaaS based IT management or were they negative about it?

Phil Fritz: I think optimism always proves eternal, because –

Michael Coté: I mean, that’s kind of a change from like how it was recently. I think here people like actually think like SaaS based — like something like Tivoli Live and others to work is somewhat of a change. Most people are pessimistic about that.

Phil Fritz: Well, I mean, I think, at the end of the day the model is compelling. It makes too much sense for it not to work. I mean, someone has got to figure it out. So like at the end of the day — you have got experience with this, right, you have done some of that stuff in the past.

Michael Coté: We all have.

Phil Fritz: So I think at the end of the day it’s like, it makes a lot of sense, someone has got to figure it out. You can argue there are players in the field that can figure parts of it out.

Michael Coté: So it sounds like it was overall positive for you then?

Male Speaker: We got another celebrity who just came up.

Phil Fritz: Oh yeah. I was able to spill a lot of IBM secrets for you. Those guys were furiously taking notes.

Michael Coté: Here we are again, it’s the bar, it’s after hours, in the IT Management Podcast. We have another celebrity. Come on here Damon. Damon from DTO Solutions.

Male Speaker: You can uncomfortably bend over.

Damon Edwards: There is something I always wanted to say, well, hello there! This is the IT Management Podcast, I am one of your – am I a host, am I a co-host? Oh, hell, I am Michael Coté, where is my beer?

Male Speaker: You are that John M Willis guy.

Damon Edwards: That guy?

Male Speaker: He is a nob.

Male Speaker: John M Willis, at johnmwillis.com.

Male Speaker: John M Willis should have stuck to his –

Male Speaker: Sometimes John Willis at johnmwillis.com.

Damon Edwards: Nice, nice.

Male Speaker: That ends the comedy hour.

Male Speaker: So [?], I mean you did a lot of –

Damon Edwards: Yeah. I think the concept, next generation, is one of the most overused, kind of burnt out, terms in technology. I think when someone hears next generation, they probably think, oh, it’s 20% or 30% chance it’s going to come true.

So I think us running around saying — yeah, we are going around saying, we are the next generation of IT operations or systems management or whatever you want to call, IT operation management, we are the next generation.

When we say that collectively, people just kind of think that we are crazy, we have got some newfangled ideas. And I think we live in kind of an echo chamber where we are doing some amazing work for the old companies, big companies, people make a lot of money on the backs of the work that we are collectively doing.

And I think that a lot about today was kind of coming to terms with that, and trying to figure out how to put the best foot forward. So as an industry and as a group we can do a better job of promoting our successes and really explaining the vision of what — not the vision, the reality of what we are doing.

So when we say next generation, we are actually delivering on that promise. And I don’t mean this as DTO Solutions or ControlTier, I mean this as a group across the board, Puppet Chef and ControlTier, you name it, we are making this stuff a reality, and I think we need to do a better job of telling that story to people.

Michael Coté: No. I mean, that’s a good point that I was thinking when John was saying something the other day, that the — I probably spend a lot of hours trying to think of a better phrase than next generation, because like it happens a lot where someone is like, hey, I have got a new way of doing something, and like I can’t use all these great phrases we use over the past 20 years, because people kick me out of the room if I use it.

So you have got to come up with something new, and I think that is — one of the exciting thing for IT about cloud stuff is that, it hasn’t been kicked out of the room quite yet. So people, whether they — for people who have something that’s even kind of cloud influenced, if there is actually a new, better technology, there is this window of opportunity where people might actually believe you, which is, it doesn’t really ever happen anymore in IT at all. So it’s kind of refreshing that you might actually believe it.

Like I mean the last time that happened was like with Open Source, I think, and then we got burned by SOA, and we are still kind of recovering ourselves.

Male Speaker: The trough of disillusionment.

Michael Coté: That’s right, but it never got out of the trough, that’s always the problem.

Damon Edwards: Yeah, and I think that’s — I think that’s a challenge that we face, is to show the world that it is a reality, and come up with some common messaging. And I don’t mean that in the bad marketing sense, I mean just sort of in the vocabulary sense, to help users.

Michael Coté: And the final section, the one that you didn’t see or whatever, was sort of figuring out the automation tool change. I mean, I guess I was trying to encourage you all to sort of like figure out what — explaining to everyone like what exactly — like why should I have one?

Damon Edwards: I can’t tell you how many times we go in to talk to CIOs, or even people down in the trenches, they are just confused by all the different tools out there, concepts, and they don’t realize that they all sort of fit together and do good things. It’s just a big confusing mess.

So I think a lot of this is about trying to reduce that confusion of users, and it helps the industry as a whole enable to do that and drive that conversation.

Michael Coté: Definitely.

Male Speaker: The entire world is meant to come up with the new [?].

Male Speaker: I think at the end of the day, the idea here for OpsCamp was to find out if we had enough people interested in talking about something we are all passionate about, and I think today was a huge success.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. To see if there was enough like — if the cloud gave enough grease to the wheels.

Damon Edwards: Yeah, and not just the cloud. I mean, we talked a lot earlier on about a cloudy world. It’s not cloudy, it’s virtualization, it’s actually folks who are going to have to deal with their [?] but we are ops people, where do we fit in? It’s crazy out there.

Michael Coté: Well, I think that’s a good conclusion.

Male Speaker: Oh, wait a minute. Has everyone seen the downfall, the Gartner bid, with the downfall of Mashup, just had to bring it up, where they were talking about the AR analysts.

Michael Coté: They are a challenger, but not in the leadership offering.

Male Speaker: Make sure it’s in the links. Make sure you have seen it, because there is a shout out for RedMonk.

Michael Coté: Yeah. The one person you wouldn’t want a shout out from.

With that, we will see everyone next time.

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

This week, John and I hit up on some larger IT news and themes: cloud hype and worry, the HP/Microsoft announcement from the week previous, Lotusphere as a SaaS bellwether, CloudCampHaiti, and more.

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

• EU approves Oracle buying Sun.
• Keying off a recent “Detroit Crater” article in the Economist, we wonder what that narrative would like for the tech industry. And the Coté free-associated about Denmark according to a Planet Money.
• Google awarded patent for MapReduce
• SkyMall absurdities
• The Amazon over-subscribed article – is this the trough of disillusionment? John gives is summary and commentary.
• CloudCampHaiti – a virtual CloudCamp in a week with around $5,000 going to Haiti.
• Lotusphere? Lots of Panasonic employees on Lotus stuff, ongoing. See Stephen and James on Project Vulcan and Lotus as a whole. IBM’s doing a classic “fast follower” thing here.
• Microsoft/Intuit partnership – a cloud partnership.
• HP/Microsoft announcement – Coté’s Quick Analysis on it.
• What this all means for private cloud, musical chairs going on in the industry for the next 10-15 years of cake/revenue: who’s gonna be the dude left standing?
• Previous musical chairs: Token-ring, Ethernet and BetaMax, laser disks, VHS.
• Phone tracing scenes from old, horrible horror film, Black Christmas.
• OpsCamp coming up – in Austin on Jan 30th.

Full Transcript

(I didn’t go through and double check this, so if something looks weird, check the audio -Coté.)

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! It’s the 22nd of January, 2010, and this is the IT Management & Cloud Podcast, Episode 65. And just a minor correction upfront here. Last week was not Episode 69, it was episode 64. So don’t get all upset that you have gone back in time and you are hearing an old episode, because this is an episode that hasn’t existed yet, until we keep recording it now and then publish it.

And as always, I am your timeline confused co-host Michael Coté, available at peopleoverprocess.com, and I am joined by the other co-host.

John Willis: John M Willis at johnmwillis.com.

Michael Coté: So I have been out on some vacation most of this week John, so despite having a handful of little bullet points of things that have happened relevant to the topic bucket of this podcast, I in general don’t know what’s going on. Did anything like earth shattering happen this week?

John Willis: I don’t think earth shattering, but interesting stuff I took some notes of, some good stuff, good stuff.

Michael Coté: There was, the EU finally approved the Oracle buying Sun, which will have sort of wide ranging implications eventually. But the only thing I have seen about that — well, I think the official news is that China and Russia, and I trust people still have to approve it, but everyone seems to think that that’s not going to be an issue.

And then there’s some, as the register put it, a marathon long five-hour call on January 20 something about what Oracle is going to do with the portfolio. So I think next week is when we will get official word number 1,764 about what’s going to happen with that.

John Willis: I saw something that Jonathan Schwartz sent out an email to everybody, like get ready, get rid of the word Sun or something like that, it doesn’t exist anymore. I am kind of paraphrasing, but it was one of those, hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Michael Coté: Yeah, you know, I was reading the European Press and the American Press to an extent is always — Detroit is always like one of their darlings, as we have talked about before. There’s sort of like, every quarter there’s a writeup of how Detroit is just this mystery of economic meltdown.

I started reading a current thing, that was nicely about Michigan instead of Detroit, from The Economist, and they were talking about how in the 20s Detroit was a big booming place and you get jobs and all this. And I was thinking, it would be fun; fun, it might be depressing for some people, but it would be a fun sort of like future fictional exercise to like write a story, pretty much pantomiming that one, but to have it be about the tech world or whatever. Because basically it’s a story about how the American auto industry just is in the tank, and it would be interesting to look at the parallels, know to be lazy about, and also make up some stuff.

But think about what it would look like if the tech world was basically like Detroit is now. Like if Silicon Valley and Seattle and things like that became sort of like Detroits of the tech world in the near future sometime.

I got off on this tangent from talking about Sun and Oracle, because I was thinking, well, it’s kind of natural, companies get absorbed and everything, but Sun has been around for a long time, and it’s one of the older ones that’s being absorbed by something else.

John Willis: Yeah. But that would be interesting, Silicon Valley being like a — they have, what’s the space, the guy who did ‘Roger & Me’?

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s right.

John Willis: The old Oracle building.

Michael Coté: Michael Moore, right?

John Willis: Yeah, the glass broke on the Oracle building.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. But you know like –

John Willis: Larry Ellison’s house up for sale.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Instead of his first film of this future documentary being ‘Roger & Me’, like Michael Moore’s could be like Larry & Me, or something like that.

John Willis: Larry and Me, yeah.

Michael Coté: But, yeah, I mean it is kind of — like it got me thinking a little bit this morning, and then I stopped thinking and went back to work, but imagining about like what the sort of constraints are about the U.S. high tech market that keeps it the way it is rather than imploding like the car industry.

To be fair, I think the car industry was around a lot longer than the tech industry has been around before it started crumbling and imploding.

Anyways, I don’t really know what those — and by constraints, I guess we would also use the word, what the lock in is — what the lock in. People are kind of locked into U.S. big existing tech companies, and so it’s curious why they haven’t started buying the analogous Toyota or whatever and what’s kind of going on. So anyways, it’s an interesting thought exercise.

John Willis: Yeah. I mean, this is not an error, but I am going to go ahead and speak up anyway. But if you look at Israel, they are a good example, I think, of coming up a lot with innovative ideas. But I think — I did some consulting in Japan a couple of times, 05:10. There was a guy, we became friends, and he was an American that had married a — he worked over there at a Navy base for like ten years and he had married a woman from Japan, and he was raising his kids in the local school system.

He told me a lot about how – you know there it’s very — the education is very engineering. Maybe that’s not the way to best describe it, but it doesn’t really promote kind of creative thinking, you know what I mean?

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: And I think that’s one advantage we do have over here is that, we do — maybe our education isn’t the greatest in someways, but I mean most people — I think you get a lot of entrepreneurism because and I think there’s an adventure still, there’s this idea of adventurous and –

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, that’s always been the hi-techs’ defensive answer. It reminds me also of a — while we are free associating here at the beginning, it reminds me of, NPR has this great podcast series called Planet Money, where they basically, for dummies like myself, they basically explain sort of like economic phenomena, and it’s actually pretty interesting.

They had one recently where one of the host was off in Denmark for that big Copenhagen hoopla a while ago, and he did a lot of interviews with people about — apparently Denmark is like the highest taxed place in the world, the Western world or the world or something, I mean, I don’t know what their taxes are.

So he talked with lots of people about, what they thought about the taxes, and what the taxes do. And it was interesting in talking to several– like there wasn’t really anyone he talked with who was like the kind of anti-tax people we would encounter in America.

Like most everyone was like, yeah, we get taxed a lot and we get a lot of stuff for it. There was like consequences, and someone was like, yeah, of course I would like to have more money and not be taxed, but I don’t know, they were kind of nonplussed about it.

And then he was talking with like a Danish economist about it, and he was saying — and the Danish economist — the good quote he got from him was basically like, there’s really no like geniuses or like business billionaires in Denmark, I mean, it doesn’t really happen, we are just kind of upper, middle of the road, if you will. I mean, if you are going to be like an exceptional, outstanding person, you kind of go somewhere else, because this isn’t really the kind of place that encourages genius, like billionaire mentality. That was an interesting sort of another consequence, and he was comparing it.

And then there was a sea captain who was comparing it to America and saying, if you go to America, everyone is like chasing the dollar and the buck and everything, which can get exhausting. But on the other hand, a system like that does tend to breed people who are more entrepreneurial or whatever. Which, I guess you could say maybe is more — I am always suspicious of that argument just because, I don’t know. I don’t know why I am suspicious, but it seems a little — there’s something slightly wrong with it, but I don’t quite know what it is, because so far it’s proving itself to be true, I guess.

I don’t know, I am always looking for the insider thing that’s actually locking the hi-tech world into the U.S. market, rather than letting it leak out to the rest of the world.

John Willis: Yeah. Well, the interesting thing too is, I have hired a lot of people over the years, and that most people are not — even though we are kind of more of an entrepreneurial society, the gist of the matter is, a very small percentage of people are really entrepreneurs.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, that’s the other thing. It’s funny you should say that John, because in the Planet Money Podcast the host was also saying like, can I just mention I have this pet peeve, where like every time I talk with like a European, they have this view of Americans that we are all like doggy dog and chasing the dollar and all this stuff.

And he was like, if you think about it, I only know one person who is like that, of all the people I know. And he is like granted, I work for — I am a radio guy for a public radio station, so I have this kind of a selecting group.

But it was true, there’s not that many people who are like — and I think, again, we are probably on the high-end of — we encounter a lot of people who are like that because that’s the business that we are in.

John Willis: That’s where I get — I have been an entrepreneur my whole life, but when you have got to hire people, they immediately question, well, how old is this company that you work for? They are very paranoid about all the things that they have been listening to.

Michael Coté: Yeah, they want that job security, whatever that is.

John Willis: Yeah, the job, health insurance, and everything. In the long-term, even if you have all that in place, still the size of the company just scares that guy.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Well, now that I have consumed some precious time, almost ten minutes talking about weird, obtuse topics. What don’t you start out with like what’s something that happened over the last week or so?

John Willis: There’s a couple of kind of juicy stories going, not really earth shattering, but I think that one of them was I guess — I don’t know how old this was, but we haven’t talked about it, which is, Google I guess got awarded a patent for MapReduce.

Michael Coté: Oh really, huh?

John Willis: That’s going to be pretty — yeah, I saw it on Twitter maybe a week ago or so, where people were kind of bringing it up. It never really caught on fire. I remember I was like, I better go back and remind myself. I read a couple of articles. It’s just — it’s not even like that they submitted, I mean they have been awarded the patent.

But the interesting thing I guess from the research I looked at is, I guess Google has not been kind of — they don’t have a history of patent enforcement. So maybe it was more of a protective move for them gearing at MapReduce.

And the question also came out about, MapReduce has been kind of functional program parameters, so in one way it’s hard to argue — again, it’s kind of the steering wheel concept, can you patent the design of a steering — well, actually you can.

But on one hand, you could argue that, hey, how can you enforce a patent on something that’s been around forever, but on the other hand, they did write kind of a landmark paper for doing it in large scale enterprises and everybody –

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. And it is like — I don’t want to step on the — well, you can, but I don’t want to myself step on the big dudu pile of patent stuff in software, because it’s like impossibly obtuse or whatever. But when it comes to like patents and technology, it’s — I always like to think of it as if like it’s a patent in some other field that I don’t know nothing. Like if there was some patent in like human tissue generation or something.

And I would imagine there probably are patents in stuff like this. But let’s say that someone patented it the way to like generate, I don’t know, what would be real useful, like a heart, like you could just, boom, we can just generate a heart for you and stick it in there.

As a layman, I would think like, oh yeah, that must be really complicated and they should you get a patent for that and they should get rewarded for that and everything. But I bet if you were like in, I don’t even know, in biomedicine or whatever, you would be like, oh, everyone has been 10% away from figuring that out, it’s like common knowledge. I mean, come on, cloning a heart, what are you talking about, no big deal, why is that patentable?

I tend to think that probably, and I am not in defense of software patents at all. So it’s not like I am trying to be an apologist for them, I think it’s stupid. But I tend to — that said, I can be very Janus-faced about this kind of stuff. But I think that probably software patents are similar to that, where it’s kind of like, if you went to someone and you are like, so — Google has this technology that they patented, that allows them to give you the search that you really like. Like shouldn’t they be able to patent that and make money off of it? And most people will probably say yeah. It’s like this weird dilemma, right?

John Willis: Yeah. And again, obtuse topics again, but I mean, this whole patent, something has got to — 13:12 has got to break. I mean, I have heard stories of people getting patent on genome patents, patents of disease strains. Now, drug companies can’t — they have to actually pay the patent owner before they can actually create things to help children with that disease. Something has got to change. I think technologies change, so maybe patent laws are going to have to change.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, it is like — it’s just a weird process, it doesn’t — I mean, our laws, our legal system is fast enough to like — here in Austin there is an ordinance against texting and driving, which makes sense, I guess. I mean, it’s kind of absurd that you would do the two together. So it’s kind of like — I think our legal system is fast enough to catch up with things, and it’s a real weird that the patent system — like the answer is just like, oh, it’s big government, duh, they are so slow and stupid. It’s like, that’s crap. Like if we wanted to we could reform it. Anyways.

John Willis: It’s like, I did this thing at the Atlanta Linux Fest, I was flying on Friday night, I was speaking on Saturday, and I had nothing left to read and I started reading the magazine, the Delta magazine, the one where they have all the things you can buy.

Michael Coté: Oh, the SkyMall.

John Willis: SkyMall, that’s it, yeah.

Michael Coté: Now, that is a magazine full of patentable ideas.

John Willis: But the thing is, is some of the things in there are just so freaking ridiculous. When you sit back and say, holy — like a doggie step to get on your bed.

Michael Coté: That’s hilarious.

John Willis: I don’t want my dog on my bed. There is no way in hell I am going to buy a step to make it easier for him.

Michael Coté: That’s so funny that you say that, because I was talking with like a couple of the like UK analysts that I know, a couple of years ago, and they had discovered the SkyMall in the way over, and that was the first thing that they — that for them was like the symbol of American stupidity, like retailers.

It was like, so I was looking through this one thing and they had these – they are doing this in like the refined, to me, dumb Southerner, the refined English like accent, and I see there is these stairs for when your dog can’t get up on to the couch with you. It was just like so obvious that it was an absurd notion that you would give a crap if your dog could get up on your bed or not.

John Willis: I did like a five minute Leno skit before I started; I talked about that, plus the doggie doorbell.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah.

John Willis: A little dog foot that they can hit and it rings the doorbell.

Michael Coté: That’s awesome!

John Willis: And then the other one, this was the one, it was like the car office. So it has something, hair blowing in the wind, a phone in one hand, and then just like a desk on the middle console, a computer on the back-end, the printer and a file cabinet, and she is driving. The reason I am thinking about this is, you talked about texting and driving. I am thinking, if this woman is on the road in this set up, within 50 miles of me, I want to know about it. It’s like one of those car chases, I want to be completely off the road while that woman is driving.

Michael Coté: You see, those things need to come with a Twitter accounts, they send out GeoTwitters that they are on their way.

John Willis: The crazy lady with the car office is on the road again, beware.

Michael Coté: So what were you doing at the Atlanta Linux thing, what was that talk about?

John Willis: I did my Cambrian Explosion thing. That was a little bit. It was about a couple of months I think, so that was a while back. But you just made me think of that with the magazine with how you can make a Jay Leno skit out of things in it.

But back to MapReduce. The other thing that was a pretty good conversation that went on was I guess last week somebody had written an article about, is Amazon oversubscribed? Did you catch any of that?

Michael Coté: No, no.

John Willis: It kind of started off with this one gentleman and he wrote a pretty detailed article about his history. He actually started out with FlexiScale, and he kind of felt that he had pushed his resources to the limit with this company, and then went to Amazon, and was using Small Instances, and then he felt that the Small Instances, as Amazon matured, were really not production ready, and they moved up to the kind of medium high CPU instances, and now they are feeling the pinch on CPU.

It all comes down to, again, this kind of multi-tenant environment, and more so in the hypervisor setting, and he was saying that, the problem that you have is you are sharing a hypervisor with other tenants, if you will, and some days you might get a diamond, some days you might not. You could have a neighbor that could be pounding you and disclosing lot of issues.

And then he also talked about the same problem happens with the network latency, depending on who your neighbors are within that server, and the VM’s ability to actually keep up with the queue.

So a lot of people responded. I mean, the question was, is Amazon kind of meeting — the original question is, are they oversubscribed, and then there were some really good arguments by Chris Hoff and Reuven Cohen on, well, yeah, I mean, maybe they are. But Chris Hoff had this argument that oversubscribing is not the same as overcapacity. Almost all industries oversubscribe, airlines. I mean, over subscription is — the trick is, how do you deal with capacity, how do you manage the cost.

So it was a really interesting debate, and Amazon said, we are not overcapacity, an official response.

But I think kind of the best thing, I don’t know who said this, is it really comes down to more that the customers of Amazon have — the big guys now are going to play. Maybe the first couple of years it was a lot of the little guys and nobody really did like massive stuff, and now you have got some large, large players.

Michael Coté: That’s a way to turn a frown upside down.

John Willis: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad thing for the customer. But the problem is, and I think — I kind of stepped through the whole thing and I was reading couple of blogs, and I did a tweet, and the bottom line is, look at your SLA. I mean, you don’t have really an SLA with Amazon. The good news and the bad news.

The good news is, you get in, you get going, you don’t have to spend six months defining an architecture or definition with the vendor and work out all these kinks. You get going. It’s the ability to do self service immediately. You can get scaled. The downside is, you better have a workflow that accepts failure.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. I mean, it’s like, eventually we have to get to the Trough of Disillusionment John with this whole Cloud Computing thing, and that’s a –

John Willis: We are going to have a party when that trough comes man.

Michael Coté: We will have the disillusionment party, come to the trough.

John Willis: Yeah, the trough. Party like it’s 1999.

Michael Coté: And then we will start having trough camp.

John Willis: The trough camp, that’s what — I was just going there next, the trough camp.

Michael Coté: I will have to go — I will look up that stuff. We will have to put links to it in the show note once I find it. But yeah, that is — in theory — like it kind of gets back to when there was the whole like danger problem with Microsoft, which was a bit of a scandal, but then did seem to resolve itself eventually, which was kind of an interesting retrospective on that.

But a bunch of people on T-Mobile lost all of their cellphone data because it was hosted in the Cloud, and then there was — going back and forth about it, if there was a backup or not. Then if I remember it turned out that a couple of weeks later there was a backup, so people could get their stuff restored.

And then in the meantime, everyone was — it was a big, big news story that the problem with the Cloud is it was unreliable essentially.

So it is kind of like — there are always these questions of — I know what I was getting at. It was funny, because it was kind of like the response — it was a very sort of philosophy or religion sort of discussion, where people would say, doesn’t that show that the Cloud is dangerous, and then the answer was implicit. I am not going to answer your question. The question I am going to answer is, no, this is not supposed to happen with Cloud Computing. And it was just like a battle of definitions of what Cloud Computing was.

So it is kind of like, you are not really supposed to be able to go overcapacity, but there are real physical limitations to what can actually happen.

I guess, you would think, someone must have done some analysis, because it’s impossible, so maybe they haven’t, but someone like IDC probably has some idea of like how many MIPS or how much computational resources there are in the world everyday. And then you could kind of chart out what kind of data centers for Cloud stuff you would need to actually handle that kind of computational stuff, and see if it was actually possible. And then throw in some crazy numbers in the spreadsheet about optimization and deoptimization and see what happens.

John Willis: Yeah. A lot of people, the detractors are like saying, VMware, how could — maybe this is the point where they should use VMware. It’s more sophisticated.

I think there are things — so some people blame it on Xen. The truth of the matter is — and I think Reuven had a good point, that Reuven Cohen said that the — the vendor has to come up with a way to kind of tier resources for clients, and clients that want more guarantees are going to pay more. And that hasn’t really been Amazon’s model, but I mean, I guess the question really becomes if you want true production like capabilities.

But again, I think it does, and I know I am ranting, but I think it does come back to today, the places like Amazon, and Amazon being the 800-pound gorilla, that I think the way to use production environments in Amazon — and clearly it works for test, you can deal with those kind of situations of latency and test QA development.

But if you are running production applications in there, then you really have two choices. One, deal with it, because you don’t really have an SLA. Or two, design your architecture so that those things don’t affect you, you know what I mean? But lying about it when you don’t even have a SLA in the first place, that’s kind of silly.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah.

John Willis: That’s why you did it in the first place, but anyway.

Michael Coté: So you had like an online CloudCamp thing this week too, right?

John Willis: Yeah. So that was cool. We did this CloudCamp Haiti. Basically it started with a tweet from Reuven Cohen that said, I wish there was a way to help — this was like last Thursday, I wish there was a way to help do more for the Haitians, with all the pictures we see. That was actually before the whole text thing came out over the weekend, text to 90999, whatever it is.

So I just pinged him back or VMed him back and said, hey, let’s put our heads together if you are serious about this. And that turned into an email to Dave Nielsen who runs CloudCamp, and literally within a couple of hours of just that first tweet, we had already kind of organized how we were going to move forward. And Dave put up the Camp Haiti page and the Eventbrite owned illustrations, and we were in business on Friday. In less than 24 hours we had it up and going

Just be tweeting we got three or four — in fact, I think all the sponsors came from tweeting. We made it real simple. You pay $25 for attendee, $50 if you wanted to be kind of a nice guy, and then $250 for a logo sponsorship. And we raised around $5,000, so less than a week. This Wednesday we had this online CloudCamp Haiti, and we actually — over the weekend we decided to theme it on how the Cloud can help. It really went pretty well. I mean, we had some people you know, Sam Ramji, guy at, what is it, Sanoa?

Michael Coté: Sanoa.

John Willis: Sanoa, Sanoa, sorry. Yeah, I guess he was at Microsoft. I didn’t even realize he was now at Sanoa.

Michael Coté: Yeah, he is like the VP of Product Management or something along those lines.

John Willis: Cool! Yeah. He did a great presentation on how can we help in Haiti. He just talked about API — you have talked about Sanoa before, kind of the API, the end all APIs.

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: But it was cool, we talked about how API is for crisis, and portals and things like that could enable or help. And even better than that was the — one of the groups that we got in touch with early was called CrisisCommons, and they are running crisis bar camps all around the world.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, I heard about that on the radio, that’s interesting. Yeah.

John Willis: Yeah. So that guy, one of those guys came on and talked on our session. And him and Sam were kind of going back and forth about — I mean, it was really very — again, all it really was originally was just to raise money, to see if we get folks to raise money. But the conversation was really interesting.

You had Sam talking about — they looked at the APIs and they talked about — there was one API called the People Finder that they had built at Katrina time. So this CrisisCommons has been around for a while.

And then he also said that, basically what CrisisCommons does is they get together, and they are hackers that solve problems for crisis. Like one of the camps developed a language translator from pre-old English and apparently nobody had ever built one of those.

So it was interesting to hear kind of Sanoa talking about how can we create like this pool of disaster based APIs related — then we had Rackspace, this Bret Piatt from Rackspace came and gave a great presentation, again, how Rackspace is doing things with the Rack Gives Back. But also some of the — the kind of themes that kept coming out is, what can the Cloud people do? Maybe to find best practices. Be a little bit more prepared with APIs that could help, and then possibly some of the vendors, like Amazon or Rackspace or RightScale or Canonical to donate resources.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember hearing stories about what the people are trying to get — you have infrastructure problems whenever there is some disaster, like you need roads and water and electricity and communications and phone. And I remember, this was one of the first times I was listening to the news about some catastrophe somewhere, and in addition to all that they kept saying Internet, and I was thinking like, oh, I bet that is required nowadays. Like the way you basically respond to anything, you probably need Internet somehow.

So having sort of Cloud-based resources would fit well, because you certainly can’t like even fly in like a container data center or something. But if you at least have a connection, then hopefully you can host your data center somewhere that’s more secure. And then also you can have more people helping you out it would seem, because they don’t all have to be on location, they can be remote, and be happy in their remote place. So that sounds like it was nice.

John Willis: It was fun. It was actually — it turned out — like I said, the conversation was the icing on the cake, because we even did talk. We had discussions about dropping a pod in there that used like a mesh network and maybe connected back to some Cloud. I mean, it was really — we have got all the audio up, I will send you a link on that.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah. Well, also this week, in the non-humanitarian world, Lotusphere was earlier this week, and well, I didn’t go to it, two of the other RedMonk guys, Stephen O’Grady and James Governor, they both went to it.

They had some — I mean, I think the — there is only really two things I wanted to mention. We talked about Lotus a little while ago when I came back from the IBM Software Analyst Summit. I mean, the basic summary of — Lotus is a pretty impressive sort of a — to be frank, they have been kind of like a little boring for many years here.

b But they are finally doing a lot of new things that have — they are finally pulling a lot of stuff that you see happening in the public collaboration space and social networking, and actually releasing business versions of it, sort of going beyond the research and development, which they always have plenty of interesting stuff for.

That was one of the things they talked about at Lotusphere that both Stephen and James wrote about, which of course I will link to in the show notes, was they have this thing called Project Vulcan, which is basically — it’s great, because it’s basically like, finally they have this channel or this way, and they being IBM, to kind of not really have full products that they have released, but let people start to use these things that they have in development, and they have got from research and things like that.

So it’s kind of like, when you go to Gmail or you go to Google Apps, they have this Labs thing that you can opt into and you can use experimental things or whatever. And it’s nice to finally have a channel like that open for Lotus stuff, because they do tend to have a lot of interesting things. And the problem with getting your hands on Lotus stuff is it seems difficult, so the easier they can make it, the better.

They definitely have — Lotus has a ton of SaaS hosted stuff nowadays or Cloud hosted, if you prefer, which I think is equally interesting.

And then the other thing I was going to — they talked about this with us at the Software Analyst thing, but it was under NDA at the time. But they have a pretty impressive like customer win with Panasonic, where they are starting out with I think a 100,000 employees or seats using their LotusLive thing for email and calendaring and stuff. And then they are going to expand it to like around 300,000 or something using their Lotus Connections thing, which is basically all the new fun stuff on the Internet for behind the firewall and the social networking space.

I didn’t really see it firsthand, like Stephen and James did, they have some more interesting, and probably well-rounded commentary. But it’s been surprising over the past few months to see the Lotus actually doing what seems reasonable, rather than being like a old company.

John Willis: I played around with some of the prototype stuff that they had before they turned that into LotusLive, and it definitely was pretty cool. I mean, for an enterprise that’s not going to go out and get Drupal tomorrow, and make that an enterprise implication, I mean LotusLive is probably a great bet.

Michael Coté: I think it’s interesting for like — obviously, it’s interesting for Cloud stuff, but for the good old fashioned IT management, it’s interesting to kind of look at that as — to think of it both as — to use, what do they call it, the SWOT analysis, to kind of figure out what the opportunities and threats are to your own sort of IT management world.

Because essentially what IBM is offering is finished applications that don’t really need to be managed. I mean, they still need to be managed in an administrative sense, but not in like a systems administration sense. You don’t have to run around your own and do this. You just need to make sure people aren’t spending too much money in provision account.

There’s a lot of identity management that goes on, and so, now that, to your point, it would shock all of us, not because — not for technological reasons but for cultural reasons. If it was like, JP Morgan standardizes on Drupal or whatever, that would just be crazy. But it wouldn’t be so shocking if it was like, oh, this big bank, just like with Panasonic, they are now going to just use LotusLive, just hosted collaborations stuff.

So it’s interesting if you are like an IT staff person, or even some vendor selling into IT to think about, well, what does that mean? I mean, if we didn’t have this thing about, oh, I have to run it behind the firewall, then how does that change what you are doing?

I think it’s kind of like the discussion about, what if we had a Detroit sort of scenario for the hi-tech world, and like, what if the rest of the world just suddenly became as innovative and creative and entrepreneurial as America, then what would we do? How do we bridge the chasm, if you will?

John Willis: It’s funny, IBM is pretty — sometimes you will watch them and people complain about IBM, but sometimes you can be in awe of their brilliance. If you look at kind of a little bit of a cynical view, they sit back, they wait, they watch, they absorb everything. Like their Cloud, their kind of infrastructure in the service Cloud space, they just sit back. Same thing with LotusLive, I think when they looked at it, they saw that there was a train wreck coming in this whole collaboration space, with things like Drupal and Alfresco and all those things, and they better do something fast. This just shows how — when they want to move fast, they are IBM.

Michael Coté: You are right.

John Willis: And clearly, I love the Drupal, the Alfrescos, and all that stuff, but again, I have been in LotusLive, I think I even have an account, and it’s — I can’t find too many complaints with it, all-in-all. And then you throw in the fact, what you just said is that, it’s kind of administrator bulletproof, you know what I mean?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: So I don’t have to worry about, with the Open Source guys, I am into a little bit of infrastructure management.

Michael Coté: It’s the classic fast follower thing. I mean, that’s a phrase both IBM and Microsoft love using, just to describe that they may not be like innovating on the bleeding edge, but once something is shown to work, then they quickly catch up with it.

It’s also good, like I have a briefing later today with one of our more recent RedMonk clients, this outfit called WaveMaker, which is more in the rich Internet application, it’s more in the application development space than IT management and Cloud but –

John Willis: I thought those were the guys that make those jet skis.

Michael Coté: Exactly, the Seadoo 2000.

John Willis: That’s right.

Michael Coté: Well, they have a interesting platform-as-a-service sort of — kind of sort of thing, if you will, that they have had for a couple of years, and it’s always had this issue of like, well, that’s a cool technology, and it’s based on Open Source Java stuff, and it seems like technologically it would totally make sense, but it just doesn’t seem like the mass market is like ready for that necessarily.

They have actually been around for a while and had some interesting successes, but I was thinking like, with WaveMaker and other people, there is all these people who have been — they have been waiting for someone to kind of like — for one of the elder companies to basically make it cool for mainstream IT buyers to like buy into Cloud based stuff or whatever it used to be called.

I mean, that is also the wider thing that’s interesting about stuff like having Panasonic have up to 300,000 users on a Cloud based service essentially, is that, you basically remove that artificial barrier to people using it, and then people might start saying, well, okay, maybe we should use this WaveMaker thing, or this whatever thing, or whatnot. I mean, that’s another sort of silver lining thing there. But we will see if that happens, if there is market making that gets helped out, and then we will have to find something new to talk about John, because this would just be normal.

John Willis: Dev/Ops man, it’s the IT manager and Cloud and Dev/Ops.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. We will call it, what to do with the skeleton that’s left of the IT department after the Cloud has totally won.

John Willis: No, that ain’t happening. If you look at now this whole discussion, I think the backlash on the over subscription, overcapacity, but still, we have a long way to go before that — there is even this discussion now, I don’t even want to get into these arguments, because it wastes so much time, but now there is this whole backlash about, there really never was elasticity. Because there is not infinite elasticity, everybody is like down on the elastic computing.

Again, I think Chris Hoff did a great — one thing I have learned, don’t ever argue with Chris Hoff on Twitter, you will lose, you will lose, just be careful with people, you will lose big time.

But I’d like to — he made this argument that over-subscription is not the same as overcapacity, and I totally agree with that, and I want to say — if I had energy I would say, elastic computing is not the same as Internet elastic computing. Making this argument that, oh, you guys who say computing is going to solve the world, it’s like, it’s not a binary thing.

Yes, we all agree that Cloud Computing is not infinitely scalable, yes, and the over subscription issue has pointed that out. There are some brick walls out there. But it’s still — I mean, they can’t do AnaMod type implementations, you know what I mean. There is — people that have really — it has helped their business because of elasticity, dynamic elasticity.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, speaking of the dev op sort of thing, there was another thing. I was interested enough in this that I took a couple of few minutes out of my little vacation midweek, and I talked with Microsoft and Intuit had an announcement. It’s basically just a partnership announcement. Actually, I got a podcast up since last we talked going over what’s called the Intuit Partner Platform, and I should disclose that they are a client, and they paid for or sponsored, as we like to say, this podcast.

But this podcast that I am mentioning is, it’s just an overview of their platform-as-a-service offering. To give the summary of it, essentially you have got a bunch of people using like QuickBooks, and this is just a service. QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop, and this is a Cloud based service, a platform-as-a-service, so that you can add — you can basically make little plug-ins or extensions or applications that layer on top of that user base, if you will.

It kind of like, in Salesforce you can develop on top of Force.com, and you can create things that add onto the Salesforce application. So anyway, that’s what IPP, as it’s called is.

They had an announcement that they have a nonexclusive partnership, but there is basically this partnership they have with Microsoft to have Azure be like the Cloud of choice, if you will, to help in developing things on top of this platform, if you need to have some other place to run your code, if you will.

The thing that’s interesting — the thing that’s more than just like a press release about it is, there is a Visual Studio plug-in, which is the development tool of choice for the Microsoft world of course, there is a Visual Studio plug-in and extensions and stuff, that bring in all the APIs and libraries and stuff you need to do your Intuit Partner Platform coding.

The other thing that’s interesting about IPP is that there is actually a marketplace there, an apps store, if you will. They have — I think, if you go back — you can go checkout the podcast where I am talking with the Intuit architect. They have like 30 or 35 apps so far listed in there. It has been out less than a year, but you can actually write an application and then just start selling it through Intuit, which is an exciting thing for developers who are into that kind of thing, but I think it’s worth — like when I was talking with him — what were you saying there?

John Willis: I was going to say, I heard Microsoft tried to buy them and then it got chucked out.

Michael Coté: Yeah, definitely. I almost wanted to joke with them, now that you guys don’t have money, I guess you guys could be friends again, because they killed off their Quicken competitor, Microsoft Money, if I remember.

But Azure is still like — I am always confused about this, and I always have to go look it up, but it’s not quite fully baked yet or in generally availability, if I remember. I think it’s still due out some other time, I could be completely wrong.

But anyways, like I was telling them, the thing that’s from an industry perspective that’s interesting about this is to see the same old topic I always have about the Cloud, is to see like normal, boring applications start getting deployed on the Cloud. And that’s definitely what Intuit deals in, it’s just like small and medium businesses who are keeping their books in QuickBooks. I mean, there is nothing — there is no rocket science or like glitziness about it, but it’s certainly like a huge business and a very necessary one.

It would be great to see a lot of Cloud stories like, oh yeah, there is like 5,000 little mainstream businesses running stuff in the Cloud at the moment or whatever, and so forth and so on. So it will be interesting to see if anything kind of comes with that as far as cases of just normal software being run on it.

John Willis: Yeah, like a 42:38, like a Force.com stuff.

Michael Coté: Yeah, exactly.

John Willis: The whole ecosystem going there. The first time I heard about Intuit, I was like, what? It’s baked. When guys like Intuit are saying they are — but as it was explained by you and that guy Alex, I kind of get more of a feel like where it could go and make sense.

But as far as Azure goes, I love your instruction last year when Mark Benny got sick, he called it a Zune.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s right. That was very clever.

John Willis: That was pretty clever. So I don’t know, we will see. I am kind of having a little bit talking about LotusLive and all this stuff, so I am going to find the perfect software and webcast. I have had — GoToMeeting just seems a little clunky and then WebEx is –

Michael Coté: I will tell you what RedMonk always endorses, and they are a client of ours, so whatever. But we always try to get people to use Adobe Connect, and what we tell them is, first off, it seems like it’s a bit more expensive, and I haven’t looked at pricing recently, but it is a bit more pricey if I remember. But at RedMonk, I am on a Mac and James Governor is on a Windows platform, and Stephen O’Grady is on Linux, and that’s the only conference thing that we ever use where we really never have problems. Other ones — it’s possible to get WebEx and GoToMeeting running on most all platforms, you just have to figure it out.

John Willis: Well, GoToMeeting, everybody that was on the Mac the other day for this CloudCamp, every time I tried to do — to take over, they pretty much crashed.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I mean, I will be really curious to hear what you say, because –

John Willis: Well, you know what I want to look at, I mean honestly, and I know it’s not fully baked yet, but I think it fits the theme of my new company, I would love to try to get Dimdim.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah.

John Willis: I mean, they are very competing price wise. I think it’s got a good story being in Open Source, very open. I am sure it’s going to have a lot more hiccups than the big guys, but I would love to try and start with it.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that was one of the other things that if I had been at Lotusphere I would have wanted to check out is there is — I have seen some IBM Research sort of presentations about this thing. I forgot what it’s called, but it’s like, they have some fancy pants, and I mean that in a good way, like webcasting stuff, that basically records it for you and then tries to do a transcription. It has a nice recording where it tracks the transcription and stuff like that, because having done a fair amount of webinars in the past, like you go look at the recordings that webinars have and it’s just terrible.

Like if you try to actually make some modern sort of social artifact, some thing, some piece of content out of a recorded webinar, it’s so tedious. Like it’s these weird — it’s just as weird like early 2000 technology that’s being used for that. So I am always eager to see something that makes like a very rational sort of recording.

If there was some webinar platform that basically you would like call in and it would record it and do like a follow along transcription; that’s kind of an extra sort of thing, but just something — and then had like a podcast feed that came out of it. I mean, that would be like rocket science for the state of the art of webinar science.

But it’s sort of like, obviously that’s what you want, is like, you are going to have all these — first you want all the stuff to manage, like having hundreds, hopefully for you, hundreds of attendees watching the live sort of thing and show a presentation and have multiple people and have chat and the questioning, and all this hoopla. But then it’s really — the stuff that’s missing is all the post stuff, where — and then you want to just have it like automatically blog it, make multiple formats for podcast, and audio only one, like an MP4, iTunes friendly, all this stuff, and then just like, boom, make your podcast for you. So it’s annoying that, that stuff is not easier.

John Willis: Yeah, that’s too bad.

Michael Coté: But then again, I guess to be fair, people like RedMonk can charge a premium for doing things like that.

John Willis: All that work.

Michael Coté: That’s right. Ho, ho, ho. So I only had one last thing I was going to mention. I don’t know if you have more stuff, but there was also like — this was last week, there was a whole bunch of hoopla around this HP Microsoft.

John Willis: Hoopla, hoopla.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

John Willis: I love that one. That’s from — I wish they could — Tim Robbins movie, ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’.

Michael Coté: That’s right. You know John, I only say hoopla a lot because I know you like it. It’s all fun.

John Willis: Okay, that was good.

Michael Coté: But I wrote up a little quick analysis of it and talked to a couple of reporters here and there about it. Did you see the HP/Microsoft BFF announcement?

John Willis: No, I haven’t had a chance to catch up, but I would like to hear your –

Michael Coté: It’s funny, like if they hadn’t like hyped it so much I don’t think it would have gotten so much coverage, but speaking at the middle level, it’s an excellent study, and very successful, like contemporary social media and PR like, I don’t know, jobbing, crafting, if you will.

Because they sent out an email to the press and analysts, and it was like, oh, we have got a big announcement, whatever, come attend this, and then there was little releases about that. So everyone was like waiting with bated breath to see what it was, which means — if you think about it, this is like a great PR move, which means that the initial seeders who are going to start talking about it have sort of set aside this time to commit to it. And so even if it’s bad, they are going to write about it, because they don’t want to take — they don’t want to suck up that sunk cost. To basically be like, oh, we spent all this time about this thing that was big, and they are going to publish on it, usually you don’t spike something like that. And it wasn’t as terrible an announcement as that analysis was making it seem to be.

But anyways, and they had CEOs of both the companies having a joint press conference, so it must be big. So basically what it was, and there is a great — I keep interrupting myself here, so HP and Microsoft, they had this announcement that they are going to spend, I don’t know, $250, $300 million, I forgot the exact figure, I think it was $250 million, on this ongoing partnership.

And basically, the way I summarized it in my head is, they are each other’s preferred Cloud partners, pretty much, and next generation infrastructure partners. And they actually do have some, what I would call, sort of like metal to glass sort of optimization stacks of software, that is going to be optimized and is optimized, I should say, to run on HP hardware with HP favored virtualization, and running your Exchange Server, for example, on HP is optimized out there was a — which I guess is great, it’s good for them.

And then further down the road there is stuff around Azure, and HP and Microsoft being Azure buddies. And then it sounds like, and it wasn’t quite spelled out this explicitly, but it sounds like, whatever sort of private Cloud stuff HP and Microsoft come up with, that they will basically be partners in delivering this private Cloud thing, which, I think that angle is in this glass half full analysis, as I like to call it nowadays.

That is a good opportunity for both of them, because they do complement each other when it comes to private Cloud. I mean, HP doesn’t really — they don’t have — they have a lot of management stuff obviously, but there is some point where they kind of stop having stuff, and at that same point is sort of what Microsoft has. I mean, Microsoft doesn’t have hardware or storage or networking or all this business. So it seems like it would be interesting for them, whatever it is they will be working on with each other.

Now, the glass half empty analysis is just a bunch of big announcement about really nothing except these optimized bundles we were talking about.

And also I think, Tim Anderson, who is a UK freelance guy, who writes for The Register and some other people, he actually — I have noticed like the British tech journalists are very good at this. They have nice long memories, which you don’t always see in the rest of the analysts in the tech world. But he drudged up this partnership announcement from like five years ago that Microsoft and HP had to spend like $300 million around something, and he was kind of like, so how has that one been working out?

But yeah, I mean, I think, it’s also kind of like — it’s also a sign of the time. It’s kind of signaling also from an industry perspective of the whole private Cloud thing. Like every vendor is trying to figure out what they are going to do with private Cloud stuff. I think HP and Microsoft have kind of like told you what their sort of general thing is. They may not actually have like a roadmap or a direction, but basically it’s going to be, those two guys are going to be working together.

And so other people, like IBM and Cisco and VMware and Dell and these other people need to like buddy up and figure out what they are going to be doing and so forth and so on.

Like I was telling a reporter, I mean this is all like — this is what I sit around and do all day is analyze silly interesting stuff, so of course that’s what I ramble on about.

But the other thing that it sort of represents is that, the sort of established partnerships that used to exist are really up in the air, especially because of Oracle and Sun, and then VMware and things like that. And so we are at this point in the cycle where everyone is trying to like grab their niche. It’s like musical chairs, we are all dancing around at the moment, and people are about to sit down at some point, and we are trying to figure out — and everyone wants to make sure they are not the dude without the chair. And I think that’s when it comes to partnerships, that’s what you see going on a lot.

John Willis: That’s funny, that’s funny, musical chair.

Michael Coté: So that’s why you have like — that’s why like we have talked about, and that’s why you have weird things like VMware buying Zimbra and SpringSource. I mean, whenever you have stuff like that happening it means that we are playing musical chairs at the moment, and people are trying to see where — they are trying to lock down their next 10 or 15 years of revenue, based on the partnership assignment that they get, de facto wise from the industry.

John Willis: Yeah. In someways, I mean I — where I want — the place I should be, because it gets me closer to enterprise systems management more than private Cloud. Cloud is really interesting, but at the end of the day what’s interesting to me and my whole life has been IT management, IT infrastructure, and enterprise systems management.

But I really do think that one of the things that kind of pulled me away from private Cloud is, it’s going to be a bloodbath. You have got the Eucalyptus, which is racing to get on the radar, but giants like VMware are just getting really close, couple of releases away from being — I say today VMware is –

Michael Coté: Let’s pause it while we try to get John back. Alright, we got John back, so you were saying, I think you were talking about –

John Willis: I was saying that the private Cloud space is just really looking like a bloodbath, because you have got the kind of adopters, early adopters like Eucalyptus and OpenNebula, but you got VMware, probably two releases away from being, what I would call, real Cloud.

I mean, I have talked to enough people now — I talked to a guy the other day at one of our local Cloud groups, he is a big VMware guy, he was like, they are knocking on the door. vCloud is going to be your stuff.

VMware is going to be very close to — to me the real Cloud is, get everything you want through self service APIs. APIs that can be driven, that can be provided as self service. Eliminate people. So you get your resources without the people.

VMware is really close. GoGrid just announced — they broke out of their software now, they are going to have a private Cloud. FlexiScale has announced that they have broken off their software; they are owners of private Cloud.

God forbid, I have said this a couple of times on Twitter, Amazon decides to do that, all hell will break loose, people will go crazy. And you have still got IBM waiting in the wings to do something really huge. I personally don’t want to be in the private Cloud business.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is the direction things are going. It’s kind of like Token Ring versus Ethernet, right? And you want to make sure that you are not the Token Ring essentially, when Ethernet finally wins out.

I mean, there is that degree of proprietariness, I guess, about all the different private Cloud stuff going on. There’s a lot of bets on technologies people are increasingly being forced to make, and they are going to have to go with it, and then hopefully theirs wins out.

I think that analogy works pretty well, if I don’t say so myself, because it does seem like, you are not going to want to get stuck with the Betamax essentially to mix technologies. I mean, it’s going to happen, because I am extremely suspicious that this private Cloud stuff is going to be compatible in the same way that Ethernet or networking equipment would be. So I am sure there’s going to be people who get a bunch of Betamax and they are like, oh crap, or even worst, there will be people who buy laser discs and then those guys –

John Willis: Yeah, laser disc. Well, I noticed even in the video stores now have — for a while there my local video store had like almost a third of the store, the Blu-ray stuff, but now it’s back down to one rack. So I don’t know. That means that those things that seem really good, like those laser discs, my brother-in-law had, he was like, he invested heavily in those things.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, it seemed pretty cool at the time, right?

John Willis: Sure did, those big spindles with the — but the whole standard thing, I mean, there are folks like Simon Wardley of Canonical, and Eucalyptus that are betting on that Amazon will be the standard.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah. No, I think in the public Cloud it’s a whole different conversation, because it’s –

John Willis: Yeah, but I mean — because there will be a standard, and it wouldn’t really matter private or public, it won’t really make a difference.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, that’s true, you are right, you are right.

John Willis: So again, the more, going back to the telephone analogy, there are a lot of servers involved in that process of making a call, and I think this whole argument, what is a private Cloud, is it private Cloud, is it public Cloud, will go away at some point.

Michael Coté: Oh man, that reminds me — to free associate again, that reminds me, I was watching, what was it? What was the show? It was one of these terrible horror movies that Kim and I always rent. It was an old one from the 80s. A very typical plot. There is a sorority house; stop me if you have heard this one before, and there’s just some one killing the sorority sisters essentially.

And anyways, the whole point is — I think it’s from 78 or 79 or something like that, and it actually has the lady who played Lois Lane is the character in it, and it’s hilarious, because at some point they are tracing the phone, and unlike in most movies where it’s just like, you don’t really see the actual tracing going on, I guess they thought it would be more dramatic.

I guess this was — remember that movie, ‘The Conversation’, with Gene Hackman, that was like an excellent nerd movie at that time, because like, it was basically ‘The Conversation’, if I remember the name of the movie. It was basically, this guy was just a phone tapper, and so he would like tap phones and do microphones, but they really went into detail about all the little 70s gizmos and Apex reels and stuff he would use to do this tapping. So maybe, I don’t know if it was influenced at all on that.

So anyways, they are tracing the phone call of this psychopathic guy. And it’s great, because they actually go down to like the switching station in the movie, and they have like — it’s like a data center, but it’s mechanical, and there’s these little things going, like as phones are going. So he has got to keep the guy on the line so that he can hunt down the exact little exchange he goes to. They have to do this several times.

But it was pretty awesome to actually look at like, I don’t know, they were probably embellishing it a little bit, but to think like, holy crap, that’s how stuff actually use to work.

And it’s kind of analogous, like you were saying, to like Cloud stuff is, having these loud data centers and weird cables everywhere, and then the client humming just like a big — a data center as a computer at some point.

Man, I will have to look up that movie. I mean, I am not recommending that anyone go see it, it was totally –

John Willis: Some horrible movies can be great, right?

Michael Coté: That’s right. So the last thing we should mention, unless you have some other stuff is, next week is going to be the most fabulous conference ever, OpsCamp, next Saturday, in Austin, Texas, on January 30th.

John Willis: Operations is not — I told somebody this morning on a call I had and they said — and I said, operations is hot, and they said, well — and I said, it’s getting hot. He says, it’s already hot. I said, well, it’s getting blazing hot. Watch out. Move aside Cloud. It’s operations.

Michael Coté: I am going to do a little push to round up some non-vendor people, here in Austin, to get them. There is actually like — there is only like 27 tickets left, which is excellent. Big, nice attendance.

John Willis: Yeah. I think we are bumped out though.

Michael Coté: I want to see if I can get just like some users, if you will, to kind of come in. It looks like there is actually a fair amount of them coming, which should be good.

John Willis: I mean, it look tremendous, it’s awesome, it’s got a good mix of some players like Debb (?), got some good people like Andrew, and there is Scott and Adam.

Michael Coté: Yeah, and we will see, it’s an open format, but I was thinking if I can get the right kind of attendees; I have one person I have, one person I know who is coming. One of my old friend, Zane Rockenbaugh, the proprietor of Liquid Labs, which is www.liquid-labs.com.

Anyways, he is one of these guys who has had something that we would call a Cloud based infrastructure for years and years, and he sells it to local community banks, and it’s basically a hosted thing. I was thinking, if I could get someone else kind of like him, who has been doing the ops and the development and the running of the Cloud based thing for customers. And I was thinking it would be interesting to have a panel that was kind of like, how you got your — just tell us the story of how you got your customers happy with that, and how you have been managing it, and things like that.

Because Zane is an interesting example, because he is the epitome of what you would call a micro ISV. Like he has been the one person who has been involved in his company forever, and he has had up to like three employees at some point. But he has been successful enough over, man, I guess like almost ten years now, to basically run his own business. And it’s based of off.

Like he used to have a T1 coming to his house, that he ran his own little data center to run his stuff essentially, which is not quite — I mean, it depends how you look at it, but basically he was selling to his customers, and they weren’t running on premise stuff, and they were just running it all as a service to do pretty serious stuff, to do fraud detection.

So it would be interesting to hear how he got small town bankers, who were very paranoid about any sort of new technology, to basically sign up for Cloud based computing stuff, and if I can get a few other people to talk about that. I am always interested in the cultural shift of this stuff. But we will see what people end up talking about. There is a wide variety of folks coming.

John Willis: Cool! Yeah, OpsCamp next week.

Michael Coté: And we will definitely — there’s going to be tons of people there and we should — we will have to set aside some time to record like a special podcast with — like there would be Zenoss people there, and there is even, the VP of Marketing from GroundWork is listed as showing up, and Luke from Reductive Labs will be there, and someone from Opscode will be there apparently.

John Willis: Yeah, Adam Jacob, Andrew Shafer, all these guys.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Well, maybe I will have to find several times to pull people aside to have a little podcast and panel discussions on things.

John Willis: No, it’s going to be fun. It’s the first one — I was just saying to Mark Hinkle, he is working on — we got a nice catch, with a nice OpsCamp.

Michael Coté: Well, I recently got my haircut, my short thing, so I won’t need a hat for two or three weeks now, because my hair basically manages itself John, but it will come in handy. Something happens, I don’t want to brush my hair, I need a hat.

John Willis: Caps are cool man. The inaugural OpsCamp cap.

Michael Coté: There you go. Well, with that, unless there was anything else John, I think –

John Willis: No, that’s all I got.

Michael Coté: I think we will wrap up. So we have had plenty of exciting content in this episode. Oh, I also mentioned that, this morning I just put up a transcript for the last episode. There are no SLAs necessarily with the transcription service we use, but hopefully it’s kind of like a week lag time for transcripts, but if you have listened to this, you probably don’t need the transcript, but it’s there nonetheless.

John Willis: Cool!

Michael Coté: So we will see everyone next week, and hopefully we will see some of you at OpsCamp next Saturday.

John Willis: Yeah, sounds cool.

Michael Coté: See you everyone then.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned, such as Microsoft, IBM, HP, Intuit, etc.

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Show notes:

• Why’s VMWare would want to buy Zimbra – looks like it’s official now. See also The VAR Guy on the topic. Be sure to see Stephen O’Grady’s excellent take as well: don’t forget the service provider customer base.
• This makes us remember the damn the good deal BMC got on Remedy for $350M in 2002.
• We talk at length about VMWare trying to become an Elder Company (like Microsoft, IBM, etc.)
• John going to OpsCode – VP Services & Training
• We talk about the excitement in “model-driven automation” at the moment.
• BMC buys Phurnace – Coté’s Quick Analysis.
• Microsoft buys Opalis – service management automation. Some scenario outlines over on the Microsoft virtualization blog.
• Puppet dashboards – overview of node runs, some drill down on nodes, reporting.
• More OpsCamp talk, and DevOpsDay US during Velocity.
• John talks with SOASTA. OLAP monitoring data access, did some e-Filing testing for TurboTax. This reminds Coté of Sonoa.
• Amazon: Windows Server 2008.
• Amazon spot pricing: Cloud Exchange, tracks the avg. pricing.
• Amazon media streaming and spot auctioning stuff. Gartner’s Cameron Haight on how this might apply to IT departments.
• We talk about the rumored Apple Tablet.
• John’s getting a Mac for the first time – this reminds Coté of his “getting used to the Mac” post.
• Spiceworks raises $16M in Round C. See MSPmentor’s rundown with plenty of numbers, like 850,000 “users,” and “penetrated more than 25 percent of all businesses that have more than 100 employees.”
• Per se video from David Foster Wallace.
• John buys Rock Band for his kids.

And the items we didn’t manage to get to:

• John’s Cloudies – thanks for the RedMonk nod.
• Did you hear, Forrester says the tech spending downturn is over. BOO-YAH! “The analyst firm expects U.S. IT spending to grow by 6.6 percent in 2010 after plummeting 8.2 percent in 2009.”
• Been feeling an uptick from Nimsoft of late – check this “competition we’re replacing” post.
• Spiceworks 4.5 – multi-site monitoring, now up to 1,000 nodes, SQL Server monitoring, “over 800,000 registered users,” help desk improvements (rules for routing and grouping tickets), network topology customizations.
• GroundWork new customers press release: “increasing its customer base by 105 percent with the release of GroundWork Monitor 6.0.”
• At least a pointer to Tim Bray’s “Doing it Wrong” piece. Stephen O’Grady.
• Been feeling an uptick from Nimsoft of late – check this “competition we’re replacing” post.
• Canonical CEO swap out – Mark Shuttleworth hands it over to Jane Silber.
• 22 million “lost” emails found – is any data really “safe”?
• Quest Software bought PacketTrap, for MSP stuff it seems.
• Host of new things from BladeLogic and Performance Manager from BMC, see a press release on the topic and InformationWeek coverage.
• IBM Tivoli Pulse week of Feb 22nd.

Transcript

I haven’t gone through to correct any transcription errors, so if something looks fishy, check the audio.

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! It’s the 12th January 2010, and this is the IT Management & Cloud podcast episode number 69. This is one of your co-host Michael Coté with RedMonk, available at peopleoverprocess.com, and as always, I am joined by the other co-host.

John Willis: John Willis at johnmwillis.com.

Michael Coté: As you may remember, johnmwillis.com and listeners, there was a slight power outage in my neighborhood last week when we were recording, and it just kind of — there was some excellent editing. We basically wrapped up talking about OpsCamp, January 30th, in Austin Texas, and then, all of a sudden my power went out. It was a great Cloud story, because it was apparently out for the whole neighborhood.

John Willis: In fact we were actually just about to talk about, the Zimbra rumor, and market suggested that it might be a conspiracy.

Michael Coté: Oh Yeah! Well, I was just scanning the news before this and it looks like that’s — it sounds like from when I was reading it, that’s confirmed that VMware is going to buy Zimbra. If I remember, the last one I looked at said they were buying — let me get this new story up, because it won’t be me, not to have the correct facts.

According, to this report from Network World, from John Fontana, which is just reporting on Kara Swisher’s reporting over at the Wall Street Journal or the awesomely named Boom Town Blog, VMware is going to pay, $100 million for Zimbra. So there you go. And this article also says that it was in 2007 that Yahoo paid $350 million for Zimbra.

So maybe Zimbra was like Yahoo’s Skype, except in a smaller increment. But well, yeah, it’s — I think the obvious thing that one would have to say, as people are saying about, VMware buying Zimbra is it’s this further thing of VMware wanting to be a company, wanting to have a broader portfolio, it’s not just virtualization; in the same way, if they have brought SpringSource and, yeah SpringSource.

John Willis: Well, if $100 million used, I mean –

Michael Coté: That is a pretty good deal.

John Willis: That’s a hell of deal, alright.

Michael Coté: — to buy a customer based and the channel relationships and the development team.

John Willis: Yeah everything, yeah brand, it’s a lot more brand.

Michael Coté: That is an excellent point that that’s a damn good deal.

John Willis: Yeah, that’s a real good deal. Yeah it’s like — I mean it’s the best deal ever, back in your neighborhood from BMC bought Remedy.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah!

John Willis: That was the all time best IT, because I don’t know people know, but what happened there, because I followed that space and then what happened — and we’ll get back to Zimbra, I don’t know what are your thoughts about it. But what happened there was the company that actually owned Remedy; they threw out about a-year-and-a-half, bought every product, every problem change, configuration management problem product on the market and Peregrine was the name of the company, and they basically have it, 80% in the market, because they own, they bought up the three biggest products. Then they went through that whole, they actually had Anderson consult and they didn’t get as much press as Enron, but they were using the same counting principles and almost got bankrupt and they had to fire sale stuff.

Michael Coté: I have the article from September 23rd 2002 from our friend Denise Dubie, our old friend there, and it says, what was it, they announced the deal; it’ll close in 45-60 days, because Peregrine was in — is that like say Paragreen or is it –

John Willis: Peregrine like the eagle, peregrine eagle.

Michael Coté: So Peregrine it was recognized under Chapter 11 bankruptcy and BMC paid $315 million in cash.

John Willis: Cash, that’s insane.

Michael Coté: And considering the –

John Willis: That’s not — we are not talking about Zimbra numbers now, we are talking $359 of cash, a company based, a customer base of B of A, Federal Reserve, Bank of America — I said, Bank of America, you name the launch company and it will run.

Michael Coté: I was actually at BMC when that happened and I was in the petrol line, we didn’t really know, what the hell this, we thought, just like any snarky developed, we thought everything outside of our control was a bunch of crap, which is — that’s how you can be in a nice way when you are a developer.

John Willis: That’s right.

Michael Coté: Over the past 8 years or so, I mean — as James Governor one of my fellow RedMonks likes to say, Remedy saved Beacham’s ass, which think is –

John Willis: Oh yeah! Beacham would have been gone, Beacham would have fired, big time, he is a hero, but you know what, I don’t know how to –

Michael Coté: That was a damn good move; that’s like that company, Remedy, is like a huge chunk of BMC and for many years was. So it was a damn good buy.

John Willis: So there’s a little bit of a history there too, because Peregrine was owned by John Moores, who was the owner of — and John Moores was the Admin at BMC.

Michael Coté: And also owns the Padres in San Diego, if I remember.

John Willis: Yeah, that’s right, yeah Padres. So that thing probably went down so quick, it was probably a couple of phone calls. We got to dump this task; we know you can buy it, let’s do this. I don’t even imagine anybody even had an opportunity other than BMC to buy that, because that just was an insane acquisition.

I don’t follow Zimbra in email space that much and all that, but the — I am just in following Twitter and there are all these like crazy insanity arguments like, what the heck are they doing; this makes no sense, and then I have seen James, this is one step further towards the 05:59.

Michael Coté: Yeah. I’ll give you my full little run down here with my — which is a mishmash of what people say and what I think people say and what I think of myself. So first off, organizationally, I think at the moment the thing that people say about VMware acquisition is you’ve got Paul Maritz, who is the CEO, and everyone is quick to point out that he is an ex-Microsoft guy. So when you are like the MNA conspiracy tech nut guy — if there’s a Microsoft guy and you are like, oh, they are trying to build Microsoft, so that’s something people always say, which — if you were to choose — like I always say, if you want to try to be IBM or Microsoft, that’s not too shabby.

So you got that going, where basically you have sort of Microsoft. You probably have — well I forget when he worked there, but you probably got like 90s era of Microsoft mentally going at the top. That’s the assumption. I have never actually met the dude and I don’t really know anything about him. So I am just reflecting what people say.

Then you have the — Like I always say, you have — VMware bought SpringSource which owned Hyperic, and the GlueCode — is it GlueCode, not GlueCode, they own the Groovy people. GlueCode was the Geronimo stuff way back.

Anyways so VMware is already sort of gone on this, we want to expand our portfolio, and to recap that hold notion, the whole deal is, if you are going to be a long-term tech company, if you aspire to be, what I would call an elder company, which is a tech company that’s been around for like 20 or more years like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, basically, you can’t be a one trick pony, you need a very diverse portfolio. There is serial exceptions like BMC, which is one of the top ten software companies, that are — and CA which — they are sort of like multi-trick ponies that do the same trick or something like that.

John Willis: CA is a multi-donkey.

Michael Coté: Right, so you either need to follow like — I mean CA is the exaggerated version of this. You either need to be kind of like the CA or kind of BMCs of the world, where you dominate every silo in the one silo that you are in. So if you want to do IT management, you can go to CA or BMC and you are done, if you want to be, right, which not everyone wants to be.

But the point being that, VMware is known for VMware, for its name sake, for ESX essentially, for its virtualization product, and they are not so much known for the management. They have management stuff and everything like that but really they are a hypervisor company, and that’s what they specialize in and that’s what people know them about. So, I mean what they need to do, they are public company, right. So, if they want to become an elder company, which is a good thing, then they need to have like at least three different product lines, I would — I am kind of making this up, but at least three different things on their portfolio.

So, they have got virtualization, and, in theory, as we have spoken into a length that if they have SpringSource and they build on that some more, I mean, they would need to develop or buy more stuff, then they would have application development as one of their portfolio items essentially, and then, with something like Zimbra, the theory going, if they are going to grow this $100 million asset into a billion dollar product line or whatever, which seems to be the benchmark for product lines in companies, then you would basically have what they call the Collaboration Space.

Collaboration is one of the more vague terms out there, but basically, what it means is first it means email. Email is like table stakes, as people like to say. So you’ve got to have email, and then on top of that, you got to have calendaring. So basically, Exchange. Then, built on top of that — or Google apps, if you prefer — built on top of that, in collaboration, you can have things like SharePoint and sharing documents and collaborating around artifacts that people create, whether it’s spreadsheets documents, presentations, ideas, wikis, whatever, so you got that going on.

Then even on top of that, you start to get into things like behind the — you get in, what they would call, Enterprise 2.0. So these are like, what am I — I am distracting myself with something –

John Willis: Collaboration.

Michael Coté Yeah, it’s basically like –

John Willis: Like what IBM has done with the whole –

Michael Coté Yeah. So basically, essentially if you look at the Lotus portfolio, right, Lotus has everything in the space at the moment.

John Willis: Right, right.

Michael Coté They are not always as fantastic as they can be about making that statement, they are like, hey, we’ve got everything, which I think — I mean I didn’t used to say this about Lotus, but over the past year or so, they have actually brought a lot of impressive stuff to market and I think we might have talked about this back when I went to the software, the IBM Software Analyst Conference that there are — there is actually some impressively giant installs that Lotus has at companies that are like in the hundreds of thousands.

John Willis: Oh yeah!

Michael Coté And it’s not just like old Lotus Notes stuff, it’s like Lotus Connections and Lotus Email and stuff. We were kind of like, oh, wow!

Anyways, so that’s kind of like — that would be like the happy path, glass is half full theory of Zimbra stuff is that as a corporation — like if all this were true, all of the stuff we are talking about were true that VMware’s current corporate strategy is to become a very diversified software company. So they would have infrastructure, all of their virtualization stuff, which is — I mean that’s a fair goal for them to have, because the work they did in virtualization, both technologically and marketing, market wise, has sort of created a huge amount of what IT management is or aspires to be nowadays primarily based on virtualization.

And then again, they would have basically software development. They could essentially take over — take the large chunks of the Java world, if you will, and then they would have collaboration. So you can already see they’ve got three of the six software brands that IBM has and similar comparison to Microsoft. Now all of that said, that’s a tall order to build up; that kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight at all, and it doesn’t even happen — it takes like a decade or more to build up something like that.

If you look at the career of like Steve Mills who is the head of software at IBM. I mean that dude has been there a long, long time, building up the software group. And just now, it was like, the big revenue powerhouse that it is. So it takes a while to build up that kind of thing and there is — as you know in the Tivoli space, there is plenty of missteps and weird things that can happen and all sorts of stuff.

But I mean just to round it I mean I am not a numbers guy by far but I would wager, I mean my gut tells me that VMware probably has the cash and the access to credit and the time essentially. They have the resources to probably — if they can defend the revenue that they get from virtualization and kind of innovate enough in that area to have that to be a cash cow, they probably have the resources to have a pretty good shot at building out something like this over the next ten years or so.

John Willis: Yeah, and if they don’t screw up they are — now you’ve heard from the analyst; now you hear from the other dose.

Michael Coté That’s right.

John Willis: They don’t screw up then yeah. No, I mean, no –

Michael Coté I think we need to — I need to rename my practice within RedMonk, the glass half full practice.

John Willis: No. The thing about — I think just looking at EMC, EMC is like for yeard tried that crap going.

Michael Coté Oh! That’s a good — go on. Yeah.

John Willis: Ceiling, and they have done like fantastic acquisitions and — but they just never seem to get out of that rut, and they make money. I mean I don’t think they have lost any money on the acquisition they’ve made. I still talk to people — running smarts and things like that from EMC. I am just wondering if EMC — I mean VMware will fall into the same fate, maybe too powerful or branding in one space, I don’t know, but I know just from following Twitter and the Cloud and all that, they are pouring so many resources into redefining kind of the Cloud world, and they are in a better place than — if you had — you get in betting, you had to bet on somebody right now to dominate, the place where it’s going to. I mean you’d have to have to say VMware is going to be the — is the better bet, even more than IBM or anybody else.

Michael Coté Yeah, yeah. I wouldn’t have really taken this whole strategy sort of seriously just based on them buying SpringSource, but buying Zimbra and if they buy a few more then you can kind of trust that, oh, they are actually willing to put money buying this. So it’s not just like a fluke or whatever, which can happen, and happened for a lot.

John Willis: Well, SpringSource wasn’t — I mean I know you know this, SpringSource is not a clue, right, that was — that was another like people scratching their head, getting into the outside of the enterprise, it’s where it’s at, and it should got to be in the Cloud business.

Michael Coté Yeah.

John Willis: And I think for $100 million how can you go wrong with Zimbra, right? And then it’s interesting to see what they did next because I am sure they are not done.

Michael Coté Yeah, I think this is about two years ago now but RedMonk used Zimbra for a while. When I first joined RedMonk we were using a hosted exchange server which was fine if you were just using POP or IMAP, but it was not pretty to log into and use. And then we switched over to using Zimbra, and it was much better than whatever hosted exchange we had.

And it was fine, there is no big deal, but then we just looked at Google Apps and it’s like $50 a seat, and I don’t know the terms of service for Google Apps but I am pretty sure we looked through it enough that it was satisfactory that Google wasn’t going to like own us or whatever. But it’s just like, Google Apps is hard to compete with.

John Willis: Oh yeah, I mean to any start-up right now or any small business start-up, you mentioned Google Apps. I mean it just makes no sense, I mean it is so – and you can argue all the lock-in stores you want.

Michael Coté Yeah. But the thing that Zimbra has and I have to admit, I haven’t checked in on them in a while, but the last I looked, they did have some excellent ways to like extend the platform and build in little widgets or applications, or things like that. Those are the kind of things that when you are trying to build out more of an enterprise solution, right. It is handy to have ways of customizing and immigrating things like that. So I don’t know, we’ll see how that works out with the Zimbra folks.

John Willis: Yeah. So the other thing I was going to — one last thing I was going to mention about my thoughts on acquisitions, like VMware is that essentially you get really big. Of course now VMWare is really big. In fact, it’s kind of dangerously too big too fast, right.

Michael Coté Yeah.

John Willis: And there is an arc, not that I know how to do this, but you can see companies that do it skillfully, and like IBM, there is an arc in integrating large organizations into large organizations.

Michael Coté Sure!

John Willis: And I think that — you talk about how long something comes to that fruit, right, I mean a lot of that has to do with how good you are at assuming the culture, everything about the organization that you are part of, and IBM as I think always been the standard for doing that.

Michael Coté Yeah, I mean they are the only ones who have a term for it, Blue Washing.

John Willis: Yeah, right, and even with them I have been in the guts on some of these as a partner where the companies that they caught on the way and handles major acquisition and it takes a good year-and-a-half, almost two years. Even when they know exactly what they are doing, exactly what they want to do. And that’s where a company that has got it down to science.

Zimbra, I don’t worry about so much, but SpringSource, and then iPeer, where does iPeer show up I mean — or do they ever come out in a 18:27 steaming right now if he is listening. But I mean they were – Hyperic, I mean, GroundWorks, Zenoss, I don’t think they hit the radar anymore.

Michael Coté Yeah, yeah, we’ll have to go look that up and see where they are popping up in the portfolio. If someone else — Citrix seems to have done a good job like acquiring Xen like from the outside. I don’t really know the state of the Xen open-source community and things like that, but from what I can tell they didn’t screw that up which is pretty good for Citrix. So that’s another — and they had some Netscaler and there is and they have a couple of other things. So they are another –

Citrix is another one of these like — I guess you could call it like a sleeper company, like BMC always used to joke about itself that it was the quiet giant which we thought was really dumb because why would you want to be quiet. But Citrix is one of these companies that they also do a lot of things that you never really hear about them very much, but anyhow.

John Willis: Yeah. But they are another one of those companies that have just got unbelievable adoption of the enterprise so they can, it was like VMware, they can screw up or like EMC, they could screw up royally but they still succeed.

Michael Coté So speaking of start-ups you said that you had an exciting announcement to make.

John Willis: Da… da… da… no. Yeah, so Monday I start a new job, isn’t that exciting?

Michael Coté And what is that job, John?

John Willis: I am going to be Vice President of Services and Training for an option called OpsCode.

Michael Coté: You cut out there, Vice-President of Services and what?

John Willis: And Training.

Michael Coté: Alright, for OpsCode.

John Willis: For OpsCode. The proud owners of the product Chef.

Michael Coté: Alright, definitely and they are in the –

John Willis: I am more excited than I have been probably in my whole career. These guys are in start-up mode, they are growing, they are blowing, they are rocking and rolling.

Michael Coté: So, this means you are not going to be independent anymore, right?

John Willis: I will always be an independent soul. Do you know that movie? What’s the movie? The Coen Brothers. O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Michael Coté: Right, right.

John Willis: So in the beginning of the movie, they escape from the prison and they get on like the guy is pushing the little two men dolly train, and the guy says, you work for your airline, the guy turns and he says, I work for no man.

Michael Coté: That’s right

John Willis: Yeah, yeah, I know, I am going to be — well, I mean significantly for me is I haven’t get the job in 30 years so or 25 years.

Michael Coté: That explains a lot, it’s all coming together.

John Willis: I actually worked as an employee for — they gave us some like weird contracts that I had to do, but they were contracts. But the bottom-line is I have been in consulting.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I mean we were talking about this a little before the recording. The exciting thing is like, that’s the past few companies you have been all around services and training. So it seems like a natural sort of thing for you to start doing. And I know you and the OpsCode guy, you are an advisor, you have been an advisor for them.

John Willis: Advisor, yeah. Yeah, for me that’s the thing is, when I finally came in realization that the — I started this company called Gulf Breeze Software about five-six years ago and there was a lot of things which were perfect when we started. And when I look at what’s going on right now, the Cloud, it’s about identical to what we did, what happened with that company? I built a $3.5 million service company in three years there.

And everything looks exactly the same, there is a lot of confusion in the technology, there is not a lot of people that actually really — I have been doing against just independent consultants, I am finding these people. When they are going out to find Cloud experts and stuff, they just, they don’t even know where to pick and they are getting jalopies, they are getting people that really say they are great, they don’t know, what they are doing.

So a lot of things we have seen very similar to the way it was, when I started at Gulf Breeze, and it’s exciting back when I started Gulf Breeze, typically was phenomenally exciting. In fact, it’s been about ten years now actually, and I think it’s about 2000 — 1999, 1998 is when I actually started.

Michael Coté: Three or four years ago.

John Willis: Yeah, right, because you are awfully fast when you get old, right. Yeah, there are so many similarities to it. So I think it’s going to be great, I mean configuration in the Cloud is I think the most exciting thing right now.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s definitely the whole space that like, Reductive Labs with Puppet and OpsCode with Chef that they are in. I was slinging around the phrase the other day like Model-Driven Automation or something and the VP of Development, Michael, over at Zenoss, he noticed that phrase and he was asking for more detail about it, it made me thing, I need to sit down and actually think about, what the hell that means. But whatever this Model-Driven Automation for the lack of a better phrase is, like it definitely is that seems to be sticking to the wall pretty well. And even hear people like Cisco and BMC when they are partnering around the unified compute stuff, like they speak in these terms and if you talk to Tivoli people, they are starting to talk in these terms.

So, yes, it’s exciting and it seems like, we have joked about this a lot to use a common frame. But it’s kind of like the autonomic stuff, except it looks like it might actually work this time.

John Willis: Exactly, well in fact, you’re talking about, it’s funny how, like you block something or treat something, and then have somebody to say, hey! Well, tell me more about my book. I was just got talking it out loud, right?

Michael Coté: Right.

John Willis: But it’s kind of funny because I have been — when I actually got started in Tivoli a while back, there was – Tivoli had acquired this company called Think Dynamics, which actually called the founder of a sudden kind of — friends with him for about a year or so. A year-and-a-half we just talked about Cloud and stuff, and I know he was a founder. And I asked him, because they kind of introduced this concept of orchestration for IT enterprise. This idea of being able to — it’s kind of funny because this is like 1995 and they were having this idea of being able to dynamically move server resources, based on workload and monitoring.

And it was actually a ridiculous idea in 1995, right? I had some briefing in New York City from IBM after they acquired them talking about. Yeah, we can have 20 Oracle servers over here, and 15 utility servers over here, and if the workload gets we’ll move them back and I am like, you know I am playing myself. They are current, they are 1998 version of configuration, it took a day-and-a-half to build the server.

So I wonder how they are going to pull that trick off, and then, by the way the monitoring matrix don’t seem to be too reliable either. But they are back in the day, but they had this idea and IBM is always great about the ideas and this idea of policy-based orchestration being.

And so, I was kind of playing around with the term and I started thinking about, kind of like, people just took the word Cloud and may be the definition that we live with, and put a taxonomy around and like. So as I move into this new job, I want to kind of — I think I am going to try to put a stake in the ground, can’t of like your model-driven idea of orchestration being the lynch of the datacenter. It requires everything from, agile infrastructure; it takes in all the agile like how do you get the requirements to fit with the development which fits with the continuous integration, which fits with the provisioning, which fits with the configuration, which fits with the actual dynamic movement of resources. And all that holds their orchestration.

Michael Coté: Definitely.

John Willis: In fact, I submitted with Damon Edwards, the guy over at DTO Solutions, he is one of your clients, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah. The control (Voice Overlap) guys.

John Willis: Yeah, we submitted a presentation to Velocity, in fact, we did it at the midnight hour last night.

Michael Coté: Oh! Yeah.

John Willis: Last night was the deadline. But I have had this idea, and he is just a sharp guy, and we think alike. So we were talking about, I had this idea of orchestration.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I was talking with Mark — it was someone the other day. I think he was Mark Hinkle and he was asking me about moderating a panel that was kind of along the lines of having some enterprise, sort of people talking about stuff. So we’ll see what happens with that. That would be interesting.

John Willis: Yeah, we set a paper what’s called the IT Philharmonic, how out of tune are your operations, and just really kind of –

Michael Coté: Exactly! That’s exciting, so come Monday we’ll finally see you wearing a suit. I am looking forward to it.

John Willis: Yeah, I’ve got to get do, what they call 28:03, really fancy shoes and all the –

Michael Coté: And like an old brother what I thought, may be you’ve got to figure out if you are a dandy dan or a thought man.

John Willis: Yes, you are right, I am a dandy man, no way man.

Michael Coté: No way no thought, I am a dandy man.

John Willis: That was a great one, pulled back from the O Brother.

Michael Coté: Well, you know, speaking of that, so that the thing that Lin was commenting on with that Model-Driven Automation, so we’ve got a huge back log of little news items. We should go through here.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: From the holiday, from last weekend. So since it’s a good segue, so BMC last week bought this Austin-based company called Phurnace, which I wrote up that little quick analysis, as I like to call them on that, it’s to give the quick run-down, if you are not familiar with it.

So Phurnace is this company that they are little company here in Austin, and essentially the core technology that they have, is they can extract the configuration from Java application servers and portal stuff, basically Java app servers. And they can move, they have an intermediate model if you will that hints model-driven automation, you see the hook up here. They have an intermediate model this configuration goes into and then they can move this configuration to other types of app servers.

So when they started out they did a lot of WebSphere to JBoss migration, cost-saving stuff. And then what they got into after several other years is more, just more purely configuration management, the theory being that, the configuration for an application server is kind of complicated and easy to screw up, and so forth and so on, like any configuration.

And so part of their system is just helping you manage the life-cycle of that configuration and deploying it and so forth and so on. And so yeah, BMC bought them for, I forget — I don’t think the terms were disclosed. But I talked with their CEO and he said that, according to him, they were good favorable terms, it wasn’t any fire sale thing or anything at all.

So every now and then I have mentioned Phurnace is someone who if you wanted to manage Java stuff they were interesting people to look at.

So it’s kind of not to toot my own horn, but it’s kind of heartening that one of the IT management people actually sort of realized it, what looked like a Java sort of company was actually a management company.

John Willis: Yeah, now you have mentioned and I think before and the products when we talked about, because right now it’s kind of ringing a bell, but I moved back and I looked at them, it was interesting, they were actually apparently it was part of University of Texas, MBA were they had to come up with business plans and then –

Michael Coté: Yeah, down here in Austin there is a couple of like start-up incubators, and things associated with the University of Texas down here. There is actually a fair amount of contest like that where, you get like a small amount of money if you enter this contest, but it takes you through the rigor of coming up with the business plan. And there is another sort of friend of mine, this guy Divakar, he had a company eVapt, which we might have mentioned a couple of times, they did SaaS, and he had a similar story.

I don’t know if it was the same — it might have been the same program, but he was another success story of the local Austin community here having like a little contest, and being Mr. Booster here. But having a contest where they basically — I think they won like $20,000, or something like that but it gave them the validation, enough funding to really kick up a bigger company and eVapt got sold to an Indian billing company recently. So there has been a nice round of sort of exits.

John Willis: I was surprised that students would have actually come up with kind of a Java configuration, that’s kind of out there and looking somewhere.

Michael Coté: Yeah, and so in their press releases and stuff that — I didn’t actually speak with BMC about this, I did speak with Larry Warnock is his name if I remember the CEO of Phurnace, but it look like I think the BladeLogic Group bought this, and I think essentially what Blade – Blade does automation, they do kind of contemporary old school automation.

John Willis: There what I call Second Generation Configuration Management.

Michael Coté: Here you go, perfect!

John Willis: As opposed to Third Generation.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

John Willis: Like including Puppet and Chef, oh by the way, sorry.

Michael Coté: That’s right, so I think essentially Blade is buying them to fill out their product line to help, to manage Java more essentially, which makes perfect sense.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Like I said in the write-up that I had, I mean from the BMC that I know does two types of acquisitions, and this is like the BMC episode apparently, and usually it’s the Cloud or IBM episode, but some other TLA is getting all the juice. But either BMC buys like a transformative company like Remedy or BladeLogic that adds a whole new portfolio, a whole new product like line of products, or they would buy one of these little tactical companies that just fills in a technology hole for — and I think that’s what Phurnace does.

John Willis: Yeah, and going back to kind of IBM, that’s another thing IBM does really well, they even buy really big mammoth companies, or they find these like little diamonds in the rough, and they pay nothing on their scale even if they pay $30 million for these guys, or $20 million. They all got loaded and – for that kind of money for BMC to solve this problem. It’s a nice little acquisition.

Michael Coté: And while we are on the acquisition thing back in December Microsoft bought this company called Opalis, or Opalis, however you want to pronounce it, which I think I also wrote up something. I am a little writing-up dude apparently.

John Willis: Yeah, you’re writing them up.

Michael Coté: But that’s another interesting acquisition, kind of in this orchestration space if you will.

John Willis: That’s in some of the area, not Run Book, but Run Book Automation I guess is another. And that’s definitely kind of a strange acquisition I guess, right.

Michael Coté: Yeah, well, I mean I think, so run books are an interesting – I’ll admit that until I joined RedMonk about four years ago, I didn’t really know redbooks.

John Willis: You didn’t know Run Monks?

Michael Coté: That’s right, I didn’t know too much about Run Books, so when I was first discovering, I was like, Holy Crap! This is awesome, you know like the promise of a Run Book is it’s sort of like a first generation sort of Cloud-based infrastructure, automation, orchestration, hooplaw. And the promise of a Run Book is essentially this is like the most full blown out like robots serving UT sort of thing.

But you basically you’ve got this self-service page to one goes to and they are like, I want to get this, and they just click on it and the Run Book just executes everything, and then you provision stuff when you are just all happy-dandy, it’s all like automated. So that’s like what a promise of a Run Book is.

So the Run Books that exist they end up being based around like a service catalogue and the sort of workflows that have to execute to deliver these services and things like that, which is fine, right? And I think this is — so with that sort of scattering introduction like Run Books are very ITSM or IT Service Management, or good old IT Management sort of conception of delivering the stuff. And a lot of the ones I’ve talked with nowadays they are catching up or have caught up with kind of the Cloud theory behind thing, which is a lot more loosened fast than the sort of perfection that Run Books are.

And I think for Microsoft, I mean Microsoft has been bogged down in responding to virtualization and Cloud stuff versus good old fashion IT management, which if you are forced to put money down I think is probably the wise move to get bogged down in virtualization and Cloud stuff. And meanwhile, in the background Microsoft is for a long time, they have aspired to be one of the big four essentially.

So I think getting something like Opalis, or Opalis or have you say probably help some with their more good old IT management stuff, which I think is interesting. And it’s also significant that I think it’s mostly their virtualization people that are talking about it. Which make sense because to have a real good Run Book, I mean you have to use virtualization and all this Cloud orchestration business, so we’ll see what happens with that. It seems like it wasn’t too bad of a thing for them to get.

John Willis: Yeah, well, this is again I think it’s similar, I heard you were going back to — I think this is at good times. I think you are seeing the cost of the economy, which is really good, very similar to when I started my last company is that you are seeing a lot of good technologies get purchased by big guys.

A lot of it is, yeah, it maybe good, but a lot of it is just the bargain prices, and the money that these big guys have, and make sense to just acquire them, and that just leaves wide gap openings for new technologies to fill the gap.

Michael Coté: Yeah, and I am scrolling through my stuff, we should also mention that I forget if it’s an early release or the finished release, but the guys who are at Reductive Labs they have some dashboards out now. Basically UI stuff on top of Puppet that I have been taking a look at, those are with checking out in this, what did you call it Third Generation Orchestration, John?

John Willis: Third Generation Configuration. Yeah, they are Puppets, I mean Puppet to find this space.

Michael Coté: And I think since Puppet, the Reductive Lab guys have been in the lime-lights it’s getting fine. I mean, they have been mentioning that they are working on something, right, and I think these dashboards and another UI, they are finally exposing to the public stuff they have been working on.

So if I remember correctly like what these dashboards do at the moment is they obviously have reporting on like things that are run in your — the Puppet, the different Puppet masters that run around and configuration that’s happened, and there is also just being to look at different alerts. I think there are alerts in there. I might be over-thinking it. But it’s basically just a visualization of what’s happening in Puppet land if you will, which their really wasn’t a rich UI at all or really any sort of UI beyond the command line. So that’s good that they are adding that in there.

John Willis: Yeah, so I was actually searching this stuff, pretty good stuff, look like good stuff. So what else? I am kind of looking at my list, we’ve got — there are couple of things like we talked about the Ops camp on the 30th, right?

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, that’s definitely.

John Willis: Yeah, we’ve got three – and in fact Reductive Labs is a sponsor.

Michael Coté: Oh Yeah, and Zenoss.

John Willis: 38:53 is coming.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: So he is your buddy.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah he is like the Agile in the longest developments.

John Willis: Yeah good, so I am just going to see if some of the OpsCode guys come down. I think we’ll get about 50-60 people. We’ve got guys like you, me, Luke, and maybe I can get Adam.

Michael Coté: Oh, so if you go to opscamp.com then I love this about Eventbrite, but it lists all the people who have signed up and BitNami is a sponsor as well.

John Willis: Yeah, BitNami.

Michael Coté: It looks like the Marketing VP Tara Spalding from GroundWork coming as well.

John Willis: Yeah, very cool!

Michael Coté: I don’t think I have met her, so that will be fine.

John Willis: I never met her either, and it looks like another team of Zenoss.

Michael Coté: Yeah, he is part of the five runs injection for Zenoss.

John Willis: Oh there you go, they go, 39:44 Luke, BitNami, Damon Edwards and DTO where this control 39:49 is coming.

Michael Coté: Yes, so far if only these people show up I’ll have a good time.

John Willis: Oh by the way we have heard recruit you during the video recording.

Michael Coté: Well, fantastic, yeah, this is the great thing about Dave Nielsen who does CloudCamp, he is very good, and I don’t know if this is a non-PC word to use, he is really good at shanghaiing you, like all of a sudden you are like, oh, hey, how did I become involve in this?

John Willis: Yes.

Michael Coté: I’ve worked with him enough now that I am pretty good at like deflecting it and like accepting what I — because he just add (Voice Overlap). So you’ve got to watch out with this guy because next thing you will be –

John Willis: Well, at all fairness, I accepted the task of asking you if you would do it.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

John Willis: Yeah. And one other thing just so we got little ways to go, but if you are planning and going to Velocity, Velocity actually runs Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday this year, and we are going to run DevOps Days US. So I went to DevOps Days in Belgium last year and we had a one-day DevOps Days in that general area around where Velocity is going to be. So a lot of the guys from Europe that ran DevOps Days are coming all over.

So if you are interested in this whole camp Agile infrastructure, Agile operations and Agile shapers definitely going to be there, in fact the Agile shaper is you say it’s like 75% that he is going to be able to come to an Ops camp.

So yeah, I mean we get those guys around, and you feel I just got stop and it just doesn’t get any better.

Michael Coté: Yeah definitely. So why don’t you hit us with something from your list?

John Willis: Okay, so here we go da… da… da… So I talked to the guys from Solasta the other day. They had called me about sponsoring the Ops camp and he was telling more about, the Solasta is that they are kind of the killer app in the Amazon Cloud. And really I guessed it couple of times. They do the testing, they’ve got the testing.

Michael Coté: Oh, that’s right, that’s right.

John Willis: Their famous story is, they’ve got a lot of stories now, but one of their famous stories is that they did the turbo 2009 and they basically automated a simulation or they ran a 22-hour test, like 2000 nodes and it emulated 350,000 e-files. And the cost is like dropping the bucket, right? Because it’s all Amazon [Inaudible]. I didn’t realize this.

He was telling me a little more about the product and the owner, I think Tom Lubane (ph), I am probably hacking us last time, but he will be the first guy that hacked us. He said, in fact one of the things I didn’t know about, which is right now kind of our area of interest is, they actually built a whole monitoring infrastructure and all app infrastructure on the backend.

So they don’t just do the testing, they are very serious about integrating with Tivoli and different monitoring tools and so on, they are running the test. They are like scraping data from like anything available and they are throwing it into a very sophisticated kind of all app data warehouse to do analysis on where did they break, where did performance strength break. So it sounded more sophisticated, just, you know I know when you talk to people. Oh it sounds better when they are telling you — when you are using it, but it sounds like, wow, that’s you know, give me that all the time. You know what I mean. Sounds like they run this trace for like ten hours or run this testing deal for ten hours and then have a backend data store, data warehouse all that. Here’s where you need to improve, just killer stuff. A, what’s killer about it? The whole advent of the Cloud in that and these are the kind of things you just couldn’t ever do.

Michael Coté: I think this is kind of like the bright side of Cloud Washing if you will, which is sort of like retrofitting your offerings to the current buzzword as you were being Cloud stuff. But if there is a shimmer, a silver lining to that Cloud so to say, it makes it easier to appreciate these existing technologies that you are kind of like one would be easily dismissive or confused about, right?

So something like doing that kind of testing and data access on a mass scale (Voice Overlap). Like if you didn’t have Cloud stuff you’d be like, oh that’s a weird freakish thing, but now you have the context to put that stuff in.

People like one, we have talked about this client of RedMonks like these people Sonoa, they are another one of these people who — they have this — they make using APIs to their Cloud easier and they have little Cloud accelerators and things like that, I am greatly simplifying it. But they are another company like who is offering, it would seem kind of weird if you didn’t have the context of the Cloud to put it in. It would be sort of like, who needs to keep management of APIs, but now that you understand Cloud, this makes a lot more sense.

John Willis: Yeah, this whole abstraction, this whole — you know what I call Cambrian Explosion where things are really starting to make sense to group things together, that you couldn’t five years ago even dream of.

Michael Coté: That’s right.

John Willis: So, I guess some Amazon stuff quickly, just little stuff, like so Amazon had, I guess, Windows Server 2008, looks like some LDAP, I didn’t play, but some LDAP federated service support, it’s kind of cool.

And then we talked about the spot pricing a couple of podcasts ago, right? There is actually have been a couple now, the first one I saw was called as Cloud Exchange, and what they do is they actually have grass now, where they actually show you the average pricing. Actually get a feel for using some kind of capacity to may be figure out, what your — if the spot pricing is all about, you put in a price that you are willing to pay.

Michael Coté: Yeah, it’s a marketplace, it’s kind of brokering as you like to call it.

John Willis: It’s kind of cool, now there has been some nice, I figured it had to happen soon.

Michael Coté: So, what’s the average pricing looking like?

John Willis: You know what, I shouldn’t look that up. I did a quick look on, well, why don’t you start talking about something?

Michael Coté: Yeah, like also looking through our pile of old news, there was also some media streaming stuff from Amazon. I mean like John was saying at the end of last year, Amazon has really been piling on the news.

And this reminds me of, I think it was today, that Rackspace announced that they are hosting like encoding.com or something like that which is another — I am always fascinated by this — what encoding.com does is, it’s pretty straightforward, they do video and media encoding, sort of on-demand. And me doing a lot of this media stuff, I am fascinated by that kind of business delivered over the Cloud, whether streaming medias is the end-user consumption of it, which is exciting.

But then the actual encoding of it is also nice as well, because I think HD and even non-HD video encoding is one of the last front — it’s one of the major current frustration sources in computing at the moment, because that stuff is just painful, and it’s with these files that are still huge enough that you can’t — it’s difficult to just like upload them to somewhere and things like that. So if you had a high-speed access and you could upload a gig reasonably well, then I can see doing online encoding, it would be fine, which I am sure most people who use it do that.

And it’s actually — once you have like a high performance. I guess this is what I am getting at, as I am rambling here. Doing video work is one of the few instances, where you actually need really high performance computing at the moment, for common everyday uses, and it’s not really easy to get that high performance computing. So that’s why it’s curious to see how people are applying video stuff to the Cloud.

Did I eat up enough time for you yet, John?

John Willis: Yeah, perfect! Good example, so now if you look at like pricing or what they call on-demand pricing for Amazon, they have three different regions, now they have the US North Virginia, US North California – not North California, sorry and then – but East Coast, West Coast US and then Europe. So do you look at like US West Coast a small on-demand instances, 9.5 cents an hour, and so (Voice Overlap) exchange guy, it’s running right now at about 3.9 cents an hour.

Michael Coté: Okay, and so, how does that compare to like list price?

John Willis: Well, list price is like 9 cents.

Michael Coté: Oh, got it, got it.

John Willis: So, the running is – here in fact, it even gives you the percentage ratio, it’s 41% off the list basically, and you can look at like for example, I look at the large, large is 43 in the same region, and then what’s cool is you go to any region too, and so you can go, you kind of change your region, so I can go up in the East, 49:09.

Michael Coté: Yeah, well, I am sure, there is some aspiring — what would you call them? Gray hat people out there, who were trying to figure out how to like eat up Cloud resources to raise the price and if they can make money off of, that’s key in that.

John Willis: Well, that’s come up on Twitter, there has been couple of interesting conversations about, 49:35 Amazon and then will there any kind of whole side business or sub business of doing this?

But anyway, I thought that it was cool and they are virtual product of clock came out big. I don’t even know what the difference between beta and non-beta is these days. So some of the beta for like two years and then now VPC, but other things, and then there is the perpetual beta.

So I was going to ask you, I don’t know if we have some time here at gadget guy more than me, so what’s the skinning on me 50:10?

Michael Coté: Well, it seems like one of the higher level executives at Orange which is a French telecom. It was kind of like a, I don’t know, a Verizon for France, I am probably exposing myself to be an American idiot. But it’s like a French Telco that’s pretty big across the pond there. And according to news articles John, he let slip that there will be a tablet. You can see how this would have happened if it was accidental or it was controlled. He was like oh, yeah, Orange will offer one of these for sure.

So that means that there will be one of these tablets. But beyond that, I have to be honest with you, I used to follow Apple rumor news really closely when I was bored of programming and stuff, but nowadays I just kind of wait for them doing non-stuff because there are so many different rumors that. I don’t get much pleasure out of tracking gadget rumors I guess. But yeah –

John Willis: Yeah, it sounds like pretty cool, because I am thinking of buying Kindle, but maybe I’ll wait.

Michael Coté: Oh, I hadn’t thought about that but you see Apple is pretty tight lipped about stuff, but it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for Apple to be being strategic and especially right before Christmas to basically put a dent in like Kindle sales and other sales to kind of say like, well, maybe I should wait a little while, because I bet there are people probably somewhat maybe yourself who would have bought a Kindle, but you are a little like — now you are like, well, maybe I should buy this other thing.

I think in the summer when these rumors came up, the old columnist John Dvorak, I think he actually had some pretty good commentary on this kind of stuff. And it was basically like if you are paying like $300-400 for a gadget, it’s kind of like this whole other realm of stuff.

That’s kind of around what Kindle’s cost and so they are like luxury gadgets, essentially. So I think this kind of thing is all about the pricing versus being general compute.

On the other hand, you could see that something like an Apple tablet would get the same what’s the right phrase? It would capture the imagination of the market, just like Netbook sort of have, right? And you could say like well, a Netbook is not a fully operational battle platform. It’s not a fully functional laptop but it’s cheap enough for what it is. So like I will spend $300-400 to get what a Netbook is, right? And if the tablet is like a general purpose machine that has multitasking for God’s sake unlike the iPhone, then maybe you’d be like, well, I’ll buy that.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: We will see what happens if it even comes out in the first place.

John Willis: I bought a Netbook for one of my boys for Christmas and it came — it was one of the Acer ones. So it’s actually pretty cool, because it’s not the SD drives, it’s a real hard drive and it’s actually pretty — for the boys it’s unbelievable. They put on this Windows 7 starter set. So it says Windows 7 when you get it. I am not going to torture my kids and make them run Ubuntu. But it’s like the starter set that you can’t change it. You can’t even change your background screen.

Michael Coté: Oh really!

John Willis: Yeah, you can’t. Like Christmas day we spent the whole freaking day, just trying — he wanted to put one of his pictures on the background screen which is one of his friends got one too. And they were running XP I guess. And so he was like, Dad how come you don’t know how to do this? And I was like, oh, no son, I’ll figure it out. So I wasted the whole day and I should have done when writing in the Google, I did a Google search and this Google search says, yeah, yeah you can’t change it. It’s horrible.

Michael Coté: That’s interesting because I think messing around with your Desktop configuration is one of the better entrees into learning about computers, because it’s never easy. But you’ll learn to like explore the computer right like just –

John Willis: I did actually learn about the whole Windows 7. I actually know where the screen — I mean there is all sorts of stuff I want to know but I –

Michael Coté: You basically like walk every tree through the UI if possible.

John Willis: So the lesson I learned always Google something first, no matter how — I think, it was like being dated by my son. He was like Dad — I can do this, I can do this, son. But hey, I got some really, really huge news.

Michael Coté: What’s that?

John Willis: Bigger than anything ever. I left Axon when I was like 25-years-old. So I have been an independent consultant for 25 years, right? For 25 years I never had a company buy me a computer. You know what I get on Monday?

Michael Coté: Are you getting a Mac?

John Willis: You got it, baby!

Michael Coté: Sorry, are you getting a MacBook Pro or an Air? What are you going to get?

John Willis: No, not the Air, I am going to get the MacBook Pro.

Michael Coté: Oh, that would be exciting. Well, you know, John, I have an excellent article that’s basically like surviving the first 100 days of the Mac.

John Willis: Oh, really, I need that for sure.

Michael Coté: I am kind of overstating it, but it’s more or less like the — like I sat down because people asked me this a lot. So I got a Mac, I am a Windows person like what do I do. So I kind of wrote up something that’s sort of like the way I used my Mac for day-to-day work essentially, and it doesn’t really have Windows equivalent season, but it is.

John Willis: Just your advice on the iPhone when I got it, it was like you know what apps to get and all, that was like real, so yeah.

Michael Coté: Yeah, well that’s exciting to get a Mac.

John Willis: I know, well to get a computer, I have to buy myself, I mean I don’t even know that. I was complaining about my Dell about how it doesn’t do this and that, it’s like, well, that won’t be a problem in a couple of weeks and what do you mean? It’s like, oh, we’re going to give you a — why? That’s better than the offer, that’s better than the job, somebody actually buy me a computer, my goodness1

Michael Coté: So is this like the fist Mac, you ever going to get?

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Wow! That is interesting. From sleeping on crest to MacBook Pro.

John Willis: Yeah, I get a fun at 56:22. Yeah, that’s a good introduction if I do write a article that might be joke.

Michael Coté: You know what while we are on the topic of Apple, I just want to mention that from my birthday which was the 1st of January, my wife Kim got me one of the new iPhones, the iPhone 3GS and I’ve been complaining about the iPhone 3G that I had, and so far this has fixed all of my complain problems essentially. And this is like a love-hate sort of thing where it’s a sort of like, the old iPhone I had. It just got to that point, like all computers do or it just gets crudded up and things are slow and stuff crashes all the time.

You know whatever, I don’t really care, why, or like if it’s my fault, all that matter is that it was happening.

And it basically made me start to really hate my iPhone, because there were things which just crashed all the time and it was slow but — now that I have got this new phone, and I don’t know just because it is a new phone, so it’s got like the new OS, Operating System install and everything on it. Or it’s probably more than it has; a better processor and more memory and stuff like that, but man, it’s fantastic having this new phone.

It’s just like — it’s as good as I remember the iPhone being when I first got it, which is like good for Apple for making us give them extra money to put out with their crappy products but –

John Willis: Oh, you had a surprise party, right?

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s right. I did that was really fun.

John Willis: Were you surprised?

Michael Coté: Oh, totally.

John Willis: Okay, I got an invitation from Kim’s, I thought it was — it was like right after January 1st, what was it?

Michael Coté: Yeah, it was on the 2nd I think.

John Willis: 2nd yeah. I would have used the 58:02. You were probably like what the hell is he doing here?

Michael Coté: No, it was great like, the nice thing about the surprise parties, Kim has only done two, but the nice thing about parties that Kim orchestrates is that she orders — she invites like friends from all the different silos that I and we have.

John Willis: Yeah that’s cool.

Michael Coté: There might be little clicks of people that hang out like you know there is the BMC work friends and then there is like the people I know through RedMonk and then there is the people I know through Kim and so forth and so on. And the people I know from my college days. I usually hang out with those people in little silos, but whenever we have a larger party they all come together which is, it’s always fun.

John Willis: We are going to party like it’s 1999 on January 29 till 30th, right?

Michael Coté: That’s right. Absolutely! So we are topping an hour here, do you want to keep going or do you want to wrap it up, John?

John Willis: I don’t think I have anything more, we’ve covered a lot.

Michael Coté: I have a ton of links that I will put it into, we didn’t get to it. There are things like GroundWork had some new customer stuff and they said they’ve grown in customers that will put a link too, and our friends over here in Austin Spiceworks raised 16 million in a round C, and they’ve got new numbers as far as adoption and things like that.

John Willis: It was you or who said this, somebody said they are like the Facebook, or enterprise systems manager.

Michael Coté: Yeah, well that’s their line that they’ve made.

John Willis: Is that their deal, okay? I don’t know I can take a look at those guys again.

Michael Coté: Now those guys are — to think about Spiceworks is I mean one, they are just a good company to start with, and two, they are — and I have mentioned this before. I mean, I think they are really — they are trying to go up market this year and you’ll see them with this extra funding that they have and just with the positioning that they have. I mean, I think they are going to spend a lot more time, rather than growing their community, only growing their community so to speak.

I think they are going to spend a lot more time on product management new features and trying to — they are going to try to grow their community through more enterprisy features and things like that in addition to what they are already doing. Which I think will be interesting for consumers of this, people like myself, but also people who are in the lower, the sort of lower rung of the monitoring and sort of basic asset management, and even helpdesk.

Basically people who are in the medium IT management area, as Spiceworks sort of sets their sites on larger installed-bases, and if they can manage moving to that area they have a pretty compelling offering. So that’ll be an interesting force in 2010.

And also, I mean to be frank, I mean there is got to be lots of companies looking at them as far as buying them, because they are — they have many different phenomenal assets. I am not only saying — well, hopefully, I am not only saying that, because they are a client, but they are really interesting. So we’ll see what happens this year.

John Willis: (Voice Overlap) why do people say to be frank?

Michael Coté: To be frank, I think you are right, this reminds me of –

John Willis: Why are they to be like Bill or BigTom(ph)?

Michael Coté: Yeah. Oh! Why is it frank? I don’t know. May be it’s because the Germans were franks, right? So may it’s to be Germanic, which is sort of to be serious. I bet I am just totally making that up. I am sorry for that joke.

John Willis: It sounds good though.

Michael Coté: But yes, this reminds me of a great like, that author who — I guessed he killed himself David Foster Wallace. He has this great video I came across, where he discusses the use of the word per se, and why it’s terrible when you use the phrase per se, I’ll have to put a link to that video because it’s hilarious to see him like — I don’t want to say mathematically, because he is not a math guy, but very linguistically, and like very rightly going through why per se is a total waste of a phrase to use. But it fits in with like, why people say let me be frank, as if like, well, what were you being before, were you just screwing around with me?

John Willis: Did I tell you that one my friend he works for IBM, and he has taken all the large group to manage in India. So he tells his great stories about how, like all these idioms that he normally uses that he never realizes, he is always getting burned out. Like he’ll say, a guy, you’ll be in a con call, and so we really have to round up the wagon and circle around.

And then, like two hours later one of the guys will call like Mr., Mr. we didn’t really quite understand circle the wagons, what should we do?

Michael Coté: That’s right, and then there is some stuff like you had your cloudy awards, I’ll put a link to that.

John Willis: Oh! That’s right, Cloudy awards, yeah.

Michael Coté: Thanks for the little RedMonk node and there is an excellent post that Stephen O’Grady, one of the RedMonk guys also commented on from Tim Bray, that’s sort of like, what is it? There’s always the sentiment that Enterprise Software is a big bowl of crap and as Tim Bray titles his post that we are doing it wrong. And usually, this is just the cliché trite write-up of this problem, it’s very real, but commenting on it gets boring. But I think Tim Bray manages to have a breath of fresh air, as they say, for this sort of idea.

I think it’s kind of worst taking a look at just to kind of see the way, that he phrases what’s kind of going wrong there, and they both have some other links in there, like quest 01:03:21 which you might remember from (Voice Overlap).

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: And some things here and there. And then also I should mention, Tivoli Pulse, February 22nd.

John Willis: Yeah, I am hoping, I can go to that.

Michael Coté: As the VP of Services and Training, I mean it seems like the kind of thing. I guess maybe you are not 1:03:40 for partnerships. But it definitely – it’s worth going to.

John Willis: Yeah, well, I’d like to go.

Michael Coté: With that, there’ll be a bunch more of links that we didn’t get to. But I think that takes care of our back-log for the past 12 months.

John Willis: For 2007, or 2009, yeah, good (Voice Overlap) 2009.

Michael Coté: And next week, we’ll have next co-host from OpsCode on.

John Willis: Yeah, that’s right, he is a lot smarter than the guy.

Michael Coté: Oh! There is one last thing. I think you should tell people about, the gifts that you got your kids, having to do with rock bands and things like that.

John Willis: Oh! Yeah, that’s very cool. Sorry! So I’ve got you the little caroler, I’ll take my foot out of my mouth or whatever it is.

Michael Coté: See this is (Voice Overlap) because that’s the whole point.

John Willis: I know you, don’t you think I have figured this out in two years. You set me up to get me all excited about some idea. But yeah, so I have gone record and said that I would never do guitar hero, and so we got — one of our boys got the Xbox 360 for Christmas and my wife went ahead and slipped in a rock band, Beatles rock band.

Michael Coté: And I love the way you sort of like solved the problem, that you had with this.

John Willis: Well, yes, so –

Michael Coté: The whole thing was to give more background that — you were kind of — I remember you had some post, right? Where it’s basically like you shouldn’t play guitar hero, you should play real guitar.

John Willis: That’s right, correct!

Michael Coté: Which I think is perfectly valid, and you figured out an excellent sort of –

John Willis: Oh! I didn’t want my kids spend like three hours a night playing guitar hero when they could have been spending three hours a night playing real guitar.

Michael Coté: Right, right, exactly which makes sense. So now, that you have rock band but what did you do to make sure that doesn’t happen?

John Willis: Well, so unfortunately it was actually kind of serendipitous, because the rock band actually comes with a microphone, drum set and a bass guitar. So bass guitar, I can handle. So I am kind of slipping back or black slide, and I guess. But I only play the drums or sync, I don’t play the bass guitar.

Michael Coté: So you have a rock band without the guitar.

John Willis: Actually yes, so well, you could either play it as bass or play it as guitar. So I concludely restrict usage of it as a guitar.

Michael Coté: That’s awesome!

John Willis: So I am selecting – I’d like to figure out how to break a code, disable the guitar option, but I don’t know, I don’t think I can probably do.

Michael Coté: As a totally un-music oriented person, my understanding of the bass is the only thing you need to do to be a successful bass player is always look bored.

John Willis: Yeah, that’s right.

Michael Coté: Like basically, if you are playing the bass and you look bored out of your mind, you are perfect!

John Willis: Yeah, that’s right. It’s final tad version. But yeah, I still know, it’s a blast, what’s actually really fun is the singing. And the drums are actually drums and they actually have to keep the beat.

People would argue that the eye-hand coordination of playing guitar and guitar hero is a good thing, but again, if you don’t put two or three hours a day into something that’s –

Michael Coté: It might as well be a real guitar, right?

John Willis: But actually you are, there are patterns and you are — actually I have got my little guy and he is — so you are actually really being playing pattern, and from the singing it’s even better because my older son is a little bit of a good singer. And you have to kind of follow with your voice. I didn’t realize I had this. So your voice is an instrument in the game and you have to — they give you the pitch and you’ve got to follow the pitch to get –

Michael Coté: Oh! Yeah, that’s right.

John Willis: It sounds great.

Michael Coté: It sounds like fun. Well, on that note, I think all I can say to everyone is, don’t stop believing. And we’ll see everyone next week.

Disclosure: several folks mentioned above and in the podcast are clients, see RedMonk clients list.

In this tragically short podcast – power went off in my neighborhood – John Willis, Mark Hinkle, and myself discuss the upcoming OpsCamp in Austin, on Jan 30th, 2010. You should come, it’ll be pretty rad.

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, short as they are:

• OpsCamp in Austin – “everyone interested in cloud and management” – we talk about the location and the area – what the agenda and topics might look like.
• William’s taxonomy of cloud benefits fits in here.
• Then the power in my neighborhood cut out. Thanks cloud metaphor!

Disclosure: Zenoss, where Mark works, is a client. See the RedMonk client list for other relevant client.

Recently, I sat down with IBM’s Phil Fritz to talk about Tivoli Live – he’s the product manager for the service. We start out with a discussion of what Tivoli Live is, the types of things it monitors, services it offers (like reporting) how the SaaS angle works, the types of users they’re seeing so far, and what we can expect in the Tivoli Live roadmap. After we lay that ground work, we get into a brief, but thorough demo of Tivoli Live, from logging in, to looking at the monitored infrastructure, to browsing the available reports.

And, if you’re interested in more, check out my initial write-up of Tivoli Live from late November.

Interview

Transcript

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! Here we are in the Austin Tivoli offices to talk about one of the new releases that’s come out pretty much towards the end of 2009 and that’s the Tivoli Live offering that IBM has come out with. To go over that, we have a guest with ourselves. Would you like you introduce yourself?

Phil Fritz: Sure, my name is Phil Fritz. I’m a product manager in Tivoli and one of my responsibilities is the new IBM Tivoli Live Monitoring services that we just announced.

So what we’ve done essentially with Tivoli Live Monitoring is that we took our portfolio for resources in application monitoring, we were using the same software that we sell on premise for customers that have been using in the enterprise and essentially partnered with our colleagues in GTS to made this software available over the web using a monthly subscription model.

So really the differences are more in terms of the business model, the subscription, and the customer experience in using it as opposed to new technology. So we are really working off of our existing software offering. So we haven’t dumbed it down or tweaked it in any way shape or form from a functionality perspective.

Instead, what we are doing is hosting the management servers and the infrastructure, allowing customers to sign up for a certain monthly fee, and they can download the monitoring agents and instrument them to talk back to our hosted servers.

Michael Coté: It’s kind of like air diagrams: it sounds like essentially you’re hosting the – I always call it the “brains,” but – sort of the central part of the monitoring platform somewhere in the cloud or on your servers and essentially someone might have stuff behind the firewall they want to monitor and so there’s agents that they download or some little piece of software depending on if its agent or agentless.

Phil Fritz: Right.

Michael Coté: But there is a piece of software that they download behind their firewall that basically talks to the “brains” in the cloud if you will.

Phil Fritz: So there’s three essential services we offer as part of Tivoli Live Monitoring services, so you described two of them very well. There’s what we call out “touchless” or “agentless” service, which is our technology for downloading a data collector that can reside in your environment, but we don’t have to touch or reside on every single server. We collect data, really availability information more than anything else, things that are available natively the operating system or a network device you are trying to monitor.

So from a customer perspective, you only really need to download one thing and they have pretty good visibility – is it up, is it down, back in to he service.

The second service we offer is our Distributed Monitoring Services and those already using the agent-based technology. The difference there is that we do have to deploy those agents of data collectors on each device you want to monitor. The benefit is you get much richer set of data, much deeper information that you would that while using the agentless as well as you get the ability to automate.

So you can actually take actions on the computer. So if it is something like deleting temp files to make more capacity available on that machine or actually recycling that machine to – use that time auto condition if it’s not working in -

Michael Coté: I always call it the “problem fix.”

Phil Fritz: – exactly, reboot, and restore. So anyway that’s the tradeoff, is that you do have to deploy them locally but you get much more powerful automation functionality out of that.

There is third service we call Performance Services, which is a tool that does historical reporting and analysis to help you with capacity planning.

Michael Coté: For people who are more familiar with Tivoli, how does GTS fit into this?

Phil Fritz: Well, GTS fits in to this in lots of interesting way. So for those that may not know Global Technology Services is what we refer to when we say GTS and they offer a variety of capabilities in the service management space. So they do consulting for you, so if you want to start your service management practice these are experts that can come in and help you identify which processes to automate and, obviously, love it if they use Tivoli to automate a lot of those processes.

But they also provide managed services, so that if you wanted IBM to take care of the infrastructure management of your IT we’ve got managed services to do that, to manage your servers, your storage, a lot of different pieces of your infrastructure.

Michael Coté: What exactly are the different things that the data collectors interact with in the different sources – what are the things that get monitored?

Phil Fritz: We have extensive monitoring for Operating Systems at the operating system level. That’s traditionally where a lot of our customers start with, is they’ve got Windows, a variety of flavors of Windows, a variety of flavors of Linux, a variety of flavors of AIX including things like HPUX and other Unix types. So that’s kind of the basic starting point as well as some simple network devices.

Michael Coté: Great.

Phil Fritz: — be able to ping things, capture SNMP traffic, things like that, so the basic up and down. We also have monitoring available for a lot of Microsoft applications as well. So things like SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, BizTalk, what we see in mid-range business is just a variety of applications in that area and also some middleware. So web servers, JBoss things like that, thing of that nature, WebSphere are obviously, the major players there.

Then finally we also have some packaged applications like SAP. So if you are running some mid-ranged servers with SAP those are things that we’ve got available.

Michael Coté: Right. Tivoli is usually thought of as a big enterprise thing that you’ve got teams of people running it and taking care of it, and yet your guys are targeting this at the mid-market?

Phil Fritz: Right.

Michael Coté: What are other aspects that you’ve changed around a little bit as far as whether it’s sort of the pricing that you have or just various other aspects that fit for the mid-market?

Phil Fritz: So first of all, the pricing is the biggest part of it; the model as well as the price point. So as I said, I mentioned we offer a fixed configuration and part of the service delivery is structured in a way to make the price points and the model, the monthly model – that’s the first major elements that we’ve done.

The other things what we’ve done is we’ve put a lot of investment around self-install scripts for the agents themselves. So when the customer goes to the portal and downloads the agents there is actually a script that helps them deploy that agent without them really getting to know a lot of the details and configures that agent to talk to their private instance of the management server.

So we are really reducing the amount expertise required to get the system up and running and to that there’s also a lot of self-enablement capabilities, a lot of knowledge-base that GTS has developed over time to say, here are the best practices for deploying these pieces and we’re making those all available. As well as all other regular ITM documentation, all of the regular IBM support documentation, all of the tips and tricks for using ITM are that we give to our regular enterprise customers are also available to customers of the services.

The optimizations we’ve done for this environment is really – each instance can support about up to 500 monitored resources and that is, for now, the target. We’ve got in terms of how we offer in terms of conditions of our service.

And that seems to be good number of in terms of number of managed things that we are really targeting for in this space.

Michael Coté: So you are saying that GTS kind of contacted Tivoli as wanting to have this form factor, if you will, the sort of packaged way, this way of selling to the mid-market and I’m curious then since it seems like it was driven by demand that was sort of existing – like how have you seen people been using Tivoli Live, what are the different types of organizations that have been using it?

Phil Fritz: Well we get a pretty wide mix of customers across a variety of industries sectors. I would say some of the early customers we are talking to on this are in the retail, in the Telco and media spaces. So there is a lot of government interest especially outside the United States for the service.

Typically the situations are again sometimes geographically disperse organizations that may have lots of branch offices or retail offices or manufacturing facilities, government agencies that have responsibility for a certain region or maybe across a country.

Sometimes large enterprises, but at a departmental level that they may not want an enterprise-wide deployment but they will have a particular area or two that they want to — that the service would be an alternative to deploying this off and having the staff then in those places from our GTS partners as well as our Tivoli business partners there’s lots of opportunities to layer on value-add services on top.

So, for example, a lot of Tivoli business partners are very excited about the service, because it allows them to extend their value proposition that they have today like best practices for deploying agents or configuring or reports that they want to add or workspaces that they want to tailor all they way up to even custom agent development, all that kind of activities, all valid, all the stuff they are doing for our software.

Michael Coté: Right, so you can use their agent-builder stuff too.

Phil Fritz: All that stuff is plugged in and then from a GTS perspective there is a set of managed services they can layer on this on top of this is well. So for example for those customers that want off shift management, so I will use Tivoli Live and I’ll watch the alerts from 9 to 5 but I want somebody from 6 to 8 to look at that for me, those are all [there] so it’s a new interesting service models on top of — those are the base services we are going with at the time.

Michael Coté: To the classic IBM model as you kind of alluded to it does get a lot of room for partners and other people to layer things on top of it. So IBM doesn’t have to be the only concerned party involved in that service contract — this service that you providing.

Phil Fritz: Right.

Michael Coté: So just to differentiate it, you guys, Tivoli also have an offering that you can actually run in the cloud all on you own if you want to, on EC2. And can you explain the differences between those two, just so that people don’t get confused?

Phil Fritz: Sure, Amazon has been an important partner to IBM for some time now and we’ve made a variety of our software available through Amazon.

So what we’ve also done is we’ve taken — which is a sub set of what you see in Tivoli Live, which are our base operating system monitoring capability – just base ITM. The agentless is well as agent-based technologies for Linux and Windows and made them available in hourly rate from Amazon.

So the differences between the two is really if you want to use the Tivoli Monitoring capabilities on an hourly basis on Amazon, maybe you have some workload you are running on Amazon and you want to provide some similar monitoring to that we’ve made that available. We find a lot of customers, for example, “Hey! This is a great way of getting instantaneous Tivoli Live,” and came back [with a] credit card out and that can start capturing monitoring information of my EC2 resources.

But if you want applications, databases, and things of that nature for now that’s the differentiator, Tivoli Live offers more capabilities from a monitoring perspective as well as an IBM team behind it, so it’s an IBM datacenter, and there is security you know other concerns, not to say Amazon is not secure or anything like that, but different ways of consuming it.

So we are looking at Software as a Service, Cloud, and Amazon and other varieties or appliances as well. Look there’s a lot of ways to consume software now and we want to make our software available on as many of those delivery vehicles as possible both to satisfying demand as well as to provide choices and look at is this a fast moving market, there’s lots of things coming up, and we want to make sure we are on top of them. We want to make sure we’ve got our experience; we’re touching all these different models so that we can better deliver capabilities to our customers.

Michael Coté: What do you guys see happening in the next twelve months or so? What’s kind of the future of the Tivoli Live stuff, what are you looking at?

Phil Fritz: Well, it’s not just going to be just for monitoring, so there’s a pretty broad set of service management portfolio we’d like to roll out on this. So we haven’t closed any plans yet, but you know absolutely we are looking at other areas of our portfolio like our service desk, for example, adding additional monitoring pieces, a little bit more robustness on some networking pieces as well, asset management, and management things like that. It’s going to be — we’re watching the space very closely, we’re responding to customer demand on this area, and so stay tuned I think around Pulse time we may be hearing a little bit more.

Michael Coté: So sometime near the end of February?

Phil Fritz: End of February, that’s right at our annual conference, known as Pulse.

Michael Coté: Given all of this that we’ve talked about, what’s sort of like the process for finding out more on getting it installed or getting set up with it and just getting Tivoli Live essentially?

Phil Fritz: Well, ultimately it boils down to – we’ve got our [info] available on the web, but contacting your local IBM rep for information, but we’ll be making, obviously, web-based resources available to either how to order it or eventually even — in the future ordering it directly from the web.

Michael Coté: Right, and like you were saying is it month to month terms or are there different contract terms that you sign up for?

Phil Fritz: Well, the billing and the rates are expressed in monthly terms and we’ve got a minimum of 90 days to sign up and typically what we find is customers are more comfortable with yearly contracts or one or two years. And here’s the thing, and I know you’ve talked to this before in your podcast, is the whole the whole CapEx/OpEx discussion is, which is true, what we found is what our customers prefer is on a well known, repeatable OpEx number.

Michael Coté: “Repeatable Ex.”

Phil Fritz: Right, so the budgeting can happen in a more controlled fashion. So that’s kind of the model we’ve seen is we’ve expressed our terms in monthly rates but single, two or two to three year contract terms is typically where our customers like to transact in, so that way they have their repeatable OpEx outlays as it were.

Michael Coté: Well, great well, I appreciate you taking all this time to go over Tivoli Live with us. It’s always – having worked on SaaS stuff in this space before – I always have a soft spot for someone who is trying it out so it was fun talking about it.

Phil Fritz: Well, it was fun to talk about it, so thanks very much for the opportunity.

Demo

Transcript

Michael Coté: Well, now we are going to check out a demo of Tivoli Live which should be pretty fun.

Phil Fritz: What you are seeing here is the actual Tivoli Live Monitoring Service where a customer that has a registered can get started. So from left to right what you’ll see here is a link to the actual Tivoli Monitoring Console, a link to the historical reporting service that we were talking about. A notification system to be able to receive email alerts based off of the alerts we’ve defined in the Tivoli software, as well as a facility for downloading agents. So where typically a customer would first start is, they would go to the screen and download the install packages.

So for example, let’s click on Linux here and what you’ll see here is a variety of catalog elements to download, those Linux monitoring agents, with the self-installed code we were talking about; so again, pretty easy start to the process. Once those agents have been downloaded, they are configured to talk to the console, it’s a fairly simple procedure to login, as you can see I am just going over the web. As part of the on-boarding process, customer will get a set of user IDs and passwords and then they can go ahead and modify and change those, so that their administrator have access to this.

Michael Coté: So they started out by going to just a URL that you guys provide, essentially login in their web browser over the Internet.

Phil Fritz: Exactly! They are just using URL over the web and logging in and voila! What you are getting is a web browser rendition of the Tivoli Enterprise Console for those folks that are familiar with the Tivoli Enterprise Console is really divided into three main areas, which you have as your tree view of your resources and we’ve got — we are at the top of the tree view and you see here the event console, all of the events that we have going on and if you are a particular IT operator, your acknowledged events, events you’ve picked up that you are going to manage.

Of course, red is always a warning statement for us; it says something is wrong, and what you see here are all of the critical events that have come up over the last few hours, and these links actually, once you click on them, will drill down into the actual resource, the actual server, the actual condition that is causing the event.

Michael Coté: You can see that tree expanded there and everything, which sort of exposes the path down to the problem.

Phil Fritz: Exactly! It allows you to drill down precisely to the root of the problem. What you’ll see is obviously the initial value that triggered the condition, what is that currently. That’s important to know because sometimes the condition happens and goes away, when you go check it out, oh, it’s not there anymore. While this is a blank what we have typically here is the knowledge base for the particular user. So this is where the person that defined the monitoring policy can say, hey, this errors happens when we see this application behave this way or we see this operating environment behave this way, so that the non-expert, the non-subject matter expert that does the monitoring, can actually understand the event.

Michael Coté: And then you can use it for some sort of datacenter folklore I guess that these things cause this problem and this is actually okay or it’s not okay, or whatever the custom information associated with some of them is.

Phil Fritz: That’s right. It’s kind of the electronic sticky path. Then you can take an action, right. And here are a variety of pre-configured take-action commands like killing a process or breaking a message, and these can be executed manually or you can tell the system to automatically take these corrective actions as well.

Michael Coté: Alright. So I guess the console must sort of batch up a job that gets in behind the firewall to the data collector or action executor or whatnot to do it for you.

Phil Fritz: You’ve got it; you must have done this before.

Again, we can expand these views, and here, for example, we are using the agent base information to look at in a Linux operating system environment. There is a variety of reports and what we call workspace is each of these windows is a separate workspace. There is a variety of tools that are available to modify these views; we’ve got pie charts and graphs and speedometers and whatever visual representation you’d like to represent the information.

These are all again, lots of data we capture around, the CPU information, disk usage, network process, system information, even users to a certain level, depending on the facilities that operating system makes available for monitoring. So again, as we talked about JMX, SMNP data is all captured here.

Michael Coté: You do have a separate reporting module, but when you are in the console, how much historical information you get access to, when you are looking at these charts and things like that?

Phil Fritz: Well, by default, typically, there is a polling interval of about five minutes and there’s typically about a day’s worth of information on the console itself. There is a pruning policy we do put in place because of the space limitations, but if you want to have that data historically for other purposes, we can make that available to you offsite, but yeah, typically, what you want to be able to capture in the console sort of the immediate problems and threats, and then there’s data that’s kept for longer periods of time. Again, it all depends on what you are collecting, how often you are collecting it, so there’s not a real quick answer but yeah –

Michael Coté: And to the point of what we were talking about earlier, I mean there’s plenty of data warehousing and another stuff, because this is just normal Tivoli Software, we’ll hook into those other systems as well, if that’s something that you need.

Phil Fritz: Absolutely! We also have facilities to be able to extract data for running other types of historical reports if you have your own local tool you want to use.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, and sponsored the above videos. Also, over the years working with him, I’ve gotten to be friend with Phil.

A little while ago, Reductive Lab’s Teyo Tyree was in town to host some Puppet training. I grabbed him for short podcast over some coffee at The Hideout (hence the 80s sound-track).

We talk about what Reductive Labs is up to and the kind of next generation automation that Puppet gets involved in.

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:

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client. See the RedMonk client list for other and related clients mentioned.

This week we’re back with our 2nd (or 3rd depending on how you count ‘em) wacky predictions show. John and I welcome back the wacky predictions panel from last year, Dave Rosenberg and Matt Ray for a loose and fun screed-out of crazy things that might happen, most based on absolutely no good sense, rationality, or anything to indicate that you should taken them seriously.

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:

• We start by review the 2009 wacky predictions (based on show notes), a surprising amount of which came to some form of fruition. I must not have put the wackier ones in the show notes.
• Microsoft kills Windows Mobile. This makes us layout: Microsoft forks Android.
• Microsoft’s retails stores will be successful.
• Amazon spins off a private cloud. As part of this, Dave says IBM gets a a cloud, Coté says Amazon partners with IBM or HP (or Snorkle?) to do a container box cloud.
• VMWare ships a private cloud in a container.
• The cult of the physical, a virtualization backlash.
• Unified computing thing seems popular
• Big competitor to Visio – the rise of hand-drawn diagrams
• Somebody buys Rackspace, Microsoft or Cisco, or VMWare/EMC.
• Dave: Eucalyptus is not going to have a business – something is going to have to have to happen. Cloudera will have a hard time.
• On the NoSQL camp in general: they’ll have to take on traditional BI tools to “have a shot.” Matt says they’ll get co-opted by existing vendors.
• Geo-location causes a mass controversy. Social networking privacy problems.
• RFID tags on everything – CueCat 2.0 with Google scanning code.
• A says revolt against celebrity, reality-tv driven culture. Meat-and-potatoes 2.0 – but John says this is more 2011.
• Return of textile manufacturing to the US…but unfortunately it’ll be domestic robots.
• Buffalo becomes the io mega of the 2010’s.
• Apple won’t do a netbook, but they’ll do a big ass iPod Touch.
• Kazookeylele boot-straps that domestic manufacturing.
• Twitter: gets revenue, coffee machine gets Twitter.
• Google starts to get on thin anti-trust issues.
• Snorkle whacky predictions – Microsoft buys MySQL.
• Either the death of the $500M+ acquisition, or $1B becomes the acquisition floor.
• BMC buys Puppet and Chef both. Cisco buys lots of stuff, as does IBM. HP gets acquired.
• Someone tries to acquire Canonical, doesn’t happen – then goes to CentOS.

Full Transcript

(As this recording was 4 folks, one on a phone line, the transcript is not perfect, but it’s certainly more than good enough. –Coté)

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody! It’s the 11th of December, 2009. This is the annual IT Management & Cloud Podcast, Wacky Predictions episode. This is one of your regular co-hosts, Michael Coté, available at peopleoverprocess.com. We have got a giant roster relatively, not that they’re tall, but there is a large quantity of people. Why don’t we start with the other usual regular co-host, phoning in, as it were?

John Willis: That would be John M. Willis at JohnMWillis.com.

Michael Coté: How about the pulled pork guy?

Dave Rosenberg: Dave Rosenberg over here. I am on cnet.com/software-interrupted.

Michael Coté: I think it’s worth mentioning that between now and the past, you are also in the hoodie business, right?

Dave Rosenberg: Yes, as a matter of fact, I make most of my money these days selling hooded sweatshirt on the streets of San Francisco. It’s kind of a sad list, it’s really what happened.

Michael Coté: Well, I mean, if you were going to sell one piece of apparel in the Bay area, I think that’s what makes them a millionaire.

John Willis: Exactly. That’s what I am working towards.

Michael Coté: And how about my fellow Austinite?

Matt Ray: This is Matt Ray, I am at LeastResistance.net. I am the guy from Zenoss.

Michael Coté: So we had the same panel last year to go over our Wacky Predictions, and just to — I mean, essentially what we are going to do here is kind of revisit the ones we remember from last year, with the excellent photographic memories that we all have. And then I think we are going to lay out what our Wacky Predictions are for 2010.

Just to set the baseline, essentially the idea, the reason we call it Wacky, not only because we like to use silly words, but it’s fine and enjoyable to have sort of like sane, reasonable predictions of things that are going to happen, but it starts to be a lot more enjoyable when you just kind of throw all care to the wind and just go crazy and have wacky predictions. So we will probably have a mix of the two of those.

But I think last year we had a good time just going nuts, like we probably predicted all sorts of three-letter companies buying each other and crazy things like that. But that’s kind of what’s going on there.

So without further ado, although I would love to hear more about the delicious pulled pork sandwich Dave ate earlier today.

Dave Rosenberg: Weren’t we wrong on very prediction last year?

Michael Coté: Yeah.

John Willis: I think so, I think so.

Dave Rosenberg: Except for the Open Source startups’ one, where there was some consolidation, because we did see that, but not –

Michael Coté: I will put a link in the show notes to last year, and let me read the way that we summarized it. This was before the wonderful world of transcription, so who knows what we actually said. But our first one was, Apple launches its own Cloud, which I don’t think that really happened. Let’s see, a net celebrity lives off their iPhone for a year.

Male Speaker: Who cares?

Michael Coté: What about like Ashton Kutcher in the Twitter link, does that count?

Male Speaker: He is like a BlackBerry guy, isn’t he?

Dave Rosenberg: Well, there was Twitter, maybe we just used the word iPhone when we should have used the word Twitter.

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Male Speaker: Twitter.

Dave Rosenberg: I am going to say we were right on that one.

Male Speaker: We were right. I take it.

Dave Rosenberg: We got the US government right. US government website is getting the IT (?) — I think we couldn’t have been more right on that one.

John Willis: That’s right, absolutely.

Michael Coté: To add some commentary, and John and I have talked about this in a couple of episodes, like I have been shocked at like how hip the U.S. government is to these crazy new technologies, all this Clouds. Now, I don’t know if they are actually using it, or if it’s just an excuse to build more $18 million Drupal sites and things like that, but at least there is a lot of conferences and interests that they are having. So that’s kind of interesting. Well, we are getting smarter as we go down this list. I am feeling charged. Then we had, let’s see, Amazon starts a marketplace for virtual goods.

Male Speaker: Way off. We missed that one, big time.

Michael Coté: Yeah. And a major Cloud data break occurs. Well, we did have the Sidekick thing, which for the Cloud apologist was not correctly categorized as a Cloud thing, but certainly in the news was –

Male Speaker: But we had downtime from Cloud services as well as services that come in the Cloud.

Male Speaker: Rack space.

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Male Speaker: Rack space, that’s some huge –

Male Speaker: Amazon, Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, Azure was out for 22 hours.

Male Speaker: Some Gmail outages.

Male Speaker: Gmail, there you go, so we were right on that one.

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Male Speaker: Fantastic!

Male Speaker: We were more right on that one than we had originally thought even.

Michael Coté: And then Google buys Yahoo! or maybe Viacom.

Male Speaker: Or whatever.

Male Speaker: Or something. And instead, if I remember, they bought some company that lets you edit text in tangent, AppJet or whatever.

Male Speaker: Is there a that.

Michael Coté: There you go.

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Although there was NBC buying — or Comcast buying NBC, that’s exciting, in a, that kind of crap never works kind of way. It sort of like brings up like the old Time Warner-AOL thing, which –

Male Speaker: — which would be the converse of that, Time Warner finally got rid of AOL.

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I guess, it did sort of bring the creation of Firefox. So maybe we will get some good out of it, we will see.

Then open source startups begin to consolidate as they miss numbers. There was, I guess, some amount of that. This happened.

Male Speaker: It happened.

Michael Coté: There’s been a massive amount of hand ringing about open source stuff being — I don’t know, sort of a valid business model for startups I guess.

Male Speaker: Well, I think they missed numbers, so the IT management space clearly hectic (?) but SpringSource in to — I mean, I think we were dead-on there, right?

Michael Coté: I guess so. These predictions aren’t so wacky. Maybe we’ll call them the sane predictions. Then we had, let’s see, the return of paying for software, even at a low cost.

Male Speaker: We predicted the App Store, we’re awesome.

Michael Coté: I think that was a bit — the future is going to look a lot like the past kind of prediction.

Male Speaker: Oh darn, I thought that one would have been real good, okay.

Michael Coté: Yeah. And then Amazon buys DHL. Who came up with that one?

Male Speaker: That was me. That was a long shot.

Male Speaker: Wasn’t DHL bankrupt or something?

Michael Coté: Yeah, they were, yeah. It’s still not that far out of the realm of possibility, it really isn’t.

Male Speaker: Are they still bankrupt?

Michael Coté: No.

Male Speaker: They are still around.

Michael Coté: Well, but Amazon’s logistics are so amazing at this point, why would they just not — I guess, why, because they are smarter than to know to get into that kind of business, just like bricks and mortar.

Male Speaker: Well, there is that guy with the whiteboard talking about Brown all the time on TV, what’s that guy’s deal?

Male Speaker: Isn’t he like?

Male Speaker: It doesn’t work for me.

Male Speaker: That guy actually — he got real pissed off at Delta. I don’t know where I saw that, but he was like furious with Delta because they wouldn’t let him sit next to his kids or something like that.

Michael Coté: That guy who does those commercials?

Male Speaker: Yeah, yeah. There is this whole blog thing, where he is like pissed off at Delta, and he will never fly Delta again until they give him a formal apology, and Delta won’t do it. He starts –

Dave Rosenberg: That’s how I feel about those, I am that guy, I am that UPS guy and you screwed me, I feel that way about the sons of bitches at Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco, which is my favorite coffee, but they are such pretentious twats, that I refuse to go there until I get a formal apology from them.

Male Speaker: What did they do?

Dave Rosenberg: If you believe this, they won’t let you take an espresso to go, or what do they call it, a macchiato, whatever, you are not allowed to take the drinks to go, because it might interrupt the experience.

Michael Coté: Here is a non-tech wacky prediction, before we get to the last item. I think in 2010, we are going to see the rise of food fascism, where there is like this like vegan level of like militicism when it comes to like various things about your food, just like you are talking about.

Dave Rosenberg: But that already seems to have passed, because out here it’s always a big thing in the Bay area, all the pseudo-foodies and whatever, but Tony Bourdain and that guy David, from Momofuku, like swat everyone down for being overly pretentious, and it seemed to have worked. I follow the food blogs, because I have such little else in my life.

Michael Coté: Well, maybe us mainstream yokels will –

Dave Rosenberg: That’s what it is. I mean, I can see it’s going to be like barbecue war, but for real, like Texas versus Alabama or whatever.

Michael Coté: That’s right. We’ll get some –

Dave Rosenberg: Everyone else lags behind San Fransisco, so we will get to be foodies next year.

Michael Coté: That’s right. We are already done with that. We are on top of things. Some math. We are bringing it back from like Arkansas. We got bummed out with middle America taking the lead on us, so now it’s drugs again here.

Michael Coté: That’s right, toothless chic that’s what’s it’s all about out there.

Male Speaker: That is absurd, outsider art.

Male Speaker: I will be selling that toothless chic hooded sweatshirt probably of Wednesday the next week.

Michael Coté: That’s right, that’s right. So our last prediction from last year, which I think, this worked out pretty well, is that Netbooks are going to become low cost thin clients. I don’t think anyone phrases them as thin clients, but Netbooks sure are. Like I was just looking over — a post that I was working on before we were recording this, I was validating my anecdotal thing that Netbooks are popular, and they seem to have an increasing — like people are buying that stuff, which is exciting for them, I guess. With that, there’s last year’s predictions. Now, so, who wants to start off with the Wacky Prediction for 2010?

Male Speaker: I got one.

Michael Coté: Alright.

Male Speaker: I say that Microsoft kills Windows Mobile.

Michael Coté: That’s a good one.

Male Speaker: Or not so much kills it, but they make a dramatic change, including the core of what it’s based on.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Yeah it was –

Male Speaker: Based on BlackBerry?

Male Speaker: Yeah. It makes more sense.

Dave Rosenberg: I am pushing for Androids. I mean, I am pushing heavily that Android is the obvious answer, because then they could fork it, which gives Google such — gives the finger to Google in such a huge way, and takes advantage of all the work that Google and Motorola and all these guys have already done.

Michael Coté: Oh Dave, that’s a good one, Microsoft forks Android, there you go.

Dave Rosenberg: That’s number one on the list. Actually, Microsoft would probably fork right Palm Pre instead.

Michael Coté Well, I blogged about this yesterday that I thought — I said Microsoft should buy Palm and at least get Web OS, but a fork of Android is genius, because it’s the ultimate FU.

Male Speaker: Well, that’s why they built the wrong one.

Michael Coté Well, right, exactly. I was talking with some people about Microsoft the other day, and we didn’t get to this part of the conversation, but they were saying, it’s always fun when you get a bunch of like industry gasbags, like myself together, and we talk about Oracle versus IBM, versus Microsoft, and how nice or un-nice those various people are.

People were characterizing Microsoft as very aggressive, though not so much as Oracle and I was thinking like — there’s always like two or three Microsoft products you can bring up, and it totally like brings a dour face over there otherwise very chipper and aggressive face. At the moment Windows Mobile for them, unfortunately, kind of one of those things, and Vista was that thing for a long time.

So yeah, it seems like they want to do something with Mobile; I mean they have to, but man, forking Android, that would be fantastic. Do you guys actually like use Android?

Dave Rosenberg: I did. I got a loaner of the Droid, whatever. And I actually kind of like — I mean, first of all it’s on Verizon, so that means I can make a call, unlike my iPhone, which is useless as a phone in San Francisco, and even in New York it sucked too.

But the thing with the Droid stuff is like, the Operating System is totally usable. The form factor on the Droid is still a little bit off, the keys are a little bit off, but there is a bunch of hacks for a lot of stuff. The challenge that I ran into was that, I wanted to — you can jail break it pretty easily, and people have already gotten the Rootkits on there, but you can’t really hack it. I mean, you can’t really go build an app and go get it on your phone and distribute it widely.

There is a lot of weird intricacies associated with these things, especially with the FCC and the way that it works with the 911 calls and such. So the SDKs, they only let you do certain things. So it’s kind of — it will be interesting to see how Google deals with this, and if someone else comes along and says, well, we are going to be the certified — if they are going to be the rel (?), right, if Google is Linux, and somebody else goes and does the enterprise version, that part I think will be interesting to watch, but I don’t know that there is any money there, unless you are a content provider.

Michael Coté That’s the weird thing about like elder tech companies in the mobile spaces, like Apple aside, they are like so reluctant to get their hands dirty with day-to-day retail operations, like exactly what you are talking about, where whether it’s like being responsible for taxes across 50 states and then the whole globe or whatever. They have got to get over that hump or they are just going to be relegated to being suppliers versus the kind of more — I don’t know, the more dominant face of technology that they are nowadays.

Male Speaker: Correct.

Michael Coté But you know, as a excellent segment, that was one of my segue, using Microsoft, one of my Wacky Predictions, and I have to be honest I think this is more wacky than whatever you said. Microsoft’s retail stores, I think they are going to be phenomenally successful, that’s my Wacky Prediction.

Male Speaker: What are you basing this wack on?

Michael Coté I am basing that on the fact that we are doing wacky predictions.

Male Speaker: I don’t know. The thing that I don’t understand about that is, like if you look at Apple, they sell Apple products, and there is so many vendors that create Windows, or whatever, PCs that run Windows, like how could you know that the one — I don’t know it’s just weird, it seems like a real kick in the nuts to the rest of your licensees when you do something like that. They are not going to have 100 different laptops there, it doesn’t even make sense.

Male Speaker: Isn’t it just HP stuff?

Male Speaker: Is it?

Male Speaker: I think so.

Male Speaker: I don’t know man.

Male Speaker: I only run Ubuntu like John M. Willis.

Michael Coté I mean, you know, they have got Xbox, they have got a lot of like fun hardware. They have got like a $200 wireless keyboard. They have got like 50 different versions of Windows 7, for home desk office use. Like they have a lot of stuff, I don’t know –

Male Speaker: I don’t think that that’s that wacky.

Michael Coté Although, you know, to be fair, I do remember, and Matt Ray might remember this too, like I remember, off 183, that we used to have this Gateway Store, which like languished forever, and there were a couple of — people have tried to do this before, and Apple has been the only one who has really been successful at it.

Male Speaker: Yeah, the Gateway Stores were terribly –

Dave Rosenberg: The cow print, they had the giant cow print. There was one in Colma, which is next to Daly City, which is next to San Francisco, the only –

Male Speaker: What’s that John?

John Willis: I have not even seen a Microsoft store.

Michael Coté Well, I don’t think they have opened up yet, but they are suppose to open by 2010, hence the predictive nature of the prediction.

John Willis: Hey, I have got one, it’s Cloud related. Amazon spins a Private Cloud.

Michael Coté Now, what would that look like exactly? I mean, don’t they already have Private Clouds?

John Willis: No.

Michael Coté With their VPN madness, I am kind of playing.

John Willis: No, not that. I think kind of a Eucalyptus type thing, where they actually — this is wacky, because everybody would say this is wacky, but it would be cool if they did it in some ways. They actually kind of spun off a version of what they have, to where they actually could sell it as a three tierish or Eucalyptusish, so somebody could take a running version of an Amazon kind of –

Michael Coté I have got to check this out, I noticed that –

Dave Rosenberg: I think IBM is going to do that.

Michael Coté I noticed that there is this –

John Willis: IBM doesn’t have a Cloud, probably tough to do.

Dave Rosenberg: Oh, they will buddy, just you wait.

Michael Coté But check it out, here is what I am saying is like –

John Willis: So you are predicting that IBM is going to have a Cloud in 2010?

Dave Rosenberg: I am.

John Willis: Okay, there you go. That’s a wacky prediction.

Michael Coté See, I think here is the bridge. I have noticed that HP and IBM, they have got these container data centers now, so maybe Amazon like partners with IBM or HP and their Private Cloud is a container that gets shipped to you.

Dave Rosenberg: That’s pretty cool, I like that.

Michael Coté So do you think that Amazon — Amazon is going to do a Private Cloud, but you don’t mean an internal, like an enterprise Cloud, right.

John Willis: No, I think they would create an software that you could run, just like download and run and install in your own enterprise, that would run identical — would be basically modeled identically after the Amazon. It would be a brilliant move if they did it, they would put — they would just pretty much own the Cloud market across the border.

Michael Coté Yeah, they would crush everything.

John Willis: They would, they would, totally.

Dave Rosenberg: Well, I have got a wack prediction to go with that, VMware is going to ship Private Cloud in a tractor trailer, in a container.

Male Speaker: But I think my prediction –

Male Speaker: (Voice Overlap).

Dave Rosenberg: There was big break up there. One of my other predictions was that there is going to be a virtualization backlash.

Michael Coté Do you think there is going to be like the cult of the physical?

Dave Rosenberg: I do, yeah.

Michael Coté Now, why is there going to be a backlash, lay out the foundation for us?

Dave Rosenberg: I think somewhere down the line, just like — I don’t if you saw Savio Rodrigues did the math on Linux versus Windows running on Amazon, and Windows actually came out to be cheaper. I think that with the new chips, I think Intel is going to come out with a chip that’s going to end up being — it’s going to be cheaper and easier to just run your own — either run it in a data center, or run it in your own infrastructure, then it’s going to be to bother with virtualization, you are just better off getting more machines.

John Willis: So you wouldn’t run virtualization in your own environment?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, you will just say, forget it, I will just run these cheapo, super cheapo blades, or these multi-multi-core chips, and just say, forget the virtualization software, because it slows everything down.

Michael Coté Hey, it’s wacky. Come on, it’s wacky.

John Willis: Yeah, it’s wacky, but the problem is they need a foundation model to do the provisioning then, right?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, but they will solve that, there is ways to solve these things.

Michael Coté Those are just small details.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté Basically they will just get a rack of like $100 Netbooks, and duct tape them together with some Ethernet cord, and then, boom, you are set — you use like a diesel generator so you can properly meter the energy consumption.

Dave Rosenberg: Well, I mean, what’s the performance that we need as virtualization, it’s pretty significant. I mean, I think you get a lot more out of the resource, but performance side is better than 25%. And so somewhere down the line — like I have looked at this a pretty good amount to try and figure out why — people keep using more and more virtualization, because they think they are getting more out of their resources. They are using less physical space with virtualization, they are not actually getting more computing power in the whole thing. So I don’t know, it’s a wacky one.

John Willis: Actually, we need to cut you off, because that’s not too wacky actually.

Male Speaker: Alright, I’ll stop, that’s a business model. Somebody call Sand Hill Road and tell him I will be right down.

John Willis: No, because actually, I mean that fits with this whole commoditization where I think there is going to be a pullback from public cloud to private cloud, because the hardware is just going to be so — I mean, pod based, and these kind of small versions of shipping containers, and I think that it’s going to — I think all the value that we have today with Public Clouds are going to kind of swing back to private infrastructure.

Michael Coté: On that topic let me ask you guys this, having come from the IBM Systems and Technology Analysts Summit this week, the hardware people. They were like really big on this unified computing sort of thing, their version of it was integrated computing, if you will. And that kind of sounds like a little bit of what you are getting at John is that, you get these kind of specialized boxes, if you will, whether they are sort of Private Cloud boxes, or the kind of like the duct taped Netbooks or whatever, and for some reason, I don’t know, you get these more integrated devices instead of generic ones.

So anyways, we had some connection problem there, but let me re-summarize. I was just saying, over at the IBM event, they were all onto this like integrated unified computing thing, like what is that, the Cisco unified compute box.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, UCS.

Michael Coté: Is that kind of what you guys are getting to?

Dave Rosenberg: That’s some hot stuff. I mean, like two years ago I would have said that, that was just so stupid, like why wouldn’t you just go build the thing, but now it’s like, yeah, maybe it’s okay. What’s happened to me? The sweatshirts.

Michael Coté: So it sounds like you guys like the unified computing idea or integrated or whatever.

John Willis:Well, I don’t, I don’t.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s still a bad model. It’s a bad technical –

John Willis:(Voice Overlap), speaking of non-virtual, but I mean, I think I Dave’s prediction of really going back, using commodity hardware to kind of componentize solutions without virtualization. But I think like what’s going on in Cloud virtualization that you could see more of the physical things turn software based. And I think that there is just some exciting things with virtual switches.

So I don’t know about all the physical hardware coupled together, where I think that we start talking about expanding large clusters of machines, I think you are going to see more of the software handle the kind of — the data as a service, you are going to see the software handle the kind of virtual networking and two type stuff and basic commodity compute model.

Dave Rosenberg: I have got another wacky one for you. I think there is going to be a competitor to Visio.

Michael Coté: Visio, like the Microsoft diagram tool?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think that that’s going to be a big one.

Matt Ray: How about OmniGraffle, cross-platform OmniGraffle? You heard it here first.

Michael Coté: OmniGraffle?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah. I don’t know, but I mean a meaningful one. If you look at like — everything still looks like Visio. Like you look at any of this Cloud crap, or any of these like DIY, put your infrastructure together, it still looks like Visio, and it looks like people are using Visio for it.

Michael Coté: I think what’s going to happen is there is going to be people who use paper and pen and scanners. HP is going to spend a lot of money to promote scanner use again, and everything is going to be hand diagrammed. It’s going to be like the shiny round cornered drop shadow thing that’s popular in diagrams now, instead it’s going to be like, dude, if you don’t have hand drawn diagrams, obviously you are not technologically innovative.

Matt Ray: I love it. That’s good.

John Willis:So you need to go back to calculators too.

Matt Ray: Those pens, where you draw on the paper and it’s automatically put on your screen, don’t you have one of those?

Michael Coté: I actually have two of those. I have a really old one.

Matt Ray: And how has that taken off?

Michael Coté: Oh, it was fantastic when I was on Windows, and then — and pardon my mini rant here, I am like paper to image things. But all of those things never work on Mac. And you would think, if there is this cliché that creative people use Mac, not myself included, then wouldn’t that be your primary audience? But no, these pens are always only Windows compatible. And actually I have got this Logitech I/O pen, and then at the Silverlight 3 launch event, I got this other thing called Papershow, and I haven’t — despite of having a Vista box, I haven’t even tried it yet. So there you go, hand drawn diagrams. We are set.

John Willis:I think somebody buys RockSpace next year.

Matt Ray: I think you are right, Microsoft.

John Willis:Those are still wacky.

Matt Ray: But let’s go with Microsoft is going to buy it, or somebody like that. I mean, who needs to own that? I think Microsoft. It won’t be IBM.

Michael Coté: Why not?

Matt Ray: Because they have data centers. They are not going to buy one that they –

John Willis:Cisco.

Matt Ray: Cisco, I think, is a decent possibility, yeah.

John Willis:Or VMware, VMC maybe, I don’t know, VMC, VMware

Matt Ray: VMC is a good possibility too. But I don’t think that that’s wacky. I think that’s a good one.

Michael Coté: How about that, son of a bitch, maybe we will be right again.

Male Speaker: What about — let’s go for some of the less popular things.

John Willis:(Voice Overlap).

Male Speaker: I am going to give you two that are not going to necessarily go over well. First one is that I think Eucalyptus is not going to have a business, as much as I like that. And I don’t think they will go out of business, but I think something has to happen. And I think that Cloudera is going to have a hard time next year. I think they are not going to be the belle of the ball that they were this year. I support those guys and I am friends with them, but I just think that it’s been a little bit too easy thus far, and it can’t go on forever.

Male Speaker: Yeah. You know, I was just talking with someone about Cloudera this morning, and it seems like the core problem they have at the moment is sort of like, it sounds really — it’s kind of — when was it that someone asked Kennedy like the — Edward Kennedy why he wanted to run for President and he didn’t really have an answer. It seems like this is kind of like the same dilemma is like, so, we got all this wacky technology and we can sort of like do — we can do analytics and big data stuff cheaper and more faster than we ever could.

And then the question is, so what are we going to do with it? And it seems like that’s sort of like the challenge for like Hadoop and big data people in Cloudera, to go out there and be like, hey, all these boring vertical industries, here is what you can actually do for it, besides like Facebook things.

Male Speaker: Which, will lead in to the NoSQL, I know this is one of John M. Willis’ favorite topics, but I don’t think — I think all those things are going to be dead. They are going to just become crappy, little open source utilities?

John Willis:I don’t think what the — I think that — I don’t know, I think like the TVs and the ones that are gone, I think those are better, those seem to be no-brainers.

Male Speaker: You think those are businesses — I mean, that’s the –

John Willis:Yeah. I mean, the business –

Male Speaker: Because that’s where you are getting it. You are getting it in business versus a project.

Male Speaker: A project could be successful that’s not a business.

John Willis:There are corporations, like I have talked to Deutsche Bank, this idea being able to process data at this scale, the need is there, and the out of the box tools. Here is the prediction. I think that if the NoSQL has a shot, it’s first going to have — in the enterprise, it’s going to have to take on the traditional overblown. That’s where they got to win.

Male Speaker: My prediction is, I think they’ll get co-opted by existing vendors. Rather than somebody else break through, it’ll just be like, hey look, IBM offers CouchDB support now.

Male Speaker: Well, IBM has got a problem. The problem with IBM doing stuff like Hadoop and stuff like that is, especially for BI, the BI players are going to have a big problem, Oracle and IBM. They don’t want — that’s a.

Male Speaker: They have to be ever sleek about it and add it as a feature instead of a rival product, so that you continue to have good sales on both, it seems.

Male Speaker: I can hear you, but I lost — I don’t hear Coté anymore. You are back again.

Male Speaker:             [?].

Male Speaker: We have got this fantastic — my prediction for 2010 is –

Male Speaker: Skype.

Male Speaker: Yeah, exactly, Skype is going to continue to be terrible.

Male Speaker: (Voice Overlap) it’s like $2 billion or some shit that this piece of crap is worth.

Male Speaker: Yeah, you know, there is a prediction we didn’t have last year that eBay would spin out Skype, that was like — that’s sort of like one of those like smart consolidation moves that you would never think would happen.

Male Speaker: But more importantly, I would never have predicted that eBay would have bought Skype and not own the IP.

Male Speaker: That was the most insane thing.

Male Speaker: Oh, is that what happened, I didn’t read?

Male Speaker: Yeah.

Male Speaker: Didn’t they lose money on the deal?

Male Speaker: Oh yeah, there has got to be a good prediction in there somewhere to say that somebody else is going to buy something and then not own it. Let’s pick one. Who is that going to be?

Male Speaker: It would be if it would be those guys again, I am getting pretty good at it.

Male Speaker: Well, but I think it’s going to be somebody who dabbles in like — decides to dabble on open source and gets just completely screwed by the GPL or something.

Male Speaker: You know, Cisco has gotten a little GPL port in the past. They might have learned their lesson, but they are one of the few companies around that, like Cisco and EMC, and there is a handful of others who haven’t really — who haven’t sort of gotten their open source stripes, if you will.

Dave Rosenberg: Right, exactly, which we all know how well that works out for everybody.

Michael Coté: Yeah, there is always that strange –

Dave Rosenberg: It only works out for the companies who get acquired; everybody else gets pretty much soused.

Michael Coté: Yeah, you damn Bay area people and your –

Dave Rosenberg: I listen.

Michael Coté: And acquisition like business models.

Dave Rosenberg: All I do all day long is hope for my alma mater to get acquired.

Michael Coté: That’s right. So starting from the less enterprise, back to the wacky stuff, I think in 2010 we are going to have like our first 24-hour multi-week coverage of someone who got killed or otherwise kidnapped or something terrible happened to him, due to like geolocation technologies. Then there’s going to be like big, geolocation is dangerous for your kids, and we should start passing laws like no texting and driving. Like those things where you have the damn cameras that make a beep when you take a picture all the time, in case you are like the up skirt people or whatever.

Matt Ray: In case I am one of them?

Dave Rosenberg: I am not saying anything. I am going to Japan in February, I will make it happen. But again, that’s not that wacky, but it’s like the same thing of like how everybody is rushed to put all this ridiculous — so here’s one, probably not that wacky, but the Facebook privacy thing is going to sooner or later, it’s so bad, that someone is going to bring a massive lawsuit, its got to happen.

Michael Coté: That’s what I am getting at, and that’s why I think it’s more wacky that it hasn’t happened already, because it’s like so easy to stalk people and track people if you wanted to, and I think unfortunately if someone is going to –

Dave Rosenberg: You faded out there again.

Michael Coté: I just stopped talking.

Dave Rosenberg: So I was just going to say, I went on Facebook for the first time in about two months, because I had all these friend requests that were all spam, of course, and I looked at this thing and I am like, what would possibly compel you to have to put this information out there? I mean Twitter is bad enough, but at least it’s only 140 characters and there’s no photos being exposed to the world.

But people I knew from high school are like, I don’t need to know that your kid just took a shit. It’s absurd, and it just looks to me like — it’s like there’s this whole — and this is a weird one and no comments from any of the around this.

So I work for a company that has a lot to do with tattoo art, and I go out and I see kids at Starbucks and these other places with like shit on their forearms, their necks, and whatever else. And all I am thinking is like, I am never going to hire you, because you are a moron, you can’t make a good decision. And that’s going to happen with this Facebook, MySpace crap. It’s inevitable.

Michael Coté: Oh, I got a good complementary one. There’s going to be anti-tattoo discrimination laws passed, how about that?

Dave Rosenberg: That’s pretty wacky. I like it.

Michael Coté: It would be like, this Rosenberg guy didn’t hire me because I had a dumb tattoo on my neck, I am suing.

Dave Rosenberg: Right. I like it.

Matt Ray: You know the military reversed their ban on forearm tattoos last week.

Michael Coté: Really?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, see.

Matt Ray: Yeah, it’s like you weren’t allowed to have tattoos on your arm used for saluting.

Dave Rosenberg: Wow! That’s pretty interesting.

Matt Ray: And they dropped it so they could hit their recruiting numbers.

Michael Coté: That’s a good one.

Dave Rosenberg: That is a good one.

Michael Coté: So alright, another one I was going to think of, again, I think it’s wacky just because I more or like think it would be cool to happen, is I think we are going to have like RFID tags on everyday common items. Like there’s just going to be like a tipping point that’s finally going to happen.

Dave Rosenberg: I have been saying that for years actually and it hasn’t happened. But you saw the Google — what’s those iCode things, they are pushing that again.

Michael Coté: It’s like CueCat 2.0.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Matt Ray: I love my CueCat. I just can’t wait to use it.

John Willis:I got one. Google also has a DNS service.

Michael Coté: Exactly!

Dave Rosenberg: With unlimited use.

Michael Coté: Yeah, maybe. How about Google opens a retail store? Google buys FedEx Kinko’s and uses that as their footprint for retail.

John Willis: That would be cool.

Dave Rosenberg: No, because they are –

John Willis:I always thought Amazon should open up a big, kind of Borders type store that could be like a playground.

Dave Rosenberg: Those aren’t good businesses though. I mean, it’s like Amazon and Google are smarter.

Matt Ray: Yeah, so some other Amazon could (Voice Overlap).

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t make any sense on that, but you know what I wonder about, I kind of think somewhere down the line, there’s going to be some — besides the back lashing on Facebook or whatever else, I like to think that somewhere down the line people are going to realize that not everyone needs to be famous, and there’s going to be a backlash, an actual reality backlash. Like the people who broke in to the President’s dinner or whatever, because they wanted to be famous or the Balloon Boy. I mean, everyone wants to be a spectacle if they can somehow get on Reality TV. It’s like, how about if you just got a goddamn job, finish college, whatever it is. Am I being too practical?
Michael Coté: A return of just like — how would you characterize this?

Dave Rosenberg: Commonsense! Let me just — it’s got to be like a celebrity economy.

Michael Coté: It’s sort of like meat-and-potatoes 2.0, that’s what’s going to happen.

John Willis:You know what, I think you are right, but I think that’s 2011.

Dave Rosenberg: That’s fair. I also think that there’s — here’s a really wacky one. I think manufacturing is going to come back to the US.

Michael Coté: How is that going to happen?

John Willis:I like that one, but go ahead.

Dave Rosenberg: I think it’s going to be not computers necessarily or not electronics, but I think a lot of stuff like — there’s a lot of clothes now that are coming back to the US. There’s a lot of like more sort of higher end luxury goods. There is a lot of brands that are coming back, because the math doesn’t workout anymore to outsource it.

There are certain products, like sneakers and electronics and whatever else, that really it makes a lot more sense to ship them out, but hoodies, t-shirts, or whatever else, jeans, people are willing to even pay a premium I think for American made goods again.

Michael Coté: So you think like return of textile manufacturing it sounds like.

Dave Rosenberg: Something, yeah, some sort of physical part will become important again in the US industry.

Matt Ray: But unfortunately domestic robots.

Dave Rosenberg: Well, yeah, of course. My army, I am sampling my army of robots right now. They are making noodles; I am starting with food.

Michael Coté: I predict that we will have a reprise of the, what was it, ‘Halloween III’ movie with the mask, except it will be with hoodies, starting in the Bay area.

Dave Rosenberg: I am wearing the hoodie as we speak.

Michael Coté: You have got to make sure there’s not some tiny computer in it, rigged up to some explosive device.

Dave Rosenberg: Here’s another one for you. I think that we will see a lot more of that company, Buffalo, you know that company that makes those –

Michael Coté: Oh yeah! They are here in Austin, aren’t they?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think that they are going to become the Iomega of the 2010.

Michael Coté: Iomega, are those zip drive people?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté: You know, I think Buffalo does make pretty good stuff.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s fantastic actually, I have two of them, and they are super high quality, but nobody knows of the company, and it seems like they are ripe for a big marketing effort, and more possibly an acquisition. How about that?

Matt Ray: How about speaking of consumer hardware?

Michael Coté: So we are back from recording, and I think another 2010 prediction, I am finally going to figure how to do this f***ing podcasting shit. Already dismissed as a failure. But you were starting to give us a prediction there Matt Ray.

Matt Ray: So we were doing a consumer hardware, and I was saying that Apple won’t do a Netbook, but they will do a big ass iPod Touch to compete with the Kindle and all that stuff.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah?

Dave Rosenberg: I don’t want that to be true.

Matt Ray: I know, me too.

Michael Coté: I tried to get my wife, Kim, I was going to get her — I had the perfect — I thought the perfect idea for a Christmas present, I was going to get her a Kindle, because she likes reading, and it’s also perfect because then I would have an excuse to buy one to play with.

Dave Rosenberg: A Kindle?

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, the Amazon eBook reader thing.

Dave Rosenberg: Oh yeah, I think you are calling it a Kimdle for her name.

Michael Coté: See, that would be sweet. And then I asked her, what do you think of these Kindles, and the first thing she said, as if anticipating my whole scheme was like, we are not getting one of those.

Matt Ray: So when is her birthday?

Michael Coté: Her birthday is February 4.

Matt Ray: I am just saying, not for Christmas.

Michael Coté: See, that’s why you make the big bucks Matt Ray, because one door closes is another door opening. That’s the way you look at the world.

Dave Rosenberg: And get her early for Christmas.

Michael Coté: Or even better, I can get a Christmas discount maybe, if there is any –

Matt Ray: Oh genius!

Dave Rosenberg: I played with one, I think it’s alright, but I mean it’s like — I kind of like a book, maybe I am crazy.

Michael Coté: The thing for me is, I travel a lot nowadays, and I see my fellow like weary business travelers, the one with the Kindles and I think like, it might be nicer to carry a Kindle instead of a book, because one, books are bulky, and two, I am perpetually at this point where I have got like 50 pages to read in a book, and I don’t want to like take that book with me, because I will finish that in one airplane trip, and then I got to lug this damn book around. But then again it’s also like, maybe I had to spend that $300 on like a nice meal or something instead of a stupid Kindle.

Dave Rosenberg: Dude, I got hoodies out the if you need some action.

Michael Coté: Some hoodie action?

John Willis:Well, I want to get a Kindle when they support books on tape.

Michael Coté: As like a podcast?

Matt Ray: They will play MP3s.
Dave Rosenberg: I saw today there is a resurgence of the Keytar, I think that that’s going to be a big thing next year.

Michael Coté: What the hell is a Keytar?

Dave Rosenberg: It’s like a guitar, but it’s a keyboard. Looks like a guitar but is a keyboard.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah!

John Willis: And you have harmonica on it too, right?

Dave Rosenberg: Well, here’s a wacky one.

John Willis: No.

Dave Rosenberg: What’s that?

John Willis: It has harmonica on it too.

Dave Rosenberg: I think so, yeah.

John Willis: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, that’s like a –

John Willis: Oh that’s cool, yeah.

Dave Rosenberg: I am going to go with – I am going to go –

Michael Coté: Now, was that thing called like a Kazookeylele or something?

Dave Rosenberg: Is it what?

Michael Coté: The YouTube has the video, that’s like the Kazoo hooked up to the banjo. And you have seen this video, and he plays like the final countdown on it. And it’s called like a Kazooajol (?) or something but –

John Willis: Yeah, that’s the thing.

Michael Coté: I think connecting back to one of the earlier predictions; I think that’s what’s going to like bootstrap manufacturing back here in the US. It is going to be like the huge demand for the Kazookeylele.

Matt Ray: That domestic innovation.

Michael Coté: And the only way to meet it will be to have people in like rural Kentucky build it for you because they know what that stuff is suppose to sound like and they –

Matt Ray: They probably already have a big stack of them ready to ship.

Michael Coté: It’s ready to go.

Dave Rosenberg: You came full circle on my manufacturing prediction, it worked.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, there you go.

Dave Rosenberg: Here’s what I — here’s another wacky one. I don’t know if we made this last year, but it would seem obvious that at some point in 2010, Twitter finds revenue.

Michael Coté: That is wacky.

Dave Rosenberg: I know.

Michael Coté: And this basically is revenue that doesn’t include them being bought, right?

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Uh-huh!

Dave Rosenberg: How about that?

Matt Ray: Here’s a wacky prediction. Someone will build Twitter integration to something that has no place having it, like my DVD Player.

Michael Coté: Oh!

Dave Rosenberg: Oh, that’s good. Oh God! Well, I know that it is very into the network management, I am not making network management tool that spits out tweets, like, oh no! I am about to go down. What?

Michael Coté: May be like my coffee machine will twitter me when that new pot of coffee is ready.

Matt Ray: Exactly!

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté: Bringing realization to what was the RFC with the coffee machine.

Matt Ray: I don’t know; it was like.

Michael Coté: So when that’s not slightly so wacky, is I think what with like Chrome coming around. I think Google is going to start to get into some like, I see, anti-trust issues coming up in this year. Because it seems like the Justice Department that we have now is like going crazy with anti-trust stuff in the tech-world. And I mean it wasn’t that — that was like the whole stink up with Microsoft, was basically IE and Netscape and doing things with Java and all sorts of business like that. So it’s sort of thin ice to get onto, once you start making your own browser.

Dave Rosenberg: I agree, and I wrote something — I didn’t — did you guys read the same thing from Eric Schmidt where his answer was like, well, if ours is the best then we should have a 100% and everybody else should have to compete with us.

Michael Coté: Yeah.

Dave Rosenberg: I like the of that.

John Willis: Does that mean that Chrome OS will not be able to support or ship a Chrome browser?

Michael Coté: Ah, there you –

Dave Rosenberg: Probably genius!

Michael Coté: These are problems.

Dave Rosenberg: If I was Microsoft, I would go right back, you are exactly right. I would go right back and.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah, definitely in Europe, if you bundle a media player in that your port not going to work. There is a bad precedent there.

Matt Ray: So any wacky predictions on what’s going to happen to Sun? We hit that last year.

Michael Coté: Oh, we did. Hey! What did we say last year, do you remember?

Matt Ray: I remember that that I said someone who was going to buy them and break them into pieces, and I don’t think Oracle has gotten the hands on it yet.

Michael Coté: Well, they are definitely going to keep OpenOffice, we know that for sure. I mean OpenOffice and Java Effects according to Larry were the crown jewels if I recall. So there is — you know, but yeah, I mean who knows it’s going to — I never know what the hell is going on with this Snorkle thing. It’s just like a continual like roller-coaster of –

Matt Ray: Well, that’s why it needs some wacky predictions.

Michael Coté: Yeah, yeah, alright, alright.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s depressing.

Michael Coté: Okay, I got it; I am going to go crazy wacky. I don’t even know what I am talking. Microsoft buys MySQL from them.

Dave Rosenberg: I don’t know, if I was Microsoft I’d buy like a — well, not but I’d buy like a Zenoss or somebody who can manage Windows machines, it’s not the worst idea.

Michael Coté: Yeah. They did by Opalis or O-P-A-L-I-S today.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah.

Michael Coté: So it’s interesting. We’ll see what happens.

Dave Rosenberg: What about this prediction. I mean, you know, with the Open Source stuff and the Cloud and all those other kinds of things and no one makes money from Cloud except for Amazon. I wonder if there is going to be a VC backlash that will stop funding all these companies. Like right now, if you have Cloud in your presentation, you can pretty much walk in and they’ll hand you some dollars, but it kind of makes me wonder if it’s all going to go sideways.
Michael Coté Well, you know if you throw in Visio in Cloud, you don’t even need to go present to them, they will give you cash.

Dave Rosenberg: I am working on it right now; I will be going to.

Michael Coté You know I am glad you mentioned that, because that was one of the ones that I couldn’t figure out how to phrase in a good way, but it does seem like the VC world is kind of — people are finally looking for it to like, I don’t know, fail or something.

Dave Rosenberg: You know the model has to change.

John Willis: Well, you know and that’s the thing is — a lot of people said this, but I am just saying is that sooner or later, they are going to hit this brick wall where they are going to have to realize, it’s a services world. And they’ve been living on on it. If you look at their investments, you know, it is kind of like you are talking about the Cloud is a good example, I think that if people have they are going to survive with the services, business model and you are just not going to get those multiples in this space anymore. You are going to have to solve it.

Michael Coté You know I think as part of that, how about this for a wacky prediction, it’s sort of like the end of like the half a billion dollar and more like acquisition.

Dave Rosenberg: No, I disagree with that actually, I think people –

Michael Coté 2010 will never (Voice Overlap).

John Willis: Well, again, the wacky predictions, you are right, but –

Dave Rosenberg: No way, I think there is going to be so few valuable commodities that people are going to pay even more form.

Michael Coté Wow! I like that, that’s a good genus prediction there. I mean faces –

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I am going to go the exact opposites.

Michael Coté: It’s just like a billion and above is your entry price for acquisition.

Dave Rosenberg: Well, think about it, because there is so much consolidation, there is really nothing — what can you buy even? There is maybe 100 truly useful — it depends on, obviously, how you look at it if you are a client for technology or adoption or whatever else, but the reason why Spring and JBoss, and everything else got all that dose, because the adoption. I don’t think you can pick 50 companies, or probably even less, probably 25 companies that have that level of adoption and therefore, you have to do it. It has to become meaningful.

Michael Coté There is some sanity that makes sense.

Dave Rosenberg: I hope so.

John Willis: On that, Puppet guys get a whole bunch of money.

Dave Rosenberg: As an advisor to Puppet Group, I can’t possibly comment on that.

John Willis: (Voice Overlap) Well, I am an advisor of the Chef guys and I hope they get loads and loads of money.

Matt Ray: I am going to predict BMC buys both Puppet and Chef.

Dave Rosenberg: Oh, that’s good. That’s good.

Michael Coté And then in classic Petrol Express style that perhaps only Matt Ray can appreciate, they will have them out to the death and then have a third party come in and kill them both.

John Willis: Yeah, there you go.

Michael Coté And they will forever be known as the BMC innovation model.

Dave Rosenberg: So, who do you think is going to be — make some predictions of who’s going to be the big acquirers of the next year. I mean I don’t think VMware has a whole lot more left in them right now.

Matt Ray: Cisco!

Dave Rosenberg: Cisco?

Michael Coté: Yeah, I think that’s your number one person right there.

Dave Rosenberg: They usually are the big one there. But what about — I mean IBM?

Michael Coté: I think IBM is like getting into these — IBM is trying to sell like they are trying to do the thing where like, hey, that looks like a network, so we can apply the same network software to it, and they are going to have to acquire a whole bunch of non-tech companies and specialized tech companies to do that. So they’ll definitely be buying stuff.

Dave Rosenberg: What about Oracle? They haven’t bought anything since the Sun deal started.

Michael Coté: I don’t know. They are probably snake bitten.

Dave Rosenberg: HP?

Michael Coté They got hurt from staring at the Sun too long.

John Willis: I think wacky prediction, HP gets acquired.

Dave Rosenberg: HP gets acquired. I think somebody even tried years ago. I think one of these big guns will try to acquire, but they can’t, and then CentOS and make CentOS to Red Hat.

Michael Coté CentOS, where did that come from?

John Willis: No, I think somebody acquiring CentOS or somebody doing stuff with CentOS is –

Dave Rosenberg: Somebody makes CentOS a business, how is that?

Matt Ray: Because they could call it unbreakable.

John Willis: I would like to do that myself.

Michael Coté I think in our second year of wacky predictions, we have come to a good sort of like — I am not suggesting we necessarily ended now, but I think we have come to a good sort of like rush thing at the end where it’s like the acquisition minute run down, and everything just like blast out, who they think is going to acquire who, and like in the last minute, I think we will have to use that format on going, just as an editorial note over there.

Dave Rosenberg: Whatever works, man?
Michael Coté: How about like Google finally like buys some big company?

Dave Rosenberg: They are not good at it.

Matt Ray: Dell!

Dave Rosenberg: It would be awesome. Let’s put that in there.

Michael Coté: Oh, I am typing that right now.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah. There are no two really more opposite companies than that.

Michael Coté: Oh, yes. That’s a –

Matt Ray: That would be like some picture of some fish trying to eat another fish that’s even that same fish. by Cisco who is buying Dell at the same.

Michael Coté: It sounds like you guys are hot on like acquisitions being a big thing next year.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s an interesting time, because if you start a company right now, everything that you are looking at is pretty — it’s a much longer horizon than it was, I think, in terms of monetization. So you have to be looking out like two years, if you start a company. And so, all the companies that started in like, say, 2006 are kind of getting to the point next year, where they have been around for a while, and they either have to be meaningful or will get acquired. And there is a lot of companies that got started in that timeframe.

Michael Coté: Yeah. Then it is like the crops — there are all sorts of metaphors that you can use, but the crop is ready to harvest, essentially, is what you are saying.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think so. And as I said, it could be adoption like the Spring stuff or it could be fitting into a niche like, again — well a public stop for Chef or any of those other things, where it solves a very specific problem that all of these big vendors have. I don’t know, it seems that the horizon is right. And if I am a big vendor, what the hell do I do to grow? And these guys are so goddamn big at this point, they have such enormous payrolls and responsibilities to shareholders; they have got to figure things out. That’s way it still seems like there are a lot of opportunities for Open Source companies to have big exits to me.

Michael Coté: So essentially circling back to the VC thing, the VC industry gets saved, essentially, is what happens.

Dave Rosenberg: No, I think it consolidates pretty dramatically itself. There is so much money though that nothing has to be forced. People like talk about VC model being screwed up, and it is, but they still have $200 or $300 or $400 millions in the bank. Like well, how long can you really go, if you know that you can run this business for 50 years? Investors expect returns over 10 years.

Michael Coté: It’s kind of like complaining that your private jet has five seats instead of ten.

Dave Rosenberg: Here is another one for you. I am going to predict that there is going to be a challenger to Intellectual Ventures.

Michael Coté: Well, why don’t you explain to people who Intellectual Ventures is?

Dave Rosenberg: Well, they are the firm started by Nathan Myhrvold who buy up patents and they fund a lot of the patent development, and basically, they pay people and vendors and such to build things, and they own the IP for it and they license it out. And a lot of people sort of make it out to be a great saving. I don’t really think it is. It’s a genius business model and somebody else is going to figure that out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see like IBM or somebody else come along and decide that they want to be a big patent house as well, and start really using it to enforce their own technology.

Michael Coté: Just sort of licensing things out as it were.

Matt Ray: Yeah.

Michael Coté Man! Every time I come across like people who do that it’s like a wrong business model.

John Willis:             gets acquired by Gartner.

Dave Rosenberg: How about an international assignment, like Michael Coté takes an international assignment, Australia?

Michael Coté: Oh, Australia! Come on.

Dave Rosenberg: How about that?

Matt Ray: That’s a hot bed of IT. Sorry, Australia.

Dave Rosenberg: You can be Telstra –

Michael Coté: This is more commentary on my American geographic ignorance than anything. But I used to think Australia would be great for like getting into this specific market and then I was talking with Australian people and apparently, it takes like 8- 10 years to get to Asia from Australia. And so it’s kind of like Jesus Christ! This is like you can’t get jack shit anywhere if you live in Australia, it takes forever.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, you are pretty screwed.

Michael Coté: Or New Zealand I guess.

Dave Rosenberg: They are all criminals.

Michael Coté: And my understanding is that New Zealand milk delivery market is ripe for innovation.

Matt Ray: DHL moving in.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I was going to say. It sounds like this acquisition stuff. Everybody but me is going to get rich in 2010. That sounds like the basic — that’s what I am taking away from these whacky productions.

Matt Ray: So, green shoots.

Dave Rosenberg: We should list — if you go to the Open Source companies, they are easiest ones to look at. Over the last couple of years, Alfresco, Matt even just blogged about it today, now sort of too big to be acquired at a number that’s meaningful for the founders. They are about 40 million in revenue and no real –

Michael Coté: Too successful for exit.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah. So how do you exit out of that? Hyperic is gone. So that means that you have got Zenoss and GroundWork or whatever in that space. You’ve got like what was that got acquired for no money. Spring is gone. I mean who else is even sort of meaningful at this point in terms of adoption or usage?

Of course, I can say this, but still the I’d love to see source software to be acquired and the revenue is up and adoption is big. And it seems logical, but who the hell knows. I am trying to think who else would we even talk about. Jaspersoft, business is doing well. Pentaho –

John Willis: (Voice Overlap).

Dave Rosenberg: I mean they started a company finally in the UK there.

John Willis: Yeah.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I don’t know who pays for that. I mean this is the ongoing challenge of being an entrepreneur, same thing with so many other technologies.

Matt Ray: Isn’t RabbitMQ Apache? Maybe that’s the problem.

Dave Rosenberg: No, there is an Apache project but Rabbit is the Java implementation of it.

Matt Ray: Oh, okay.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah. AMQP is the Apache project. I don’t know. I still think we’re going to see, there is lot of stuff like — the other thing like these companies like webappVM and all these other like nichy sort of interesting virtualization companies, they don’t really — I couldn’t even really tell you what they do. They do like one thing that sort of cool, but somebody is going to want to own it.

If I am Microsoft and I am dealing with all that hyper table, hyper browser, whatever the –

John Willis: I think in that space, next year we’ll see a bloodbath players that private cloud based on the Amazonish model.

Michael Coté: Yeah, alright.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, I think that they’re — and they’ll be out of business for 2011, that will be our big prediction next year.

John Willis: Yeah, yeah. Now I agree .

Dave Rosenberg: Well, I’ll give you two more predicted trends for Cloud because I got to jump off shortly here and go box, which is — that’s what I’ll do, I’ll have my first pro-fight in 2010. That will be my – now, I forgot what they were. I got the strike of things that are getting hit in the head.

Michael Coté: Speaking of your boxing. maybe the — I forgot what I was going to say.

Dave Rosenberg: That will be at OSBC next year, there will be a fistfight.

Michael Coté: Oh yeah? The Open Source world gets brutal.

Dave Rosenberg: Yeah, the Open Source battle, it will be like UFC. It’s a great idea. I’m going to go and sell that to Matt and rest of the.

Michael Coté: And then it turns out that much like the grappler in the UFC stuff that license just takes down every one.

Dave Rosenberg: Really, the –

Michael Coté: The only style that can eliminate — it eliminates not really by being stylistic or pretty to look at, but it’s just undefeatable. It’s like trying to argue with a brick.

Matt Ray: It just gets beats up and keeps coming back.

Dave Rosenberg: My Cloud prediction, there are two big trends in funding, I think, we’ll see will be Cloud management and integration tools.

Michael Coté: So how about we wrap up the episode since Dave has to go beat up on people as if we haven’t been giving our good work out here already.

Dave Rosenberg: I have to tell you guys, I had my first — I put a guy down in a TKO about two weeks ago.

Michael Coté: Oh wow! There is a little TKO like letters coming out of his head like in that old game.

Dave Rosenberg: No, but the trainer had to hold him from going down. I got to tell you, it’s so pretty goddamn good.

Matt Ray: And I was trying to pick fights at OSBC.

Dave Rosenberg: I was to use my words instead of my.

Michael Coté: Yeah, especially if your words are tattooed on your fist. So how about we close — so Matt Ray, do you have any predictions you want to close out with.

Matt Ray: I am not going to hire anybody with tattoos on their fists.

Dave Rosenberg: I predict I will get to my 1000 blog posts on CNET, sometime early next year in Q1.

Michael Coté: Alright, and yourself, John Willis, any last predictions?

John Willis: I predict that the IT Management Wacky Predictions gets a sponsor and we can all do this next year here in Austin.

Michael Coté: A video edition. I should think about that.

Dave Rosenberg: It’s when Google buys Dell, they are going to fly it out.

John Willis: That’s right. (Voice Overlap) One really, wacky, wacky stuff through is that we’ll get sponsors.

Michael Coté: Well, that sounds great. Well, I don’t have any more wacky predictions or snide comments. So we better just wrap it up with that. So thanks everyone for joining us this year for the Wacky Predictions. That’s a fun stuff.

John Willis: Awesome!

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

The week after Thanksgiving brings a nice mix of good old fashioned IT Management and cloud computing news: Amazon has two updates, one of which John is very excited about, Tivoli Monitoring expands into the cloud, and John posits the myth of auto-scaling.

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:

• Thanksgiving food – John eats Tofurky, Ginger in Sweet Potatoes is delicious.
• Amazon’s announcements: (1.) adding more regions, for edge/CDN stuff, disaster recovery, or even regional policy and tax “optimization.” (2.) allow you to boot from elastic block storage – a virtual SAN, so you can keep state.
• Sonoa virtual appliance for the mobile cloud, Mobile App Accelerator, and the wider trend of “cloud appliances.”
• John explores the myth of auto-scaling in the cloud. He can’t find anyone out there with a nice turn-key, open source (or otherwise) auto-scaling solution here. The good news is, “pool party is freaking cool as it gets.”
• We go over anecdotal explanations of cloud computing we’ve been giving “civilians.” And, John still loves the Pool Party.
• Tivoli in the Amazon cloud (more from developerWorks) – AMIs ready to go for monitoring. Also, Muglia speaks to System Center for the Cloud.
• Network World’s 10 IT startups to watch – we talk about Conformity and identity management in general; John’s not a fan of the Rivermuse addition.<
• Flightcaster – some clojure open source stuff.
• Submit proposals to Velocity 2010 now! John says most any IT person should attend: there’s plenty of “the future of IT” stuff evolving here. Also, there’ll probably be a devops days during this.

Also, some IT Management & cloud items we didn’t manage to get to in this episode:

• GroundWork virtual appliance.
• CA updates systems management portfolio.
• New ControlTier release.
• Red Hat virtualization management.
• Azure now has Rails, has PHP, and .Net
• Hey, how ’bout that Azure in general? See the Mary Jo round-up. Also, Gordon Haff likes the PaaS now.
• You totally want to become a fan of RedMonk in Facebook!
• Thanks to Sean for the nice review of the podcast!

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as are Microsoft, GroundWork Open Source, and others mentioned: see the RedMonk client list.