Dell held an analyst event in Austin a couple weeks ago (titled “Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era”, or SSVE), coming out strong with its message of transformation and growth via an expansion in the general “enterprise IT” space. This was primarily based on two, traditionally non-Dell lines of business.

The Growth Plan

Our strategy around the efficient enterprise and flexible supply chain continues. We continue to develop and acquire key IP and enhance our sales capabilities. And we’re also narrowing our focus on three key solution domains, namely end user computing, data center and information management and services and all things cloud. Each of these solution domains represent key areas Dell has to win. If FY11 was largely about getting operationally fit, then FY12 is going to be about leveraging this position of health and strength to move more aggressively and accelerate our transformation as a services and solutions company. Customers are now seeing Dell in a fresh light and we’re heading into the new year with strength and optimism.
–Michael Dell, FY11 Q4 Earnings Call

The up-shot is that Dell is trying to grow beyond its “cheap boxes” niche, which of course it should be. Dell is trying to become like those other “elder companies” out there: IBM, HP, Oracle, and a handful of others that dominate in the space of hardware, software, and services. For Dell, this is the way out of all their problems. That problem, as my investing friends would tell me, is being perceived as a low to no growth company. Microsoft is in that spot as well – and the pitch-fork mob of growthies have recently been let loose on Redmonk more than usual.

After the two day event:

• It’s still not entirely clear how Dell will first become a peer of and then win against the likes of IBM, HP, and Oracle (the tactics that is), but you almost don’t expect them to spill their playbook enough to make you feel like it’ll work.
• What is clear is that, product-by-product, Dell has a lot to offer: they’ve got a software division on their hands if they can realize it and start running it as such.
• Accelerating into this new role requires paying more attention to the practitioners involved: both the IT staff and the developers who’ll drive innovation and adoption. RedMonk, of course is always big on those “kingmakers.”
• As a “one stop shop,” Dell is at the beginning. While Perot allows them to speak to health-care as a vertical (“applications” and “solutions,” if you will), they need to build up more of these “solutions” with actual software and skill. The needs are things like: building up the IT for new banks from scratch, saving telcos from being stupid networks, leaning up government IT, modernization efforts, and other massive IT changes.

The rest, from Dell, is actually pretty good. Dell can talk to being additive to acquisitions, esp. in storage, but also in servers where Dell has been good at innovating and delivering to new needs for boxes from traditional profiles to “custom” orders of 50,000+ units for high scale web shops.

Also, see the quick video interview Barton George did of my reaction on the first day.

Dell as ISV

Most of all, what I like is that Dell is building a software division. I don’t feel like they really think this exactly, but they should (and they’re certainly acting like it). Software is what will allow Dell to grow in the enterprise, giving their customers a reason to buy Dell systems (or “solutions,” if you like) rather than just boxes.

Dell needs to start thinking like a next generation ISV: something even beyond salesforce.com. What does that kind of software organization look like, how does it operate day-to-day, how does it innovate, how does it package technology, and then deliver it all to make the most profit? Rival HP needs the same thing, but Dell is in a great position: a clean-slate, more or less. Dell doesn’t have the shackles of success tying them to previous (software) revenue models and technology.

Luring Developers

Well, I think the largest cloud providers today, if you will, are those Web 2.0. Those are like new workloads. I think there’s very little of the traditional workloads that are being moved into that space today. And so, most of those — and so, that’s pretty much incremental opportunity. I know there’s a lot of concerns about at some point is there cannibalization and then what happens. We haven’t seen that. I think where companies are at on private cloud is very, very early. And the number of them moving a massive amount of their scale out into the public, very, very few. And so, most of the consumption there is social media and things that wasn’t even in the calculation. So, this is net new business.
–Brad Anderson, Wells Fargo Tech Transformation Summit

This is a hard slog, though, and just the beginning of the “fun” for Dell. The main thing they’re missing is a tighter focus and catering to practitioners, developers in particular (those “king makers” of tech companies). Developers love Dell monitors, but they need to love Dell software, hardware, and systems.

Mounting up a developers relation program here starts small, but requires patients and stamina. As with any marketing program, you have to offer something better, unique, if not cheap to draw a crowd. For example, Dell could create the ultimate build box: take one of the T7500 work-stations, load-up git, Jenkins/Hudson, Vagrant, etc. and do the work to make the development tool chain integrated and ready to use once the box was plugged in. And then there’s updates to the actual open source tools and configuration to make it take advantage of the 8+ cores on that box and the 12+ gigs of memory (that’s the base-profile I have, at least). Having a powerful build-box that development teams can plug in and have it just work would be attractive: just like the Google Search Appliance is (equipment OEM’ed from Dell, by the way). The build box could come with OpenStack, VMware, Eucalyptus (curated to simulate Amazon EC2, perhaps), or whatever cloud platform you wanted. Developers always want faster builds, and they’re not too shy about being impressed by over-powered hardware.

Here, the long-term plan for Dell is (a.) gaining relevancy with developers, and, (b.) as the developers need more hardware, they’re familiar with – even like! – Dell systems and hopefully buy it. On the extreme end, in what Dell would call the “Web 2.0″ space (public web sites that use a lot of servers, cloud or not, to host their web apps), developers with datacenter needs might favor the systems platform they started with, Dell. Of course, there’s software, now, for Dell to sell as those teams accrue the needs of success: security, IT management, networking, storage, and whatever vertical offerings Dell can bring to the table. Throw in a few big-ass monitors as a bonus, and there’s even more incentive for developers to dive into a Dell build box.

IT Folks

There’s another group that Dell needs to cater to: sys admins, operators, IT staff, or whatever you like to call that lot. New technologies and practices – cloud, mobile as the new PC, SaaS (to call it out as its own force), and the vague but getting more fully baked “social” – are set to dramatically change the IT department, if not greatly reduce its importance. Who knows what the change will be, but it seems like it’s there.

Dell should be the hand-holder, thought-leader, or at least best-friend of admins: the company needs to help that community stay relevant and paid. Cost savings (or “efficiencies”) work well at first, but then IT needs to actually do something that contributes to their company’s revenue generation. Even if that contribution is just cost-cutting, there’s a question of how those savings are then strategically used. For example, as one Dell executive told me, Dell’s internal IT clean-up helped save $2B, which could be shifted, at the corporate level, to apply to acquisitions and the transformation Dell is going through.

A slightly less than impossible ambition

Dell has set itself up for the big, risky challenge of becoming a one-stop, enterprise IT shop. One of the “big boys,” as I put in my interview with Barton George. Dell needs to not only graft on and grow a software division, but build out their services arm with broad industry skills and programs. At the same time, Dell has to keep up its pose as the most affordable option that works. Normally, this challenge would be an operational quagmire (something Dell people have found themselves in too much in the past), but Dell is slightly better positioned then its peers: there’s little defendable reason to be loyal to the way things are/were, and almost no “legacy” models the company needs to cater to. In a very real sense, Dell has a clean-slate to start from, but enough existing assets to make their turn at the wheel of tech company transformation an interesting, if only slightly less than impossible ambition.

Disclosure: Dell is a client, as are IBM and HP. See the RedMonk client list for others mentioned or related above.

“We believe the current [platform clouds, such as Azure and App Engine] are incomplete,” [VMware senior director of cloud and application services Jerry] Chen says. “There is no one platform that is multi-cloud – private and public – and no one cloud is architected, out of the gate, to be extensible to many different frameworks and many different languages.”

The Cloud Foundry offering from VMware is looking like one of those obvious, good things I rarely expect Big Companies to do. Of course you’d want a portable PaaS layer that ran Java, Ruby, JavaScript, and other languages. Of course you’d want the company to actually run their own cloud instead of having to sort through “partners.”

In summary, they’ve put together a “bring your own PaaS” with wide language support and a VMware run instance you can use as well, if you don’t want to bring anything and just go directly to a cloud that has it all wired-up.

The most critical thing for VMware to do is to let this “open is best” philosophy play out in their application development strategy. VMware’s current fortunes were built on distinctly not that philosophy and it’d be easy for the kernel geniuses who must hold much of the corporate power to derail the appdev strategy, which is a much different beast than virtualization and other business models closer to the metal than the glass.

Overview via Press Pass

Nancy Gohring of IDG sent over a few questions on the topic (see her piece), so why not inline the answers here? (I’ve summarized the questions, so they’re not directly Nancy’s):

How does this fit into the context of existing cloud and PaaS offerings? It’s difficult to know completely since the offering is still in beta and the pricing isn’t available. That just covers the “.com” part of CloudFoundry though. I would think that developers would be more keen to use a packaging put together by the Spring folks, Java developers at least. When it comes to PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, and other future platforms there’s a lot of street cred VMware has to earn. But with this offering, it’s looking technically possible – it all comes to down to community and developer marketing.

As a counter example, Microsoft has to work very hard to convince developers that it’s not some kind of “evil empire” when it comes to locking in developers to Azure. Somehow Amazon (which is pretty “open,” actually), Google, and Apple get free passes on this: the perception that a ready user base and that there’s money on the table for the clever app developer in Apple-land gets developers to put up with the otherwise heinous “developer relations” Apple does.

Will this help move developers to adopt PaaS? They’re doing the right things to position themselves well: not just being Java, hosting on GitHub (an obvious thing I wouldn’t expect any BigCo to be “smart” enough to do), and providing the PaaS layer as open source for developers to run where-ever they like. Other PaaS vendors typically choose a point of lock-in to monetize every install on, where-as what VMware appears to be doing is trying to create a giant pie of which they only monetize a several hefty slices. I hope that’s what they’re doing at least: the bad thing would be for their business folks to worry about monetizing every single Cloud Foundry instance. Coming from a shop that makes its money selling licensed software and that seems to be fast trying to be the new Microsoft, you always have to understand where VMware is going to take it’s cut and see if that fits with your architectural plans. So far, CloudFoundry looks OK on that front, though.

What’s the “big picture”? So far, most people have been pleased with this. (Although @williamlouth claims to need facial reconstruction after looking at the code.) I haven’t checked out the code or anything [over the next few weeks, expect lots of snarky commentary from those who do], but the open nature of this and the wide-range of languages they’re targeting is looking good. If VMware can make Java just one of the many technologies that run on their clouds and if they can allow anyone to use their cloud software without having to give a dime to VMware or use their tools (see “The VisualStudio Test”), they should have a good chance at building a big cloud ecosystem that they can siphon cash off from. It’s a long play, but this is a good time to be putting all the pieces into place: all of their competitors are for sure.

Competition

Cloud Foundry can be deployed in public or private clouds. It runs on top of vSphere and vCloud infrastructure but can also run on top of other infrastructure clouds. Our partner RightScale today is demonstrating the deployment of Cloud Foundry on top of Amazon Web Services. Because of the open architecture, it could also be implemented on top of other infrastructure technologies like Eucalyptus or OpenStack. –Steve Herrod, VMware CTO

Here’s what I’d expect from the competitors:

• Amazon – as always, they’ll say nothing and just keep putting out new services. Perhaps they’ll lower prices, as they often do. <EOM>
• Microsoft – as I’ve said before, Microsoft is freaked out about VMware. They want to keep their existing Microsoft developers from moving and don’t like the ground moving under their Windows-shod feet. Microsoft will talk about integrated development and ops tool-chains (VisualStudio!), how you can run Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript on Azure, and say things like “if you go with VMware, next thing you know, you’re re-writing all your applications in Java!” Really, Microsoft just needs to speed up it’s cloud developer portfolio be it in betas (as Cloud Foundry is) or whatever. The Azure Appliance needs to get out there to cement in the excellent private cloud talk they started up at MMS.
• Google – what with an existing Spring partnership, this is odder. Google likes to brass-ring to open when possible: we’re more open. People always list Google as a major cloud vendor, but I must have my head stuck in the cupboard because I rarely, if ever, hear about people deploying apps on AppEngine. Google Marketplace integrations, sure, but when’s the last time you heard about some mega-supercool thing on “Google’s cloud” that wasn’t just “Google’s own SaaSes”? Really, Google’s time is probably better spent on things like Android, Google Apps, and avoiding being disrupted in Google Search and the ad revenue it drives. It’s odd to think of Google as doing as well at cloud developer relations as others could.
• Rackspace, OpenStack – in theory, these guys exist below the PaaS layer, but the competition from PaaS stuff like Cloud Foundry is The Battle for Developers to Care. If the PaaS takes care of all the operational concerns, the IaaS layer becomes irrelevant enough that developers don’t care. It’s like the x86 server market: a tough layer to be in because the lack of differentiation based on technology is almost in there by design. All that matters in price. What you’d want to see from the OpenStack folks is rapid enablement on Cloud Foundry and any other PaaS layer. They really need to shoot to be, as The Register put it a while ago, “the Linux of the clouds” and that means lots of effort to make everything work on OpenStack. The same applies for Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, and other cloud vendors. PaaS folks like CloudBees are a slightly different case: PaaS startups main hope is to use their scrappy smallness to out-innovate big ol’ VMware.
• IBM – at their Cloud Forum last wek, these guys already laid out their reply, and it’s pretty solid if you’re an enterprise-minded person: enterprise applications are complex. IBM has been doing business work for a 100 years. We know our stuff, and yours. Good luck with those other guys. Their launch of actual cloud offerings – the two SmartClouds – last week is more important. IBM just needs to move past, way past, the dev/test stage of cloud they’re in an re-discover developer relations big-time. Once they hammer out the path between “Enterprise Software Development” and “Cloud Development” (using dev/ops as a sort of lubrication, if they can understand how it’s different than ITSM, which is apparently “dead” now) and update their portfolio appropriately, they could do well. Speed is the problem here. As Amazon and the dizzying, fragmented array of open source technologies used there-in has shown, marketing to cloud developers has a distinct first mover advantage, if not a “fast and quick to change” advantage. Their other tact (which is far more likely to suck up all the marketing-oxygen) is to speak to the “C-level” and talk about applicationssolutions, costs, and “industries”: the technology is just some details for those poor saps who live their lives in flying metal-tubes to sort out.
• Salesforce – as with Google, there’s partnership’ing here to consider. Salesforce has declared that ruby is the language of the cloud, not just SaaS CRM, so they clearly are looking towards general cloud development with their Heroku acquisition. The advantage Salesforce has is zero allegiance to legacy (on-premise) IT and IT departments. In fact, Salesforce would probably be just fine – if not prefer – the IT department to go away. Most of the other elder companies working in this space don’t have that luxury. Most existing vendors feel the need to comfort instead of destroy-cum-transform legacy IT people, products, and models. Salesforce just has to demonstrate how they can make Heroku better: what can Salesforce+Heroku do that Heroku couldn’t do on it’s own?
• Red Hat – we haven’t heard from the Red Hat cloud story in awhile. With Makara they have PaaS technology and, as you’d expect, they’ll fall back on their “we’re truly open, what-are-you-gonna-trust-THEM?!” posturing. In theory, Red Hat should have the same check-boxes as VMware does here, minus running their own cloud (or maybe they will?). Their big event is coming up in a few weeks, so you’d expect to hear a lot there. See Derrick Harris’ commentary about small-fries in the PaaS market for more here.

What most BigCo’s wanting to get into the cloud development space fail to recognize is that cloud development has little to do with the massive, billions of dollars worth of existing code out there. It has almost everything to do with green-field development. Cloud has little to offer legacy applications*, at the moment. Most everything cloud has to offer is for new applications. As I’m fond of saying now: if it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it.

A company going after cloud development would start talking about how cloud allows you to deliver new functionality in your applications: what new features and software development processes does cloud allow that legacy models simply can’t do? I’m pretty bad at this myself, but I’ve taken a whack at it from time-to-time: “Useful things to do with the cloud, developer edition” and “Considering PaaS,” for example

(* Some of IBM’s announcement last week show them honing in on what cloud can offer for legacy support: solving all sorts of operator things like back-ups, replications, and slicing out cloud-friendly parts of things like SAP installs.)

Misc.

On the meta-level, the almost complete focus on developers highlights how operations obsessed much of the recent (private) cloud talk has been. It’s almost as if the rhetoric of this Cloud Foundry announcement is implicitly saying: all that doesn’t really matter to developers, they don’t care about those “legacy” corporate IT concerns. I like how Stacey Higginbotham puts this point as well:

Charles Fitzgerald says that Cloud Foundry will sit on top of platform plays such as OpenStack, but in truth it is likely to hurt that effort by obviating the need for enterprises and other developers to worry about the underlying infrastructure platform. For those who want to build out an app, electing to deploy using Cloud Foundry means the developer can choose where to host its app without ever caring if it’s using OpenStack.

Also of note, Rod wrote that the long-awaited Code2Cloud is finally coming out “in the coming quarter.”

More

• The official press release, including a quote from our own Stephen O’Grady.
• Rod Johnson’s overview of Cloud Foundry.
• Write-up from VMware CTO Steve Herrod.
• the GitHub repository for their various Cloud Foundry projects.
• Stacey Higginbotham covers Cloud Foundry for GigaOm.
• Cade Metz covers Cloud Foundry for The Register.
• Quentin Hardy covers it: “Compared with the early ‘nineties, when I was doing this at Microsoft, the whole open source world has changed,” [Paul Maritz, VMware’s chief executive] says. “It is so much bigger. Second, now it is about driving things at a higher level – not just in a single (software) framework, but to lots of systems.”

Disclosure: VMware, Cloud.com, Eucalyptus, GitHub, Red Hat, Salesforce, CloudBees, Microsoft, Rackspace Cloud, and IBM are clients. See the RedMonk clients page for others.

Technologically, VMWare is interested in seeing wider Java-based application development, esp. in the “line of business” area that the easier to use WaveMaker tool targets. As I so often quip, you don’t hear about Rapid Application Development (RAD) anymore, but the need for tools that allow more junior (or just cheaper) programmers to create applications hasn’t ever gone away. I discussed this with Chirs Keene last fall in this RedMonk interview:

More forward looking, WaveMaker is a good fit for a PaaS, having a sort of wiki approach to applications running in the cloud. As Rod Johnson says, “WaveMaker as a service will fit naturally with our cloud computing strategy, including Code2Cloud.”

Related to this is the recently announced Eclipse Orion project which is seeking to make an in-browser IDE. So far, it’s looking interesting – check out this webinar from a few days ago. And, of course, Bespin/Skywriter has had a lot of interest historically in this space.

More

• VMWare’s Rod Johnson outlines the reasoning behind the purchase.
• WaveMaker’s Chris Keene’s blog post on the topic.

Disclosure: VMWare and WaveMaker are clients, as is the Eclipse Foundation.

Cloud Builders

“The one thing we’ve heard [from businesses] is that people need a commercial entity to back an open source project,” Collier says. “Free and open source is great and all, but they want someone they call when they run into problems. Rackspace is the natural company to do that.”

Rackspace announced it’s support plan for OpenStack cloud installs today, Cloud Builders. Here’s the quick summary:

• Rackspace is starting a new line of business to support uses of OpenStack beyond its own data centers, “Rackspace Cloud Builders.” This support would be anything from training, helping setup clouds, to high level escalation of problems with those clouds.
• They purchased Anso Labs, creators of a core part of OpenStack and a cloud services company, to help seed this business. Rackspace expects the team to be 30-40 people this year, but draw on the 3,000+ support staff in the rest of Rackspace.
• Rather than displace other companies who are looking to build businesses on OpenStack, Rackspace would like to be the “third level” support for these folks and others. As Mark Collier put it, “we’re not trying to be Accenture or anything like that.”
• Momentum around OpenStack continues to be strong as gauged by “big” community members (such as Cisco, Canonical, and Dell) as well as the features road-map (pulling in more hyper-visors, upping storage limits, and providing more networking options). Indeed, RedMonk is asked about OpenStack frequently, both by users and other vendors.
• In addition to Rackspace’s new team, they’ve put together partners: Opscode, Dell, Equinix, Cloudscaling, and Citrix. Presumably, these folks will help build and service the various clouds (private and otherwise) being supported. See below for an example of that between Rackspace, Dell, and Opscode.

For an introduction to OpenStack, see this RedMonk interview with Rackspace’s Jonathan Bryce (there’s a full transcript if you prefer):

Cloud Body of Knowledge

As part of this new business, Rackspace will be generating a lot of material around best practices, architectures, and other “documentation” and practices for running various types of clouds. I asked if that would be “open,” to which the answer was more or less “yes,” or at the very least, “that’s a good idea.”

RedMonk fields a lot of inquires around cloud best practices and experiences, so there’s obviously a hunger for it. Keeping this material “open” versus close-to-the chest (as big consulting outfits would do) would be very beneficial to Rackspace: the more OpenStack-based clouds there are out there, the wider the pie for their support offering. Additionally, being the “owner” and (potentially) “biggest user” of OpenStack would have plenty of benefits to Rackspace even if they didn’t monetize support.

OpenStack Installer, Dell-based clouds

Building a hyperscale cloud requires a different mindset (we like to call it “revolutionary”) compared to a traditional enterprise virtualized infrastructure. This means driving a degree of simplicity, homogeneity, and density that is beyond most enterprise systems.

The core lesson of these large systems is that redundancy moves from the hardware into the software and applications. In fact, the expectation of failure is built into the system as a key assumption because daily failures are a fact of life when you have thousands of servers.

–Bootstrapping OpenStack Clouds

The Dell, Opscode, and Rackspace offering is the launch of a beta program for OpenStack clouds, based, of course, on Dell hardware (they’re actively seeking people to do PoC’s). As Dell sums it up: it’s an “OpenStack installer that allows bare metal deployment of OpenStack clouds in a few hours (vs. a manual installation period of several days).” In addition to using, of course, OpenStack, Dell is looking to use Chef for not only the on-going automation (“configuration management,” if you prefer) and initial setup. Their nicely detailed paper on the topic sums it up:

The most obvious challenge for hyperscale is the degree of repetition required to bring systems online (aka provision) and then maintain their patch levels. This is especially challenging for dynamic projects like OpenStack where new features or patches may surface at any time. In the Dell cloud development labs, we plan for a weekly rebuild of the entire system [Try that on your traditional data center, where changing anything once it's in production is a frightening task. -Coté].

To keep up with these installs, we invest in learning deployment tools like Puppet and Chef. Our cloud automation leverages a Chef server on the Admin and Chef clients are included on the node images. After the operating system has been laid down by PXE on a node, the Chef client will retrieve the node’s specific configuration from the server. The configuration scripts (recipes and cookbooks in Chef vernacular) not only install the correct packages, they also lay down the customized configuration and data files needed for that specific node. For example, a Swift data node must be given its correct ring configuration file.

Additionally, these bootstrapped clouds use Ganglia and Nagios for monitoring, and the overall architecture goes on the proscribe networking and storage configurations.

While this offering is clearly built on technologies and good domain knowledge, whenever you see the word “beta” and a call for Proof-of-Concepts, you have to be aware that the offering is very early. Essentially, they’re looking to move into much more road-testing of the setup. As Dell’s Joseph George put it, “The code base has evolved enough for telcos, managed service providers, and hosters to start testing.”

This adds yet another method of cloud to Dell’s cloud portfolio. Giving people maximim option for building clouds makes sense for Dell, who’s motivated to do one thing: move hardware. While having lots of options can be confusing (should I get a Eucalyptus, OpenStack, VMWare, Joyent, or some other based cloud?), at the moment it’s better than the alternative of not being technical enough or just choosing one stack. Still, in the near future, Dell will need to stream-line, or at least do a lot of hand-holding to the answer, “what type of cloud should I build?”

Rackspace, of course, would just like to see more people using OpenStack. They have a rare, genuine interest in seeing people use their open source software without trying to up-sell them to commercial offerings. Certainly, they want to provide paid support for some, but they at least don’t speak in the traditional terms of “conversion rate”: how effective are we at making money off stuff we freely give away?

For Opscode, there’s two angles: getting more use of their open source Chef which brings both (more) legitimacy and also hopeful conversions to their commercial offering, the SaaS “Opscode Platform” (hosting your configuration management in the cloud). Many operations oriented people still can’t wrap their heads around putting IT management in the cloud (“what if the network goes down?!”), but there’s a certain appeal to the near-statelessness that you could achieve for managing a (private) cloud with this whole setup. Meanwhile, some are taking that leap, like Rhapsody and 3,000 others who’ve signed up (there’s a free option for 5 nodes of less) to use the Opscode platform.

More

• Dell’s Rob Hirschfeld covers “Crowbar” (the project name for the cloud installer) in his blog: “One of my team’s significant lessons learned about installing clouds is that current clouds are more about effective operations than software features.”
• Timothy Prickett Morgan wraps up the Dell angle over at The Register, along with a cataloging of other Dell cloud offerings included the much wondered about Microsoft Azure cloud partnership.
• For more on the Cloud Builder partnering angle and opportunities, see Andrew R Hickey over at CRN.
• Julie Bort covers the news and spends some time on the Eucalyptus competitive angle.
• Rackspace’s Cloud Builders overview a la blog.
• Check out Dell’s white-paper on bootstrapping clouds – it’s got plenty of nice, strident cloud statements (like the one quoted above, essentially telling enterprises they need to change how they manage hardware) and just enough technical detail to flesh out a 15 page paper.

Disclosure: Rackspace, Dell, Opscode, Eucalyptus, VMWare, and Cloudscaling are clients.

Seeing a computer play two humans at Jeopardy! is a lot more entertaining than I thought it’d be. I’d been ignoring most of the hoopla around Watson figuring it for a big, effective PR campaign on IBM’s part. It is that for certain, and good on them for doing it. I’ve been more interested in what practical and “work-place” applications the technology behind Watson has, and I got a little bit of that along with some other interesting tidbits at a Watson event this week at IBM’s Austin campus.

The Technology Used

In addition to IBM PR and AR reaching out to me, the Apache Software Foundation sent me info on the Hadoop and UIMA software being used by Watson:

The Watson system uses UIMA as its principal infrastructure for component interoperability and makes extensive use of the UIMA-AS scale-out capabilities that can exploit modern, highly parallel hardware architectures. UIMA manages all work flow and communication between processes, which are spread across the cluster. Apache Hadoop manages the task of preprocessing Watson’s enormous information sources by deploying UIMA pipelines as Hadoop mappers, running UIMA analytics.

The ASF press release is actually jammed with a lot of “how it works” info.

Additionally, Watson is run on POWER7 machines with Linux, one of IBM’s exotic (but revenue pulling – $1.35B last quarter by TPM’s estimates) platforms. I was wondering why the team chose POWER, and though I didn’t get a chance to ask, once of the IBM’ers I was sitting next to said that the cooling ability of POWER machines meant they could pack more of them into the Watson cluster(s).

Here’s a brief hardware description from an overview whitepaper:

Early implementations of Watson ran on a single processor, which required two hours to answer a single question. The DeepQA computation is embarrassing parallel, however, and so it can be divided into a number of independent parts, each of which can be executed by a separate processor. UIMA-AS, part of Apache UIMA, enables the scale-out of UIMA applications using asynchronous messaging. Watson uses UIMA-AS to scale out across 2,880 POWER7 cores in a cluster of 90 IBM Power® 750 servers. UIMA_AS manages all of the inter-process communication using the open JMS standard. The UIMA-AS deploy- ment on POWER7 enabled Watson to deliver answers in one to six seconds.

…

Watson harnesses the massive parallel processing performance of its POWER7 processors to execute its thousands of DeepQA tasks simultaneously on individual processor cores. Each of Watson’s 90 clustered IBM Power 750 servers features 32 POWER7 cores running at 3.55 GHz. Running the Linux® operating system, the servers are housed in 10 racks along with associated I/O nodes and communications hubs. The system has a combined total of 16 Terabytes of memory and can operate at over 80 Teraflops (trillions of operations per second).

During Q&A an audience member asked if Watson could do better if it took longer to answer questions. In the game, of course, Watson is trying to answer questions as quickly as possible. The answer was, yes. And, in fact, Watson already does this: it’s actually running two processes to answer a question:

1. The first is a quick process that favors speed instead of accuracy. This fast process is used by Watson to see if it should buzz in at all.
2. The second is a longer process that favors accuracy and is the process used to actually answer questions.

So, you’d think, at the start of each question, Watson spins up these two processes, handing the real answer off to the one that gets a few more seconds.

There’s a 6 page whitepaper on the POWER7 (and software) angles of Watson over at IBM, tragically, you have to lead-gen your way into it, but it’s worth the typing if you’re interested.

Open Source

What I find interesting here is the big reliance on open source software for this impressive Big Data application. The innovations are interesting on their own, but from a “how do I apply this to my situation?” perspective, in theory, the fact that it’s open source opens the possibilities of using the underlying technology to a wider set of people, if only because it’s cheaper than proprietary options.

For the IBM Systems & Technology Group (STG, who produces and sells all the hardware IBM has), it’d be gravy: why spend all that money of software when you can spend it on hardware? (To be fair, for sometime now and especially with Software Group [SWG] head-honcho Steve Mills running both STG and SWG, IBM would prefer to collect on both types of -ware.)

It’s part of what John Willis would call “The Cambrian Cloud Computing Explosion.” In my words: there’s an excess of technological innovation at affordable prices (the big difference) out there just waiting for business demand.

Applications beyond Trivia

In addition to the technologies used, the most commonly asked question around Watson has been what other uses. As one of the professors at the Austin event said, what they wanted to do was have a system where “you give a question, and it comes up with a specific answer, not just a [list of documents like Google].” That should remind people of what WolframAlpha is trying to do (in fact, see an in-depth comparison).

Dealing with unstructured text (much of what we humans produce) has always been difficult. Getting “computers” to understanding the nuance in human questions has also always been hard – I can barely understand my UK-dialected fellow English speakers at times, I wonder how a computer gets by? Part of what Watson does is prove advanced in both of those. The costs for this initial run (and those that have come before it) are high, for sure, but watching that thing zoom through oddly phrased questions on TV is pretty amazing.

The IBM folks sent along some possible applications post-Jeopardy!:

Making better decisions- Companies relate to the problem of data-overload. Potential applications for Watson are:

• Healthcare and Life Sciences – Diagnostic Assistance, Evidence-Based, Collaborative Medicine. More, as quoted by Michael Cooney: “… a doctor considering a patient’s diagnosis could use Watson’s analytics technology, in conjunction with Nuance’s voice and clinical language understanding solutions, to rapidly consider all the related texts, reference materials, prior cases, and latest knowledge in journals and medical literature to gain evidence from many more potential sources than previously possible. This could help medical professionals confidently determine the most likely diagnosis and treatment options.”
• Tech Support, Help-desk, Contact Centers – Enterprise Knowledge Management (looking stuff up, documenting it) and Business Intelligence – Watson’s analytics ability generates meaningful and actionable insights from data – in real time.

Heathcare is the most cited industry for application that I’ve come across. As an analyst presentation on Watson said, providers could ask Watson questions like “What illness presents the following symptoms…?” And check out more from Mike Martin on the healthcare angle.

A post from Louis Lazarus over at “Citizen IBM” about using Watson in the non-profit sector ads some more possible uses:

It’s not hard to imagine how the technology could be used to help triage health patients, or field phone calls placed to municipal quality-of-life hotlines, or assist teachers in helping to score complex essays on tests, or help provide information to disaster survivors.”

Check out this IBM video for some more possibilities discussion.

Injecting UX into AI

Several people have alluded that part of what’s special here is the interface – how humans use – the technology. Coming up with just one, or a handful, of definitive answers over a massive body of content is no doubt helpful – going to wikipedia when you know a topic is generally faster than simply searching Google (esp. considering all the spam-crap it’s loaded up with on general topics).

In the health-care sector, as one Enterprise Irregular said, doctors often find themselves in wikipedia instead of the better, official references simply because it’s easier to take out your iPhone and look up the topic there. This is one of the under-appreciated aspects of “the consumerization of IT”: realizing that if you make your user’s life easier (focus on UX and usability), the overall software will be more valuable because (a.) users will use it, and, (b.) they’re be more productive using it. Speed is a feature here (how many times has someone at a call center told you “the computer is being slow, please wait”) but honing workflows to be help is too. And when it comes to helping find the answer instead of a pile of crap from a knowledge base, that’s huge.

Getting your hands on it

The question, as with any whiz-bang technology, is a depressing: so, how much is that gonna cost me? Hopefully, the open source angle helps drive down the cost, but the hardware needs are still high. Part of the reason to build Watson on POWER7, IBM says, was that the systems are commercially available, as opposed to the custom-built machine used for their previous AI, DeepBlue. Perhaps there’s some help from cheap cloud infrastructure, but I’d wager you’d be sacrificing speed.

It’s fun to watch that polite flat screen beat human at buzzing in, but it’ll be even more interesting watching the technology be industrialized for the mainstream.

Also, you can check out my quick debriefing recording of the event.

Update: Ideas from John Arley Burns

An old friend of mine, John Arley Burns, suggested some possible uses over in Facebook:

1. a google labs plugin that returns watson search results alongside normal results, maybe a watson tab
2. watson was not connected to the internet – connect it to a webcrawler and let it give you answers
3. watson’s search results, instead of being a list of sites like google, will be a list of hypothesis for the answer, in order of descending cofindence, as the reasoning tab on the TED lecture showed
4. i was disappointed that it was getting the information electronically instead of via understanding what was being said – hook watson up to a speech processor so it can crawl audio content as well
5. hook it up to a visual pattern recognizer – IBM already has one of these – and let it crawl images and videos so it can begin to form semantic constructs around them as well
6. put it on the cloud for long-running questions you could submit in batch jobs, such as, here’s all my research data, i want you to tell me how many nanotubes i should use for this circuit layer
7. give it long-running backend goals at low priority, as with SETI@home, that serve a socially useful function
8. allow it to rank importance in recent semantic hypothesis, so that important new items it has with high confidence can be placed on an always-updated news page: what’s watson learning now
9. feed it news wires so that it can answer time-dependent questions about current and just-now events
10. connect it to incoming data feeds at all air control towers so that it can reason where probable collisions or bad weather encounters may occur, and automatically warn pilots
11. connect it to flight schedules, stock prices, pipeline meters, so that it can form a current world view of the instantaneous state of reality
12. allow it to improve itself by testing program hypothesis, evaluating if they cause its answers to be more or less correct, faster, higher confidence, and then updating to new code if it performs better than previous code (using genetic algorithms, perhaps)

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as is ASF and Cloudera.

Soon, everyone will have a tablet in the market, it seems. Watching the HP TouchPad & friends (excellent coverage from Cade Metz) event this morning, I got to thinking about what tablet makers must do to compete with Apple. Most of them, so far, have failed on the key item: being cheaper than the iPad. That’s feature number one.

Price < iPad

I mean, let’s be frank: if you’re releasing a tablet, you’re benchmark and your competition is the iPad. That could change in time, sure, but for now, as in mobile, that’s the sort of Platonic model of perfection that most buyers seem to have.

The sell isn’t “here’s why you should buy our tablet because it’s awesome.” The sell has to be “here’s why you should spend your money on us instead of what you really want, an iPad.” As the always entertaining @jrep said in Twitter while we were watching the HP/Palm/webOS/TouchPad shin-dig: “Interesting, ain’t it, that Apple finds itself both “best” and “cheapest” for once?”

From what I’ve seen in non-iPad tablets released so far, each has been around the same price or more than an iPad. The Kindle is a the lone stand out here. I’d argue that it only succeeds because it’s cheaper than an iPad. Not having used one personally, but having talked with many people, the Kindle is a great form-factor and a great device for reading books (that screen is pretty fantastic looking, even across an airplane row). But if the Kindle cost as much as an iPad, most people I’ve spoken with would just get an iPad. They especially have that thought if I mention that you can run a Kindle app on the iPad.

As Stephen O’Grady put it awhile ago: “Anything more than the iPad is too much, given the quality of that device. Less is better, obviously.”

Other Requirements

There’s some other differentiating “musts” as well that I’ve been metaphorically jotting down on the backs on envelopes as I see more and more tablet action:

1. It better work and look good doing it – we’ve seen plenty of tablets in years past that were basically crap or just clunky enough to not really be worth it. Back when I was at BMC, a co-worker had one of those laptop/tablet things where the screen twisted around to be a “tablet.” I think it had a stylus too. It was just a little weird.
2. Flash – having used iOS devices for awhile now, when I switch to a mobile platform that supports Flash (like Android on a phone or the Logitech Revue Google TV) I notice Flash is a good way. I sort of think, “oh yeah, I’ve been missing that without realizing it.”
3. All-in-one device for business and pleasure – clearly, having as many devices in one as possible is highly desired (phone, camera, computer, digital picture frame, music/video player, email machine, etc.). The fact that the first iPad didn’t have a camera was pretty weird and something competitors can’t get away with. Another “all-in-one” is allowing people to use the tablet for both personal and work use – integrating with Exchange, VPN, Office formats, and all that. The emphasis on email in HP’s webOS bonanza this morning was a nice indication along these lines. The device has to work with corporate email and applications, but at the same time allow the user to cart around their personal music collection, photos of lady/guy-friends and kids. And most importantly, it needs games. Lots of games.
4. App Integrations – allowing apps to integrate and communicate with each can be a big disaster, but done right it can be great. One of the major problems I have with iOS is the inability route different types of files and “streams” to different apps. For example, on an iPhone, looking at a picture you can only upload it to MobileMe (boo!), MMS, or email. While on Windows Phone 7, they add in Facebook – and then with Android (and WP7) you can actually gets apps that will add new Share options in there, say, for flickr. Providing these extension points makes the tablet platform more useful and customizable to how I want to do things. iOS has finally added in opening PDF files in other apps like Goodreader, but I’ve seen much better use of these extension points on Windows Phone 7 and Android.
5. Apps – a tablet needs a wide range of popular apps if not right at release, very quickly. At the moment, your best bet is to probably just get the popular apps in the iTunes App Store duplicated in your app store, paying off the developers if needed (for some, free devices might do the trick, other will be more savvy and just want cash). While not a tablet, the current state of Google TV provides an excellent counter-example: the apps are limited to the handful of ones that come with it, making the device an overly expensive alternative to the excellently priced Roku box.
6. Developers – the other side of apps is providing a platform that developers want to develop on (ostensibly, webOS should be doing well here, esp. with the tight node.js/HTML5 emphasis) and speeding up the compile-to-cash cycle as much as possible. In the mobile space, developers are (rightly) driven by profit motives: they want to sell apps. It’s a bit hyperbolic to make a point, but after a “generation” of developers raised on “open source as in ‘no one pays me for my code’” the prospect of making a living of selling software is alluring.
7. Cables – just use USB cables, micro or mini, or whatever: use something that’s standard so I can use the same cable between my external hard-drives, camera, and tablets. This is more of a personal preference, but, again the point is to be compete with the iPad.
8. Battery Life – as Stephen pointed out back in September, battery life is key. Being able to use a tablet “all day” is sort of the key use case and depends on portability, wide app availability (you can do all the things you need to do), and long battery life. Every happy iPad user mentions this to me, esp. the startup execs and sales people (an edge case – except if you consider all those field people at $500-600 a pop for a tablet) who basically use their iPad as a fancy, three-ring binder presentation slide binder.

Actually, you probably shouldn’t make a tablet

Finally, and to satisfy the Talebian quip that good consultants tell you what not to do: chances are you probably shouldn’t be making a tablet. Aside from a handful companies (good for you guys!), delivering a tablet is out of scope and potentially a big distraction from your existing businesses.

The task of doing a tablet well – read: not loosing money and avoiding lost opportunity cost – is immense, expensive, and multi-year. You’re essentially building a whole new computer platform. Worse, you could be OEM’ing a rag-tag of hardware and OS that’s going to get you into a thin-margin market. People like Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, and those folks can hack through businesses like that int he PC space (surviving that crappy marketplace is their core competency – compare to high-end Apple), but it’s not a model you want to get into as a new line of business.

I know, I know: your share-holders (if you’re not public, you’re probably nowhere near big enough to even think about making a tablet) are asking you WTF? on Apple making all that cash from phones and tablets. Just focus on making more money in what you know and then ask your share-holders, “do you want a tablet, or a higher share price?” Your existing customers who just want your existing stuff working better, and for cheaper, will thank you too.

(Side-note: while I was there for the HP TouchPad launch, it looked pretty fine – thanks to the guys at precentral.net for live-blogging it. Hopefully their pricing is good. As one of the commenters at precentral.net said, “Dear HPalm: Please make this worth the wait in a hundred different ways. It is my love for you that prolongs my patience, but it is now wearing thin.” Also, pardon the link-baiting title: I couldn’t help myself.)

Disclosure: check the RedMonk client list for relevant clients.

(Above: Wordle tag cloud of Steve Ballmer’s letter on BobMu leaving.)

Microsoft’s Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft later this year, and he seems like the decision wasn’t entirely his, as CEO Steve Ballmer put it: “I have decided that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB.”

It’s always rash to speculate on executive departures. Whether it’s a “disagreement over strategy” (kind of like “artistic differences?”), failure to perform, pursing “new opportunities,” or just “moving on,” you never really know Speculating the reasons early on are little more than a fun parlor game (which is a fine, bike shed way to spend time if you’re looking for entertainment).

But…since some people have asked, here’s my speculation free commentary:

A good track record

Without a doubt, “BobMu” has a good track record, helping build up the $15B business that is Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business. Data centers and the IT department being an otherwise “boring” (compared to XBox or consumer Windows) money-maker, cloud computing has pushed this category of IT into the forefront, in addition to the usual data center and IT department needs which haven’t suddenly gone away. From the number of times Ballmer mentions cloud in the email (four), and how he mentions it (“Once again, Microsoft and our STB team are defining the future of business computing”), you can see that cloud computing is a big deal for Microsoft, as it should be.

Muglia has always struck me as one of the more personable and smart executives out there. His “fire-side chats” at analyst events are always fun, interesting, and full of good, useful tidbits. A little while ago when I spoke to a reporter about IBM’s Steve Mills, Muglia came to mind as a solid tech executive that under-appreciated.

The state of things

(Above: the most dressed down I’ve ever seen Bob Muglia, at PDC 2010.)

Microsoft has its share of criticism: the prevailing view is that they’ve been flat as a stock for a decade, or so (I’m no financial guy, so I can’t really speak to that); that mobile thing hasn’t worked out (yet, Microsoft folks in their humblest of moments would hasten to ad); and while there’s been lots of cloud talk from them (and build out!), many say that the pick up isn’t there “what like we’d like to see by now.”

Still, when you look at Windows Server numbers, becoming more heterogeneous and slightly more open (if still not enough), the care and feeding they’ve put into cloud, and jarring (and somewhat ill-handled pivot) but good moves like going for HTML5, I wouldn’t say this part of Microsoft has been unimaginative or anywhere near a disaster. There’s plenty of hard work to do, technologically and marketing-wise, but there’s a good base and pace to start from.

For those who demand fun

I’ll leave you with one of James Governor’s tweeters from this morning on the topic, for entertainment purposes only:

Question(s) to you, dear readers: What do you think the reasons for leaving are? How will it effect Microsoft’s server and cloud efforts?

More

• Steve Ballmer E-mail to Employees on Bob Muglia Transition – the official press release.
• Mary Jo Foley has Muglia’s email on the topic: “Later this year, I’m moving on to new opportunities outside of Microsoft.”
• Gavin Clarke covers the story: “Was Muglia another notch on the hatchet? Ballmer’s words suggest that Muglia either disagreed with Ballmer or wouldn’t or couldn’t give Ballmer what he wanted in terms of growth for Azure.” Also, including a list of high-visibility departures from Microsoft of late
• Matt Rosoff talks with Rob Horwitz speculates on reasons for leaving – leading with cloud vs. on-premise or a bad quarter coming.
• Dina Bass over at Bloomberg covers the story, with some history on Muglia.
• Summary of FY11 Q1 results for STB from Microsoft.
• There’s an (still open) question over on Quora on the topic as well.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client.

Too much travel makes your brain into pudding. It’s like being hung over, except you didn’t have that nice experience of being drunk. As I work towards a more serious write-up of SpringOne, here are some quick notes a la Voltaire.

Earlier this week, I was at VMWare’s SpringOne conference, covering announcements and new work from their SpringSource division. They launched an integrating cloud-based software development suite of tools, several technology partnerships with Google, and started to outline new integration needs from the social, mobile, and database world.

(For an excellent, detailed summary, see Darryl Taft’s write-up of day one and then day two.)

Code2Cloud

The release of Code2Cloud is the most interesting announcement. Working with TaskTop – mostly TaskTop it seems – VMWare (or “SpringSource,” as I’ll call them) has put together a good looking approach to doing cloud-based ALM. They of course want to move away from the idea of “ALM” (good council, and one of those Three Letter o’ Death that our own James Governor has told people in the past to avoid) but you’ll pardon me using a known quantity as a crutch to talk about “all that stuff other than the IDE and complier that you use to get software out the door and manage the project.”

Since leaving the programming world, I’ve been envious of teams who could use hosted services like Rally and VersionOne, along with the host of other, well, hosted tools. Those tools tend to manage the artifacts of an Agile process: tracking the “stories” and features that should be built, what phase of the development cycles they fit in (the “iteration”), who’s working on the item, and how far along it is up to completion.

In addition to that issue tracker, there’s version control and your build system. Both of those have been ripe for moving into the cloud, and the ability git provides to do synchronized web style use in git (meaning: you can pile up changes and even use the tool offline) takes care of the unreliable cloud problem most people would probably carp on.

(“Send moar minis” from Christopher Blizzard)

Cloud-based builds are an area that many people, and stealthy startups, have been interested in over the past few months. It makes sense: builds are processor intensive and, as such, a perfect match for the “bursty,” elastic functionality a cloud would provide. Also, as one of Sun’s hosted projects was shooting for, cloud-based builds open up all sorts of platform testing and compiling options: maybe it’s easier to compile to some weird HP-UX version if you just rent that node as part of your build cloud.

The tough nut here will be convincing developers that this system is as open as TaskTop and SpringSource would tell you it is. While SpringSource obviously wants you to use their stack top to bottom, Code2Cloud properties to be an open and interoperable pile of components. Thus, even if you weren’t using Spring, you could use it. One Spring use I talked with said he liked the setup, but didn’t use Spring’s Tools so he wouldn’t be able to use it. And, besides, he said, he already had all that ALM stuff setup. That’s the kind of quick perception to get over by showing, not marketing, as it were. We’ll see once it comes out, sometime next year they say.

I have a short, video interview with TaskTop on Code2Cloud that should be up soon. Also check out Israel Gat’s take: as someone who’s interested in optimizing the development process from the perspective of management, he’s esp. interested in the ALM-we-shall-not-call-ALM innovation here.

Google Partnership

Also of interest were the three integrations that Google and SpringSource announced.

Sorting out Google’s angle on the developer-front can be a freaky walk down memory lane. At the end of the day, the reason they do most things is “to make the web a better place.” The more people that use and enjoy the web, the more Google ads they see, the more clicks there will be, and the more money is made, and layering in the collection of data that allows Google to better do that targeting and connivence advertisers that they’ve finally solved Wanamaker 50% waste rule of advertising, and you’re set.

When the stranger lady dumps billions of dollars on your desk each quarter, you don’t worry too much about direct revenue producing products on a quarterly basis. Hence the feeling all too often that Google isn’t operating under the same strategic pressures as other companies.

That’s all to say, when you look at partnerships Google does, you can’t always look at it through the same lense you would other companies. You almost have to take on that cutely, starry eyed attitude most Googleers have: we just thought it was a good idea and Larry and Sergey agreed!

To the Google/SpringSource announcement, then. The first two items – integrating Roo and GWT can be taken at face value as just a “good idea.” GWT has been successful, and it’s certainly one of the UI toolkits I about (Java) hear people using frequently.

Integrating together Spring Insight and Google Speed Tracer is half “just a good idea,” but also ties up with Google’s enterprise cloud strategy, AppEngine. As Oracle’s William Vambenepe recently showed, the management piece of a PaaS is an extremely complex and demanding set of functionality: you can’t just expect people to sort out diagnosing cloud-based applications on their own, they’ll need tools that are designed to work with that platform. They need a Wily for the cloud, which is what this tie-up is going for: doing end-to-end tracing of a request from glass to metal, from front-end (if it’s Chrome) to database.

The demos are compelling, but, of course, limited to the Spring stack.

The third announcement ties much of this together and gives you some tea leaves. Hidden in the messaging around the “SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Plugin for Eclipse” is the fact that the Spring Framework is essentially being “certified” (thought they don’t call it that) to run on Google AppEngine. AppEngine has long been a weird-beast of Java: it has a whitelist of classes that will work and support, which is a fancy way of saying it’s not 100% Java compatible. Having Spring, more or less, “certified” to run on AppEngine means developers can worry a little less about that weirdness…if they develop on Spring.

At that point, tying in the ETE monitoring that Spring Insight and Speed Tracer brings you makes sense – it’s part of that stack.

For VMWare, this is another cloud partner that Spring is paving the path for. SalesForce, of course, is the other prominent one. It’s interesting to watch the “use Spring as PaaS interop” as part of VMWare’s cloud strategy, and I’d expect to see more such moves as they try to get their tendrils into as many “clouds” as possible. In a post open source world (pardon the phrase), it’s worth thinking on the question: if your code runs on most of the (proprietary clouds), does that mean it’s interoperable, or lock-in madness? The answer is a little less clear than you’d think if you grew up in the era of rainbows and sandals (like this guy did, dear readers).

It’ll certainly roil up the usual Java suspects, esp. those who have their own cloud agenda to push (mostly RedHat and IBM, and Oracle if you slap in their “cloud is everything, so, yes, we’re doing cloud” world-view).

The New SDKs: Social, Mobile, Big Data

Next up, SpringSource started tossing out some vision in a rare escape from the highly technical (and welcome) content they usually put out at SpringOne. Rod Johnson and others pointed out that “social” and “mobile” are two huge areas of interest looming in the future (and in the here and now if you’re lucky to work on it). They’ve been hammering away at projects in both spaces, represented by their running reference application, Greenhouse.

Here, the pivot you need to make is thinking about all those social networking sites and services (from Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter) as “the new APIs” that the Spring Framework will wrap. That’s been Spring’s thing since the beginning: finding the APIs (and, implicitly, the actual running code underneath the interfaces) that are popular and powerful, but terrible to actually use – J2EE, for example. Then take wrap those APIs in the Spring to make them easier to use. From that, the rest of the Spring empire was built.

Now, there’s less action in the framework and API world than their used to be. There’s still plenty for sure – but the real interesting action are in the APIs that social services host: the Twitter API, Facebook connect. These aren’t things that will show up as an open source project somewhere, they just exist as the one API in the cloud.

For SpringSource, then, the shift is to treat those hosted APIs the same as they did J2EE, and try to figure out how to integrate them into (corporate, mostly) Java developers’ work.

Mobile is another form factor, another UI. The thick-client model mobile encourages seems to be having some interesting effects on the old MVC monopoly, and once you throw in JavaScript as first class citizen (something SpringSource hasn’t done yet), things do start to look different.

And, then there’s NoSQL, which means to SpringSource, as Rod Johnson said, “We mean ‘Not Only SQL.’” Their GemFire buy gets them into some credible discussion here, as does the work with neo4j. RedMonk has been field many inquiries about using NoSQL, so I can’t help but agree with the sentiment I heard several times from SpringSource folks that now is the time to start sorting out when to use Not Only SQL.

Disclosure: VMWare is a client, and paid air and hotel for this trip. TaskTop is a client as well. IBM, RedHat, and Neo Technology are clients as well. As always, see the RedMonk client list for others in this space.

A new Liferay portal releases provides a good chance to ponder the state of runtimes in the Java world.

Open source portal vendor Liferay has just released a new version, building out the platform around the popular portal it’s been putting out for years. CMS Critic has a good wrap-up of the features in the new 6EE release. As with much of the Java world now, the ideas of an application server, a portal, a container, and a general platform have run together nicely for Liferay. The same is true for many others in the field since the iron-grip of the J(2)EE went arthritic awhile ago.

Think of the bucket of everything that Spring does, the opening up of the VM to run other languages, like the darlings of last year, Scala and Erlang. JEE has turned into a buffet finicky programers can pick from, not a suite of The Frameworks Ye Shall Use. On the whole, this is good as the standard, official Java world wasn’t really keeping pace with the fast evolving ideas coming from the consumer web – from the non-enterprise world.

The Motherhood and Apple-pie

Liferay seems to have done well with it’s strategy of keeping pace of “social” and the basics of portal needs. This is probably due to being open source and, as a company and project, scrappier than it’s rival products from Oracle, IBM, and JBoss. There’s a refreshing sense of simplicity in their messaging, e.g., a 215 meg runtime instead of “boxes of DVDs.” And, of course, there’s the promise of being cheaper than Brand X, often much cheaper. Their client list – with no shortage of big names – would seem testimony to the success of that strategy.

Being here at the Symposium in Anaheim, I can see that the Liferay folks and community itself (represented in something over a 100 attendees, I believe) have a nicely evolved open source warm-and-fuzzy feeling, at the same time being unashamedly open core. They’re all nicely earnest. (And, hey, it’s always nice to be in California to get one of these.)

From speaking with the Phurnace pholks before they were acquired by BMC, there’s a brisk business going on migrating from closed-source portals (IBM’s and Oracle/BEA’s) to open source ones, JBoss, Liferay, and co. CMO Paul Hinz used the phrase “end of feature” life as a jab at incumbent portal offerings that may not be End-of-Life, but are stagnant in their development. Clearly, in the portal space, Liferay is looking to pick up migrate-to-cheap portal projects. At the same time, they’re hoping to offer a harbor for Java developers, most of which are casting about for the platform to standardize on.

Write once, configure everywhere

As James pointed out recently, Java is far from “dead.”. Indeed, Java is finding much use as the basis for new middleware:

So the cool kids aren’t using Java. Or are they? One of the hottest trends in tech right now is NoSQL (If you’re a software developer get acquainted with it). Many of the hottest NoSQL technologies are written in Java.
MapReduce – one of the core technologies Google and Yahoo use for fast response times across large data sets is Java-based. A whole new industry ecosystem is growing around Hadoop, Apache’s MapReduce implementation. Ask our client Mike Olson fromCloudera if Java is dead. What about HBase? Java… Neo4J? Java. And so on. Of course we’re also seeing innovation from the new hotness – thus Erlang underpins CouchDB and RIAK. But Java is certainly core to the innovation. Lets look at RabbitMQ for example – which though written in Erlang was acquired by SpringSource as a messaging engine to underpin a Java-based programming model.

And that’s just the category of NoSQL. Sure, there’s plenty of folks who are happy to be liberated from Java – the post Rails world blew that sentiment door off the hinges.

What’s clear, though, is that Java is being used as a base language for larger runtimes and middleware, rather than a ends-to-itself, a walled community of its own. The idea of an “application server” is being eliminated, component by component. In eliminating that idea there’s a huge vacuum when it comes to the runtime developers use to house their projects.

Liferay, like so many others, is starting to move into this vacuum. The likes of VMWare/SpringSource are betting the farm on it (and looking good), while RedHat/JBoss, IBM, and Oracle/BEA/Sun are casting about to keep up. (An interesting non-Java example is MindTouch.) It’s clear that a highly component-driven runtime is needed (OSGi seems to have won out, if by sheer exhaustion in the Java Modularization War, largely forgotten): a “stackless stack,” as us RedMonks wickedly like to repeat. Open source seems required as well, if only to drive that extreme simplicity that, for whatever reason, commercial middleware is deadly allergic to. Hint: enterprises will pay cash-money for complexity, tragically, they’ll pay little, if anything, for simplicity. And once bought in, the pace of innovation isn’t always the same as that frenzied period of finding a “solution.”

PaaS and Mobile

In the wider spectrum, the ongoing evolution of Platform-as-a-Services and mobile drives both this application server vacuum and the search for a replacement. In the PaaS world, the PaaS is your runtime: Force.com, Intuit’s Partner Platform, Azure, Google App Engine, and various other apps ecosystems. In mobile, while there are several frameworks out there, it’s too early for developers to coalesce around a short list of them: rolling your own is still popular and, let’s be frank, until Android produces an app-bubble, developing in Object-C is the top concern of mobile developers. (Object-C!)

And, to call on the distinction between ISV and corporate developers from earlier today, while ISVs as always (well, since the web, at least) can sort out their own needs, the sense I get is that corporate developers are further out to sea when it comes to PaaSes, mobile, and even the search for a runtime. For vendors, this means it’s a great chance to insert your foot into the runtime door – when things are in flux is the time to cement your future shackles of success.

More

• In addition to the above link, some excellent, in-depth coverage from Mike Johnston at CMS Critic on today’s symposium.
• The official press release from Liferay.
• More videos from Liferay on 6EE.
• You can see a live stream from Liferay West, today and tomorrow.
• Dee-Ann LeBlanc of CMS Wire covers the Liferay release and event today.
• Mitchell Pronschinske writes-up the new features with some screenshots.

Disclosure: Liferay is a client and paid my travel and hotel to here. IBM, VMWare, RedHat, SalesForce, MindTouch, and IBM are clients as well. See the RedMonk client list for related folks as well.

Really, it’s sort of baffling that Intel would buy McAfee. Sure, you can put together a good story on wanting to buy into software, needing to do something with that big pile of cash, and even the idea that this gives Intel “security” that they can either put in their chips or “in the cloud.”

As far as I know, McAfee is a solid company, so there’s nothing wrong with the assets being purchased. Of course, CPU-bound nerds hate it, but they’re hardly the target market.

Context: Market Pressures?

In the wider-context, there’s a certain threat to x86 hegemony – more mobile devices means a move from the desktop where Intel has it easier, Oracle is having a go at high-end server sales (using SPARC chips), IBM revamped its POWER line, and folks like Cisco would like to reduce purchasing to one box where you can’t pick (nor “should” you care to pick) what type of chip is inside.

Conceivably, the same would apply to “cloud,” if that’s going to take off in the public, off-premise sense: when you choose a cloud service, you don’t choose the chip inside, you’re choosing purely based on service-levels (performance, uptime, etc.) and software.

Intel has staved off being commoditized numerous times, mostly with marketing and partnering deals. Those bunny-suit guys some how made consumers care about having Intel inside. I bet you’re humming their medley now. That’s powerful, enviable brand-marketing. In contrast, you probably don’t care about the type of tire on your care, let alone the who makes the parts in the engine.

You can’t grab software with tweezers

Intel is very narrowly defined in my mind as a chip company – a very successful chip company, doing whatever it takes, apparently, to move product. Jumping into the software business through acquisition, thus, seems odd. As Jon Collins pointed out, Intel once had LANDesk (from 1991 to 2002). LANDesk is something of a “quiet success” in the SMB IT Management space. I was worrying about dating girls and passing classes back then, so I have no first hand account of the logic, but I’d wager it had something to do with the “hotness” that was IT Management back then (the hay-day of Tivoli, PATROL, etc.) and Intel wanting to expand into it. And then they sold off LANDesk.

Partners & Ecosystem

There’s also partnering angles to worry about. Being a more pure chip company, Intel doesn’t have to worry about competing with partners, like, say, Microsoft (see “Wintel”), VMWare as well (taking advantage of virtualization built into chips, etc.).

Mobile

“Hardware-enhanced security will lead to breakthroughs in effectively countering the increasingly sophisticated threats of today and tomorrow,” said [Intel’s Software and Services Group Renée James, senior vice president, and general manager of the group]. “This acquisition is consistent with our software and services strategy to deliver an outstanding computing experience in fast-growing business areas, especially around the move to wireless mobility.”

And as far as mobile: sure, everyone’s doing it. The idea of Intel being a one-stop shop for secure, mobile chip and hardware – with embedded/branded McAfee – aligns with the current dance craze in tech, everything from one vendor, “one-check to write” strategies. Intel is all into MeeGo, as well, which Nokia seems to be looking towards as anti-Apple bug-spray.

In this context, Intel’s mobile ambitions can also be extended to The Internet of Things, as Anshu Sharma pointed out in the Enterprise Irregulars list.

But, as Forrester’s Andrew Jaquith puts it: “[n]either Intel nor McAfee are serious players in the mobility market.” Again: we’ll see.

Cloud

Bob Warfield sums up the cloud angle:

rankly, McAfee should have been snarfed by someone with major Cloud ambitions.  The Cloud needs serious security, and there are synergies with the Cloud I won’t go into here.  Suffice it to say that some powerful potential exists when you own a good-sized Cloud and can take responsibility for defending its inhabitants from outside threats.  That will be a more and more serious value add over time.  Oh well, need to check how much Symantec is up on the expectation someone will want the remaining player.  IBM?

Indeed, there’s only one stronger brand name in security than McAfee, and that’s Symantec. The brand access, channel access, and the existing infrastructure of being a “security” company may be valuable – but does McAfee or Symantec really have anything for “securing the cloud”? I’m just now seeing those things emerge, and I’m not sure too sure what the yellow jackets and McAfee have in that area.

The Simplest Answer

This last point is perhaps the most practical angle, as many have suggested to me: Intel is just buying McAfee’s revenue streams and market to help shore up Intel’s traditional sales. With that big pile of cash on-hand, perhaps the old adage applies to Intel: you have to spend money to make money.

I’m usually pretty good at turning up the vision dial on these kinds of things, but I can’t get it past about 3 or 4 this time. We’ll see how it develops.

More

• The official press release – nice bullet points!
• McAfee CEO George Kurtz on it: “In fact, McAfee is a perfect fit with the Intel acquisition of Wind River, a leader in embedded and mobile software…. McAfee’s strategy of protecting the multitude of devices such as ATMs, printers, digital copiers, and cars fits with helping organizations better manage and protect the IP enabled mobile and embedded devices that run Wind River embedded and mobile software.”
• From Apr 13, 2010, a “backgrounder on Intel’s Software and Services Group’s group, in PDF – goes over Intel’s Software portfolio.
• See the rest of Bob Warfield’s piece – he’s as confused as me, suggests that Google buying Adobe would be mo’ better.
• Also, the rest of Jaquith’s piece is very detailed.
• Andy Greenberg wraps up the “head-scratching”.
• Bruce Schneier hits up the “security as commodity” angle, quoting an older note of his: “So, remember, if security is going to no longer be an end-user component, companies that do things that are actually useful are going to need to provide security.” (Thanks to Charlie Wood for the link.)

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as is Microsoft. OpenHand was a client before being acquired by Intel.