I wanted to thank RedMonk and all of you, in the RedMonk Community again for the conversations and, well, community that you’ve let me be a part of over the past five and half years. It’s been wonderful, fun, and enriching.

For future reference, you can reach me at cote@coteindustries.com, my usual phone numbers (+1-512-795-4307), CoteIndustries.com, and, of course, over in Twitter @cote.

Working with RedMonk has been easily the best job I’ve had: the trust and mentoring James and Stephen have given me over the years has been more than I could have imagined, and the actual work has been great. As Stephen gets into in his post, there’s now an open position at RedMonk which should be an equally great opportunity for some yet-to-be RedMonker. I can assure you, whoever you are, that it’s even better than you think it’ll be. I’m actually humbled by Stephen’s kind words: as always, RedMonk can put their graciousness in over-drive and over-deliver to genuine, heart-felt success. So I don’t want to go on with my own words too much. I’m so thankful for the opportunity RedMonk gave me.

I also want to to give all those people I’ve worked with over the years a big thanks. Building the long-term relationships and friendships with people in the industry has been a great benefit of this job. I’ve always valued – and will continue to value – the conversations from early in the morning to late at night that I have with all of you.

Looking forward, I’m really excited about my new job. It fits perfectly with what I want to do next and I can’t think of a better new role. I’ll wait to talk more about the job until I’m officially there, at Dell, but I was lucky to be offered a great opportunity. In recent times, as I wrote in my Dell analyst summit trip report, I’ve been impressed with the company. (And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I also like the fact that I’ll be working for an Austin-native company: being an Austin-native myself, there’s a certain amount of overblown, Texan-pride us folks take in that kind of thing ;> ) From what I’ve been able to tell from my outsider position there’s interesting stuff afoot , and the company and people there have been gracious and affable.

And, to answer those people who’ve asked me: don’t fret, I’ll still be around in “public,” as they say, there’s no worry of that going away. I’m over at DrunkAndRetired.com and you can always find me in Twitter, you know, @cote (I’ll probably wire-up CoteIndustries.com to something a little less profane than “Drunk And Retired”). Feel free to email me at cote@coteindustries.com after next week, too.

Finally, let me thank RedMonk and the RedMonk Community again. I really appreciate it, genuinely. I owe a great debt to all of you and, as always, give me a call, IM, email, DM, or singing telegram whenever: I’m always happy to return the kindness.

Yesterday was the first day of the Dell Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era analyst event, nicely for me, in Austin. While there’s a well known consumer and server side to Dell, much of their future-looking life tied up on growing their “enterprise” credentials and offerings. Rather than just selling hardware, Dell wants to be the type of “partner” to businesses that you see larger tech vendors like IBM, HP, and Oracle playing. This is totally appropriate and where growth for a vendor comes from.

Dell’s Barton George de-briefed me, as it were, in a quick video, above. I’ll steal his summary of topics:

• What his clients ask him about Dell and what, as a result was he looking for today
• Dell’s focus on solutions and de-emphasis on technology
• Is Dell putting on its big boy pants?
• The value of expanding on Dell’s success in select verticals

There’s more in this second day. I’m especially looking to see how Dell is packaging up its various offerings and services to target specific business types (health-care is a favorite with the lead recent acquisition Perot has there) and more “horizontal” applications like cloud (their VMware, OpenStack, Azure, and more portfolio is numerous, maybe too much so), big data/analytics, evolving ERP infrastructure (things like SAP HANA, but also knowing how to slice up an existing ERP stack to take advantage of new technologies without having to do major re-writes – there’s some mention of that in Smart Cloud land), getting cloud economics, mobile backends, and so forth from the “hot, exciting, and new pile” of technologies.

Disclosure: Dell i a client, as are Microsoft and IBM.

Coté: Man, if you combined together the technical, demo-heavy keynotes Microsoft does with the overly business focused keynotes IBM does, you’d have an awesome keynote.
James: You realize, that’s what RedMonk does, right?

As you may recall, I did short talk on this topic last month. The slides are above and you can see the replay as well, including two other talks from vendors on the topic. In my part of this ADT Supercast on requirements management, I quickly outline some of the new ways and tools to help with requirements management and also get into some new and better ways to do software development and delivery in general.

Disclosure: some companies mentioned in the presentation are RedMonk clients.

In recent years, Tivoli has been of two minds: classic Tivoli managing data centers and IT, and then the new Tivoli looking to manage the world’s infrastructure, not just its computers. After picking up MRO Solutions and going all “Smart Planet” at the corporate-level, Tivoli speaks much more in public about waste water, building, and city management. One presumes that there’s a better market in managing the “Smart Planet” than there is in just the data center.

The annual Pulse conference, then, always leaves some part of the audience flummoxed asking who this conference is for: sysadmins, building managers, IT bosses, power companies, BSM dashboarders, or utilities? As you can imagine, it drives us IT analysts crazy: we’re used to working on narrow products and lines of businesses – at the very least, technologies. IBM instead wants us to take a more “big picture,” solution-driven approach to looking at them: ithe details of the exact customer use of IBM (and partners!) matters less than the fact that IBM was involved and played a major role in improving the business.

Digging into the Smart Planet

Just as a math teacher would demand of you, a company must show its work when it comes to impressive solutions.

Schiphol is not really buying software. They’re buying performance and we took up the challenge of IBM to design and deliver performance.
–Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Case Study Video

IBM has a bit of a presentation problem, really with this: they want so much to talk “high level” and not get into the gorpy details of the technologies used. They have the exact opposite of the problem Microsoft has: all technology and product with not enough business. The thing is, as a technology company you have to open up the can of worms and spill it out to gain credibility: we trust that you can assemble technologies together to solve big problems only if you tell us about the technologies. The more high-level and the less technology based, the vaguer it is and the harder it is to take seriously without a lot of extra leg-work hunting down those missing items.

For any given Smarter <insert noun with a big budget here>, the technology story is there and should be easy to tell. In Tivoli land it’s this: imagine if everything had an IP address and was sending and receiving data on a network of a bunch of “things” that are all working together towards some goal(s), just like a computer network. Garbage trucks, rooms in buildings, pipes in utilities, and power meters on homes – all of these things (can) exist in networks now, and Tivoli knows how to manage networks of things (starting with computers). Here’s some screenshots and demos of that management in action…

Structurally, that’s just like a data center problem: lots of data flying around that you need to track; domain knowledge to understand what the data is and means in itself and in the overall context; analytics to report over the state of things that let you decide what to do next; and, eventually, a fancy dashboard with the Three Colors (Green, Yellow, Red; Good, Get Ready to freak out, FREAK OUT!). This pattern applies to computer networks, to telco networks, clouds, buildings, city-as-networked-system, and whole planet-systems if you’re lucky enough to get that contract.

Instead of having to be Indian Jones to ferret this out, it’d be great to just see Mr. DNA explaining it, gnarly SKUs and all. If dig even shallowly into the details of the oft cited DC Water win, there’s plenty of fascinating technology details. Imagine what you could show with a 10 minute demo in a keynote!

Products, Statements, and Meaty Propositions

Nonetheless, amongst the passionate stories about running Swiss trains on time and tracking beef from field to feast, there were some definitive pointers to what you’d expect, technologies:

• BSM – A Business Service Management demo showed how “everything” is pulled together to manage a theoretic airport (I don’t think they realized that “airport” and “BSM” were all but trade-marked by BMC back in the BSM heyday) – it was very nice and much welcome as, really, the only demo in the keynotes.
• Product Announcements – A rapid-succession of bullet points on the second day keynote slide introduced a slew of new and updates IT Management offerings. This press release seems to round them up, including a new beta offering for cloud management that looks nice (but that’s difficult to find outside of the press release).
• 1,000′s of cloud customers – In that same press release, there’s some “cloud wins” chest thumping: “IBM has helped thousands (!!) of clients adopt cloud models and manages millions of cloud based transactions every day in areas as diverse as banking, communications, healthcare and government, and securely tap into IBM cloud-based business and infrastructure services.”
• Private Cloud is where the money is – And when it comes to those clouds, IBM said time and time again that the revenue was all in private cloud at the moment. One snarky analyst said that when faced with the notion from IBM that their mainframe (System z) is the best way to run a “cloud” he likes to challenge them to start charging Amazon prices. Indeed, at several points, claims were made that a z was at least comparable in price to cloud pricing – be a nice study to hunt down. (In the meantime, check out this RedMonk overview/interview of the newest z IBM has available.)
• How do companies decide on public vs. private cloud? “What we came to see: if that processes that are not critical to my business, [companies] don’t want that in the public cloud,” IBM’s Robert LeBlanc said, instead they want private cloud.
• What is a “private cloud”? But then what makes for a private cloud? As Tom Rosamilia said in another part of the analyst sessions: the cloud ends up giving us a new method of delivery and what people charge for [those IT services].
• Image Management – When you look at how IBM would like to do cloud, they’re largely (only?) still on images instead of the model-driven automation (see one discussion via Amazon CloudFormation here) we see from Puppet and Chef.
• Warming up to dev/ops – There was a strong (enough) theme of dev/ops: the word was uttered much. While there weren’t really products ready to go to support a dev/ops like way of delivering software, there was much speaking to it. “It’s time for ops to insert itself and really be heard,” Harish Grama said.
• The Developer Land-grab – During an executive panel at the analyst event, there was much “dev/ops love” as it were. Neeraj Chandra even spoke to the developer land-grab saying that “not so long ago, QA was the enemy” and in the same way that they were brought into the team, it seems like getting operations involved as part of the overall team is a good idea.
• My advice to IBM was to get out in front of this dev/ops now – they had a tragically long lag time with cloud, and there’s a tremendous amount of room in the enterprise-y space to get at least one IBM “evangelist” out there talking about dev/ops and cloud at a technical, developer friendly level.
• A Standard for dev/ops – IBM really wants OSLC to work out as a model to do all of this. Indeed, the work of the likes of TaskTop of Rational’s Team Concert can be impressive. When asked by one analyst about getting more industry heavy-weights involvement to make it standardized, it was pointed out that Oracle is involved, Microsoft won’t ever join anything (the implicit rhetorical question being: so who cares?), and that HP should sign-up. See the sort of “how we’re doin’” dashboard for the group for more.
• Get rid of your IT – The idea of consolidation was a sort of theme through-out: consolidation onto the higher end boxes IBM has to sell (POWER, System z [mainframe], and x if you really want that). In a characteristically bombastic and plain-spoken keynote, Steve Mills summed it up, as in here: “The fewer boxes you have means the fewer power supplies, which means less energy and less labor. So doing more computing with fewer boxes is a good thing fundamentally. You can’t deny it. It’s arithmetic. Anybody who thinks otherwise is not thinking clearly.” Later on, he added: “Now, obviously, if you’re not a company that makes one of these, you don’t like them. So, if you’re only in the Intel server business, you don’t like these things and you have a lot of disparaging things to say about these systems. Duh, of course that’s what HP is saying, of course that’s what Dell is saying, of course that’s what Sun/Oracle is saying, of course they’re saying that. Duh, doesn’t mean you have to listen to it. People say stupid crap every day.” You can put that last sentence on a button and start wearing it at conferences. (Also, see TPM’s recent overview of IDC’s server market-share estimates.)

More

• Our very own Tom Raftery goes over the “Smart Buildings” angle.
• The conference site around Pulse, PulseSmartSite.com is great and, for some content (?), open to those who didn’t attend. You can see the keynotes and even transcripts.
• Patrick Thibodeau covers the cloud and virtualization management news in more detail than above. And more from him on the non-datacenter business.

Vic Gundotra:

“Two turkeys do not make an Eagle.”

Ben Franklin:

For my own part I wish the Eagle had not been chosen the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree near the river, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

With all this injustice, he is never in good case but like those among men who live by sharping & robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our country…

I am on this account not displeased that the figure is not known as a Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the truth the Turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America…. He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.

(See Engaget’s boot-note on the meaning of using quotes in Gundotra’s tweeter.)

The Findings

In their data-set (machines “in the Spiceworks network”), Spiceworks found that, world-wide, Dell lead laptop and desktop market-share world-wide with 42.1%, followed by “other” at 32.1%, HP at 21.7%, and Lenovo by 4.1%. In the US, Dell dominates even more with 54.3% share.

There’s some estimates on how much revenue these numbers bring in, with a note that just a 0.1% growth rate probably means $100M extra a year for HP and Lenovo.

Check out these visualizations:

For comparison, check out Ars Technoca’s summary of Gartner and IDC market-share numbers for US and worldwide PC sales (their US figures don’t have Lenovo, but do have Apple). It’s a bit different, I assume throwing in “enterprise” with SMB, along with “consumer.” Here’s quick-and-dirty comparison of the 3Q 10 world-wide share and Spiceworks 2010 share (see the raw data if you really care):

Ars 3Q 10 vs. Spiceworks 2010

Background

Spiceworks has grown that impressive community of 1.3 million “IT pros” using their eponymous, free IT management platform. The target is primarily small and medium shops, though depending on what you think of “enterprise” the platforms seems to support larger networks. They can offer the platform for free because the company takes privacy scrubbed data about each users networks and aggregates it together to sell these hard-to-reach “eyeballs” to vendors and others. More than ads, there’s interesting “sponsored” features/plugins, like being able to monitor email inboxes in Rackspace or take advantage of Intel vPro functionality.

I’m not sure exactly what data Spiceworks gets, but it’s a nice swatch of hardware and software assets. They’ve been very cautious to respect the privacy concerns of users, of course, but with a combination of looking over that aggregate data and also doing polls of their user-base, they’ve been able to put out some useful data.

Disclosure: Spiceworks is a client, as is Dell.

Anyhow, I’ve somehow come up with a little, uh, “research agenda.” These aren’t the only things I’m doing (in fact, these are more like the things I’m not really doing much of given all the other, usual stuff that comes up in the job ;>), but I wanted to put them here in case you, dear readers, had any input or suggestions:

1. “Saying No to Cloud” – I’m putting together valid and invalid reasons to “say no” to the cloud. Security, regulations, costs, lack of integration, and so forth. There’s plenty of good and bad reasons to not do cloud computing and I’d like to catalog some of them and the “responses” to those reasons. There’s a good thread going on over at Quora on the topic and I’ve been talking with some folks as well. If you’re a vendor or a user of cloud, I’d love to hear from you on this topic.
2. Cloud Cases – “hey, cloud computing sounds great, but we’re not Facebook.” That’s the sum-up of some discussions I have with normal, “boring” IT folks. At this point, they get what cloud computing is but they’re not really sure hot to apply it to their “enterprise” (better, “corporate”) day-to-day. Meanwhile, there are some trail blazers who’ve been doing cloud on purpose or by accident who’ve been figuring out how cloud applies to the mainstream world. I’m looking to pick a handful of these “cases” and write them up as RedMonk-style case study and then best practices that can be gleaned from the stories. If you’re one of these “normal” folks, it’d be great to hear your experiences – or if you know someone to introduce me to, I’d appreciate it. I’ve had some initial, enthusiastic folks pitch in already, which I really appreciate.
3. Mobile web vs. native apps – as mobile becomes more important, the question of doing mobile web or native apps has been coming up a lot. I’d like to write-up a short note on picking between the two, without getting too “it depends on your needs” vague. The recent write-up from Evernote (more or less) on this topic is interesting, for example. I’ve been lucky to know a few folks who know a lot of mobile developers to give input here, and I’d love to hear from you too.

If you’ve got any input or pointers, it’d be great to hear about ‘em ;>

Adobe closed the acquisition of Day Software this week, with a press release out early this morning. While we were at Adobe MAX this week, James Governor discussed Day and the opportunities for Adobe with Day’s former CMO, now Adobe employee, Kevin Cochrane.

They discuss open source, developers, content management, and even OSGi.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as way Day.