James Governor's Monkchips

From Wikipedia:

“A pilot is a mariner who guides ships through dangerous or congested waters, such as harbours or river mouths. However, the pilot is only an advisor, as the master remains in legal, overriding command of the vessel.

Pilotage is one of the oldest, least-known professions, and yet it is one of the most important in maritime safety. The economic and environmental risk from today’s large cargo ships makes the role of the pilot essential.”

I had just finished a call with a client today, first day back from my vacation, when it struck me that often RedMonk is tasked with helping to steer a big ship in a different direction. Not easy- but often essential in business. I tweeted accordingly:

redmonk as a pilotage company. we can steer ships large and small into port. we know the local waters and can help avoid obstacles.

The Wikipedia definition, frankly adds a lot to the thought… “the pilot is only an advisor”. We can’t of course make our clients take our advice, but that doesn’t lessen its value.

I also really love the painting I found on Flickr… Waterfront Scene, 1934, oil on canvas by Pino Janni, so redolent of hard work and long days. RedMonk identifies and works with practitioners, the makers and doers. We spend as much time with with longshoremen as ship’s captains – which gives our advice a solid grounding in practice.

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I attended a briefing last week in London with Rod Adkins, SVP IBM Systems and Technology Group, and Robert LeBlanc, who runs IBM’s middleware business. The subject at hand was the new POWER7 chip.

If you’re not a hardcore IBM server customer you’ve possibly never heard of POWER. It runs IBM’s mainframes, Unix boxes and the i (otherwise known as the most successful midrange platform and channel play in IBM history- the warhorse i like to still call the AS/400)

If you’re a hardcore gamer though you likely use POWER every day: Big Blue provides the silicon for XBox 360, Playstation3 and Nintendo Gamecube.

The question for POWER though is whether IBM can drive volume success with the chip in the mainstream IT market, which means database workloads. To win IBM needs to beat Oracle, which currently dominates the market sweet spot for mid to high end online transaction processing (OLTP) and decision support systems (DSS), a position it massively buttressed by expanding its application portfolio with numerous acquisitions. IBM DB2 has failed to take share from Oracle in the midrange Linux and Unix markets. That is IBM’s problem in a nutshell.

IBM maintains its high end market share leadership with DB2, CICS and IMS, but in IT volume is usually the charm. If IBM is right that Big Data and next generation analytics will be a bigger market than ERP it could be in a chance of some volume success. Clearly Big Data is a market, and systems inflexion point. Running smart grids, improving healthcare, instrumenting and monitoring a Smarter Planet.

But to win with POWER IBM will need to POWER the cloud, not just servers. The cloud will underpin Big Data, alongside the wave of 8 way Nehalem boards from Intel. That is – there is a double transition at work.

A few words on Fashion, a Lesson from History

Anyone that thought Oracle wasn’t serious about the Cloud because Larry Ellison dissed it just doesn’t know Oracle. I have been watching Oracle for 15 years now, so I have a number of Larry Ellison fashion t-shirts. Indeed Ellison is the Yves Saint Laurent of the tech world- never missing a trend. He talks it like Chanel, as if one little black dress would get you through life, but he sure knows how to play to industry hemlines.

I remember Ellison panning the notion of Grid Computing when everyone else started hyping it up. Same language – “its just fashion”. Then Oracle went ahead and called its next database Oracle 11g.

While IBM was architecting systems for customers that scaled to thousands of processors, Oracle, quite simply owned grid with that one little g. You see – not many people needed real grid computing. But they wanted 2 and 4 way clusters running Oracle RAC. And the g meant they could feel like they were doing that grid thing.

A couple of seasons before Ellison had dismissed the Internet, and then rolled out the Oracle 9i database. “i” is for Internet. See a pattern emerging? Oracle was always going to make a play for cloud marketing dominance, whether or not this was a tech “revolution” or not.

IBM needs to be careful not to confuse technical ambition, and the needs of a tiny percentage of the market, with the cloud C-spot.

POWERing the Cloud

What do Oracle and IBM both agree on? There is nothing new in IT. Ellison is even saying that with its acquisition of Sun his firm ready to deliver a promise like IBM System 360 mainframe.

But if IBM really wants to play in the Cloud sweetspot or C-spot its going to need to win more Web workloads. IBM should therefore worry less about SuSE and more about Ubuntu. What runs the Cloud? Ubuntu. What is the fastest growing OS for MySQL? Ubuntu. That’s the growth play. And Ubuntu can beat Solaris in volume – something no other IBM OS can claim. Hadoop on Ubuntu on POWER – that’s a Big Data play.

Virtualisation is somewhat of a wild card here, but unless we start to see Linux, Windows, and Solaris running as guests on IBM POWER-based servers, IBM’s play will be limited. VMware is currently better positioned here.

Weird Runnings.

Finally, I just want to talk some interesting installed base dynamics, namely that more IBM middleware runs on Solaris than any other OS. That’s right – Oracle servers and customers run the most IBM middleware. Like BEA (now Oracle), IBM knows hows to make money from Java. But the account management issues get more and more interesting. Oracle already supports many PeopleSoft customers running on Mainframe DB2 so all this is nothing new, but it should be remembered the next time someone from Oracle starts talking about cleaning and simplifying their stack.

In IBM’s favour will be intensifying competition between Oracle, Dell, and HP. In Oracle’s favour- account control.

I maintain that IBM blundered in not acquiring Sun, but now the bed is made. If IBM is to really hurt Oracle it must focus on volume, not the needs of a few global companies. It needs to nail the c-spot.

[update: please see the comments below for clarification on POWER family vs POWER chip. Thanks to Derek and Gordon Haff for reminding me not to let a good line obscure the bits. Also – I need to follow up with some comments on the other leg of IBM’s POWER systems strategy – appliances)

disclosure: Canonical, Dell and IBM are clients.

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Sunday night about 7pm I checked my phone and the chatter was already in full effect – SAP CEO Leo Apotheker had agreed to leave the company. The hardest working man in the analyst business, Ray Wang, already had first take post online a couple of hours later. Ray is awesome, but I am sure glad I’m not married to him! Dude- it was Sunday!

Make no mistake. For an organisation such as SAP that prides itself on a consensus management style in the German style this was a sudden and brutal change. Chairman, SAP founder and hefty shareholder Hasso Plattner (10.5% of the company’s shares) was taking responsibility. Indeed- he is arguably effectively the new CEO in anything with name, with new “Co-CEOs” Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe effectively both reporting to him.

Having said that SAP is a consensus organisation, its worth noting that in a recent employee satisfaction survey Leo performed poorly. Apotheker had made problems for himself by trying to tough out justifiable customer unhappiness about maintenance fee hikes rather than take a more emollient line. Lose the customers, lose the employees and there is indeed consensus – and the consensus said its time for change.

We’re so conditioned to the American cult of the CEO that from a governance perspective the changes look even more surprising. You mean that the Board actually does something? Its not just a rubber stamp for CEO decisions? SAP just showed us Board level activism in action. Of course the other way to look at it is a Chairman with more power than usual flexing his muscles. Anyone that saw Plattner’s keynote at Sapphire last year could tell he was itching to be back in the game – at least as far as technical strategy is concerned.

But back to Leo and his sustainability legacy.

Before Leo took the CEO role SAP had a fairly traditional approach to Corporate Social Responsibility and Citizenship. They had one of the best guys in the space – James Farrar – making contacts, winning friends, and helping steer corporate ships to better outcomes. I met Transparency International through James. Indeed- James helped me understand that CSR is relevant to business, rather than just being a less than benign form of PR. But CSR still felt a little homespun at the company.

Until Leo pulled the trigger, that is. He created the role of Chief Sustainability Officer and gave it to one of SAP’s rising stars, Peter Graf. Here is Graf getting excited about cutting paper use. Sustainability at SAP had to be sustainable, which meant making it a product-driven activity that was going to help the top and bottom line. Apotheker made sustainability a watch word of his tenure – presenting his ideas at CeBIT for example.

I should disclose that that I have been involved in SAP’s sustainability strategy. I am currently chairing of a group of external stakeholders advising SAP on its Sustainability Reporting and Strategy.  I am not being paid directly for my role, but I do have a client relationship with the sustainability business unit. The stakeholder panel is pretty stellar – Bill “Cradle to Cradle” McDonough is one of the advisers! The project’s sponsor, who we were set to report to next Month – none other than Leo Apotheker. Leo takes a personal interest in sustainability. He wasn’t interested in a corporate fig leaf, but growing a big tree with deep roots.

SAP’s Sustainability product strategy is in increasingly good shape. The firm has built and bought new technology to fill out its portfolio, linking Governance, Risk And Compliance with environmental concerns such as Health and Safety and Chemicals Reporting. My colleague Tom Raftery writes up SAP’s Sustainability KPI tool here.

Leo’s legacy is that he took Sustainability seriously and made it part of SAP’s spine, rather than being a fingers and toes activity. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank Leo for continuing to stress the importance of sustainability even as the economy collapsed. SAP and its customers are set to benefit. SAP customers are some of the “dirtiest” in world in terms of energy consumption, chemical use and so on. SAP can act as a force multiplier in making these firms more effective, and cleaner.

Talking of force multipliers, one of the common arguments about Leo’s tenure was that there wasn’t enough technical  innovation. With respect to many esteemed commentators that’s rubbish.  Take a look at 12Sprints, a tool designed to drive collaboration around corporate data. The Business Objects folks in Palo Alto are on fire right now with product innovation. SAP CTO Vishal Sikka may have just taken a board level position, but he was already driving technical strategy. And Leo was prepared to sell Vishal’s vision of Timeless Software… NetWeaver is being retooled as web glue rather than on premises integration middleware. Non-transactional services will be delivered by cloud.

No – SAP was mainly struggling to sell to customers because they were angry about maintenance fees, especially in SAP’s biggest and most important market- Germany. As the recent Siemens case showed clearly enough. Plattner admits he fully agreed with the hikes, but unfortunately for Apotheker he was their public face.

Sustainability is Leo’s real legacy, and I would like to thank him for it.

[update: it seems the story is still evolving pretty fast. John Schwartz, member of the Executive Board responsible for SAP BusinessObjects, Ecosystem & Corporate Development has just also resigned from the board.]

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Stephen did his usual excellent job of explaining the the VMware Zimbra acquisition with a Q&A. Seriously – read the analysis. I already fed some of my thoughts into his post, but there are a couple of other things I wanted to mention.

Zimbra’s awesomesauce

Zimbra remains probably the single best implementation I have seen of real plasticity in a GUI, where information pops in context, without needing to move to a new screen or click through. Addresses turn into Google Maps, or sit up and beg to become Contacts. Zimbra was designed to be a plastic front end – not just for email, but any kind of back end web service.

RedMonk actually ran on Zimbra for collaboration for a while but the performance of the system was disappointing. This was because of the third party host we were using, rather than the Zimbra architecture itself. I know for example that Headshift ran its own server, and it was blazing fast. Another reason performance may have disappointed was that this was before the browser performance war really started heating up, driven by competition from the awesomely speedy Chrome browser.

On Premise Good?

As I just mentioned, Zimbra was never designed for cloud only deployment- on the contrary it can work just fine as an on premise open source email, messaging and collaboration server. Oh yeah- works well with Outlook too! Yahoo never seems to have decided one way or another what to do with its acquisition. VMWare has a much clearer view: Zimbra will fit neatly into a hybrid cloud play, potentially with an associated storage play for parent company of the parent company EMC.

Channels

Just before the VMware deal was announced I met a UK Zimbra reseller called In-Tuition. I was pretty skeptical about making a play to compete with Microsoft Exchange with a piece of software owned by Yahoo, which is not exactly renowned for its enterprise chops.  But they must have known something we all didn’t…

Suffice to say Zimbra is and always was designed for enterprise class deployments. Its very much a business tool.

Summing Up

The collaboration market is in play again – customers are fundamentally reassessing strategies defined in the 1990s. Lotus is back. Google is making headway. Microsoft is not going to give up without a fight. And now VMware has a play. Different buyers? Perhaps. But the same people that make virtualisation decisions also make Microsoft infrastructure decisions. VMware CEO Paul Maritz wanted a pushback if customers decided to can VMware in favour of Windows Virtual Services. Now it seems he has one.

I am looking forward to seeing what happens when Zimbra meets SpringSource (another recent VMware acquisition): That could be back end to front end goodness, and a growing set of Java APIs for VMware to steward and grow a community around.

For an enterprise looking for a mail server – Zimbra can definitely do a solid job. But its where it goes from there that’s more interesting. Java and Javascript is increasingly common as a skillset and programming approach. Zimbra was architected to the pattern.

As I said in a recent post

Products like IBM WebSphere Portal and SAP Netweaver Portal were supposed to bring much improved user interaction models to enterprise IT, but unfortunately traditional systems-focused IT departments, rather than user interaction specialists and their web brethren, did the work. People like Josh Porter generally weren’t invited to the party. Portals were built to support IT systems and data, rather than users

Its not just email that’s up for grabs. The 1990s portal is also looking tired. I wouldn’t be surprised to see VMware make a plasticity play.

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The idea of a cloud drive or folder in the sky is obviously a good one. We’ve been waiting for how long for the fabled gDrive? As a Google Enterprise customer I am glad to know I can now upload any kind of file, up to 250MB, into my account. Very handy. But the use case on the Official Google Enterprise blog post announcing the news reads like, well, its like the cloud never happened.

Let’s say you’re about to make a very important presentation to a prospective client on the other side of the country. Before you depart on your business trip, you download all of your presentation materials and InDesign® hand-outs onto your trusty thumbdrive. Just in case, you also email the files to yourself.

But while you’re in the air, your colleagues back at the office are making last minute edits to the files and your copies are now out of date. Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.

Sound familiar? The good news is that things are about to become a whole lot easier.

What? No that really doesn’t sound familiar. RedMonk uses Google Docs so we don’t worry about this kind of thing. As my coworker James Stewart commented:

“Its like their own products never happened“.

Replacing the Thumb Drive? The cloud already did that.

“Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.” AINT GONNA HAPPEN. Road warriors have laptops. Its what they do. Failing that they have iPhones, or, dare I say it… Android Phones. Really, who leaves for a business trip carrying nothing but a USB stick?

I can only assume the Google Enterprise team is so tightly ensconced in the GooglePlex that they aren’t used to the workaday scenarios the rest of us are. The post certainly made me chuckle this morning.

Tools for automatic file migration and syncing between multiple folders and devices? Now *that* is a use case. See DropBox, Evernote, Mozy, SugarSync etc. I want Google to offer me the Synchronised Web, not a USB stick replacement.

Google is not a client.

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