Tickets sales are ticking along. The site looks lovely. Sponsors have signed up – including Microsoft, Appirio Cloudspokes, Alcatel Lucent, Google, IBM, VMware, Joyent, and Sift Media. Confirmations that quite a few reporters from titles like RWW are coming along. The menus are in place, and look frankly amazing. The beer-tasting is booked. I have two local craft beer supplier partners in the shape of The Kernel and Camden Brewery.

There is still an awful lot to do. But I think I deserve my wine tonight. Less than two weeks to go, but frankly I am ready completely exhausted. It seems conference organisers insomnia is about as common as tennis elbow.

If you are interested in software development and management. If you are interested in new business models based on serving practitioners and engaging with communities then buy a ticket and come. February 1st, London.

I have been writing and consulting about the Internet of Things since 1999, when I helped Jonathan Eunice create the “Pervasive Automation” practice at Illuminata, a boutique research firm based in Nashua, NH. Billions of dollars have poured into the space since then, but we still haven’t seen the big transformation many of us have expected for a long time. But increasingly it does look like machine to machine communications is going to get real.

IBM, for example, is investing heavily in Smarter Buildings, bringing the world of HVAC and asset management together with IT. Energy is the common thread there. I also wrote recently that IBM had open sourced some core MQTT technology, in an attempt to kick start the Internet of things, in a world made of messages.

At the other end of the infrastructure scale is a London startup called Pachube recently acquired by Logmein (remote access management for things rather than desktops… interesting potential) Its a simple broker and aggregator – initially targeted at environmental monitoring, though it can be used for pretty much anything. Pachube is very webby.

So what’s going to be in the middle, rather than the edge, where the business domain experience and knowledge is located? One interesting company in the space is my client ThingWorx. Why interesting? For one thing the founding team has done it before. This is industrial automation 2.0 for co-founder Rick Bulotta and the team. They sold Lighthammer to SAP back in 2005. ThinkWorx knows enterprise down cold-0 one of the reasons SAP bought them was massive industrial clients like Dow Corning.

The first time I got a demo of ThingWorx I was quite surprised. I expected something that looks like a message bus, but the platform is actually more like a app dev tools that understands a range of different endpoint types. A 4GL for building industrial automation apps if you like, or in modern parlance a mashup platform for business users.

The search and indexing in ThingWorx is also impressive. While not positioned in that way, it could potentially be seen as a Splunk for industrial sensors and devices.

ThingWorx is also beginnging to tie in some interesting partners- such as Sensei for smart grid management. Smart grid has been massively hyped, and covered extensively by our sister research arm Greenmonk, but the key point here is budgets. Smart Grid is still picking up stimulus funds, and as such its a great market to target.

I can’t promise 2012 will be the year of the Internet of Things. Like I say, its been 13 years since I thought it would take off. But – ThingWorx is well positioned to win clients in industrial automation, where messages are connected to business applications, and manufacturing and the supply chain become effectively integrated, and amenable to pivots around, for example, energy footprint.

I started the day reading this post from TorrentFreak, which lays bare some of the key problems with the current Copyright situation. In the early days of RedMonk we spent a great deal of time writing about the need for copyleft approaches, and more permissive content licensing, as a basis for both business innovation and better user experience. Our position hasn’t changed, but sadly the situation has probably worsened in the last eight years or so. The Digital Economy Act in the UK, and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US, are both pieces of legislation that skew the balance of proof in copyright cases, so media companies can shut down users and services they suspect of infringing their copyright. While I appreciate the need for protection of intellectual property, the problem with poorly written legislation is the potential for abuse, particularly when one side (namely large media conglomerates) has massive resources on its side. So back to TorrentFreak, which in the post about computer games industry sums up how abuses become institutionalised.

What we have here is a business model – a complaint filing machine that generates around $1000 a time, split between a law firm, the anti-piracy company and CD Projekt, and the more letters sent out, the better it is for everyone. There are no outward checks, there’s no accountability and absolutely no compassion or understanding for those wrongfully accused through hidden incompetence.

This is why I, a prolific games player and games buyer of more than three decades standing, say that you don’t have to support piracy to hate bullying, intimidation, and abuse of position.

This is a numbers game, which assumes the accused probably doesn’t have the resources to push back. Even a major company such as Google can’t police every piece of content on its network, indeed if it did it would open itself up to further abuse by copyright holders. As TorrentFreak says: “What we have here is a business model”.

When news first rolled in, back in December, that SAP was going to acquire SuccessFactors my first reaction was – makes sense, that brings them some much-needed scale, with 15k customers and the potential for volume economics. And of course an aggressive sales force that lives and breathes cloud deals.

But then a week or so later at SAP’s annual Influencer event something began to nag at me. You see- the SAP cloud story was finally beginning to look pretty solid. The company has adopted agile development, and even some user centric design, to make its products more appealing to the end user, rather than the IT department or Big LOB. SAP’s cloud products actually seem to make a virtue of usability.

LOB Sales On Demand
Sourcing On Demand
Career On Demand
Travel On Demand
Carbon Impact On Demand
Environmental Health and Safety on demand

Given the subject in hand, lets look at Career On Demand, which is a lightweight, social-oriented human resources app. The demos I have seen so far indicate software that SAP should be able to sell pretty easily into the “Talent Management” software market. But – and this is the kicker – it would take a long time to get critical mass by building tons of tiny deals.

Just after the SuccessFactors acquisition was announced some developers I know popped up and said how much they hate SuccessFactors. It gets in their way, its an end of the quarter or year budgeting app that they don’t like to use. This isn’t end users choosing platforms, this is top down stuff. It was just like hearing complaints about Oracle Expenses from the business people I spend time with.

The final question in my mind after two days at the Influencer summit, was – would SuccessFactors get the nod from the new cloud savvy SAP if it was an internal product? I suspect not.

Given this thinking, and I make no claim to be a Talent Management industry analyst (I leave that to vendorprisey) I found this post from Jason Corsello very interesting indeed – The Biggest Misperception in Talent Management.

Jason says:

“We are starting to witness separation in the [$4.5bn Talent Management] market where size, scale and financial viability is essential for long-term survival. Market share will ultimately be determined by three factors: 1) strong ORGANIC growth, 2) continued innovation in existing and new products, and most important, 3) happy customers.”

So far so good. But then using Oracle’s Siebel acquisition as an argument from history, Jason says:

“As ERP vendors begin to “bolt on” talent management, in a mix of cloud and on-premise models, IT is likely to return as the primary decision-maker. I have yet to run into any HR professional that wants to hand the keys of the car back to IT.”

Jason argues the market will bifurcate into large ERP vendors selling their stuff through IT, and cloud talent management vendors selling directly to this business. My question then is – which one is SuccessFactors? The acquisition’s tagline is Business Execution Software. rather than Helping Employees Flow or something more human and maybe fluffy, but its precisely the fluffy stuff, the consumerisation of IT, the copying of Expensify features for the SAP’s new Expenses On Demand that marks out where the ball is going to land. The future designs for the human, rather than just the organisation. So is SuccessFactors the new Siebel, in Jason’s terms, or something else?

Salesforce.com just a couple of weeks later jumped into the market and acquired Rypple (tagline Work better, together), which talks to Social goals, and has a customer base of next generation web companies.

Once again I should stress I don’t know SuccessFactors that well (I am generally an infrastructure guy, though web app curious), and it could be that most people feel that using SuccessFactors is like breathing fresh air.

But I am left wondering whether the deal is really just about cloud scale, rather than humanisation of IT, which is where the real value is beginning to be felt. I will know more once the deal closes, and or I take a deeper look at SuccessFactors.

I am listening to developers, and we all know they can be squeaky wheels – but they also understand the value of flow better than anyone.

disclosure: SAP is a client and paid T&E to Boston for the Influencer Summit. Salesforce is also a client. Siebel is not.

One of our potential sponsors for the coming Monki Gras conference was interested to know more about our thinking – will this be a one off, or an event series worth investing in for the long haul? The answer is the long haul. This is a chance to get in at ground level for what promises to be an influential event series.

Its worth pointing out that the umbrella brand for the community event series is actually RedMonk Brew – but “Monktoberfest” suggested itself so strongly for our inaugural event in Portland, Maine, that we had to run with it. RedMonks and beer in October – what else could we call it?

The reason we are running Monki Gras in London in a few weeks is precisely because of the great success of that inaugural event in Maine- attended as it was by company founders, developers, development managers, open source mavens and web types. Many of the folks in my local London community asked at the time when we’d run Monktoberfest here. Who am I to argue, But what to call it? Monktoberfest, perhaps, or would that only work for an event in October? I was sitting in the Old Fountain off Old Street roundabout discussing the event with Appirio (now a sponsor), when Narinder Singh, or was it Lori Williams, said if its in February why not call it Monki Gras, like Mardi Gras. Fait accompli.

Ever since we founded RedMonk back in 2002 its been a mission to bring different practioner communities together: proprietary with open source, Java with Windows… and today increasingly Web with Enterprise. Generally each domain can teach the other something, and at RedMonk we don’t believe in binary thinking, one thing at the expense of another. Rather we try to build bridges to bring expertise from one area to another, try and create fora for useful conversations between different communities. In 2012 we’re going to see an acceleration of enterprises adopting Web technology, notably in the NoSQL and Big Data spaces – which is a great fit for us given our expertise and associated communities.

So building bridges and community spaces is what RedMonk does, and now we’re trying to foster an event series to do the same thing. Our core thesis for RedMonk Brew is that social is changing how tech is designed, built, managed and paid for. We want to get under the skin of this trend. This is the beginning of the social journey, and the beginning of the Brew series. The social trend won’t slow any time soon, in terms of how its making life better for practioners. And of course its only practitioners that can actually make life better for users.

The final part of the puzzle is beer, which goes so well with Social, and the fact we’re Monks. So the events will have great food and beer-tasting. The presence of beer may make it slightly harder to push through corporate procurement, but we’re optimising for fun, insightful events. Nerds tend to be fussy, so why not give them a new corpus of knowledge to geek out with?

So this is definitely the start of something. You should buy a ticket to the first RedMonk Brew London: the Monkigras here.

Last month I attended IBM’s 10th Annual [Steve] Mills event, when industry analysts converge to hear what Software Group has been up to, and where its going. There is always a ton of content, which makes it hard to summarize, so I won’t even try. But there are a couple of key narratives I want to capture, and I will use separate posts for them.

The first narrative is Get Simple.

Generally IBM doesn’t understand simple. IBM likes to create systems that are infinitely configurable, to meet every possible “need” that an enterprise might ever think of. As I like to say: IBM never met a requirement it didn’t like. But configuration is expensive – it requires consultants (go IGS!) and a lot of time and unnecessary pain.

I had a number of conversations at the Mills event however, which indicated IBM is getting a feel for the new simple. Rather than telling customers they can have all their old complexity and cloud operations too IBM is going to start being opinionated about system images. One of the first IBM products built to this way of thinking is the new Intelligent Operations Center, used as the basis for IBM Smarter City and water management plays. Customers can basically acquire the IOC in four different versions… large on-prem, large SaaS, small on-prem, small SaaS, and that’s pretty much it. But more products are likely to take the same approach.

When I have spoken to IBM Distinguished Engineers and senior managers in the past they have tended to believe that complexity could be abstracted, but after the failure of models such as Ensembles, it seems a new pragmatism at work. I talked to Jason McGee and Rob High, both DEs, and they both talked to the new simplicity as a better way of doing things.

IBM of course isn’t the only one with the config problem – its practically definitional for Enterprise software. In 2006 I said “Microsoft servers are a configuration fetishists’ wet dream”.

Unlike the enterprise however the Web thrives on simplicity – certainly on the config and operations side. Ruby on Rails, the favorite framework of many web developers, is based on a core concept – Convention over Configuration.

The idea is summed up pretty nicely here:“Design a framework so that it enforces standard naming conventions for mapping classes to resources or events. A programmer only needs to write the mapping configurations when the naming convention” fails.”

Or in my rambling fashion:

Ruby on Rails is interesting because it forces constraints on developers… and they like it.

Rails is about freedom in the Kantian sense-development has a categorical imperative – what you do should be morally applicable to anyone else in the same circumstance. Its about responsibilities rather than rights. The responsibility to ease of use.

Abstractions are aspects or constraints of the framework itself, rather than veneers to hide code behind and allow ever more configurations to be applied. Freedom comes from accepting and working within constraints. Beautiful code comes from limitations, not being able to configure everything in sight.

A related way of thinking is lesscode.

lesscode.org is a place to advocate, discuss, and practice the art of using less code to get more done. We shun complexity and challenge the status-quo when it impedes our ability to simplify our development tools and processes. We appreciate Python, Ruby, LAMP, REST, KISS, worse is better, and talk like a pirate day.

Back in 2006 (that year again!) I asked David Heinemeier Hansson, inventor of the Rails framework, if lesscode also meant less maintenance. He was good enough to offer a thoughtful response, which I will include in full.

“So my experiences would tell me that conventions of reward (“do it like this and you’ll get that for free”) has a really long shelve life. I remember when I worked in PHP, I would always tweak the configuration approach a tad going from app to app. This would lead to the code base of the previous project feeling really old really quick.

Rails applications don’t suffer from the same notion. Yes, we keep adding features and tweaking APIs to make the common stuff easier, but the majority of core conventions has been stable for a very long time now. It gives all applications a common culture and fix point.”

Java culture (more JAR JAR, more WAR WAR) is a long way from Rails culture, though early Spring (and latterly Roo) made some valiant efforts to make Java more of a convention oriented system for development.

Now I don’t want to go down a Rails is more maintainable than Java rathole, especially because Web Companies seemingly turn into Java shops when they grow up (Twitter, for example, recently took a seat on the JCP). As Eric Baldeschweiler, founder of Hortonworks and the guy that hired Doug Cutting to build Hadoop for Yahoo, told me recently he learned to love Java precisely because it allowed Hadoop to evolve, because of its maintainability.

But its inarguable that reducing configuration options makes support and maintenance easier. You can’t automate your way out of complexity.

That’s the real lesson of the web. How does Twitter support a user population of hundreds of millions of people with such a small ops team? The answer is limiting the range of deployment options in terms of servers. The same is true of any of the major web firms.

As I wrote recently, VMware seems to understand this trend lessons of the web: on vmware, cloud and what comes next. I have to say its good news to see another client, in the shape of IBM, thinking the same way. The Web can teach the enterprise something about Cloud Computing – after all, that’s where it came from, right?

Am I saying that all IBM products are now easy to install? Of course not. This will be a multiyear effort with missteps along the way. But consider- when you build a new data center you don’t retrofit it with a bunch of old intel gear. You build out for scale, with the latest hardware. That’s the kind of model we need to move to in software.

As much as anything, I think its worth calling out that IBM is thinking this way.

IBM is a client, and paid T&E to the Mills event.

Come to our conference in London on February 1st. You should buy tickets here.

The core idea behind curating the RedMonk Brew series of events is to examine how social is changing technology adoption, development and management. For all the manic celebration and high-fiving around products, platforms and technology in our business it seems that the most important constituents – the people that actually design, build and run applications – are often an afterthought. Neglect them at your peril though, because they are the New Kingmakers. From agile to devops to distributed version control systems (DVCS) to bottom up platform adoption to social analytics and Big Data, practitioners are making the difference in differentiating, and differentiated businesses.

We bill Monki Gras as a developer conference because its aimed at people that get stuck in, that aren’t afraid of code. But that’s certainly not to say non-developers won’t get something out of the show. Want to know how Procurement as We’ve Known it is Finished and what are the implications? If you’re interested in the basics of how to get people in different locations to work together there will be plenty here for you.

Regardless of what you call it, social is having a massive impact on tech. Consider that its increasingly commonplace for folks to say that Linus Torvalds will be better remembered for the Git DVCS than Linux. What made Git such a success? The Github social network for developers.

I argued a few years back Open Source is an implementation of the Social Networking pattern. Nothing in the intervening time has served to change my view. Of course the touchstone of much of that kind of thinking has to be Tim O’Reilly, as he laid in 2004 that the successful Web platforms are Architectures of Participation. As usual Tim was about 8 years ahead of the rest of us – Github is the canonical architecture of participation for developers, which has been so effective that some people are now questioning whether open source governance is even necessary any more. See “Apache considered harmful“. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, is sure to have some thoughts on this subject in his Monki Gras talk about the impact of social on open source governance.

If you’re interested in how businesses are blazing trails in Social Analytics, learning from the instrumented web, creating new business models based on data analytics, talks from Matt LeMay at Bitly (Kitteh vs Chickin) and Greg Avola, founder of Untappd, of the beer check in app and official social network of Monktoberfest, will have you leaning forward and nodding – both speakers are also pretty funny.

A conference about social and tech that didn’t have a solid look at user experience design would be lacking, and we’re lucky to have Leisa Riechelt talking about her experiences helping people to build more usable systems and services. Paul Downey, founder of Solderpad, will talk about the future of electronics design collaboration (Git-enabled, of course).

One of the highlights of the first event in the RedMonk Brew series- the inaugural Monktoberfest (here’s What You Missed according to ReadWriteWeb) was a session from Zack Urlocker, COO of Zendesk. The theme of the speech was best practices in distributed software development, and the beers that go with them. For the talk Zack asked some of the best development managers in the industry, folks he had worked with at companies like MySQL AB, how they managed distributed teams in terms of tooling and management practice. He then asked them what their favorite beer is. He crafted the feedback into an outstanding presentation – this video interview gives you a feel. But what really made Zack’s session rock at Monktoberfest was the knowledge that came from contributions from the floor; many delegates had extensive experience of managing and working on distributed development and contributions came thick and fast from people like Mike Shaver and Theo Schlossnagle, and of course our own Donnie Berkholz. The international flavor of the content was emphasised by the some of the patriotic beer choices- we all tend to think our brew is tastiest (except for aggressive Belgophiles like Stephen). So if you want to know how freezing your proverbials off in an Icelandic anti-sauna can pay dividends in team bonding this is the talk, and conference for you. For the Monki Gras this will be a special session, with collaboration built in, hopefully building on the excellence of round one in Portland.

There will be plenty of other excellent speakers (we plan to keep talks short and sweet, and there won’t be a a sales pitch in sight) and I will be pointing to them over the next few days.

By now, you might be wondering yeah yeah yeah, but why beer at a tech conference? For one thing monks love beer. For another… What could be more social than beer? Alongside the rise of craft and social approaches to software development, we’re also currently seeing a resurgence in craft brewing in the UK, and even cross-brewery beer collaborations from folks like The Kernel in Southwark and the Mikkeller in Copenhagen (hopefully we’ll see them on the day, too. So RedMonk Brew is where OS kernels meet hop kernels. I suggest you come along.

Initial sponsors include Appirio Cloudspokes, Joyent and Zendesk. Again – expect more news on that front over the next couple of days.

Why not follow Monki Gras on Lanyrd to see who else is coming.

I have long argued Adobe needed to shit or get off the pot when it comes to the Enterprise business. Well – it recently decided to get off the pot.

Adobe has decided that it can’t make a broad-based enterprise platform play, and has refocused instead on two core markets it feels it can perform best in – namely Software for Marketing and Software for Creatives. It has laid off most off the staff associated with its enterprise business, including some good friends of mine. They’ll get new jobs or already have them, so that’s ok. With respect to its Flex app dev platform – it has chosen to hand the Flex code off to the Apache Software Foundation. Unless Adobe continues to play sugar daddy to Flex though its likely to wither on the vine. Open source code needs committers. One piece of code that deserves attention in the contribution is Blaze-DS, a data integration framework.

In related news Adobe is also dropping mobile Flash, in favour of packaging HTML5 and native for mobile and tablet apps using PhoneGap (also now an Apache proposal). PhoneGap definitely has significant market momentum.

From a strategy perspective Adobe’s decision to focus on high margin opportunities in markets it feels it can dominate makes perfect sense. Omniture is very good at sales to marketing departments. Creative Suite is well, Creative Suite – that is, one of the great franchises in tech.

But from a developer relations perspective, a human view, a grassroots view, Adobe just lost a lot of goodwill, which is a problem because it is elite developers that are rocking the world of brand marketing right now. Untethering a developer community is not new for Adobe; see for example the ColdFusion ecosystem. But for all those people in the Adobe community that spent money to go to its MAX conference, and returned home all fired up, only too find a few weeks later that the MAX roadmaps were being torn up… the repositioning is awful news.

My old colleague Cote makes some great points in his analysis of the mobile Flash move.

This scenario seems great to me as I’ve always thought that Adobe is one of the better positioned application development toolchains out there…if they can just focus on HTML5 instead of Flash. The main thing I like to point out is that, chances are, PhotoShop was involved in any application you use. Not all, of course, but so much UI and UX work gets done with part of the Adobe toolchain. It’s a foot-in-the-door for the rest of the application development process.

There was a brief time, years ago, when Bruce Eckel brought the Adobe horse to the Java water, that passed into the RIA days, which are long over. Now, by embracing HTML5 (I hope, and it seems from recent moves), Adobe has a better shot at building that general, application developer business they’ve been lusting over for years. While talk of focusing more on “publishing” vs. “programming” slightly confused the point, the important thing to look at is the underlying technology and process supporting that publishing…namely HTML5-based programming, I’d suggest.

In summary Adobe’s decisions makes strong strategic sense, but there is definitely a human cost. Next year Adobe has to hope it can start to win more HTML5 developers to its toolchains than it will lose. It has a lot of work to do.

Adobe is a client.

So today is Donnie Berkholz‘ first day as a RedMonk employee.

When we started on the search to hire an analyst with deep analytics skills a few months back I had no idea we’d find somebody so good. We had plenty of outstanding candidates throw their hats in the ring, but Donnie has the skillset we need now.

“So if you love developer tools, methods and mores, and want to be a developer advocate – pushing the biggest tech companies on the planet to do a better job serving developers, if you can tell stories that resonate, can riff with authority, and you know how to get the most out of logs and available data sources to build and stand up thesis about Developer Experience and how to improve it we’d love to hear from you.”

In my first email to Donnie I described him as a “terrifyingly good candidate.” In the intervening time I have only become more impressed with him.

People bandy around the term data scientist, but of course any scientist is a data scientist… and Donnie is the real deal. He was a Fellow in Physiology & Biomedical Engineering Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, doing stuff like:

and Using a conformation-dependent stereochemical library improves crystallographic refinement of proteins.

His previous role explains why we had to wait a couple of months before he could join us. When you’re doing disease research you can’t just swan off at a moment’s notice. So we have a PhD on the team. If you’re supposed to hire people that are better than you are then RedMonk is on track.

But what does biomedical engineering have to do with developers? Well Donnie is a developer at heart, and has been a long term open source contributor, a leading light in the Gentoo Linux distribution.

He understands, and does a great job of explaining How Assholes can Ruin Your Project (with data!). Our recent Monktoberfest conference was the first time I had seen Donnie speak, and I was impressed. No drama, just data.

In this age of Social Business you’d think we’d be looking for social in an analyst hire. Honestly- that wasn’t a huge deal for us this time around. But even during the hiring process I was blown away by the fact Donnie just dovetailed with us. If I wrote a post Donnie commented. If Stephen tweeted about some data, Donnie explained how to normalise it. He friended me on every social network I use, and engaged. More than any other candidate Donnie just became a natural part of the team… before we even made the final decision to hire him.

Honestly, I feel humbled that someone of Donnie Berkholz caliber has chosen to join us. He is passionate about RedMonk’s role as developer advocates, and that’s why he threw his hat in the ring. RedMonk is a purpose-driven company, and Donnie shares that purpose.

It may have taken us a while to get our new RedMonk Analytics platform into shape, but he will make a huge difference there. Its a business now, rather than an idea. I look forward to introducing Donnie to our community and our clients. I am sure you’ll all welcome him to the team.

I am really pleased with how this video, the second in a series sponsored by Actuate, with no editorial interference, came out. So much so I need to get this transcribed.

Too much of IT procurement is just so much “security theatre”, not really adding value to the process. The idea is a straight lift from Cheryl McKinnon who coined Sales Cycle Theatre.

Bottom line- enterprise vendor sales people shouldn’t be running your corporate strategy. Use open source to bust through the shackles of traditional IT procurement. At the very least use open source as a personal trainer for the proprietary.