Tom Raftery recently wrote a piece calling for public cloud providers to be more open about the energy footprints of their services to allow for customer and consumer benchmarking. You might expect the likes of Amazon and Google would be open to publishing a footprint, but sadly that’s not the case yet. The Silicon Valley leviathans are doing some great work in terms of efficient IT – see Facebook’s OpenCompute initiative for example.

But its interesting that a company with a rather different heritage is banging the drum for sustainability metrics in the cloud. Step forward traditional outsourcing and systems integration firm CSC, and vp of cloud computing Siki Giunta.

“We really need to really understand a workload, how long it runs. We need to understand the rhythm of the business, and provision to that… At the moment metrics collection is all over the place.”

Giunta said that regulatory environments such as the UK Carbon Reduction Commitment would start to force enterprises to be more rigorous about energy monitoring and management. But what should you measure, in order to get a better handle on energy use?

Obviously we eventually need to instrument everything, for an internet of things that drives more sustainable outcomes, but Siki argues that a simpler metric would be a good place to start.

“In terms of servers a common area of metrics is RAM. It doesn’t matter how many VMs you what matters is RAM. But customers don’t know the RAM capacity…. of their workloads. they just provision to the spike.”

“Going forward we’ll see on spot memory… spot markets. At a couple of banks, like energy markets today- there is a spot rate. In IT RAM is the metric – like kilowatts.”

Its very early days, but its good to see Giunta leading the debate, talking to her customers, and folks like the CSC Advisory Council, about measuring server use, and moving towards more sustainable clouds.

Given that CSC bills for cloud on the basis of RAM you can see the attraction of a RAM-based energy measurement metric.

I also like the idea of a brute force metric so organisations can’t use complexity as an excuse not to report on energy use.

Last Friday Jason Huggins aka @hugs popped into the office to talk about Sauce Labs, a business set up to commercialise the Selenium open source testing framework. Jason is outstanding company- he was showing off arduino-powered 3d plastic gizmos before he even sat down (if you’re looking for a local 3d lazer-cutting shop in Chicago just ask @hugs).

What is Selenium? The wikipedia definition covers the bases pretty well:

Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language. Selenium provides a test domain specific language (DSL) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including C#, Java, Ruby, Groovy, Python, PHP, and Perl. Test playback is possible in most modern web browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms.

Selenium was originally developed by Jason Huggins, who was later joined by other programmers and testers at ThoughtWorks. It is open source software, released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded and used without charge.

In case you were wondering- Selenium the element does indeed neutralise Mercury… And that’s also Jason’s plan.

Selenium Remote Control is a Java-based server that can run tests developed in multiple languages- you can see why Selenium is popular at Google…. Indeed Jason actually worked at Google for a while- he still does a fair bit of contracting there.

Selenium came out of a Plone-based project to build a time and expenses app for a client, a client that clearly understood that Speed is a Feature.The app needed to be tested to within an inch of its life. One of Jason’s design choices at the time had a huge influence on the direction of Selenium, a direction that has made it so popular with Web Developers. Jason took the decision to use Javascript for the T&E forms back in 2004 – which meant he quickly ran into the problems of supporting forms-based apps in multiple browsers. So what did he do? He built cross-browser testing into the Selenium framework.

I came to the conclusion I needed a testing tool that would let me functional-test JavaScript-enhanced web user interfaces (aka “DHTML” or now “Ajax”). More specifically, I needed to test the browser UIs: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari. There were no commercial apps at the time that could do this, and the only open source option was JsUnit, which was more focused on unit testing pure JavaScript functions, rather than being a higher-level black-box/smoke-test walk through a web app. So we needed to write our own tool.

Jason was at least two years ahead of the market. Smart guys often are. When AJAX blew up, so did Selenium. Adding to that momentum, Selenium IDE is a Firefox plugin which allows the easy creation of tests, but also the recording, edit, viewing and debugging of tests. The ease of use massively expanded the Selenium user base.

In many ways Selenium IDE is the real synapse trigger. Testing should be about observability. If we’re building synthetic transactions what do they actually look like? Which brings us to Sauce Labs.

Sauce Labs offers a hosted environment designed to package up all the Selenium goodness. One intriguing part of using the system is that it records a video of every test created.  And rather than being secretive about testing, Sauce OnDemand takes a fairly open and useful social network approach. Users can easily tag and share tests, to learn from each other. For Jason and SauceLabs testing needs to be all about observability. If we’re going to simulate browser activities then it makes sense to be able to watch the “user” flow.

Unlike HP Mercury tools, which were designed for a world where QA is seperate from AppDev which is separate from ops management- the key design point for Jason is agile and continuous deployment. Selenium is designed for continuous integration, and as such it works out of the box with popular continuous integration servers such as Hudson.

Selenium is well loved by developers and developer designers – it was funny because Jonathan Lister, aka jayfresh one of my co-workers and a great example of designer turned Javascript maven, had just started using Selenium. He and Jason immediately started chatting about how Sauce Labs needs a stronger designer play (they are the guys most interested in browser behaviours and front end user experience, after all).

Jason is smart, open and totally committed to what he is doing. He has a community to serve, with a lot of people that will pay for services. SauceLabs is set to benefit from the current major transition from waterfail to continuous deployment and devops. Oh and did i mention performance testing the cloud for HTML5 apps? Timing is everything.

Stephen wrote a great post based on data from our new RedMonk analytics platform the other day that set me thinking. Its easy to blithely assume that all developers use Macs these days, but the data doesn’t bear such a thesis out.

Briefly, Ian Skerrett of Eclipse asserted that, according to Eclipse’s community survey data, Mac had fallen behind Linux as an operating system of choice for developers. Rolling up their numbers, I get the following distribution of operating systems:

Windows is the easy winner, but Linux is as clearly second to Mac’s third. The primary takeaway for most is that Linux traction is strong amongst Eclipse users. The obvious next question is whether this trend holds amongst a wider development community or whether it’s a more localized Eclipse phenomenon.

Stephen’s post goes on to show that Windows is the dominant OS across a number of developer spaces – only in Javascript was it not above 50% marketshare, and even there its a respectable 46.4% of the market, according to our logs. Why were Ian Skerrett, Eclipse marketing director, and I pondering the numbers? For the simple reason that Apple has announced it is going to deprecate Java in its operating systems going forward, thus neatly skewering the many Java developers that choose the Mac for flow and productivity reasons. Apple has obvious and simple business reasons for making the choice -  this is by far the best post on the subject.

The Apple news wouldn’t be so problematical if broad questions weren’t also currently being asked about Java governance and commitment – basically who will support the development required to ensure an awesome Java experience on the Mac going forward, especially given all the neat tricks Apple has hitherto done to make Java work so slickly on the machine? The business problem is that the only constituency really hurt by the news are Java developers- that is to say folks using Eclipse or Netbeans: Adobe, Google, IBM, Oracle, SAP developers, more than end-user customers of same? hmmmm.

Stephen’s data led me to consider another alternative: how about Microsoft as a white knight for the Java development industry? While I appreciate this sounds like an extremely weird scenario… lets consider the facts. Windows is already the leading platform in the space, so its really a question of supporting existing customers. Even by doing nothing Microsoft is likely to pick up some of those that feel they can’t keep using Macs for their day job. Of course some might go virtualised, or move to Linux. But Microsoft could pick up malcontents.

Its important to note that Microsoft has been making a long slow road to support of the the kind of open source innovation that Java supported. It has already invested in the Eclipse ecosystem via Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight. So why not invest directly in making Microsoft the absolute best place to run Eclipse or other JVM software? Certainly laptop makers want to appeal to developers, because for all RedMonk’s data the perception is that the cool kids all run Macs. Microsoft could work on a Windows developer workstation edition with its OEM partners. Windows Vista sucked too much for developers – but Windows 7 is a lot better, and we’re not even into SP1 territory yet. Some developers use Windows Server on their machines.

My basic premise is this – at the moment everything is in play in the market, and if Microsoft is really serious about attracting developers- all developers – to Windows then it needs to be strategic about Java. Its investing in supporting WordPress, Joomla and other open source technology through its Web Platform Installer Tool (gotta love the .aspx URL, eh). It recently lost Jim Hugunin to Google, at about the same time it open sourced IronPython and IronRuby, dynamic language implementations to run on the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).

Jim had this to say about his departure:

However, I leave feeling respect for the many great people and products produced here. I will suffer some pain when I have to write code in Java now that I’ve learned to love the elegance of C#. I will suffer some frustrations when I have to use Google Docs instead of the finely polished UI in Microsoft Office. More than anything, I will always value the chance that I had to work with and learn valuable lessons from some truly great people.

But more interestingly in the context of this piece:

Given my new employer, I will be throwing my lot in with the Java side of the virtual machine world. I think that C# has truly evolved into a nicer language than Java and that .NET has some cool features that the JVM is missing. However, I also see great things in the Java world both technically with features like the adaptive compilation in HotSpot and more significantly in terms of the vibrant community it has managed to create that adds huge value to the platform. When I weigh them both in the balance, neither side has a clear advantage. I respect Google’s decision to standardize on a uniform set of primary programming languages with Python, JavaScript, Java and C++. I don’t see any reason to push against that set - particularly if it means I get to consider Python a primary language!

The post indicates to me at least that we’ll see an even stronger JVM play from Google going forward. But the Google App Engine JVM is designed for the cloud, not the Mac. And the whole Oracle suing Google over Dalvik thing (please see our coverage here and here) does create some fear, uncertainty and doubt around Google JVMs. Will Google be the white knight for a desktop JVM that runs beautifully on the Mac? Its quite possible. Google supports a fair bit of native Windows code to help it try and hollow out Microsoft from the inside.  I, for one, love the Outlook gmail support and Picasa rocks. So why wouldnt Google play around with Apple native code around for a high performance JVM with UI extensions for goodness? Actually that sounds like a pretty tall order doesn’t it?

Microsoft should be able to engineer awesome JVM  support on Windows a lot more easily than Google on a Mac. Does it make sense to continue relying on Oracle to provide the JVM? The broader question is what’s the surrounding community management and infrastructure to make Windows a more obvious choice for Java developers. And then there are the potential legal issues.  But the bottom line is this: the more developers use Windows the more they’re likely to at least try other technologies from the Microsoft stack. Developers, developers, developers, developers. That much seems obvious.

Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference starts today in Redmond. I don’t expect Microsoft to spend its time lauding Java environments – but an opportunity seems to have opened up here. I would take it. Step one – call the Eclipse Foundation and consider a full membership [yes Eclipse is a RedMonk client, and no that is not the point of this piece]. For that matter I know Oracle is offering pretty sweet terms for corporate JCP membership at the moment…

I haven’t even discussed the continuous integration to cloud disruption (see our VMware SpringSource Click2cloud coverage  here. and Collabnet buying Codesion) that’s changing the way Java development is done, but like I say, disruption is happening in multiple dimensions. Apple is running around creating new competitive dynamics left right and center – which also means its creating new collaborative opportunities as well. Microsoft as a white knight in the Java space – have stranger things happened or am I batshit crazy to even ask the question? What do you think?

Adobe, Eclipse, IBM, Microsoft and SAP are clients.

I was in Copenhagen last week for VMworld Europe 2010. Monday was an analyst briefing so I wasn’t particularly surprised when VMware CEO Paul Maritz spoke at length about his strategy to attract developers to VMware as a platform.  After all most analysts are curious about what happens next.

But seeing Maritz give the same speech to his core VMware audience the next day was impressive. After all – the traditional VMware customer is very much on the ops side of the house – they are neither line of business nor application development. These folks are just not that interested in app dev- or more accurately tend to have a pretty adversarial relationship to the development side of the house. Application development means change, and enterprise ops folks don’t like change, because change can break things. So to see Maritz on a tear about application development was impressive.

If he made the same speech at SpringOne this week it wouldn’t be out of place at all. That’s right. SpringOne – in case you missed it VMware recently acquired SpringSource- the enterprise Java company. Sadly I couldn’t make the show but I will be following up because I know there was significant news waiting to drop at the event. [My spar @cote captures the big Spring picture in quick and dirty fashion here- its a very good read. ]

Maritz said that other major tech firms were still “consolidating the client/server stack” while VMware wanted to capture a new wave of application development.

“Developers are moving to Django and Rails. Developers like to focus on what’s important to them. Open frameworks are the foundation for new enterprise application development going forward. By and large developers no longer write windows or Linux apps. Rails developers don’t care about the OS – they’re more interested in data models and how to construct the UI. Those are the things developers are focusing on now. The OS will fade into the background and become one of many pieces. We plan to do the best job of supporting these frameworks.”

Or as he said to the analysts:

“Our goal is to become the home of open source and open framework-based development”.

[contextual digression here: In case you didn’t know, Ruby On Rails, the framework for building web apps invented by David Heinemeier Hansson continues to be about as popular with web developers as Apple Macbooks, which is to say, very popular indeed. If you want good-looking data-driven apps Rails is a really good place to start. Frankly though, hearing Maritz name check Django was more surprising - the framework bills itself as “The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines” but is not nearly as well known. There is a wave of content-driven application development building, and Maritz is evidently hip to that. Adobe acquired Day Software, which is playing in that space. This week Alfresco at its developer conference pushed the message that content applications was all about the web, rather that traditional Enterprise Content Management. I met with Eric Barroca of Nuxeo last week and he is extremely excited by the new developer-driven content management apps he is seeing emerge. Nuxeo had originally been positioned as an application – but now its very much a platform to sell to architects, rather than slideware purchasers. Eric said his goal is to become a platform to integrate innovation happening in open source content management. So VMware certainly isn’t alone. Maritz is evidently just the highest profile executive to really grok what’s happening. Two key standards seem to driving all this content management integration goodness- CMIS and OSGi. I should also strongly credit our client the Apache Software Foundation for providing governance for a lot of this open source code/innovation.] But back to VMware.

Given RedMonk is all about developers you can imagine I loved the keynote. Thought I doubt many people in the audience had a bloody clue what Django is. When @sogrady came online later that day he immediately asked on twitter:

“Maritz really said that?”

it’s one thing to rubbish the operating system, but what about packaged apps? At the analyst briefing Maritz made it very clear indeed where he thinks competitive advantage lies.

In the final analysis they [purchasers] are not the people making strategic decisions in the business. Developers have always been at the leading edge, because that’s where business value is generated. Things that don’t differentiate you at a higher level will be SaaS apps – which will also be purchased at a higher level. The differentiated stuff you have to do yourself, and that means software development”.

In other words Maritz has pretty much the same core thesis as RedMonk: Developers are not an overhead – they are the new Kingmakers. I have to say I was pretty stunned. I still am. After years being an outlier RedMonk now has chief executives on side. And lets look at the folks Maritz has hired. Tod Neilsen is on the management team- he is the guy that built up the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) – you might have heard of it. Maritz himself is ex-Microsoft, and clearly knows developers. Paul Lukovsky is another ex-Microsoft guy in the fold – he understands what makes a successful API as well as anyone on the planet. Apparently back room enforcer Charles Fitzgerald is also in the mix.

That VMware can hire from Microsoft is not surprising. But poaching outstanding talent from Google shows the level of ambition, aggression and resources that VMware will throw into becoming a leader in application development, not just operations.

Meanwhile the SpringSource assets are already great basis for a solid developer story. Rod Johnson, who runs that part of the business for Maritz, is as smart a strategist as he is a technologist – and he is a scary good technologist – with Spring he managed enterprise Java development far less painful. He is a purist about developer flow- which is why he outsourced development of the Spring IDE to Mik Kersten of Tasktop Technologies. Kersten’s company also contracted with Spring to develop the new “Cloud ALM” platform announced this week. Spring ROO is a Rails-influenced environment for building Java apps, while Spring is also home to Groovy, the dynamic language. Another intriguing developer play in the Spring arsenal comes in the shape of RabbitMQ – a lightweight scalable message queue system popping up all over the place. Developers like it, and messaging is going to transform the web into a more a event-driven transactional model. I list these technologies because you may not know about VMware’s assets in the space. (Please check out further coverage of VMware SpringSource here, here and here.)

You can’t buy competitive advantage, but you can build it. That’s VMware’s line. I’d love to see Nicholas “IT Doesn’t Matter” Carr and Maritz in a debate.

SpringSource is a client, Microsoft is a client. Google is not a client. Alfresco is not a client (but i should really sort that out).

The photo of Maritz, capturing something of his brooding nature, is by Robert Scoble. Please click on the link to see more of his flickr portfolio.

For a brief few moments after the invasion of Iraq US conservatives crowed that we had entered a Unipolar Moment – where US global hegemony was assured. This was an echo of Fukuyama’s End of History. We have heard a lot less of this triumphalism lately. Events have gotten in the way- not least the disastrous financial downturn driven by the great god “leverage”.

So Oracle acquired Sun. Game over. We had entered the Unipolar Java world – where top down governance by the sole Java superpower was assured. First step – sue Google over Android. At the risk of taking this metaphor way too far, the suit against Google is kind of like the debaathification of Iraq – it seems to have dramatically destabilised things (which helps explain why Sun didn’t just sue Google itself).

Java now seems to have more power centers than ever, which could prove to be the real future of the platform. I was at the OSGi Community Event this week in London – where I keynoted on how power in Java is becoming more widely distributed. It’s easy to be dismissive of the C in JCP, but that’s the only part of Java that really matters in the end – community. Sun was always smart enough to realise that “innovation happens elsewhere”. Open source governance is no longer a side activity in Java innovation – its the very heart of it.

Take NoSQL for example – which is set to become the most important trend in enterprise Java over the next few years, by the simple expedient of delivering sustantive business value, but also because the skills needed for enterprises are already present in abundance. NoSQL is a massive shot in the arm for Java skilled architects, developers and engineers.  Oracle and the JCP? Isn’t even in the game. The Apache Software Foundation on the other hand, is the home of Cassandra, CouchDB, Hadoop, and Voldemort.

The Eclipse Foundation has of course been disrupting, and enriching the Java ecosystem since its inception, keeping Sun honest, and helping to clean up some horrific messes/poor architectural decisions.

OSGi meanwhile you may never have heard of – but it essentially makes Java modular. One of the ironies of Scott McNealy’s constant screeds against the Windows Hairball is that Java became not one, but three, giant hairballs. If Sun really wanted a clean extensible Java that leant itself to reuse, and separation of concerns, without unnecessary interdependencies, driving exponential complexity… why didn’t Sun fix the modularity problem? Thankfully it didn’t need to – because OSGi provides a mechanism to turn Java into a Stackless Stack, where a runtime consists of only the classes needed to run a particular application.

Sadly because Java didn’t focus on modularity – neither did Java developers. Now, having been one of OSGi’s big supporters, Oracle has decided to take one last stab at killing the technology. Sun has tried and failed to kill OSGi a few times through the JCP, and now Oracle is putting weight behind Jigsaw. But Jigsaw won’t be here until 2012 at the earliest. Its DOA. Its way late- because pretty much every commercial software vendor in the Java middleware space, and most open source projects, are supporting OSGi. From Progress to Day Software, To WS02, to Apache Sling. Even where vendors are concerned that OSGi is too complex to expose to corporate developers – they are making OSGi work for plugin architectures, supporting dependency injection as it does: Atlassian and MuleSoft are both taking the latter approach. Whether or not anyone works out how to deliver OSGi for humans – for ISVs and really big enterprise Java shops it will be an important infrastructure approach. The point I am making is that OSGi is loosely coupled to Java, rather than tightly coupled to the JCP. Intriguingly OSGi is also making real progress in the space from whence Java was also originally intended for – embedded devices, automotive, industrial automation and so on – embedded computing doesn’t like hairballs, but loves over the air class loading for system refreshes. NTT is using it, and the company knows a thing or two about mobile service delivery, having been the inventor of Docomo, the first app store. Or take for example, Kirona – which offers field force automation running OSGi (on windows mobile too!) so that apps can be refreshed without bringing engineers back into the field.

Which brings me to IBM. In the good old days everyone knew that Sun defined Java, while BEA and IBM made money from it. These days not so much. But if IBM’s can’t influence the JCP as much as it would like it can now play divide and rule. I expect to see IBM giving Eclipse and OSGi a concerted push over the next couple of years.

Google is another Java player. It bought Instantiations and is giving away the product. Search company becomes IDE supplier. Weird. But then Instantiations had built some slick tools for building Google Web Toolkit apps. GWT- what’s that? Oh nothing much – just a technology which brings Java and Javascript together in a development model. How many awful Java front end technologies have we seen over the years? Java ServerFaces and so on. Well GWT is a much cleaner approach to application development, and suits web apps – thus Google’s interest. Then we have Google AppEngine- a place to run Java apps. Java in the cloud? So far Google has made all the running in Platform as a Service thinking and delivery.

EMC VMWare SpringSource is another major center of gravity for Java leadership. SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson after all is the guy that found a way to make JEE not so painful to develop. With his ambition and technical skill, and EMC’s heft- and of course Paul Maritz in the picture- there is now way Oracle will have Java leadership all to itself. It speaks volumes that Rod didn’t even bother to attend Java One this year- then, neither did the RedMonks.

I’d really like to know your thoughts on the the idea of a multipolar Java world. Who is going to be China?

My biggest issues is that Oracle seems to think benign neglect will work in the Java world. It won’t. And when your salesmen start denying that your app servers run OSGi, when they do, then you have a problem.

I could see positive scenarios for the JCP before the Sun acquisition closed, but I certainly don’t see them playing out the way I hoped. Oracle isn’t treating Java as an accountant would, its looking at it as a warrior. But the world needs soft power and diplomacy, as much as hard. I hope Oracle understands this sooner rather than later.

Maybe Oracle doesn’t care – but the forking of so many of its technologies can’t be a good thing. OpenSolaris now has a fork called Illumos, with some of the very best engineers Sun used to have working on it. This week also saw the arrival of a new fork of OpenOffice- LibreOffice (to which Oracle was invited). The bottom line? Java is a lot bigger than Oracle, and seemingly more diverse than ever. Alternative governance models such as OSGi, ASF and Eclipse are now just as important as the core Java platform, if not more so.

disclosure (please note that pretty much everyone I mention in this post except Oracle is a client – take that as you will. We do occasional project work for Oracle)

As I have argued before, in IT everything is dead. That is- if its in production, its “dead”. When a commentator says Technology A is dead, they generally just mean its not an Apple or Google product. So what about Java, in light of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, and the complete win of the web over everything else? What role can Java play in a world of dynamic languages?

According to Tim Bray:

“And finally, as a citizen primarily of the Web, I can’t help but notice that in recent years, its interesting bits (Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, 37 Signals, Ravelry) are largely not being built in Java.”

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 from Cloudera 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.

The Apache Software Foundation can hardly keep up with the pipeline of cool new technologies. Apache SOLR for large scale text search is of course Java-based. And so on.

NoSQL came from the web, but it willl find a natural home in the enterprise. The enterprise Java shop.

For a software stack that really isn’t in the NoSQL game I would say look at Microsoft .NET. myspace was one of the few major web properties built end to end on Microsoft technologies. In fact one wonders whether one reason myspace lost competitiveness with other web properties is because it had access to fewer cool technologies.

The irony of Bray’s argument is of course that Android – the part of Google that pays his salary, is also Java-based (well, pending the outcome of the Oracle suit anyway) and extremely innovative.

Anyway the point of this post is really just to riff on the data from simplyhired, as per the graph above. A 59% increase in bobs since January 2009? Not bad for a dead technology. Java has plenty of runway left and plenty of room for innovation.

disclosure: The ASF, Basho Technologies [RIAK], Cloudera, Microsoft and Neo4J are clients. Oracle is not but we have done work for them.

The more I think about it the more sure I am that watching sport on TV will be what drives the coming Internet TV convergence, which is probably good, given I was quoted to that effect in The Guardian last Friday.

“We are going to get integrated internet TV. I think that the integration of data-driven sports experiences will drive this in the US – where statistics matter so much for baseball, rather like statistics do for cricket here.”

In his News Corp AGM in 1996, Rupert Murdoch said:

“Sport absolutely overpowers film and everything else in the entertainment genre… we plan to use sports as a ‘battering ram’ and a lead offering in all our pay television operations.”

I am not sure much has changed. But the addition of data to sports can certainly make the experience more immersion and enjoyable. Just try and enjoy baseball or cricket without understanding the poetry of the data. Wisden’s Almanac is the original augmented reality.

My esteemed colleague Stephen O’Grady is a baseball stats nut. Not sure I can find the post explaining it now, but his appreciation of the stats is not separate to his enjoyment of baseball. It didn’t come after the fact; it pulled him into the game while he was living in Boston as an undergraduate if memory serves me correctly. Anyway, given I had a post of immersive data-driven Internet sports TV his most recent posterous was telling. It says simply:

no one knows better than a Linux user that Flash has its issues, but c’mon – MLB At Bat is just incredible

That’s what I find most interesting about the phenomenon I am describing. That is – watching sport is not independent of the medium. Thus – Stephen became an iPhone true believer on the strength of one app – MLB.com at bat. He calls it “quite possibly the best app ever written”.

Or ask vendorprisey about cricinfo.

People will choose to purchase hardware and software that best suits how they want to engage with sports and metrics. That’s why I think GoogleTV has a chance. Just because nobody has nailed Internet TV yet doesn’t mean Google won’t. Let’s face it – nobody understands stats and metrics like Google: if the firm can apply some of that genius to sports on “TV” they could change how we watch sport forever.

I, for one, can’t wait for the Opta TV app. Don’t know Opta? It turns sports into stats. And it knows exactly what its doing. The company’s slogan Finding Beauty in The Detail. Today Opta sells through broadcasters and directly to sports teams, but you can bet Internet TV will change all that. Opta already got an iPhone app. It also has one of my favourite twits- @Optajoe – who has the headline writing succinctness of the Sun and the stats prowess of, well, someone really good at stats. So – Opta as a future Google acquisition? Don’t bet against it…  And don’t bet against the notion you’ll be watching, or even better engaging with, GoogleTV within three years.

Another News Corp Google battle? This will be fun. The Murdochs’ claim that Google is just a content thief would be sorely tested in a stats-driven battle…  You see- Google creates content by maths. Its what it does. Even the spell check is a stats-driven service: the most common spelling of a word is the correct spelling: non-intuitive but true.

Why did I say “engaging with”? Because passive one way TV is so last century. TV can be an event, as the recent UK general election clearly demonstrated, particularly if you integrate Twitter into the mix. What surprised me about the  GoogleTV announcement last week was that it didn’t stress Read/Write TV. Watch that space, I guess.

Just in case you didn’t get the memo, and following yesterday’s post about the new business realities for industry analysts, I thought it was worth talking to a convergence RedMonk has long championed, and how it affects my sector.

For many years things were simple. JavaOne was the most important conference of the year. Sun paid our travel and expenses. We got free passes. We could hang out with the smartest developers on the planet, all brought together around a (somewhat) common set of platforms. Google folks came along, as did the entreprisey world. Deals were done over beer at the Thirsty Bear. If not deals then Big Ideas.

I am proud that RedMonk pioneered the dynamic language discussion at JavaOne back in 2007, helping folks like Charles Nutter and Tim Bray make their case.

With the acquisition of Sun by Oracle it feels like the baton has been passed on, as dynamic languages become production environments- often hosted by Google. Who owns Java? To me now it looks like Oracle, Google and VMware can all stake a claim for leadership. IBM decided to sit out the game.

So next week is Google I/O. I can’t make it but Stephen will be there. There is no way Google would pay us, or any other industry analyst,  to come to the event, or even, I suspect, comp us a ticket. This is very very different for the hitherto privileged industry analyst community. We’re just another influencer as far as Google is concerned. Same for Twitter’s Chirp conference, or Facebook’s F8.

At first glance you might ask why industry analysts interested in enterprise technology should want to go the Web 2.0 developer conference. But enterprise Web convergence is real and its now. Comcast presented at NoSQL EU. Big Data started on the web but is coming to the enterprise. Cassandra now has enterprise support in the shape of Riptano. Cloudera is making Hadoop enterprise consumable. NoSQL is real. The Cloud is real. Amazon is running enterprise conferences now.

Android is Java-based. Google AppEngine is real. The big convergence is upon us. What does that say to industry analysts that are used to enterprise technology coming from enterprise vendors being purchased by enterprise decision-makers? It says- you better change the model and change it fast. Research that doesn’t have time for the web and the companies building the web is backward facing.

Of course Oracle will still run Java One. Of course Gartner will continue to do well selling to the enterprise purchaser. But pure buy-side sell-side distinctions are from a different era. Open source killed that past.

If we want to know what’s going on we have to use the web. But if we want face2face we have to pay for the privilege. By lowering barriers to participation for normal folks, the Web companies have created barriers to entry for industry analysts. No more information asymmetries. No more “arbitrage” and competitive advantage through secrecy and embargo. Perhaps this is just a moment in time, and as Google builds its enterprise business it will indeed privilege the traditional industry analyst. But I kind of doubt it.

I, for one, am very glad that RedMonk has a model based on The New Patronage Economy that gives us time to spend time with the engineers building the web.

And if you’re like us to be the patrons and buy the beers?

RedMonk beers, House of Shields, next Wednesday night. sure to be The Party of @googleio, which is the new @javaone.

Cloudera is a client. Google is not.

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.

Has to go to the folks behind Google Android.

A couple of months ago when my Nokia N95 suddenly turned into a brick the inestimable James Whatley aka whatleydude was kind enough to loan me an HTC Magic running the new mobile OS from Google. I played with the device for about five minutes before proclaiming: For now, Nokia, you’re dead to me.

A couple of Christmases ago Stephen O’Grady had a similar experience with the iPhone, but I was never quite ready to join Apple’s Permission-based Web.

The Magic though, has changed my living and working practices for the better. Its as simple as that. Its not as good a phone or digital camera as I am used to, but its aeons ahead as a web friendly device. Series 60 is hobbled for the web. This year the hobble turned into a wobble, and now Nokia is finally acknowledging that Symbian is a problem.

To my mind it wasn’t the iPhone that really brought home the problem to Nokia, it was Android. The thought of all those Asian manufacturers bringing Android devices to a European market with a ready made business model through the carriers should concentrate the mind.

That’s the thing – so far at least Android isn’t a phone, its an ecosystem.

Which brings me to 2010 and a big question mark. Is Google about to kill the golden goose? Releasing its own Android phone onto the general market, as rumours clearly indicate, is not exactly a great way to instill confidence in partners. The temptation internally to favor the Nexus in APIs and so on is going to be too hard to resist. Android has has a few knocks already for its kinda, sorta open source approach, and I expect the volume of criticism to grow pretty significantly.Google seems to think it needs to own the entire stack to have a truly great user experience, but isn’t it possible hardware competition would have delivered just that?

Funnily enough, for example, I prefer the HTC Magic to the Droid. It may be underpowered compared to the black monolith Verizon is selling, but it has better hand feel as far as I am concerned.

Android as a trojan horse for Google’s apps ambitions makes perfect sense.  Part of what makes the Android experience so great for me at least, is that I use Google Apps. All the syncing is done in the background for me. As a Google client it “just works” – beautifully.

But Google is entering the hardware business now. I suspect competitors are breathing a sigh of relief. Except Apple perhaps -we can surely expect an Android “Slate killer” tablet sooner rather than later. But where does it all end? Will Google sell its own car navigation hardware? What about ChromeOS netbooks?

I am looking forward to seeing if my team of 2009 can prove me wrong in 2010 by keeping the ecosystem happy and growing as it competes with hardware makers.

This year the winner just screamed out at me, when I started considering it, so no runner up. Last year I chose a team that I know personally, the IBM Eight Bar crew from Hursley Labs. This year I chose a team I can’t name a single member of, but they had a notable impact on me, and more importantly, an entire industry or two.