Bickel Blog

VMWare Exec makes my day

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:52:00 +0000

It was a really good day yesterday. Very productive on lots of fronts, and a ton of good news for CloudBees. We got in the Jolt Awards - "Cloudbees was included for special distinction because we strongly feel it indicates an important new direction in coding. The product is still in its infancy, but we think its importance to the market warrants inclusion for a special award." And we got named one of the 9 Hot Startups by NetworkWorld.

Then as I was getting ready for bed James Watters of VMWare posted this:

wattersjames James Watters

@stevengharris who in their right mind would take that troll blog by@bobbickel seriously? It doesn't even have its facts right around price

Well, a little tweet storm erupted that I will copy here for posterity purposes and ease of reading. There are two blog posts in question: How Will PaaS be Priced, and Why VMWare Loves and Hates the Cloud.

bobbickel bobbickel

I'm a troll!! So thrilling! Can't wait for those bridge tolls to come rolling in... Thanks @wattersjames

wattersjames James Watters

@bobbickel I mean, I get it, start-ups should be scrappy and make noise, its cool, have fun.

bobbickel bobbickel

@wattersjames - my daughter just asked me if you called me a troll because I am short and ugly. I told it was complicated ;-)

wattersjames James Watters

@bobbickel but if your best troll is just making up pricing and not even looking at VSPP, its a pretty thin argument and you loose cred

wattersjames James Watters

@bobbickel I didn't call you a troll, I said your blog was a troll. And it was, look up the history of the word.

bobbickel bobbickel

@wattersjames - smile a bit. If my pricing is off, correct it in a comment. I tried my troll best to understand your pricing on VMware.com

wattersjames James Watters

@bobbickel its not my job to educate you about the market, enjoy your misconceptions, I just questions others using you as a reference.

bobbickel bobbickel

Here are the two blogs in question -bobbickel.blogspot.com/2011/06/paas-h… andbobbickel.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-vm…

wattersjames James Watters

@bobbickel google: VSPP

bobbickel bobbickel

I pulled the VMware pricing from vmware.com/products/appli… andvmware.com/products/vsphe…

michaelneale Michael Neale

@bobbickel trolls do have beards.

This whole thread made me giggle.

But to get serious:

1. This is my blog. I do not seek approval from the companies I work with. They are my thoughts as they pertain to the businesses I am involved in.

2. I am a homer (meaning I cheer for the home team). So most of my blogs have to do with the businesses I am invested in and work with. They recount the basic reasons that I am working with them beyond the fundamentals of wanting to hang with smart, hard working, fun, team-oriented people. If that is a troll, then so be it.

3. I make sure that the information I write is accurate. In spite of being a troll, I do value my credibility. Although sometimes folks in big companies like Ted and James do not always agree. As for the pricing in my blog it is based on single unit costs as explained on the VMWare TCServer Pricing and vSphere Pricing pages. I do not get how James thinks a glorified volume discount program for Service Providers makes my blog troll-like.

Making me feel a bit better about this was this tweet:

vaporfog Benjamin Dover

@bobbickel @stevengharris everyone is a troll according to@wattersjames so don't pay him no mind.

vaporfog Benjamin Dover

@bobbickel is much more accomplished then you @wattersjames , he was on the board of #hyperic for crying out loud.

I am so happy a guy named Ben Dover came to rescue my credibility!

Bickel Business Review 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:49:00 +0000

I like to spend a bit of time looking back at the year each December. I'm happy to report that all of my various business adventures have moved forward since last year. My family is also happy that I did not take on any new projects this year!

Overall, it was a year where strategies that were put in place in 2010 started to reap benefits and all of the companies "grew up" a bit. None of them are fully grown by any means, but there is a sense of maturity in each.

The other big trend was just a total focus on the Cloud as a delivery and a business model. My view is that tech companies are founded on the technology, and developing for the Cloud changes things drastically. New versions go up each day. There is no need to support old releases. This changes the development, QA, and support processes a great deal. It has the effect of faster cycle times, a requirement for new automation, and if done right, significantly lower costs.

CloudBees - 2010 was about building the technology team. 2011 has seen that technology team deliver mature and robust cloud services, and Jenkins has basically kicked ass (I am so happy for KK).

While PaaS is still in early adoption mode, we are seeing strong growth in small apps and have even gotten to the point where we have a couple of six figure customers. This means our infrastructure has become big enough and our processes mature enough to start to bring real economic savings to customers. We rolled out pricing change for our Jenkins in the Cloud services and should be rolling out the Java PaaS side pretty soon. This will mean that the Cloud becomes a "no brainer" for anyone doing Continuous Integration or developing and deploying Java apps. You simply can not buy raw hardware and load it with open source software for less than we can. This is going to bring big changes over the next 3-5 years to the enterprise software market.

As a company, we grew beyond the raw technology foundation. The key to a company's success (as long as you have solid technology and are in a good market) is the people. We added Jim McLaughlin as VP of Sales, Andre Pino as VP of Marketing and Steve Harris as VP of Products. I've been lucky to work with Andre and Steve in the past. What strikes me as I sit in team meetings is the rare combination of experience, maturity and drive this team has. We are lucky to have the business team that will make sure our transformational Cloud offerings bring real value to customers. In addition, we solidified our technical advisory board as well as our corporate board and balance sheet with a great Series B fundraising that brought an additional $11M into the company. It should be a kick ass 2012!

eXo - This is a company on the cusp of making a major move forward based on the new cloud offerings that started coming out this year (Cloud-IDE) and will continue into this coming year as the entire platform becomes cloud enabled. This means we will enable both ourselves and our customers to shift from the old business model of open source / enterprise software into the new Cloud business model.

We also saw our business double in 2011 thanks to the efforts of our new VP of Sales, Yann Aubry, and his team. There was also expansion beyond our strong partnership with Red Hat with new relationships with VMWare and an expanding partner ecosystem. Given the new offerings coming out we are quite excited about 2012.

The thing I like most about eXo is the fact it is a glimpse into the future of how companies will be organized. Development teams are in France, Ukraine and Vietnam. Tunisia is home to a sales team, support team and consulting team. It was so exciting to see Tunisia lead the Arab Spring revolution this year and seeing the excitement of Oualid and the whole team. France and America both have sales, marketing and product management responsibilities. Benjamin has been a visionary in terms of using social and collaboration and reporting tools to keep this distributed team in sync and producing simply amazing amounts and quality of technology. Without getting too mushy, I think this type of cross-cultural team will move the world forward to be a more peaceful and equitable future. I also must admit I love going to Paris for board meetings ;-)

Metaverse - This company may have matured the most in the past year. The transition was caused when Doug Kerwin went on his honeymoon and read Tony Hseih's book on Zappo's. Doug has done basically what Tony did with his company. He went from worrying about investors and valuation to worrying about his customers and employees. Instead of trying to come up with the latest "get rich quick with new stuff" the focus shifted to doing the little things right to satisfy customers and employees. The results have been very rewarding in terms of company morale, customer satisfaction and (surprise, surprise) financial results.

I love visiting Metaverse where tens of thousands of shipments happen each month, generated from literally thousands of websites (they provide the art backend for online stores like Macy's, Sears, Kohls, Office Max, CafePress and others). As I have said in the past it is a technology company that has automated processes for a seamless and highly efficient system. As an e-commerce company they have been a leader in what many others are finding out about a Cloud process. Making changes across thousands of web properties on a daily basis in baked into the DNA of this company. When I think about old line companies, it will be very difficult to compete with this new breed.

Moorestown Running Company - We are in the middle of our fifth year, and it looks like this will be a very long term business. We became profitable last year and we have grown 7% this year and delivered another profitable year. What I love most is how the store has become a part of the culture of Moorestown.

There was a nice article in the local online paper about the store. It did a good job of explaining how happy I am to be able to work with Joe, Ralph, Ed, Colleen, Mo, Becca and Dave to deliver a place for the running community in our small town.

The big addition this year were the coaching services Colleen and Ralph expanded. Ralph also started up a side business by buying an Alter-G machine. This enables runners to run at a lighter weight for training or recovery from injuries.

RunSignUp.com - At the end of 2010 I decided to invest more into this new business as the first year results were very promising. We have a seen a 5X growth in registrations, and it looks like it will just keep growing very quickly over the next year. Jordan has been on a full year now and makes sure our race directors, timers and runners are happy. Our development team has grown quite a bit, and we have just added a couple more part time college students from Villanova.

We are the up and comer in this market leveraging our new cloud-based architecture to move past the old and unfocused Active.com. I was not able to spend much time on this business in 2011 as it was an important year at CloudBees in particular. I have started to focus more on this business for 2012 and am very excited about the coming year!

And finally, my big achievement for the year was recognized by USAirways...

Why VMware Loves and Hates the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:45:00 +0000

Paul Maritz is trying to figure out how to overcome the innovators dilemma at VMware. The spectacular success of vSphere and virtualization has taken the company from $700 Million in revenue in 2006 to $3.7 Billion in 2011. The company now carries a valuation of $40 Billion.

The innovators dilemma phrase, coined by Clayton Christiansen, of course refers to how a company can shift economics, culture, talent, customer contracts, etc. to jump on a new offering. This is a difficult trick, not often done. In this case the VMware sales force needs to bring in $4.5 Billion next year, and lowering prices is not the way to get that done as VMware recently proved with their new pricing schemes. Plus, customers paying large maintenance contracts demand existing technology to get better, not be usurped.

Today VMware is an arms supplier to the Cloud. This works out well for selling to big companies who think running vSphere and vCloud and vFabric is the same as the cloud. However, VMware's traditional service provider channel is shunning the VMware technology stack for their public Cloud offerings.

Amazon has led the public cloud market in terms of aggressive offerings and pricing. This pricing makes it impossible for a VMware service provider such as Verizon/Terremark or Rackspace to base their offering on the VMware stack. The same is true of the VMware hardware vendors – HP, Dell, IBM – who have been aligned with VMware in the traditional enterprise server business, but are shunning VMware as they bring out their public Cloud offerings.

VMware could potentially bring out their own public Cloud offerings. But this would compete with their partners, and undercut their existing pricing structure if they were to be competitive in price. And forget transitioning their business model of ~20% margin with Amazon's 3-4% margin they are used to.

To their credit, VMware has tried to be innovative on the development front with the Spring acquisition and the CloudFoundry PaaS offering. But even this carries the same set of problems. Spring may be doing only $100M of revenue, and therefore easy for VMware to justify ignoring. However, a true PaaS eliminates the need of the whole VMware stack. Virtualization is done on different levels, with no need for vSphere and vFabric. (See more on this topic in my article on Application Virtualization).

This is why VMware has been mute on timing and pricing of CloudFoundry. For every CPU out there, VMware collects about $400 for vSphere and $750 for vFabric (Spring).

That is over $1,100 per year of VMware revenue per cpu. Given Amazon's pricing of about $750 per year per CPU including the hardware and network and a fair amount of storage, the VMware business model will need to shift dramatically to really play in the new generation of the Cloud.

Web Developer Intern/Co-Op for RunSignUp

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 17:23:00 +0000

RunSignUp provides cloud services to the running community – such as race registration, running club management, coaching services, and running logs.

We are looking for an intern or co-op computer science student with an interest in doing web development. The ideal candidate will have experience building websites with HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL. Web design with tools like Photoshop is also a plus.

You will be working with a small, but highly talented team with deep experience. This provides a learning opportunity to work with cutting edge web technology like Amazon EC2, social integration with Facebook and Twitter, Mobile app development, Ajax, REST services, etc.

You would work at our office in Philadelphia (20 N 3rd St.) as well as remote (your home/dorm room).

Compensation is dependent on experience, but starts at $20 per hour. Send me your resume - bob dot bickel at comcast dot net.

CloudBees Open Source Choice

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:37:00 +0000

CloudBees is made up of Open Source veterans. Sacha Labourey was the CTO of JBoss, Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the Founder of Jenkins and Hudson, Michael Neale, Adrian Brock, Ryan Campbell, Paul Sandoz, Harpreet Singh Vivek Pandey, and many others have spent most of their careers developing open source software. On the business side, David Skok and I are two well known advocates for the open source business model.

It begs the question, why is CloudBees not open source?

The fundamental reason is that our goal is to create a new type of software – that is really consumed as a service. We feel strongly that open source brought a whole new cost efficiency to using software in the enterprise. JBoss and Jenkins greatly reduce the cost as compared to previous enterprise software models. The new Cloud era ushers in new levels of cost savings and increased flexibility.

In short it required a different model, one that is more hybrid in nature. Still using and contributing to open source projects that can be used in enterprises – we do plenty of this with Jenkins, Tomcat, JBoss, Glassfish, etc.

The Cloud is Different

The Cloud affords the opportunity to drastically reduce operational costs and increase the flexibility. To get at those, we need to eliminate the overhead of installing, configuring, testing and maintaining many layers of software for each application, department and enterprise. Eliminating the overhead of multiple versions of infrastructure. Eliminating costly support contracts with vendors. Eliminating capital requirements.

In the perfect world of effectiveness, application developers build apps and just deploy them to the Cloud. No need to have any of the old overhead.

We felt strongly that the open source business model did not fit this new world. Open source fits well when lots of people will be running lots of versions of the software and making lots of changes to it for their own environment. This use case is kind of the polar opposite of the Cloud.

Open is Different with the Cloud
The lock-in for Java app servers was not because the application was unable to move, but the investments made in the infrastructure. Companies had to buy servers, expensive licenses, expensive maintenance contracts, pay high powered people to design the architecture, install and configure the systems. Create a process for testing, staging, deploying. The tooling, scripting and environment around this became BEA and IBM's lock-in. Even JBoss and Spring use EAP, JBoss Network, and tcServer, to lock in the operational aspects.

By outsourcing much of that to the Cloud, companies can step up to a new level of openness. eXo Cloud-IDE demonstrates how it can do a git deploy to CloudBees, CloudFoundry, OpenShift, Heroku with a simple menu option. The core competency and investment is in the code. So if users don't like a Cloud provider, they just point and click and are done moving.

The reduction in operational overhead reduces costs, and the ease of migration ensures competitive costs between Cloud alternatives.

This is a radical departure from the past. And will take a couple of years for the market to truly understand. But this new approach will cause companies to look more at the functionality provided than how it is done.

Not to channel Steve Jobs inappropriately, but some of the thoughts of simplicity he brought to the consumer market are being brought to the Enterprise market by new companies with new approaches like CloudBees.

How Steve Jobs Impacted me

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:15:00 +0000

While many people are saddened by the loss of Steve Jobs, it goes just a bit deeper for me

In 1992 I was at a small consulting company that resold software, Bluestone Consulting. Mel Baiada was the owner and founder, and was famous for dropping lots of articles on my desk that were interesting. One day he dropped a video tape of Steve Jobs demoing Next. It was an over-reaching workstation/operating system/development environment. But it had the by now familiar Steve Jobs elegant simplicity.

The part that fascinated me was a demo of him dragging and dropping a database object like last_name onto a graphical object like a text field for the last name. Of course Jobs made the demo cool by dragging and dropping graphical objects like a person's picture onto the screen. Then pushing a button and magically it was an application. Users of the application could type in a last name and do a search of the database and poof – that person's information would be there, including their photo.

At the time we were reselling a product called UIM/X which allowed developers to create the user interface for an application, much like half of what Next did. We had also started reselling a product called dbViewer, which provided a quick way to retrieve information from a database. "Borrowing" from the Steve Jobs video, I decided we needed to create our own product to do the same thing. Mark Nigro and Scott Pennell joined the company and created the first version of this product.

Shortly after the World Wide Web started (1994-95), we created a totally new version of this product called Sapphire/Web – a visual tool that created one of the first application servers in the market. That product grew and Bluestone Software eventually spun out of Bluestone Consulting, provided hundreds of jobs and opportunities for people. Many of those people have gone on to create many more products and services that have created many, many more jobs and created lots of market value.

That whole chain of good things happened because of Steve Jobs. All of my personal career good fortune goes back to that video. I am convinced I would not have had the career success I've had without Steve Jobs.

Thank you Steve.

Montana and the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

As we were sitting up near Logan Pass in Glacier National Park this past week, my wife asked me what I was thinking about. I replied that the shape of the mountain range reminded me of one of the central themes of Cloud Computing - you pay for only what you use.

I enthralled her with the story of how unused capacity should be free like the sky, and how the workload needed to be stable and ready to handle the peaks and valleys of real use.

OK, maybe enthralled is not the right term...

Book Review - Why the West Rules, For Now - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:56:00 +0000

Mike Olson recommended this book a while back on Facebook. It is a dense book, and so full of information (all of history from the beginning of Homo habilis thru today) that I am having trouble keeping up. A passage last night convinced me that I had gotten a couple of big concepts out of it, and figured I would write them down before I forgot them...

The book is written by Ian Morris, who teaches classics, history, and archaeology at Stanford University. It takes an archaeological and social look at the history of mankind and how we developed. Four items stood out to me as learnings from history that could be applied to today.

1. Climate change has been happening for a long time
and has very dramatic consequences. "In two or three centuries

around 17,000 BCE the sea level rose 40 feet as the glaciers that had

blanketed North America, Europe and Asia melted." Weather determined where humans could go (people migrated all the way from Africa thru Asia and Alaska to settle the Americas since they were all connected due to the cold), what areas were warm and wet enough to grow vegetation and livestock, forced migrations as land dried up or became submerged.

2. While he develops a system for rating progress, the most fascinating underlying enabler is how much energy we can produce. In very

early days we had trouble producing enough calories to feed ourselves with hunting and gathering. Once we started cultivating the land (the "Fertile Crescent" near present day Syria was first around 10,000-9,000 BCE) we started generating more energy in the form of calories people could eat - thus freeing them up to pursue other interests. Once people started forming societies with organization and bureaucracy, they could accomplish great things - like building the Pyramids (that is a lot of calories burned to cut and move all that stone). Learning how to harness the power of water was a step forward. But the real big step was coal and the steam engine harnessed

in Britain in the late 1700's. Oil took that to the next level being more efficient and easier to transport, and then the internal combustion engine gave humans access to incredible amounts of energy creation on a per capita basis. And for the trifecta Electricity was harnessed making for three straight centuries of unreal increases in energy creation. There is

a lot more detailed data in a paper he wrote - http://www.ianmorris.org/docs/social-development.pdf

3. It was very interesting to see the evolution of religion as a lever of power across the ages. I must admit it all reinforced my perception that religion has many times been used as a source of power. In the 10,000 - 2,000 BCE timeframe most communities had rulers who was thought to be a God. This was true in both the East and West. Around 2440 BCE the first King "announced that he was his patron god's son." This was a popular angle - having some sort of connection to god. The Han and Roman empires cracked at least partially due to losing the "mandate of heaven". There were only a few hundred Buddhists in 65 CE and by the 6th century most Chinese were believers, and the spread of Christianity in the west was even faster. He calls these second wave Axial religions, offering new kinds of salvation to more people and making the path toward salvation easier." When the high end state institutions started breaking down, the bishops were will placed to step into the gap.

4. Empires Outgrow themselves. During the first half of the 1800's, "British manufacturers were exporting trains, ships, and machines, and British financiers were lending foreigners the money to buy them. Britain was, in effect, building up foreign industries that would challenge its economic dominance.... Britain created such a big market that it would concentrate on those skills that made the biggest profit." He recounts how this basic process has happened many times in the past. "The core" has success and is eventually overtaken by surrounding areas. "It even creates whole new cores when the advantages of backwardness empower those who had previously been marginal. (Social development) growth depends on societies becoming larger, more complicated and harder to manage; the higher it rises, the more threats to itself it creates." I am sure the author will build on this for his theories about what will happen in the future and explain the "For Now" part of his title.

Anyway, a good book if you want to get a broad view of history and human development...

PaaS and ADHD

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 11:45:00 +0000

We live in impatient times. 24 hour cable news, 140 character spurts of creativity, $1B companies created in less than 2 years by selling spa treatments at half off, LinkedIn has a valuation of $9B on $500M revenue and a new penchant for daily emails to remind us how relevant they are...

Michael Cote and Bob Warfield both wrote interesting articles this past week on the unfulfilled promise of PaaS - "Touted at the next thing in cloud, Platform as a Service is receiving much attention now. While PaaS has been far from a failure, it hasn’t been a mega success…yet." and "There’s been plenty of time for PaaS to get big, but it is kind of lumbering along."

Perhaps people forget that Salesforce is over 10 years old. I bought my stock in them in 2004 at $17 per share. It took 7 years to reach $154... All good things really don't always happen overnight...

When we think of PaaS, we think about the next generation of middleware. This is a business that Gartner puts at $16B per year, and the Java segment at $3B. It is a business that does not shift quickly.

The reason is several-fold:

The Develop - Build - Test - Deploy - Manage cycle is a long one that has huge, multi-layered investments that are difficult to change quickly. Lots of people, lots of tech, lots of moving pieces.
It takes time for a new project to select a new methodology and get their apps to production.
It takes time for a new app to get traction. One of the mobile apps that uses CloudBees took 2 years to go from no users to several million doing 10,000+ transactions per minute.
Vendors need time not only to find the right feature set, but to get difficult middleware technology things like transactions, messaging, failover, replication and more right. Not to mention the new demands of multi-tenancy and hyper-scalability and virtualization. Not as sexy as Farmville, but important foundations for real business apps.

For those of us in the app server business in the 90's, we remember before Oracle and IBM really entered the

market. We remember a bunch of small companies like NetDynamics, Bluestone, WebLogic, Kiva starting the market in 1995 and real maturity did not happen until 2000. The second wave in app servers of open source and more agile development followed a similar path. JBoss took 5 years to get to a $25M run-rate, and it was considered a very fast growth company. Spring had similar metrics and experience.

CloudBees and eXo see the PaaS market as something that will take time to develop.

We see the cycle as being something akin to the experience we had at JBoss. First a few (cutting edge) developers try out PaaS. Then they develop a few small apps and use it for Test purposes. Then a few apps sneak into production. Someone in the business notices she can do it quicker this way. Then the investment starts to become strategic - delivering significant cost and time to market advantages.

Those same cutting edge developers are starting to play with PaaS now. The writing is clearly on the wall in terms of career futures for Java developers...

Sure, it is taking time for the example Heroku set in the Ruby marketplace to be understood by the enterprise and Java folks, but the wake-up call has happened. It is clear that PaaS will displace App Servers and infrastructure virtualization needs for at least web apps over time. The long term advantages of cost,

flexibility and speed of change will win out as they have in previous cycles.

Patience, my friends!

IBM is Cool

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:10:00 +0000

Tonight I read about Oracle's lawsuit against Google and then HP's suit against Oracle. I got depressed and did a couple of sarcastic Tweets.

Then I opened up the NYTimes and read IBM's essay celebrating their 100 years. While it takes a couple of cheap shots at founder-driven companies (Apple, Oracle and Facebook envy), it is a very aspirational piece.

My favorite quote is:

"I believe that if an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself, except its beliefs." - Thomas Watson, Jr.

I admit, I am a sucker for IBM. My Dad worked there from the mid 1960's until his retirement. I had a summer job in the Glendale Labs where I wrote 11 lines of code that went into all of the company's 300 and 600 lpm band printers in the late 70's. I attended a day long class in the history and culture of IBM, learning the importance of THINK, of respect, and the value of technology. Tom Watson, Jr. wrote my Dad a note when I got a broken leg in 6th grade. My Dad "feared" for me when I took a job at Digital Equipment rather than IBM a couple of years out of college. I competed head-head with IBM's Tony Shaloop (sp?) at the duPont Experimental Station in the mid 80's. I had my respectful differences of opinion with IBM open source guru Bob Sutor in the mid 2000's. The listened to best guy I ever worked with, Al Smith, as he raved over the past 3 years after his company (Princeton Softech) was acquired by IBM. I have the 3 shares of IBM stock framed on the wall next to my home office desk that my Dad gave me with the words "Break in case of emergency" written on the back.

I think Tom Jr.'s words are relevant today as each of us make our daily choices. It is all about core values. Doing the right THINK.

And, yes, I was proud when Watson kicked Ken Jennings and Brad Rutters butts...

CloudBees Thinks Big - an Ecosystem

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 20:17:00 +0000

CloudBees took another important step forward in fulfilling our vision as the Java PaaS innovation leader with the announcement of the CloudBees Partner Ecosystem. CloudBees knows that we can not develop everything ourselves – and that customers want choice and flexibility. Here are the first partners, with more coming soon:

JFrog Artifactory - Binary Repository - think Super Maven!
SonarSource - the leading open source Static Code Analysis.
Sauce Labs / Selenium - the leading open source based cross-browser testing service.
Cloudant - Clustered, cloud-based CoachDB (noSQL) service.
New Relic - the leading Cloud Monitoring service.

The Cloud offers new ways of partnering and bringing solutions to customers, and CloudBees is enabling that in an open, flexible, easy-to-use offering.

For Java Developers and IT shops:

• Extends the low cost of doing business on the Cloud.

• Enabling extended services is as simple as clicking a button.

• Integration is already done in the Cloud – no messy self-configuration.

• Centralized management.

• Services extend across the entire lifecycle of development thru application deployment.

For Partners:

• This is a whole new level of Partnership.

• Gives ISV's and Open Source Projects a clear path to the Cloud.

• Lower cost of integration and support.

• Open new revenue sources.

Best of all, this program is real and working today. Check it out at http://cloudbees.com/platform-ecosystem.cb.

CloudBees has become the smart choice for Java shops moving to the Cloud.

PaaS - How will it be priced?

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:44:00 +0000

CloudBees is in an interesting position being so far ahead of the rest of the competitors in the Java PaaS space. We have a GA offering that is basically competing with Beta versions from VMWare (Cloud Foundry) and Red Hat (OpenShift). So we have to price our full offering ahead of our competitors.

We all have free versions. Given the market is early, this might be the most important thing today given that a lot of people want to experiment and learn and understand how the Cloud can play in their development and deployment cycles. It is likely we will all keep free versions. For example, CloudBees offers up to 300 free minutes of Jenkins build time per month on the dev side (lots more for Open Source Projects) and up to 5 apps on the RUN@cloud side. Of course those 5 free apps are not scalable, or have high availability or have SSL or have custom URL's. But certainly very useful for learning, testing and even small apps that are non-critical.

The interesting part comes when trying to figure out the pricing for running this in production. CloudBees has made our pricing public, and we think it is very competitive to the alternative of having to own your own hardware, operating system, virtualization, webservers, application servers, database servers, repositories, Jenkins, etc. Not to mention installing, configuring and maintaining that stack. And of course only paying for what you use. Oh, and the nice benefit of having "instant on".

Of course we have to play a bit of a guessing game as to where our two major competitors will end up later this year or early next year when they finally go GA. My guess is they will be significantly above us given they have an installed base to protect. Just look at the VMWare stack diagram above. CloudFoundry is just a little green box at about 1 o'clock, and when coming from VMWare will likely be packaged with other things like vSphere, vCloud, vFabric (Spring) and management tools. If you buy those today they cost $2-5K per CPU depending on configuration. My guess is that VMWare can not say goodbye to $2B in revenue by giving those components away or by devaluing them by bundling them in CloudFoundry.

I heard from a mutual partner that Paul Maritz says they want to commoditize the PaaS to keep the value in their other components.

You can also get a sense for where they stand with the recent vFabric 5 (Spring) announcement in this article - "Our approach ensures that the best place to run any of your applications is on vSphere, and secondarily, vSphere is the very best place to run your Spring applications" says SpingSource's David McJannet. My educated guess is they will take a similar stance with Cloud Foundry.

While at Red Hat summit we heard rumblings from the RHEL sales force that hints at the kind of internal battles and real revenue continuation program they must have to protect their installed base of RHEL and JBoss.

What this all adds up to is that CloudBees will have a competitive advantage since we are unencumbered by running on specific stacks and do not have revenue streams to protect there. This means we will be able to charge prices to customers that will continue to save them money from their existing stacks. This will become more clear as we make announcements over the course of this year where we run on alternate stacks - giving customers a lot of flexibility and freedom of choice in where and how they take advantage of the Cloud. It should be fun...

Will Oracle's Hudson Karma follow the project to Eclipse?

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Thu, 05 May 2011 13:37:00 +0000

To borrow & adapt a line from the Supreme Court, "You know Karma when you see it".

Clearly, the Hudson project has had bad Karma hanging over it due to Oracle's moves that forced the re-creation of the project as Jenkins - http://jenkins-ci.org/content/hudsons-future. The idea of forcing most of the community out did not sit well with people, and the resulting fast adoption of Jenkins as the default best open source CI offering in the market followed. See KK's slides for the rapid adoption of Jenkins – http://www.slideshare.net/kohsuke/current-state-of-jenkins.

What is surprising to me is that Eclipse has seemingly backed the proposal already (see comments from the Eclipse Foundation leads Mike Milinkovich and Ian Skerrett in the threads quoted below defending the proposal and trying to educate others on open source).

It surprises me on two levels. First, Eclipse has a deservedly sterling reputation. Maybe Karma does not transfer, but it seems to me that there is a risk to this reputation.

Second, given the reputation Eclipse has as a community builder, I would have expected some amount of communication and collaboration with the original Hudson community and the project creator, Kohsuke Kawaguchi. While it can be argued that Hudson and Jenkins are simply separate open source projects now with different communities, the Tweets and posts and blogs have been full of people wishing for the good old days of a single project. Perhaps Eclipse thought no notice beforehand and having behind the scenes discussions between companies for the past couple of months without involving anyone from the Jenkins community was the proper way of reaching out to the Jenkins community. Or maybe various corporate interests just want to try to have the Hudson project be resuscitated and brought back to life to compete with Jenkins.

The first day showed that the bad Karma may indeed follow the project into Eclipse. Here are a sampling of quotes:

From http://tasktop.com/blog/eclipse/proposal-hudson-eclipse#comment-117101:

"I'm just a Hudson and Jenkins user, but I did get the impression that Oracle did a hostile takeover from the original Hudson community. It left a negative impression.

I must admit that this move on Eclipse Foundation's behalf put EF in a negative light."

"Our team decided a month ago to switch to Jenkins as it was clear that Jenkins had more energy and support, and it was unclear where Hudson would end up."

"For me as an outsider the Hudson/Jenkins project is the baby of KK. I know a lot of other people have been involved in the project(s) but at the end of day it is KK and his incredible skills that drive the whole thing. What would Linux be without Linus or Python without Guido? Whatever will happen I will follow Jenkins and KK. It is not because of some irrational worship. It is about trust. I trust KK as I trust PJ of Groklaw, Linus Torvalds and many other in the opens source world. But I do not trust Oracle."

"From the owner change of Hudson to the Jenkins fork, some people say, it was a "heavy communication misfire" on both sides. I can't see that. Oracle clearly played hardball on the Trademark and what will go where and when. It backfired, and when lots of customers and devs left, there is was a 'Plan B': the move to Eclipse."

"Obviously, Oracle is hoping that there are many paths for success; they have already tried one with Hudson and failed, so they have no choice but to keep looking… However, dismissing the original community that was built around Hudson, is not likely to help them attain that goal."

"Mik: When you write “IP-clean, inviting, API-robust and long-lived” do you mean by that Jenkins is not IP-clean, not inviting, not API-robust and short lived?

You also write about meritocracy. Did you see the number of commits in the project and who made them? This is not an open source drama. It is about companies, or organizations (acting for companies) trying to gain ownership of something which is not theirs."

"What I'm questioning is what is Eclipse getting out of this?"

From http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&th=208592&start=0&S=fdff280283ffffdaff8cf11b79064bae

"the only meaningful reason to have Hudson at Eclipse is that this move will unity the Hudson/Jenkins community"

From http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/eclipse-hudson

"Ha, what happened? Sonatype not doing the job well enough?"

"So nothing much has changed then except that are using the eclipse foundation as a white wash? So if the jenkins people came back their treatment would be different somehow?"

"Face it. Oracle is not Sun, does not want to be and never will be. They have proven this with so many very public examples in such a short amount of time that calling it a "conspiracy" insults us and makes you out to be a fool."

"Is this proposal basically about the trademark and not so much about the code or the community?"

"I don't understand what Eclipse Foundation is getting.

Wouldn't it be the similar to, say for example, any large company forking Jenkins, apply for Jenkins trademark, screw the rest of Jenkins community, then put some employees working on it, then propose to donate the project to Eclipse Foundation?"

"If there's such a thing as donating Hudson, surely it has to involve the original Hudson community."

"It's ironic Oracle can propose to donate something that's 90%+ coded by someone else, just because Oracle has the trademark."

From http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&th=208592&start=0&S=fdff280283ffffdaff8cf11b79064bae

"the only meaningful reason to have Hudson at Eclipse is that this move will unity the Hudson/Jenkins community"

The Cloud is the New Path to Open Source Monetization

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Tue, 03 May 2011 13:29:00 +0000

To date there have been several ways to monetize open source projects:
- Don't. Just donate your time and code.
- Sugardaddy. Get a job at a big company that embeds your open source project in other products that make money.
- Services. Do consulting or training.

- "Pro" version. This is where most of the scalable open source businesses have gone like Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, Spring, etc. This is typically some combination of support, packaging of bits, and enhanced features like the Red Hat or JBoss Network.

For those open source projects looking to expand, there was often frustration that only a few percent of the users who were all gaining value form the project would actually pay anything. This has limited growth. Look at RedHat being a $1B company and VMWare being a $2B+ (much younger) company. The reason is quite simple - there are free ways to get Red Hat's technology and you have to pay VMWare to get their technology.

Well, the Cloud has opened up a new avenue to monetize your open source project. When you offer your open source project as a hosted service, people are willing to pay you for that service. SauceLabs offering of Selenium is a great example of this.

This is one of the key strategies behind CloudBees. Not only are we offering a variety of open source projects like Jenkins, Maven and Git as cloud services, we are opening up our platform for other open source projects to also run in the Cloud.

Today, we announced our first open source cloud partner, Sonar. SonarSource is the company behind the leading open source project for doing code coverage analysis. The Cloud is a perfect deployment environment for this type of technology - where code analysis is done in bursts that may be quite resource intensive. So the pay-for-use model and no administrative and capital costs of the cloud is quite compelling.

CloudBees is greatly easing Sonar's transition to the Cloud. Our platform gives the project multi-tenancy and billing capabilities. In addition, many of our Jenkins-in-the-cloud users make use of Sonar and the integrated Sonar plug-in.

To be sure, the Cloud is not an instant path to monetization. Users have to migrate over according to their project schedules and hardware refresh cycles. For Jenkins, we have seen a powerful interest in Cloud deployment. Our customers April usage was double March (although still on relatively small numbers of about 1,500 users. However, if this growth continues over the next year it will produce a nice revenue stream - certainly int he neighborhood of the early JBoss days of selling training and documentation and a bit of phone support.

Here is a video demo.

We welcome other open source projects to engage with us. We have also just announced a free cloud development service for any open source project.

CloudBees Opens up VMWare and OpenStack for Developers

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 12:03:00 +0000

CloudBees announced today that our Platform as a Service for Java, RUN@cloud, will be running on VMWare's ubiquitous vSphere and the emerging OpenStack platform.

This is great news for Java developers and people deploying Java applications. Platform as a Service is certainly sweeping the development community like app servers did a decade ago. It brings a new level of savings, efficiency and agility. No need to worry about all the deployment and provisioning details. Just develop and go!

PaaS is part of a stack, though. And customers will have many requirements about the stack they run on. This announcement opens up all sorts of flexible and affordable options for running your Java applications:
- Run on Amazon.
- Run on your own servers that have vSphere already.
- Run on your own servers on the new, low cost, open source OpenStack IaaS. This addresses many customer's desire to get off the VMWare high cost virtualization wagon. It moves the virtualization up to the Java application level.
- Hosting and Cloud Providers can now provide a Java PaaS platform to customers.

If you are a Java developer - give CloudBees a try with your applications today. If you are an enterprise intent on operating your own cloud and have a major investment in Java applications, sign-up to be a part of our Java Cloud Beta Program. While we are already talking with most of the large hosting/Cloud providers, let us know if we have missed you.

Jenkins vs. Hudson - Time to Upgrade!

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 20:07:00 +0000

As I wrote a month ago, there was a lot of emotion around the Jenkins - Hudson split, but the reality is they are two separate projects. The purpose of this blog is to look at what has transpired over the past month and a half and how it is obvious why Hudson users should upgrade to Jenkins.

It was triggered by a company wanting input on whether they should go down the Hudson or Jenkins route. They had talked with Jason at Sonatype to get the Hudson version and they wanted to talk with KK and others for the Jenkins side. I put together a bunch of data (mostly collected from others) and thought I would share it.

Here are the reasons why Jenkins will win:

Jenkins Developers

If you liked Hudson, you will like Jenkins. The developers who wrote 99% of the core are now writing Jenkins. This includes Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the original creator of Hudson. And of course it is built on the same base. We think this will lead to more stability, better bug crushing and more new features faster. In addition, we have seen an increase of contributions to Jenkins from more people since the split.

Jenkins Governance

There is a very open community managing the Jenkins project. There is an independent board with long time Hudson developers from multiple companies including Yahoo, CloudBees, CloudEra and Apture. They hold regular and fully open governance meetings and post notes after each meeting for public comment. They are also in the process of donating all the code to the Software Freedom Conservancy to assure continued openness of this community.

Jenkins Stability

One of the unique features of Jenkins has been KK's well known weekly schedule of releases. The project recently passed release 1.400 (yes 5 releases since the 1.395 split at the end of January)! Since the split happened there have been over 30 bug fixes to Jenkins. The project board and community have also decided to announce a stable release approximately every 3 months. The stable release will get patches. This will fit more users requirements for not upgrading on a weekly basis.

Plug-Ins Move to Jenkins as Primary Platform

Jenkins now has 345 plug-ins - here is a list and here are the pointers to Github. There was a very good research blog done a couple of weeks ago showing how the Plug-In developer community has moved to Jenkins. Jenkins has become the primary platform for 5 of the top 5 and 19 of the top 25 plug-ins (View the raw data here). There was that rash of departures from Hudson that demonstrates this as well. More data on the moves here and here.

Community Activity

Clearly the community activity has moved to Jenkins. Most of the users on the dev and user mail lists at Oracle are legacy Hudson users, although there was about a 15% drop in numbers on both lists within a couple of weeks after the split. Oracle did a bulk upload of users on Feb. 18 to the Hudson list that brought them back up 15%. In spite of this, the User list of Jenkins outnumbers Hudson 1300 to 864, and the number on the Jenkins dev list outnumbers Hudson 790 to 543. JenkinsCI Twitter numbers blow away HudsonCI numbers 3,500 followers compared to 255 followers. Activity on Tweets containing #JenkinsCI outnumber #HudsonCI 140+ to 8 over the past 4 days.

Mail list activity on Jenkins is also also 2-5X the Hudson mail list. To the date of this writing there have been 1,172 vs. 444 posts to the DEV mail lists of each project. Many of those 444 were unsubscribe posts, but to be fair the Jenkins mail list also subscribes to the Hudson mail lists so people on Jenkins do not have to look at both. The March to date numbers are more striking: March 1 - 11 it is 244 on Jenkins and 44 on Hudson.

The Jenkins and Hudson user mail lists are even more striking. Since the split thru March 11 it is 1,109 to 159. March 1-11 is 337 to 34 - a 10X difference in activity.

Finally, the Github data again shows that Jenkins is a far more active community.

Hudson Sites Moving to Jenkins

A recent Jenkins blog entry shows the raw data for sites using Jenkins and Hudson. There is a utility that has been in Hudson for a long time that sends a ping back for unique IP addresses from Masters. It shows about 23,000 total sites using Hudson (1.395 and before - after that Oracle has disconnected this counter from reaching the Jenkins community server) or Jenkins. In the 5 weeks since the split over 4,000 sites have moved to Jenkins. There has been no discernable drop in the count - implying there has not been much of any movement from Hudson 1.395 to Oracle/Sonatype's new releases. Furthermore, it is large users who are moving - for example Apache is now running on Jenkins.

One of the key reasons people upgrade from Hudson to Jenkins (in addition to all of the above) is how simple it is. A recent tweet "complained" that it took all of 4 minutes.

So join the crowd - upgrade from Hudson and download Jenkins now!

Jenkins Upgrades

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:51:00 +0000

Thought I would post some of the Twitter messages about upgrading to Jenkins or new Jenkins Plugins over the past 5 days. Nice list...

atonewell Lee

Upgraded our build server from @hudsonci to @jenkinsci today. Painless.

redspot357 Andreas Simon

mission accomplished: #continuousintegration with @jenkinsci #maven #cuke4duke #selenium-webdriver

_godin_ Evgeny Mandrikov

Gentoo Ebuild for #JenkinsCi 1.398 available : http://code.google.com/p/godin-gentoo-repository/wiki/Jenkins

tomhe Tomas Hellberg

Migrated all Autoliv #HudsonCI production servers to #JenkinsCI. Went smoothly as expected.

msonnabaum msonnabaum

Setting up automated testing for #drush using @jenkinsci.

Lewisham Chris Lewis

This is what a bad couple of days looks like #jenkinsci http://skit.ch/bg6a

orrc Christopher

Android Plugin for #jenkinsci now lets you control hardware properties (e.g. RAM size, keyboard present/not) http://bit.ly/gjtrQ8

jenkins_release Jenkins releases

RAD Builder Plugin 1.1.3 #jenkinsci

mitchblevins Mitch Blevins

Since the split, I've seen 7 brand new plugins on the @jenkinsci mailing list, zero for @hudsonci. Valid metric?

buildscientist Youssuf ElKalay

Just finished migrating from #HudsonCI to @jenkinsci - what was everyone so worried about? Seamless upgrade - easy peasy.

9200feet Jon Archer

@simongh not sure how comparable it is, but I've recently set up @jenkinsci and it's very nice, lightweight...just works.

jeffl8n Jeff Layton

Took longer to make a backup of the old Hudson directory than the actual @jenkinsci upgrade I just finished up at work

#jenkinsci Japanese Localization http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JA/Japanese+Localization を修正

yoavlandman Yoav Landman

Moved all development of the #Artifactory plugin from #HudsonCI to #JenkinsCI git: github.com/jenkinsci/arti… home: wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKIN…

dllmr Mike Dillamore

Moving assorted software builds to Rake to go onto a @jenkinsci server. Not glamorous, but it needs doing.

littlesanga Tim Sampson

#jenkinsci publish-build plugin just removed a substantial amount of hassle from my life. Thank you plugin authors and @sti

SuperTux88 Benjamin Neff

http://jenkins.coding4coffee.org/job/TD2k11%20Vortrag%20Mockito%20und%20Powermock/ continuous integration for #latex with #jenkinsci #EPIC

gmccance Gavin McCance

Setting up @jenkinsci to bring automated build and test to the CERN compute facility operations. #cern #devops

buildndeploy Brian Kelly

Created a #git repo for my #maven powered #docbook project. #jenkinsci now building it. Need password-less checkout with @unfuddle next.

anickelsen Anders Nickelsen

Setting up automatic deployment of 4-stage build pipeline; dev (in @virtualbox), integration, QA and prod (in cloud) #jenkinsci #puppet

ssogabe ssogabe

#jenkinsci persona plugin ビルドのステータス毎にメッセージを指定できるように修正

thaberkern Timo Haberkern

PEAR on Windows can be so annoying sometimes. Setting up a #jenkinsci on a fresh Win 2008 Server. Everything is working except PEAR :(

ssogabe ssogabe

#jenkinsci Email-ext plugin 2.11 released. See http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Email-ext+plugin orz

el_joni Joni K

Pls tell if my #StackOverflow answer/rambling on #JenkinsCI-#HudsonCI situ has glaring errors or omissions :] http://j.mp/h4vVMG @JenkinsCI

garethr Gareth Rushgrove

Whoot. Have @jenkinsci building a ruby project and, if the unit tests pass, deploying to @brightbox staging environment for functional tests

tfnico T. Ferris Nicolaisen

Neat #jenkinsci Walldisplay plugin just ticked in on the mailing list. Screenshot: http://bit.ly/hINC54 src: http://bit.ly/hycT5y

thesleepyvegan Ted Pennings

Upgraded to @jenkinsci from Hudson. Super easy. Good riddance Oracle.

onelin onelin

I switched all of our production Hudson deployments to Jenkins on Friday - no issues. Go Jenkins! #jenkinsci

bmathus Baptiste MATHUS

Dream has become reality (demo video, *must see*): http://is.gd/LnrZsw Gonna install that asap at work! #git #gerrit #jenkinsci

absj31 absj31

RT @kiy0taka: jenkins-assemblerリリース！ code.google.com/p/jenkins-asse… #jenkinsci #griffon

yusukey 山本裕介

@jenkinsci where can i get the "powered by Jenkins" like banner? I want put it on http://bit.ly/eqkjoP

jeremymurray Jeremy Murray

Gimp's nightlies have switched from BuildBot to Jenkins. #jenkinsci http://www.chromecode.com/2011/02/why-gimp-28-is-not-released-yet.html

GiulianoBR GiulianoBR

RT @littlesanga: in other news: the #jenkinsci dependency graph plugin is lovely.

jautero Juha Autero

Hint for #jenkinsci #python plugin users. Start your build script with: import sys,os sys.path.append(os.environ["WORKSPACE"])

bmathus Baptiste MATHUS

Just discovered an interesting #jenkinsci plugin: #scriptler centralized #groovy script catalog (instead of wiki: http://is.gd/65tC5m)

armmer Jason Meridth

@jenkinsci for the record: i love your product and this is a meh conversation :) kudos for the hard work.

stutsmansoft Stutsman Software

@joakime @jenkinsci is one of the best Open Sores apps out there. It's quality.

@giulianobr: I just move our #hudsonci to #jenkinsci, it's was easy and very fast! #great #win #jenkins #ci

Ken Olsen - RIP

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:48:00 +0000

I just got news that Ken Olsen has passed away. It makes me sad. It makes me recall his influences on my life.

In 1981 I was getting my MBA at night while working as an engineer at Leeds & Northrup designing local area networks built to the joint Xerox/Intel/DEC Ethernet Specification. I had my sights set on becoming a product manager, and figured I needed to understand why people buy. I started looking for a sales job and ended up going to Digital Equipment Corporation. I went for a couple of reasons. First, they had a policy where they did not pay sales people commissions so they would act in the best interests of the customer. That felt right to me. Second, the people were amazing. Third, they were growing very fast and there was a lot of opportunity. When I joined revenues were about $1 B, and when I left 11 years later they were over $13 B. Pretty fast growth for back in those days...

Once I got inside, it was amazing to see the culture. It was a combination of people trying to make each other successful, where individuals were empowered. There was a one page document that everyone had that laid out the very meaning of the company and defined the culture. Everyone there could summarize it in the same four words - "Do the Right Thing". And you knew what that meant - it would make your mother proud of you. It would make Ken proud of you.

Ken was a larger than life figure. Everyone in the company called him "Ken". The casualness was still new and refreshing back then in corporate America. By the time I got there, Digital had developed into a Matrix organization. While this was popular, I think Ken set it up purposefully to try to give more people more responsibility and try to avoid the Top-Down model.

During my time there a flurry of new products were created across the entire spectrum of hardware, software and networking. Innovation flowed because people were encouraged to create startups right inside the company.

I had a wonderful job for several years servicing the duPont Experimental Station. A place with 3,000 PhD's on what looked like a college campus inside a barbed wire fence using computers in new and interesting ways. It developed into a big customer on the cutting edge. Due to the culture, I was able to help introduce some of the DEC engineering teams to new ideas and got to be in the middle of a couple of interesting new developments like the deployment of a campus-wide Local Area Network as well as one of the first VAXClusters. Both were considered the largest in the world at that time. Ken actually came down to visit us once and I got to attend some meetings between the top research management at duPont and Ken. I then got to drive him back to the DEC office.

He talked about how the company had grown so large and complex and in some ways he wished we could focus on only a couple of products so everyone would know what the company did - employees, customers, the market. But he felt that he needed to let people have responsibility and with that there was a degree of chaos and change. He liked all the innovation. I could sense that he struggled with the idea of breaking the company up so that the many innovations could be unleashed from the growing corporate bureaucracy.

A few years later, it became clear that Digital had missed new waves of computing that were springing up. There were actually Digital people and products in each of those areas - UNIX was first created on DEC PDP computers and the VAX was the leading UNIX computer at the time. The Robin was originally loaned to Dan Bricklin to write Visicalc - the app that made the first wave of PC's appeal to business, however the Digital manager did not let him have it for long enough and he wrote it on a PC.

This left Ken with a legacy (although I prefer this one from 1988) much like Scott McNealy and Sun. A cruel reminder of the pace of change in this industry.

I credit Coach Gulden, my college coach, with teaching me the value of teamwork. I credit Ken with teaching me and countless other Digital alumni the value of sharing responsibility, helping to make others successful. And knowing that doing the right thing IS the right thing.

Thanks Ken.

Jenkins - Hudson Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 21:21:00 +0000

There has been a lot of emotion and effort over the past several months regarding the split of Hudson and Jenkins. I obviously have ties to Kohsuke, and tend to side with him on the Jenkins movement. Certainly the general public reaction has been strongly in favor of Jenkins, which is really encouraging.

Stepping back a bit, I think this winds up being a good thing since it has created a sense of competition in the market and made room for two approaches.

Certainly the Jenkins community has a renewed sense of energy from the old Hudson community. The ideas that have emerged over the past couple of months seem to be getting a lot of momentum - improved quality, improved communications, open governance, improved documentation and roadmaps and so forth. It is clear the community is much larger than just Kohsuke. It is also clear that very large users are moving to Jenkins and have confidence in this community.

On the old Hudson side, Oracle and Sonatype have stepped in with a new approach. They have defined their own roadmap and they have their own perspectives on how things should be done. It looks like they will be following a process much closer to Maven. It is kind of a shame that Oracle did not put more resources on the project until this whole upheaval. It is also a shame that Sonatype did not contribute code to the community until they could really control the roadmap.

I think this boils down to two types of approaches to software development and open source. Both approaches have proven successful in the past - no one can argue with the success of Kohsuke's Hudson or Jason's Maven. I tend to like the release early and often and having open communications approach that the Jenkins community is using. In any event, I think users of Jenkins and Hudson will tend to benefit from the increased energy and having a choice. It will be interesting to watch as things unfold.

January Solar Panel Production

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Well, my first month of producing energy. 290 KWH. Close to 10 KWH per day. About enough to light 100 light bulbs for an hour...

You can read more on the solar panel installation on my earlier blog.

If Hudson Community renames Hudson to Jenkins, Will Oracle Fork?

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:30:00 +0000

The Hudson community is currently voting on whether to rename the project.

Since it is on Github, my assumption is that if there is a name change, then it will simply be made to the project. That would then mean that Oracle would then fork from that code and I am guessing bring it onto it's own servers.

There have been other instances where a project renamed itself. I recall with EJBoss was told by Sun it was breaking the EJB trademark and had to rename itself. Probably one of the biggest favors Sun ever did for JBoss.

However, I am not aware of a project renaming itself like this and a fork happening back to the previous name. I wonder if this is a first?

Marc Fleury Comments on Oracle and Open Source

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 06:40:00 +0000

Marc has a way of boiling things down to the essence...

"There is also a large dose of ignorance of how "things work" on the part of Oracle in how it approaches these problems. At the end of the day, an OSS project is lead by a few individuals that truly drive the community. If Oracle feels it "owns" certain projects but the work is done outside the company, then Oracle doesn't own shit. Point in case when it gets down to it in Hudson, it seems to me that Kohsuke Kawaguchi, also known as KK, and his friends do all the work, while Oracle just waves their arms wildly. A community without its community of developers is an empty vessel, and Oracle is about to learn this lesson."

http://www.thedelphicfuture.org/2011/01/oracle-and-open-source-not-good.html

The last time I posted something negative about Oracle and Open Source I was threatened with libel - so be careful Marc!

Jaspersoft Goes Modern!

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 18:49:00 +0000

Jaspersoft came out with Version 4. As the number implies, Jasper has been around quite a while. What is great about this release is that it really makes BI relevant to today's web. Lots of buzz words here like Cloud, Gadgets, UI Framework, SaaS-enabled, Tablets, etc.

The real benefit to me is how Japsersoft makes it easy to use and understand data. Take a look at the high level "What's New", also Brian Gentile's thoughts, as well as a nice little video that shows how simple query and reporting capabilities are in Jaspersoft 4:

CloudBees Buzz

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:54:00 +0000

We just got a report from our PR firm, Page One. I was pretty impressed by our coverage over the past month. And from the sort of discussions we have had the first week of the year it will be a busy 2011 as well...

Stax Acquisition:

TechCrunch

"CloudBees Acquires Java Platform-as-a-Service Company Stax Networks" (12/14)

CloudAve

"PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: CloudBees Acquires Stax Networks To Accelerate

Their PaaS Strategy" (12/14)

RedMonk

"A new run at the Java PaaS – CloudBees buys Stax – Brief Note" (12/14)

Enterprise Irregulars

GigaOM

"PaaS Consolidation Continues as CloudBees Buys Stax Networks" (12/14)

Also appeared on NY Times:

InfoWorld

“CloudBees launches Java Cloud” (12/14)

Network World

Reseller News

Application Development Trends

"Java PaaS Provider CloudBees Acquires Stax" (12/15)

CloudDaily

"CloudBees Gets Busy with Acquisition of Stax Networks" (12/14)

JaxEnter

"Sneak Peek at Nexus 1.9 and CloudBees Acquire Stax Networks" (12/14)

XConomy

"CloudBees Gets Stax" (12/14)

Silicon ANGLE

"CloudBees Acquires Stax Networks" (12/14)

Javalobby

"CloudBees Adds Another Java All-Star" (12/15)

Tech Republic

“Programming news: Silverlight 5 unveiled, Python 3.2 beta, SOA/Agile survey” (12/16)

VatorNews

"What You Need to Know - Tuesday 12/14/2010" (12/14)

SYS-CON Media

"Two Java PaaS Start-ups Merge" (12/16)

Top Analyst Coverage

Tier1 Research

“http://t1r.com/client/view.php?rid=65544” (11/30)

The 451 Group

“CloudBees builds PaaS hive with open source, novel devops approach, acquisitions” (12/15)

The 451 Group

“451 CAOS Links 2010.12.01” (12/1)

The 451 Group

“451 CAOS Links 2010.12.15” (12/15)

General Coverage

InfoWorld

“Oracle’s open source missteps continue with Hudson project” (12/3)

The Register

“Oracle asserts non-existent open source trademark”(12/3)

The Register

“Oracle claims trademark on Hudson open source” (12/1)

GigaOM

“Which Java-PaaS Options Will Win Developers’ Hearts?” (12/5)

GigaOM

"Dec. 14: What We’re Reading About the Cloud" (12/14)

JaxEnter

“Oracle Assert Right to Hudson Trademark” (12/7)

IBM developerworks

“Andy Glover Java series: Sacha Labourey of CloudBees” (12/15)

VatorNews

“Funding roundup – week ending 12/03/10” (12/3)

The Virtualization Practice

“Performance Management for Platform as a Service (PaaS) Clouds” (12/8)

Funding Coverage Unreported in November Report

Reuters

“CloudBees’ Java dream team lands $4M from Matrix Partners” (11/29)

WIREDvc

“CloudBees buzz up $4m Series ‘A’” (11/30)

SYS-CON

“PaaS Takes Center Stage” (11/30)

Solar Panels

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Bickel) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 20:56:00 +0000

We are up and running on the Grid, producing energy!

Proven Renewable Energy is the company founded by Harry Mayer, Charlie Close, Chuck Gamble and Dan Fischel to put up Solar energy systems. I happen to be friends with all of them, and was happy to be one of their first customers. From the way the system looks and operates, they will be helping a lot of other people invest in this great technology.

I have solar panels from Andalay. They are a very nice looking system - low profile, all black, and all fit tightly together. Eric and Phil of Close Construction put them up.

We have 33 panels on our back roof.

It faces South, South East - so it is a pretty good angle. We do get shade over parts of the roof (you can see that in the crane picture) during the heart of winter. They use a neat little device that gets put on different parts of your roof to estimate the sun exposure over the course of the year. This is used to calculate the efficiency of the system. We also decided to cut down some trees. The system is expected to produce 7,300 kiloWatt-hours (kWh) per year. To give you a sense, this is about 35% of our yearly electric usage.

On the economics side, here are the basics. The system cost a bit over $40,000. There is a federal program that gives a 30% tax credit for qualifying solar systems - so the net up front cost is closer to $28,000.

The payback comes in two forms. First, the electricity produced over the course of the year either offsets our current use of electricity, or if we produce more than we use it gets sold back to the electric company. At $0.18 per kWh, that works out to be about $1,400 per year.

The second payback is called an SREC (Solar Renewable Energy Credit). Many states have set programs that require utilities to produce some of their energy from renewable resources. New Jersey has been one of the most aggressive with their Solar Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) for utilities, requiring 2% of energy to come from solar by 2021.

The utilities need to deal in bulk. That starts with the measure of an SREC, which is 1,000 kWh. So we will produce about 7 of those each year. The utilities need to buy in units of Millions, not Thousands of kWh. So there are auctions that will aggregate residential units like ours. Right now the price of an SREC is $640. So that means we will be able to sell our 7 units for about $4,500 per year.

SREC prices are likely to come down as more systems get installed, but electric rates are likely to rise. So let's assume they cancel each other out and we get a net savings of about $1,300+$4,500 = $5,800 each year. The net effect is that we break even in about 5 years.

The other economic benefit is the increase in home value. First, the present value of the $5,800 in yearly savings is very valuable (over 15 years at a 10% discount rate it is worth about $48,000). Second, there is probably perceived "green" value on the part of potential buyers of a house with solar energy.

But the really cool thing about this whole system is the online monitoring. Each panel has a microinverter that reports back real time information to a little box that connects to the Internet. Enphase Energy then polls this box every 5 minutes for near real time data that then get displayed in a cool interface (shown in this picture).

It shows a map of the roof and the production of each unit. See the unit on the lower right in the picture is in the shade and therefore not producing as much energy as the other units. The little time graph at the bottom shows total production over the course of the day - it is near nothing at night (it is 6PM and dark right now as I write this and the system is actually producing 20 Watts of energy from ambient lighting). There is a little horizontal scroll bar that let's you play back the day. I'll put up a video of that at some point as it is cool to see cloud shadows and tree shadows make the untis go darker and brighter.

Anyway, I am very happy we did this.