The IT Management & Cloud Podcast

IT Management & Cloud Podcast Episode #46 - Private Clouds, etc.

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:27:24 -0700

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John and I caught up earlier in the week. Despite it being a short time between this episode and the last, we found plenty to talk about:

Man! It’s hotinhur!
John’s Cloud Week videos - John Adams from Twitter, Chris Wensel on Cascading, ControlTier.
The “science” meme at Velocity - R, Mathmatica, and doing stats. Coté also remembers that Sara Dornsife now works for the R company, and the Zed Shaw talk that included R. I ask John what you’d use this stat stuff for, obviously charting historic data, but also doing predicting.
Chef vs. Puppet - also cfengine is mentioned in this context. What other “alliances” does OpsCode have around Chef? EngineYard, (maybe, if John remembers) RightScale. Also, they got $2.5M in funding (we mistakenly remember $5M).
Eucalyptus - talking through their layered up, (seemingly) “swappable” cloud platform and how they’re thinking of making money off it.
IBM CloudBurst demo (this one, or this one, or another one? - how was that? John likes the Service Management hook-in, self-service portal.
Is “private cloud” slowing down “cloud computing.” And getting at traditional IT shops “hav[ing] that ability to, kind of, ‘API’ themselves.”
Are SLAs and KPIs calling out for “better” operational stuff in IT like private cloud?
This gets us into webappVM - deep instrumentation; “webappVM is building a self-monitoring application cloud for web applications, bringing enterprise-level application management capabilities to public and private clouds” from their site.
FiveRuns Dash - generic-ish, Web 2.0 style metrics. This gets us onto FiveRuns memories. Also, former FiveRuns CEO OT is now at Zenoss as their CMO.
Google Ops Head goes after blood at Structure 09, .Net at MySpace
Kuleto’s review
John [was] helping run CloudCampColumbus this week. He’s trying to get some Tivoli folk out there.
Coté interested in pictures and anecdotes of Detroit. [We'll see if John snatches some.]
I mention that I’m thinking of strumming up interest in barcampESM II (see the first for reference) - is there enough interest for that kind of thing this year? Also, I’m lazy.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs (Puppet), IBM, and Zenoss are client.

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Rare Footage

See here.

IT Management & Cloud Podcast #45 - Velocity 2009 Special, w/Andrew Shafer

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:23:46 -0700

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During the second night of Velocity, in the piano-filled sunken lounge of the Fairmont Hotel, John and I talk with Reductive Lab’s Andrew Shafer, who walked up just in time to be the guest for this episode.

We start out talking about Reductive Lab’s big news of the day, getting $2,000,000 in funding. Andrew tells us what Reductive Labs plans are for the moment: working on some additional offerings on-top of Puppet that have been wanting for awhile and, as with all newly funded open source companies, focusing on the community.

We then turn Velocity itself as I ask Andrew and John what they’ve seen and liked at the conference so far. This gets us into a conversation about what a “traditional” enterprise operations guy would think of this Velocity. As I put it, it’d be fun to do an “Alice in Wonderland” with one of these operations guys and see what they thought about the high-scale, web operations focus of the conference.

Latching on another trend, we discuss how the web operations folks at Velocity seem to have less silos in their “IT departments” (groups of 3-10 folks, usually) and how “doing everything” effects the approach and tools vs. traditional enterprise organizations.

We discuss some of the other tidbits from the conference sessions of the day: focusing on queueing more, the mythical flickr provisioning systems, etc.

I then try to extract some other IT Management items from Andrew, but, having focused on Reductive Labs of late, he’s got nothing. So I ask him how he keeps up with IT Management news now-a-days. In place of RSS feeds, he uses Twitter. This gets us into a discussion of the efficacy of RSS vs. Twitter vs. both and so on.

Catching up on the news since Thursday, we mention the RightScale and Hyperic/SpringSource partnership. I then briefly go over the AccelOps launch from today.

We wrap-up by talking about the rest of the week, where we think we’ll be moving into “the dry-cleaning cloud” at Structure.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs, SpringSource, and AccelOps are clients. As is IBM.

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IT Management & Cloud Podcast #44 - Ethan Galstad & Nagios

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:12:28 -0700

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This week, John and I are joined by Ethan Galstad, the “father of Nagios.” Having caught up on the news in the previous episode, we spend the entire time talking about Nagios, Ethan’s history with it, and Nagios Enterprise’s present and future.

First, Ethan gives us a quick overview of Nagios, the open source monitoring framework used by (Ethan & co. estimate) 250,000 users world-wide. Following this, we start out talking about different scenarios where Nagios is used. And then I get ask Ethan to give us a brief of architectural overview of Nagios. John asks about events vs. collecting all data and Nagio’s take on that divide.

In the context of enterprise installs, John asks Ethan if he see lots shelf-ware out there. That gets Ethan to talk about several sites he gone in that use Nagios along-side Big 4 offerings. Next, I ask Ethan about the commercial services around Nagios. They’re building up several support deals, and have been doing some service engagements.

John asks about Nagios scaling - the biggest installs, how many nodes typically get used. I also ask Ethan a question I get asked a fair amount myself: why hasn’t Ethan started a company like others have done in the open source IT Management space? After discussing it, this gets Ethan into a discussion of how he’s like to see Nagios commercialized, keeping closer to the open source way of thinking than doing things like, say node limits.

John gets into forking open source projects which leads to the forking of Nagios a month ago. Ethan tells us what his reaction at the time and then the resulting community management Ethan and Nagios folks have been doing afterwards. We also talk about ICINGA, the recent fork of Nagios.

Finally, him being up in the Twin Cities, I ask him what the tech scene in Minneapolis/St. Paul is like.

Disclosure: IBM, Zenoss, GroundWork, and Hyperic/SpringSource are clients, as is HP. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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IT Management & Cloud Podcast #43 - News Catch Up

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:27:39 -0700

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This week, John and I catch up on several weeks worth of news, cramming a lot in:

John in China. Seems like there’s lots of open source IT Management in China. Industrial park Waixi for cloud stuff - see Mike O’Rourke RSC video for more, that Coté references. John thinks IBM must be pushing a lot of iron (hardware) over there. Of course, we talk about the food in China, which John says is fantastic.
IBM’s Cloud announcements - Rational tools in the cloud, CloudBurst, Virtual desktop stuff. CloudBurst: 42U rack VMWare ESX with Tivoli Monitoring and Tivoli Provisioning manager. John Willis getting exciting about IBM Blue Cloud!
Here, we get into talking about different approaches the private clouds: dramatically changing the role of IT, or playing along with the “way it is.”
In “good, old fashioned IT Management” news, there have been several recent releases: GroundWork, Zenoss, Spiceworks.
John’s recent Hadoop adventures… the trend of mass data/BI vendor talk going on now.
Microsoft STB Analyst Summit - also, Management Pack for Novell SUSE Linux. SDM/SML/Oslo. Also, MOF usage (by chance, see this ITIL/MOF decoder ring).
Also: Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 - Bjorn Axell summerizes a little video from the SCE team. Also, SC OpsMgr is coming out with a new release in July: check out overview post on it.
CA gets Cassatt’s IP - probably for automation and cloud stuff.
John wonders, who’s the Big 4/Little 4 of cloud computing? We solve it with an inside joke.
RightScale has Mårten Mickos on their board. Eucalyptus friendship there? Also, Ubuntu has Eucalyptus bundles in it.
Google Wave - see also Stephen O’Grady’s take.
SalesForce Force.com free app, Sites. The chance to build on SalesForce.com and Intuit’s Partner Program seem interesting.
Coté will be around for Velocity, CloudCampSF, Structure. Also, in August, I’ll be at OpenSourceWorld, which appears to be free for some now.
SolarWinds IPO.
Seems like CITTIO shut down while I was out. Also, a 451 write-up of Nimsoft getting big.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, GroundWork, Zenoss, Spiceworks, Intuit, and Cloudera are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients that might have been mentioned.

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IT Management & Cloud Podcast #42 - Good Old Fashioned IT Management

Thu, 07 May 2009 16:48:38 -0700

Update: I had the filename all whacky but have fixed this now. The podcast download was working, but the direct link and player below were broken. Everything works now. Here’s the episode.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week, traditional IT Management seems to dominate our discussion, which is kind of refreshing for how much glad talk we’ve been doing of late. We discuss:

IBM Impact has been going on this week in Las Vegas. After explaining what that is and skirting around our light coverage of it (neither of us was there, though RedMonker James Governor has been there all week) we discuss how IBM acquisitions have been generalizing the conferences. This also leads us into a discussion about conferences in general I’ve been having a lot recently: large vendors are looking to get into doing more, smaller conferences. John reports on hearing about how the crowds went wild at the prospect of “never having to install WebSphere again.”
“Enterprise” means (a.) complexity and high performance, but also, (b.) accepting and dealing with old stuff, legacy.
This gets us into talk of disruption - Kindle driving more book sales - but can tech companies defend against tech disruption.
Nagios forked to ICINGA. GroundWork’s take, and the Open Sourcers’ Dilemma.
SpringSource buys Hyperic - John and I go in-depth, covering who SpringSource is and the happy-path for IT department shopping at SpringSource + Covalent + Hyperic. The general up-shot between the two of us is pretty positive, actually. Coté is wrangle up some scheduling to talk with SpringSource, so perhaps there’ll be an update/clarification.
Citrix Synergy was also this week in Las Vegas - there’s a helpful links wrap-up page from them. Their Dazzle cloud service-catalog (as we understand it) looks interesting. Also, on the cloud front, it sounds like they’re adding Application Virtualization into their cloud bucket, C3.
Coté is a judge for the Microsoft Azure contest, which should be fun for seeing the types of applications people will be building on Microsoft’s PaaS. Also, see Jeffrey Schwartz’s story on the topic. (For more on Azure, check out the interviews from MIX09.)
John re-caps what he’s heard about the Federal Summit on Cloud - he strongly recommends Ruv’s write-up. As he said over in Twitter, “I can’t believe how high a priority cloud computing is for the new IT agenda in Washington. The fact there is a Cloud Czar says it all.” Of note is that the (US) government now has a definition of for “cloud computing.”
Tap In Systems - we’ve both been hearing about this outfit. RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady is setting up a briefing with them, so perhaps we’ll have more to report next time.
Conformity - identity life-cycle management for SaaS applications - more details here.
Spiceworks 4.0 - in alpha now, very interesting: help desk, portal, network map.
John notices an ousting at SugarCRM, of John Roberts - I get John to explain what SugarCRM does.
Phurnace migrations - this gets us to talking about IBM in Amazon EC2. John likes the pay-as-you go pricing that’s relatively new.
We recap the (in)famous McKinsey cloud report.
John will be at Interop - embracing the cloud, cloud summit session. May 19th and 20th.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, Spiceworks, Hyperic, SpringSource, and GroundWorks are clients.

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Michael Wilde on Splunking the Cloud - CloudCampAustin Interviews 2

While our audio recording equipment was having a nap at CloudCampAustin, I whipped out the video camera to talk with Michael Wilde of Splunk. Being at CloudCampAustin, we end up discussing how Splunk fits into all this cloud computing stuff: here, the point Michael lays out is that you've still got basic IT infrastructure to worry about and shift through, namely logs.

Having worked at Tivoli in the past, I ask Michael to compare the traditional, Big 4 way of doing IT Management with how folks like Splunk and other "Systems Management 2.0" (to use an old moniker) folks do it. It's sort of a best-of-breed vs. unified suite discussion. Him living in Dripping Springs, I ask him about a new vodka from there I've been seeing around Austin.

Disclosure: Splunk is a client.

Michael Wilde on CloudCampAustin

I get Splunk's Michael Wilde to talk about CloudCampAustin as a excuse to show off one of his corny iPhone apps.

IT Management & Cloud Podcast #41 - The Cloud’s Awkward Teen Years

Mon, 04 May 2009 16:13:26 -0700

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John and I are back after a few weeks hiatus (I’ve been traveling too much, see above). There’s tons of news to pick from, and most of what we go over is cloud related since that’s been coming hot and heavy recently:

The Killer Cloud - John’s government consulting.
I ask John what he knows about vSphere. He’s not too hot on it as a private cloud; we discuss “hyper-visor virtualization.”
We get into a discussion about “workloads” you’d put in a cloud and the risk-profiling, lacing in John’s military chatter and my notes from a recent IBM cloud talk.
We once again arrive at our “get rid of all that annoying IT process” candy-land of cloud computing. I ask John what kinds of applications people are putting in these candy-lands: new stuff, or just the regular workloads? John says he’s seen standard LAMP stack stuff and a few other items.
IBM cloud explosion - what exactly is all this cloud stuff we’re seeing from IBM? Here, here, etc.
GroundWork Starter edition - $4,000 starts you with 100 devices.
Snorkle - Sun + Oracle. John gets me to re-cap my post on the topic.
Cassatt closing - David Dennis had a nice write-up, but I ask John to add in his take which seems to be: “provisioning on steroids might be a cloud.”
OpsCode (Chef) funding, and Eucalyptus too.
The Bowling Kid - John’s son Daniel can bowl a mean game.

Also, we finally have John’s new “IT Management Guys” hit theme-song.

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Prashant Ketkar on Microsoft Azure - MIX09

While at MIX09 accompanied by a rockin' sound-track from the Rock Band mega-stage down the hallway, I talked with Prashant Ketkar about Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure.

After nailing down the proper pronunciation of "Azure," I ask Prashant to give us an overview of Azure. We then get into a discussion of the PaaS aspects of Azure and the overall ecosystem that may develop including partner opportunities and roles. I ask Prashant what the developer experience is like: that is, getting started with using Azure. We then briefly touch on the slightly different development concerns when deploying to the cloud.

Finally, we go over the current feature set of Azure and look outwards at it's road-map, some items of which will announced this coming summer, esp. the pricing structure for Azure.

Disclosure: Microsoft paid T&E to MIX09 and sponsored this video.

IT Management and Cloud Podcast #40 - Cloud Hoopla, The ITSM Quandry, Model-driven IT

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:16:36 -0700

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This week, John and I are back on Skype for That Fine Audio Quality. We spend most of our time talking about all the cloud news this week:

Manifesto Gate - John gives an overview of the hoopla around the The Open Cloud Manifesto. It’s trying to level the playing field and why would people like Amazon who have the high hill want to level down? The Conspiracy Theories fly! Microsoft vs. IBM vs. The Grays!
This gets into a brief history lesson on cloud standards: OVF virtualization container stuff at the DMTF, Elastra XML markup, 3Tera, the CCIF.
Would the CCIF transform into some sort of Cloud Foundation? All things aside, John says this was a very productive week. They seem to be putting together a legal entity and a website. Also, you outta sign up for the CCIF Google Groups thing, the Cloud Forum.
This draws out a comparison from me to the open document world where you get down to subjective arguments about complexity and openness.
What’s the IP for APIs? This gets us into a side-discussion about IP in IT. Principals or profit? We get into a long discussion about the “morally right” thing to do with IP in software. While we do an elephant’s load of arm-chair lawyering, we predictably get nowhere but more loads.
We discuss the IT Skeptic’s recent comment on private clouds, namely, his pointing out the need for re-training for the private cloud: “Great: when cloud techs are two a penny, we’ll look at it. Not only do we need to retrain our developers to rearchitect our existing core systems, and our testers to test stuff they can’t see and which is different every time they run a test, but we also need to retrain our operations staff to manage an environment that isn’t even onsite or owned by the same organisation. Now there’s a learning curve.”
Speaking of, Rob England of the IT Skeptic has much books online. I am liking Owning ITIL.
Enterprises like to customize things. They still regard all the separate layers as things to standardize on: OS, application… and thus don’t seem to like appliances where there’s many different OS versions running around. We discuss this layer addiction, gold images, and other things.
What the hell is the goal of all this cloud, SaaS stuff in context of IT Management? A simplified IT environment, driving towards SaaS stuff. Compare everyone having a server to SalesForce’s mythical 1,000 servers.
ITSM/BSM quandary preview: how do you manage something that doesn’t exist, like an “IT service.”
Quick overview of the HP Cloud Assure stuff: see white-paper. Looks like it uses “80 global points” around the world to scan (public?) cloud stuff - white-paper says it requires “no installation of software or agents on the networks or servers where your applications reside.” Also, see the HP Software as a Service stuff they have. It seems like they rolled that in/used it for Cloud Assurance. We need to follow-up more on this, esp. since RedMonker Stephen O’Grady was at their recent analyst day.
ControlTier and Puppet reference case - this gets me into a long overview of the model-driven approach to IT, or the “developer/operator workflow.”
Preview of living off a Netbook, sponsored by Zenoss!
It’s John’s birthday. He’s now the “Wised Cloud to everyones silver-lining.”

Disclosure: see the list of RedMonk clients for clients mentioned.

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Data in the cloud - Patric McElroy on Databases and Data Services in Azure - MIX09

While at MIX09 this year, I had the chance to talk with Microsoft's Patric McElroy. We start out talking about how Microsoft data services map into cloud computing. While we discuss how existing technologies and techniques are migrated to Microsoft Azure, we also talk about the new functionality that comes with being hosted in the cloud: e.g., self-service provisioning, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and scaling data up (performance wise) to meet high data demands.

I then ask Patric if there's cloud technologies and techniques that they're pulling back to on-premise software. There's some interesting tooling and provisioning tasks he tells us about. We also discuss how the role of the DBA may or may not be impacted in the Azure world. We wrap-up by talking about ADO.NET Data Services (or "Project Astoria," as I remember it), primarily how the RESTful entity mapping framework fits into Azure.

Disclosure: Microsoft covered Tamp;E for MIX09 and sponsored this video.

IT Management #39 - Rumor Central

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:20:33 -0700

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Recorded last week, in this episode John and I catch up on the IT management and cloud related news, like:

BMC & Cisco: using BladeLogic for the Unified Compute, Mainframe 2.0 thingy. Talk with BMC was all about “model first” approach to virtualization automation which is like what the Puppet guys talk about.
Cloudera - packaging for Hadoop, “Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop” (RPM); web-based config tool for Hadoop; wants to be a “stand-alone data management company.”
Sun Cloud (El Reg coverage, even better detail here) - Hadoop interest. Hosted at Switch Communications in Las Vegas - nice Ashlee Vance piece on them from awhile back.
There’s also several rumors we go over: IBM and Sun and some more nutty ones.

Disclosure: IBM, Cloudera, Sun, Groundwork, and others are clients.

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Network management with SolarWinds, with Josh Stephens

While visiting with RedMonk client SolarWinds recently I recorded a super-short interview with Josh Stephens, SolarWinds "Head Geek."

I asked him to go over SolarWinds portfolio of products, define exactly what "network management" is, and then show us a quick preview of their newly announced personal dashboard, Workspace Studio, an addition to the Engineer's Toolkit.

Disclosure: SolarWinds is a client.

IT Management & Cloud Podcast #38 - SIGSCE, Azure, Acquia, Groundwork Execs

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 09:27:33 -0700

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

As ever, your co-hosts are John M. Willis and Coté. This week, we discuss:

SIGCSE education conference - John was there to see Alice, but there was much more. I ask how people are ranking how important (or not) it is for The Kids to learn programming? John starts out referencing a McKinsey video from Eric Schmidt McKensey. Along these lines, a book I’ve been picking at recently, Born Digital, is a good overview of what “The Kids” are like re: technology, though I can’t stand to read through it.
We comment on Google booths at conferences; they seem to be too much focused on recruiting vs. showing off their wares. That said, the Google booth at SIGCSE was handy for John: they showed off Summer of Code, now on Google App Engine.
Azure (shipping later this year, Ballmer says) - John got the rundown from a Microsoft booth person. It’s a PaaS, at the moment, not elastic (but maybe when they go GA, some better stuff here). Architecture: when you put an application in, like Google AppEngine, they abstract the OS and file-system, but there’s BLOBs. Each process (or applications, at least) you run is in it’s own Hyper-V machine. It has also work(load) manager, that is, built in queueing.
Was there any queue’ing/async/ parallel programming sessions? Are people talking about that at SIGCSE? Professors were debating focusing on teaching functional vs. procedural programming - whereas now the dominate thing is object oriented.
Education people having problems setting up cloud-based apps, thinking like operations folks. Bringing cloud-knowledge to the university. John collected his “cloud for edu” recommendations in a recent post.
Acquia announcements: “DAMP” installer, cloud-bases search with Apache Solr, and doing one-stop-shop cloud hosting (backed by Amazon EC2/S3/CDN). The BitRock based telemetry stuff is interesting as a leading indicator as well. Cloud: “Acquia also entered the hosting business today with the availability of cloud-based Drupal hosting, providing customers with a one-stop shop for Drupal hosting and enterprise-class support. Targeted at large scale sites seeking to scale Drupal to millions of users and page views, Acquia’s Drupal hosting delivers support for multiple server deployments, with high availability and failover support. Pricing is usage-based, offering large-scale websites with a cost-effective mechanism to grow their site to meet changing traffic demands.” Acquia has posted some (relatively) extensive roadmap info.
TAG summit with Thomas Friedman
Running SAP on IBM-crafted clouds - as John says in the piece covering it, “If you can do it with SAP, then you can do it with everything. I think that’s the statement they’re trying to make.”
I recommend a piece on VDI from Brian Madden, who actually knows what’s going on in VDI land much more than our rambling selves.
John goes over the new GroundWork execs (CEO & CFO). This prompts me to go over the way I advice startups when they’re looking for executives. See also Matt Asay’s interview.

Disclosure: IBM, Groundwork, Acquia, and Microsoft are clients.

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IBM’s Fine-grained Energy Management, a Demo

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:18:52 -0800

While cloud computing was the most buzz-heavy aspect of Tivoli Pulse a little while back, the green IT driven offerings and demos were actually very compelling. I know I’ve mentioned them to several of you, dear readers.

Essentially, with a full IBM stack (from hardware to Tivoli monitoring software), IBM can monitor energy use and other environmental concerns, surfacing them up in your IT management stack just like they would other metrics like transaction run-time, memory usage, etc.

The Greenmonk fellas managed to get a copy of the demo Chris O’Connor gave, and it’s worth checking out:

As a side-note, if you haven’t been following Greenmonk, you should go check it out. Tom has been pumping out videos, commentary, and the usual output you’d expect from RedMonk.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and paid T&E to Pulse 09.

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Chris O'Connor's Presentation at Pulse 2009

Chris O'Connor is VP Strategy & Market Development, Tivoli Software. Chris gave a spectacular demo presentation at Pulse 2009 on energy efficiency in the enterprise. IBM were good enough to give us a copy of his presentation for posting here.

Industry Solutions with Dave Bartlett & Gaston Sandoval

(Watch the video by clicking play above, or subscribe to the RedMonkTV podcast feed to have this episode and others downloaded automatically for you.)

While at Pulse 2009 last week I had the chance to talk with IBM's Dave Bartlett and Gaston Sandoval about the Industry Solutions Tivoli have been talking about recently. Here, I you get the chance to hear what exactly these Industry Solutions are, go over some examples of them in use, and hear how IBM is creating them.

We start out talking about what the Industry Frameworks are exactly. After going over a broad overview, I ask a low-level question about what makes this possible: is it that "everything" is IP addressable now, on a network? The answer is a nuanced "yes." We then discuss what these frameworks look like in other industries, such as energy, for example, on offshore oil platforms. I then ask what the stack looks like - the boxes and arrows, if you will.

This gets into a discussion of how the team has devised the frameworks, with a mandate to draw on existing technology rather than invent news ones exclusively. We then talk about how IBM gathered up this industry specific knowledge, and how they've been maintaining it. As with all IBM offerings, the topic of cross-brand cooperation comes up as well.

We then go over an example of what this looks like using one of IBM's more popular examples, utility management down to the power-line level and "smart grids." The vision here is to start delivering new services on-top of traditional electricity delivery. Here, the thinking gets into classic open platform theory: if you open up a previously closed platform - a black-box - there's more possibility for innovation on-top of that platform without being threatened by the Innovator's Dilemma.

You might also be interested in this previous interview with IBM's Karen Parrish on the topic. As more background, also see this piece from Dave.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

Lauren States on Cloud Computing

While I was at IBM Pulse this year, I had the chance to sit down with Lauren States who's title describes what she does quiet well: Vice President Cloud Computing for IBM's Software Group.

In this brief discussion, we cover several topics:

Pulse 2009 cloud related product and consulting announcements
Does Conway's Law apply to cloud setups?
Mixing public and private clouds - one us it for spilling over peak workload to public clouds - use often begins with testing and QA and spreads closer to production deployments.
The decision process Lauren has seen companies go through around public vs. private clouds.
What types of applications - or "work-loads," even - has Lauren seen running on clouds? This gets us into some interesting talk of how verticals might driving cloud use with more tailored, SaaS-delivered applications.
Cloud computing might drive simplification, standardization, and maybe just "good enough."
Tailoring the operations vs. the user interfaces for cloud computing - a little more complex for ops people, but much simpler for users.
The cost savings angle - internal IBM folks used cloud technology to bring costs down 83%.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

Pulse 09 Day 01 - John Willis

Right after getting James' take on the first day of IBM Tivoli Pulse, I got John Willis'. While he touches on the broader vision plays, he talks mostly about his take on the cloud computing discussion of the day.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and paid T&E to Pulse 2009.

Pulse09 Day 01 - James Governor

Mid-day during the first day of IBM's Tivoli user conference, Pulse 2009, I talked with our very own James Governor about his quick impressions on the morning's keynote.

He starts out talking about Tivoli's Industry Frameworks, which, as he says, is about IBM Software Group selling applications but not calling them "applications." Indeed, as a Q&A session on that topic later in the day evoked, it's a sort of semantic issues best discussed "over drinks," as one exec put it.

We then get into a short discussion of Tivoli's Dynamic Infrastructure story which, according to James, is all about bringing SOA together with IT Service Management ("ITSM" as he says). I ask how he thinks this fits in with older IBM ideas like Autonomic computing.

Finally, we wrap-up discussing the Tivoli cloud computing story we've been seeing evolve here at Pulse. James is (still) not too happy with the IBM cloud story. That said, he suggests pulling in the OnDemand phrase and discussion from the past, the content of which he liked. I add in that the cloud computing discussion seems to be around what cloud means for operations people, not end-users, where you'd expect to hear more from the Lotus folks (as we did back at Lotusphere this year).

Disclosure: IBM is a client and paid T&E to Pulse 2009.