James Governor's Monkchips

Jumping Off IBM Connect 09: looking back

2009-11-19T11:19:59-08:00

I just got back Connect 09, IBM’s annual Software Group (SWG) analyst event. After a couple of days of intensive briefings and discussions across the entire IBM Software portfolio its hard to know where to start in summing up what I learned. Our man in Austin, Coté, has already put together some sweet roundups of the information and themes covered.

What I would say is that, in agreement with Coté, that the event was meaty, and I don’t just mean burger slides (that is, architectural stack diagrams). Signal to noise was high. Speaker after speaker had something to say, real products and customer problems to talk to. Smarter Planet informed the event, without being splatted over every slide.

Less vertical industry focus was good for the audience. Many of us have spent a career learning tech, only to be told by IBM last year that verticals were now the lens for viewing all tech purchases.

Well this year IBM went back to basics, with a more horizontal integration story. Good job. I know this decision came right from the very top. And the boss likes dorking out just as much as any industry analyst.

In terms of managing the event I want to particularly commend Sarita Torres, who runs SWG AR, and John Simonds, her point man for managing Connect this year. The event had flow. A cursory glance at the #connect09 hashtag makes it pretty clear the audience got a lot out of it.

At this point I should say that what follows is clearly not a Connect roundup. I will get some specifics down tomorrow.

The House That Steve Built

Steve Mills is IBM SWG Senior Vice President and Group Executive. Connect, now it its eighth year, is very much his event, just as SWG is very much Steve Mills’ organisation.

He built SWG from the ground up. I remember driving back from meeting him for the first time in the Autumn of 1999 with Jonathan Eunice, my boss at the time. I turned to Jonathan while we were driving down to the airport to fly back to Nashua:

“You know what. I think IBM is actually serious about software.”

The statement might seem ridiculous given IBM had already made major acquisitions, in the shape of Tivoli and Lotus. But at the time it was not a given that SWG would be a real competitor to the likes of Oracle and Microsoft. IBM was a hardware company, right? IBM was a services company, right? IBM clearly wasn’t a software company, or financial analysts would have given the firm a decent multiple. Mills had an awful lot to prove, and not everyone at IBM was convinced.

Fast forward ten years and software is at the very heart of the IBM mission. While other firms went into this recession claiming they would win market share, IBM kept fairly quiet, but started turning the screws on competitors. It has been a very good downturn for IBM, as it mops up stimulus dollars, but the upside as we emerge should be even better.

IBM has a sense of mission, a sense of purpose, that goes far beyond crushing competitors, or putting a PC in every home and office. The mission can be summed up in two words – Smart Planet. IBM has had successful ad campaigns before, but not ones that drove opened doors to governments and boardrooms in the way Smart Planet has.

Nothing New in IT

Its important to note that the core tenets of Smart Planet are nothing new. Instrumentation, Intelligence, Interconnection. Indeed, the IBM Software leadership team has been banging on about the same key themes since, well, forever. Probably my clearest single memory of meeting the team (which not incidentally is largely the same today) back in 1999 came from Danny Sabbah, now general manager of Rational (of which more later). He told me:

There is nothing new in IT

And there really isn’t. My own version of the dictum is implement, reimplement, rinse, repeat. People tend to think of Tim Berners Lee as some kind of godlike genius, who came from nowhere with a coherent view of the networked world, and a markup language to support it. But if you read Vannevar Bush’s seminal work on the Memex in 1945, you realise that Berners-Lee’s achievement was not vision, but implementation.

A stack of index cards, hyper linked throughout in a great skein of memory. Vannevar saw the WWW before it existed.

So what?

Well – if there is nothing new in IT then IBM’s expertise is just as relevant as it ever has been. More importantly the expertise of the team running the business is just as relevant as ever. And these guys have serious continuity. No other company in tech has people that stay in one place for so long.

These guys cut their teeth in mainframe tech. Now they are reimplementing for a global networked world of sensors, processing and storage. A world in which software is the basis for potable water availability. Where high availablility describes utility networks rather than computers.

Cloud- business as usual. Virtualisation- invented here. Non-relational data stores… That’s what IBM used to have before one of its mathematicians, Edgar Codd, invented Relational Theory, the basis for modern databases and SQL (and Oracle’s SQL franchise).

IBM is confident. Mills is confident. SWG is confident. It really showed through at Connect this year. Expect some specifics tomorrow.

IBM is RedMonk’s biggest client.

Share This

Me, My Mo and I

2009-11-18T08:42:33-08:00

People keep asking me – what’s with the moustache? What’s with the caterpillar on your top lip? What’s with the bum fluff? Insert bad ‘tache gag here.

The answer, my friends, is pretty simple. I have joined the Movember movement, in support of prostate cancer awareness. How I plan to raise awareness when you could hardly see the darned thing is probably a good question.

Intriguingly the mo has worked really from a business perspective. I gave two presentations last week and used the ‘tache as an icebreaker.

“Most of you have heard about The Cloud, but defining it is hard. Definitions are nearly as indistinct as my moustache.”

Luckily the line got a laugh in both cases, one with a Linux crowd, and one with business performance management folks. The ice was broken, the audiences were on side. Facial hair for the win.

Another thing I have discovered is that lots of men can’t grow facial hair or don’t think they can. When I started tweeting about Movember lots of folks pinged be to say so. Its kind of a taboo subject. Which brings us nicely back to prostate cancer awareness.

Movember is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues, specifically prostate cancer.

Mo Bros, supported by their Mo Sistas, start Movember (November 1st) clean shaven and then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their moustache. During Movember, each Mo Bro effectively becomes a walking billboard for men’s health and, via their Mo, raises essential funds and awareness for Movember’s men’s health partner – The Prostate Cancer Charity. At the end of Movember, a series of Gala Partés are held to thank Mo Bros and Sistas for their support and fund raising efforts.

Movember has continued to grow each year, both in terms of participation numbers and funds raised. In its first year, 30 Mo Bros took part in Movember and last year, across the globe more than 173,000 Mo Bro & Sistas got on board, raising more than £14 million across the Movember’s men’s health partners globally.

To date, Movember has raised over £30 million globally for the fight against prostate cancer and depression in men

Please donate. You can do so here.

I realise that current state of the art in “evidence-based medicine” is pushing back against regular breast exams, but it seems to me that firstly that’s just plain wrong, and secondly, prostate cancer awareness is a long way behind women’s health issues.

If I have to look like a 70s porn star to help with the issue I am only too happy to do so.

Movember is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues, specifically prostate cancer.

Mo Bros, supported by their Mo Sistas, start Movember (November 1st) clean shaven and then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their moustache. During Movember, each Mo Bro effectively becomes a walking billboard for men’s health and, via their Mo, raises essential funds and awareness for Movember’s men’s health partner – The Prostate Cancer Charity. At the end of Movember, a series of Gala Partés are held to thank Mo Bros and Sistas for their support and fund raising efforts.

Movember has continued to grow each year, both in terms of participation numbers and funds raised. In its first year, 30 Mo Bros took part in Movember and last year, across the globe more than 173,000 Mo Bro & Sistas got on board, raising more than £14 million across the Movember’s men’s health partners globally.

To date, Movember has raised over £30 million globally for the fight against prostate cancer and depression in men. And, more importantly, as a direct result, male awareness of health issues has improved with Movember helping to spread health messages directly to millions of Mo Bros & Sistas around the world.

Going forward, Movember will continue to work towards helping to change established habits and attitudes and make men aware of the risks they face, thereby increasing early detection, diagnosis and effective treatment.

Share This

Linux and The Enterprise Cloud: A Canonical Gig

2009-11-13T10:19:52-08:00

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to present to Canonical customers and prospects about what’s going on with the enterprise Cloud market. I was a little nervous because Simon Wardley was on the same agenda, and his cloud presentation is a masterpiece. Luckily he came after me though.

My basic thesis is that Amazon Web Services remains the de facto standard for cloud computing. There are three kinds of economics you can’t compete with – Open Source, The Web, and Simplicity. Well: AWS embodies all three of those economic justifications. So what can the enterprise learn from Amazon?

Here is my deck:

Enterprise Clouds With Canonical

View more presentations from James Governor.

While I left the sales job to the chaps at Canonical, the commercial arm of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, I would say that the decision by Ubuntu to mirror AWS for the enterprise using the Eucaluptus architecture, based on Amazon’s AWS APIs, makes a great deal of sense. Rather than delivering more complexity to enterprises for their enterprise needs, Ubuntu is essentially saying: keep it simple. This is opinionated web oriented ops, rather than all singing all dancing all enterprise knobs and dials enterprise ops we’re hearing other vendors pitch. The demo by John Willis of the new Canonical Landscape monitoring and provisioning tool spoke clearly to less is more. More on that later.

Canonical paid for the speaking engagement and is a subscription client.

Share This

What’s in store for 2010? 9 Trends, Quick Take

2009-11-03T03:34:23-08:00

I just got an inquiry from a client, and rather than just answer it in private, I thought why not share my thoughts here, because you might find them interesting. Its a little early for a predictions post, but I can follow up later. Why only 9 trends? Because the list isn’t finished and you’re bound to suggest some good ones!

Q: Can you talk to technology and innovation trends for the IT industry, business model changes and any other challenges that you think will continue or develop in the coming year.

Ubiquitous analytics. In 2010 business intelligence will become less about the power user, and more about democratised access to the ad hoc query. In memory databases will underpin the trend.
Location, location, location: the new frontier in app dev is location-aware applications and services, for internal, asset and service management, and B2C.
Which underpins a new wave of mobile services as smart phones become pervasive. Augmented Reality will begin to make a mark in the mobile space. Initial experiences in Europe are likely to be in augmented tourism next summer – where you point your phone at a building and it shows you the associated wikipedia entry.
Greener business processes through deeper instrumentation, more effective automation and orchestration. Smart Grids, LessWater, LessCoal etc. Resource footprint reduction will be a megatrend from here on in. See IBM’s Smarter Planet.
Google will significantly ramp up enterprise efforts – notably in sales, but also ecosystem partnerships with the likes of Deloitte and the other Big SIs.
Hybrid Cloud and On Premise models for the enterprise. Hybrid is now just the reality of how we get things done. Just as open source began as a fringe activity, but captured the mainstream, so SaaS and Cloud are increasingly just an economic and technical reality. Cloud doesn’t replace on premise, it augments it.
That said, the Big Cloud Backlash will be in full effect in 2010, after all the hype in 2009.
SOA without the SOA. The hard work done by Oracle, SAP and others will begin to bear fruit. Not in terms of the acronyms loved by Architecture Astronauts such as XML Web Services, WSDL, UDDI and other acronyms – but the componentisation of application suites into more modular services makes them far more amenable to web-based integration.
A big upswing in enterprise demerger activity…. notably in financial services. See today’s EU-led banking announcements, for example. Financial services companies that took major state bailouts are going to be split up. The Great Unbundling offers significant opportunities, but also threats, for technology providers.

Share This

The great unbundling: remaking the economy

2009-10-30T11:17:57-07:00

Too big to fail? The obvious way to remove systemic risk is to distribute risk by taking single points of failure out of the equation. Small is beautiful. How did we kickstart the economy after the 1980s fall? Pulling apart huge conglomerates like Hanson, for one. The same needs to happen now to really get the economy moving. We need to make it a lot easier to identify winners and losers. I was expecting a lot more demerger activity already this time around, whether voluntary or enforced.

Or as Neelie Kroes, EU competition director memorably put it this week:

“Some banks Are Too Big To Fail. However no banks are too big to restructure”.

I concur.

Share This

IBM’s Smarter Utility play: Solutions Architecture for Energy and Utilities Framework (SAFE)

2009-10-30T06:33:20-07:00

Jeff Smith is an old buddy of mine, so its good to see him leading an IBM vertical play that aims to make asset and service management an awful lot more efficient in the utilities industries. Jeff has a solid background in automation from his time at Tivoli, IBM’s management systems management arm, so he knows this stuff pretty much down cold. To deliver smart grids, that allow for more effective energy use and management, we’re going to need much more effective network automation, instrumentation and orchestration. The US government just announced the winners of a $3.4bn smart grid grants/stimulus package, so IBM’s timing couldn’t really be better. I have written at length about alignment between IBM and Obama’s agendas.
For obvious reasons Greenmonk is pretty fired up about this stuff, but given Jeff lives in Austin it made sense to have our very own Michael Coté do an interview and demo. You should watch them.

or here is the extended version

but what you really want to see is a demo, right? Well you’re in luck!

disclosure: IBM sponsored these videos. IBM is also a RedMonk subscription client.

Share This

Towards a Permission-based Web. Wherefore Net Neutrality? Or: Maybe Open Source Wins After All

2009-10-30T06:08:18-07:00

As we rush to purchase Apple products and services on Cupertino’s monochrome treadmill of shiny shiny I can’t help thinking the open web community is losing something vital - a commitment to net neutrality and platform openness.

If a single company can decide what plays on the network and what does not, in arbitrary fashion, how can that be net neutrality? According to Wikipedia

A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.

Does that sound like the environment we’re currently buying into? Is the AppStore a neutral network? Should it be?

Is Comcast, the company net neutrality proponents love to hate, really the only company we should be wary of? Pipe level neutrality is surely only one layer of a stack. The wider market always chooses proprietary wrappers - every technology wave is co-opted by a master packager. Success in the IT industry has always been about packaging- doing the best job of packaging technologies as they emerge. Twas ever thus.

IBM System/360 – the first true mainframe was a packaging exercise.
The IBM or Wintel PC was a playing field that said – let the best packager win. Step forward Compaq and latterly Dell.
Windows packaged the TCP/IP stack and brought standard network technology in the enterprise.
Unix was an academic operating system, but packaged up in a system, generated billions of dollars for firms like Sun, in the era of the Unix Wars. With systems packaging came less application portability.

Packaging is great – its how we take things to the mainstream. But packaging also has a cost. Successful technology packaging invariably involves extending the standard componentry being packaged, in order to improve the overall user experience.

It seems to me that Apple is building a Permission-based Web, where we have to ask permission to play, or to sell apps, or whatever. It makes me nervous. But what really makes the current Apple sales explosion so interesting to me is that was initially driven by the Alpha geeks, who normally stay ahead of the curve on the margins of the mainstream.

Alpha geeks and web communities have talked a lot about openness since the very inception of the network. We claim we want open. We throw stones at those we perceive as trying to impinge on that openness.People practically had heart attacks at the idea Microsoft might be in control of our name space when it first talked to Hailstorm. In Europe, which used to be ahead of the USA in terms of mobile services, until Apple came along, the talk was about how to have Open, rather than Walled, Gardens.

Sun has arguably been more open than any other enterprise vendor over the last five years and how did the industry respond – with disinterest, if sales are anything to go by. Tim O’Reilly said a while back that open source in effect no longer matters - the new frontier is data; “The Intel Inside” as he calls it. Tim has an unerring sense of what comes next, and he also has an unusually strong social conscience.

Tim saw the future back in 2004.

Sites such as Google, Amazon, and salesforce.com provide the most serious challenge to the traditional understanding of free and open source software. Here are applications built on top of Linux, but they are fiercely proprietary. What’s more, even when using and modifying software distributed under the most restrictive of free software licenses, the GPL, these sites are not constrained by any of its provisions, all of which are conditioned on the old paradigm. The GPL’s protections are triggered by the act of software distribution, yet web-based application vendors never distribute any software: it is simply performed on the Internet’s global stage, delivered as a service rather than as a packaged software application.

Apple didn’t make the list in 04, but it would now. Tim seems surprisingly passive in his analysis. But I think Open Source and open standards and neutral networks are worth fighting for – because of the potential for transparent development. Learning and pedagogy: “view source”. We need to agitate for open. So much of what makes open source great are the social aspects of the technology. Lower barriers to participation.

Android Coda: Maybe Open Source is the charm after all.

I suspect that Google’s open source Android play will prove Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer right. It was Ballmer that argued that Microsoft had beaten Apple once, and would do so again by being more open, running on a ranger of devices and growing a larger ecosystem. Right analysis of the situation- wrong pick of the winner. With Acer, Asustek, HTC and Samsung Electronics, Motorola, SonyEricsson on board things look very rosy indeed for Android. I myself have an Android-powered HTC Magic. The hardware may not offer the performance and responsiveness of an iPhone, but that’s really just an implementation detail. The Droid is a spec beast.

Since I got the Hero I have been less worried about the Permission-based Web. Or maybe Google’s packaging is so good that I forgot myself. I still think we need to be vigilant about Net Neutrality, and believe it may be time to think of it as a layered architecture. I think the FTC is right to be looking to extend net neutrality to web service providers. They are as much gatekeepers of the web, and controllers of the last mile, as anyone. Especially as the mobile web kicks in. The open source model of Android potentially fragments The Permission Based Web, and associated data ownership-based business models. Perhaps there is life in the old FOSS dog yet.

photo courtesy of sportsilliterate.

Share This

Personal Communities: fundamental changes in business

2009-10-27T12:29:28-07:00

I couldn’t help but notice a link between two tweets that came in within a few seconds of each other. I don’t know the answers, but these are both awfully good questions.

dan_mcweeney Sales people used to be the networks, leads. Now everyone has a community ( or should ) how does that change your business?

then

leashless RT @cheeky_geeky: “You’re not just hiring the person, you’re hiring the community they come with” – http://bit.ly/1zqZ9H (RT @jiconoclast)

I have spoken about the New Patronage Economy – but the implications of personal brand networks can be both negative and positive.

Recent M&A activity in the web consulting space seems to be all about these personal network brands. Think of Altimeter, for example, hiring Jeremiah Owyang, the highly trafficked Web Strategist, from Forrester. Or his enterprisey compadre Ray Wang, who brings the entire AR community with him, being their go to guy.

RedMonk also plays these dynamics. When we hired Coté, having never met him in person, we knew fell well that he brought a community with him – see Drunk and Retired. Same for Tom Raftery.

Of course there is a potential downside to hiring talented, highly networked folks – I am sure Forrester would rather it hadn’t lost so much talent recently… but success in business is all about managing risk.

Personal communities and word of mouth. Nothing is different from business as usual then, other than the internet, and the scale it brings for community building. One other area of the business that should be doing more to identify individuals as root nodes – customer relationship management (CRM). If someone highly connected and popular starts whaling on you, that can be an almost unmanageable crisis.

2.0 can affect your bottom line. Do the maths. Just sayin’.

Share This

Why is Wikipedia anti small business? “Get Better PR”

2009-10-23T09:55:29-07:00

I like Wikipedia a lot. But it infuriates me than while major incumbents in any sector are “notable” enough to be worthy of an entry, small firms, or new ideas, are not. Its bizarre that while RedMonk is cited repeatedly in the knowledge base, when people have tried to create an entry for us it got blocked by an editor.

I would think I were being paranoid where it not for the fact when I met Jimmy Wales a while back his answer when I asked him about the issue was:

“you need to get better PR”.

That is – use a public relations firm to get citations from print publications.

From print publications? From print publications? What the hell are we doing here? Newspapers are going out of business left right and center. Print publications. Bah.

I still love to use Wikipedia, but I do think the obsession with Hits is kind of weird for a Net property. It hurts innovators.

Share This

Critical Mass: Bringing Physics to Social Network Pablum

2009-10-22T10:06:08-07:00

I have been meaning to get a few ideas down about Philip Balls’ Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another for a while. After all, it pretty much blew my head clean off. I totally loved the book – its changed my thinking more than any work of recent time. How I got to the age of 38 without having a real appreciation of statistical physics is beyond me. But the value of the book is that it made me want to dive into exactly that discipline.

That’s the thing. When I was 16 I made a choice – either Maths with statistics or mechanics. Given I was studying Physics and Chemistry, mechanics was clearly the right choice. Doh! nobody explained what Statistics actually was- I just thought it was boring crap that sociology types indulged in. I know. I know. So when Ball pointed out the the Gas Laws were based on statistics I was floored. Really? How could I not know that? Ball brings the world of Hooke and his associate Boyle into life and more importantly into context.

Is there really a physics of social networking, or as Balls puts it, a “new physics of society” though? The book attempts to make that case.

Talking of discipline – its a big book: Cote’ was pretty shocked when he saw the width of it – its 600 pages plus. But its well worth the deep dive into Long Form writing. Not everyone agrees – James Buchan slammed it in a Guardian review. While I would agree Critical Mass finally gets a little flabby in the last two chapters- up to that point its entirely riveting.

Popular Science agrees:

It’s a big book and it’s necessary to bear with Philip Ball through the rather (aptly?) ponderous chapter on Hobbes’ Leviathan up front, but once he gets into statistical physics he takes off.

There’s a lot on economics, on political power, globalization and even the Internet. Again and again the book comes back to the way that mass human action has some resemblances to the physics of large quantities of interacting objects. In physics this has produced a lot of theory based on statistics that does very well at predicting what will actually happen. When it comes to the human world, not entirely surprisingly, things are more complicated. Not only are most human masses not closed systems – so you have to take into account the impact of external forces – but a single individual can have a huge impact. When you are looking at gas molecules you aren’t going to have a Jesus or a Hitler – we, on the other hand, can expect that.

Funnily enough, if you read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (a lovely amuse bouche compared to the epic meal of Critical Mass) it becomes abundantly clear that it makes perfect sense that a single individual can make a massive impact- if they are in the right place at the right time, connected to the right people and with the right background. Some atoms in a gas move at incredibly high speeds (its a normal distribution). These are the outliers. But we can only really understand the average behaviour of a great number of such atoms.

Can we really understand aggregates of people in the same way we consider aggregates of molecules? Buchan comes across as a bit small-minded on this question. After all, while human networks are not “closed systems” – neither are physics and mechanics. Sure in Physics 101 we ignore things like the resistance of air in working out the behaviour of a bouncing ball, because we know real life is always more complex. But look at the massive investments made in simulating wind resistance in order to get accurate models of physical behaviours.

With the Internet the science of human breadcrumbs has utterly changed. Google is a counting engine. Twitter is a motherlode of behaviour we can mine. Declarative Living and Tag Gardening can let us “do the math”. Asymmetric Follow is just a scale-free network- but we have the maths at hand.

IBM and SAP are turning social maths into products, through social network analyzer products that parse email paths. If Enterprise 2.0 is to be anything it probably needs to be based on mathematical network theory. What’s the ROI of putting on your pants? Meaningless. But who is talking to whom about what, who was the most influence in a space – these are workable questions.

We make a virtue of ignorance. How many so called “social media experts” have read any network theory? We think we’re so smart. How may social media experts have any understanding of statistical physics? Probably a vanishingly small proportion. But science can teach us a lot if we engage with it. That’s the beautiful lesson of the book.

Share This