We talk about what Reductive Labs is up to and the kind of next generation automation that Puppet gets involved in.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

With the special numbering of 9,000, we kick off Ryan and I's highlights of Adobe MAX 2009:

• Quick rundown of Adobe MAX 2009 announcements such as: Flash 10.1 with much focus on mobile, LiveCycle ES and mobile access.
• Check out PNC's Virtual Wallet.
• Ryan having just given a talk on the Adobe Collaboration Services, I ask him to give us an overview.
• Of the services and announcements, I like Shibuya which is Adobe's service for doing an App Store. This brings up our favorite topic of small development shops - even of one - having a viable revenue pipe.
• Experimental code using putting FXG into the canvas tag and other sneak previews. (Check out some more HTML 5 vs. Adobe "fun" over on Apple Insider.)
• iPhone app development with the Adobe tool-chain. Be sure to check out the "iPhone in a blender" video which is sure to further win over Apple's hearts. And, see the PhoneGap approval we reference.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and paid travel and hotel for Adobe MAX. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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, both John and I are out and about at conferences, necessitating the dreaded, lo-fi phone recording option. Enjoy!

• John is at the NCIO - John gives us a review of that. Google providing custom search engines for the US intelligence agency. Reminds me of Citrix talking about how much intel agencies like virtualized networks.
• itSMF Fusion - pretty good so far. John says their problem is figuring out how this maps to cloud computing.
• Check out PuppetCamp - see agenda and details - Oct 1st and 2nd in SF.
• What's "the consumerization of IT" look like here? How does that trend effect how IT service delivery is done? Maybe it means more meta-data encoding, John says, echo'ing the Reductive Labs guys. Maybe IT has more time to customize their applications, like adding dopplr to hotel kiosks instead of those kiosks staying stale.
• Upcoming RCA webinar - Oct 1st, register here.
• Dell & Perot - Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register has a nice analysis. We recall Perot and EDS stories, like a good Dallas Morning News story on the history of EDS.
• CA buys NetQoS - summary of my take, and John gives us the common view of CA: a cash-cow holder.
• Jonh'll be down in Austin this week, we'll have a live recording.
• Groundwork 6.0 out - among other things: JBoss portal re-write, dashboard stuff. Also MonitoringForge.org.

Disclosure: Groundwork, Reductive Labs, Dell, and others are clients.

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, John and I catch up the virtualization and cloud news that's been floating around over the past week, of which there was much:

• John in Bulgaria, at Java2Days.
• VMworld: Fellow RedMonker Stephen's take. Moving between public and private clouds. does VMWare have a "real" cloud, or just good virtualization?
• RedHat Summit and RedHat's cloud take.
• John says VMWare's virtualization is still too labor intensive.
• The problem with the 100% open cloud - how does a provider differentiate on features if any provider can have it? Competing beyond price and speed.
• The RedHat cloud-application migration and development story.
• Coté's JBoss assessment - seeming to catch-up, but not as revolutionary as the used to be, the mantel of which seems to be help by open source and Spring.
• John checking out Eucalyptus in Ubuntu alpha release.
• Virtualization in Ubuntu land - KVM, kid.
• Looking forward to the Citrix Industry Analyst event next week. What ever happened to Citrix and 3Tera?
• Clouds vs. virtualized data centers.
• Overview of Capital Factory Demo Day.
• The ISV Renaissance - actually charing for/paying for software - what did the VC-types at the Capital Factory Demo Day say?
• John really likes JungleDisk of an example here. And the Silverpop Atlanta guy.
• In light of all this, r0ml's IT as a Deli talk is starting to make even more sense.

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

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

In this episode, "in the field," I'm joined by Adobe's James Ward again who I happened to run into at the RedHat Summit/JBoss World conference this week. Being at a (half) Java class, I spend most of the time asking James (who spends much time speaking with Java folks) what uses of RIAs he's been seeing in the Java world. We also talk about layering RIAs on-top of cloud services, like Salesforce. Being at a RedHat conference, I ask him to give us the matrix of where Flash (Player, Flex SDK, and Flex Builder) works in the Linux world, across 32 and 64 bits. He does a nice job of laying it out with plenty of context and history.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Sun.

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:

While at the RedHat Summit/JBoss World today, I sat down for a quick chat with GroundWork's David Dennis and Zenoss' Mark Hinkle. I ask them for their thoughts on the show, RedHat 5.4 and KVM, Mark's take on the recent Bossie awards, and how they're looking at VMWare/SpringSource/Hyperic now-a-days.

Disclosure: GroundWork and Zenoss are clients, as is SpringSource.

In this episode, Ryan and I talk with SAP's Craig Cmehil about the upcoming SAP Hacker Night at SAP TechEd. Naturally, we spend a lot of time talking about RIAs in the SAP world and community as well. The news is slim this week.

Here's the show run-down:

• Craig RIA Hacker Night - Craig gives and overview and preview.
• I then ask Craig to tell us how RIAs fit into - and show-up - in the SAP world. We go over some examples of how RIAs are used in the SAP world.
• Ryan then asks about the speed of RIA adoption in SAP technologies.
• Check out the new Netflix app on the XBox. Beyond just browsing movies, you can have "parties" and watch movies with friends. Coté doesn't know what to make of this, but it's an interesting consumer RIA, connected thing. Like a VCR with an IP address.
• Augmented reality watch - Yelp app, and another iPhone app Craig spotted.
• Capgemini using Adobe Catalyst for RAD development.
• Apple Tablet rumors.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Microsoft.

This week John and I discuss several things:

• John calls in from the Atlanta Open Coffee Club. Roam, Business Cafe and Meeting Center.
• Amazon VPC - John doesn't like the whole railing against "private clouds" slant. See Coté's advice to other cloud vendors.
• John has more to report on "cloud brokers."
• newScale Service Catalog demo, with the VMWare.
• "Circling the wagon" and Econobonics.
• John gives us a new take on VDI.
• Cray bought some company.
• Surgient getting into private cloud automation stuff
• Next week is VMworld, RedHat Summit
• NoSQL East, Oct 28th to 30th. Anyone got some select * from kiss_my_ass?
• Rob England on COBIT - looks interesting.
• Rackspace Cloud Tools - a catalog of stuff running on an using Rackspace.

Disclosure: see RedMonk clients for clients mentioned.

• The in problems in IT that cause us to start wanting Agile Infrastructure. The high-level problem is enabling change (that works) more often: configuration drift, intentional complexity, walls of confusion everywhere, hero-driven incentives. Israel also mentions the theory that you have to change up your incentive structures often so that people don't get locked into incentive-driven thinking vs. "doing the right thing," so to speak.
• Leading us into the practices, Israel asks Andrew about including the operations folks in the Agile team, just as you do developers, QA, documentation, and so on. This gets into a discussion on "fractal teams." We then get into other practices and technologies that help with Agile Infrastructure:
• Version control - getting beyond .bak files. You need some kind of version control system. What do you put in there? All your configuration files, to start with. Perhaps your scripts next. Puppet and other tools can help do more. The tools, really, can be the same as used in development: git, subversion, CVS, and so on. In fact, Andrew says you should really use whatever development is using for consistency.
• Always ship trunk
• "Dark launches" - staging the release of features to test back-end tasks before exposing it to the user, and then finally giving the user access to the new system. This lets you test out the impact of the "background" tasks in the production system of new features without exposing it to users.
• An over-arching theme here is to reduce the fixed cost of deployment, trying to get it to zero as much as possible.
• Some other practices: test-driven infr, deploy early/deploy often, tagging everything with who/what/when, time synchronizing, and a few more.

This week, Ryan and I are joined by (hopefully soon to be come regular) guest co-host Mike Downey, 3 weeks into his new job as a Silverlight Evangelist and with a wicked mic. We open up talking about the RIA usage Mike saw in the field during 6 months as an independent consultant, and then go over some of the highlights from the RIA world since last we talked:

• What has Mike been seeing in the field? More emphasis on UX for behind-the-firewall applications.
• I also ask Mike what kind of software development process he saw these folks using.
• Both Ryan and I circle around the question of "selling UX" in corporations, asking around that topic several times. Mike has several interesting observations from the field that he shares.
• NBC football in 720p HD via Silverlight. Mike tells us what functionality will be in there: very DVR-centric.
  
• SXSW panel proposals - Ryan has an interesting one on "beyond mice and keyboards," Coté has a panel on HTML5, and Ryan rounds up other interesting looking ones. It's a lot of help if you got vote for and/or leave comments on these: then they might get picked!
• Seadragon.com - Deep Zoom on your own. Here's a door at a Chiang Mai temple - not a mega-high resolution photo (2048 x 3072, 6.3 megapixels), but fun nonetheless.
  
• RockMelt browser - stealthy startup working on a new "browser." Is this a Facebook browser, or a sort of Compuserve/AOL walled-web thing?

Disclosure: Adobe and Microsoft are clients.

In this episode, John and I spend a lot of time horsing off, but we talk about some on-topic things as well:

• The most important news of the week: John has an iPhone. (And yes, Wal-mart does sell the iPhone.)
• Lower Amazon prices - John details this. The Deli case. No word on the Deli, but there is Memo Jokes.
• How do you setup a Windows box, esp. virtualization. John says ESXi, the free VMWare client.
• SpringSource and cloud foundry - deploying and managing Java apps in public clouds.
• Last episode, John had commented on the valuation for other Little 4 types in light of the SpringSource price. Zenoss' Mark Hinkle got back to John on this topic.
• We get into enterprise/corporate uses of PaaS - using Heroku and EngineYard as proxy for thinking about how Azure and Java in the clouds might pan out for corporate developers vs. IT staff.
• While the quick and easy approach is awesome, I ask John to recount some IT disasters he's seen when there's not enough IT process and too much "quick and easy" think.
• What's up with devopsdays? In Belgium Oct 30 - 31st - John will present there on the Ubuntu elastic cloud with Chef. From this Patrick Dubous guy. Maikin Piss!
• itSMF Fusion conference - Sep. 20-23rd in Dallas. Is that anything? Agenda looks nice and ITIL-y. Mike Walker in Atlanta runs the ATL itSMF.
• "Cloud Brokers" and extradition free countries - but seriously, John explains this idea of "cloud brokers."

Disclosure: Zenoss, IBM, Microsoft, SpringSource, and others mentioned are clients.

• mil-oss
• John's new job with Canonical, also an advisor for OpsCode/Chef
• John's cloud talk at mil-oss going over what's available for, you know, cloud computing.
• Coté indulges himself in repeating all the brilliant things he said at the open source management panel at OpenSourceWorld.
• VMWare buys SpringSource - see Stephen O'Grady's and my own takes on it.

Better show notes soon...

Disclosure: SpringSource is a client, as is Canonical. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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, John and I meander around several topics:

• Baltimore fun facts: umbrellas.
• Google building a data center in Belgium.
• New restaurant update: Frank in Austin ("hot dogs, cold beer"), glazed donut burgers in Atlanta (like this?).
• Hadoop, The Definitive Guide - a pre-reading book review.
• The "Lean IT" meme - from CA, or Forrester? See a FAQ here.
• And this leads me to ask: has the phrase "BSM" and "business service delivery" talk flipped the bozo bit for marketing talk? John remembers some tales in this area.
• John tells us The Good News about BSM, tough-love version. You've got have your plumbing fixed before applying "BSM in a box," but how well does "fix your plumbing in a box" sell?
• John's review of a recent Gartner webcast on CIO priorities and performance.
• John's DMTF wanderings - OVM, OVF, vSphere deployment. Maybe Winston Bumpus. XML templates for virtual appliances.
• Dealing with PR email, embargo's, etc. For bed time reading, see the infamous TechCrunch take on embargoes.
• Rivermuse launchy - event management, correlation, etc. What is this "event management" anyhow? John says SMARTS is dandy here.
• Our man William over at Oracle has been doing nice stuff on his blog of late, lots of details on how all this IT Management gorp should be designed. I esp. like this line from one post in his series on REST in IT Management: "I can think of ways in which some REST principles would help in this area, but they are mainly along the lines of 'any consistent set of principles would help' rather than anything specific to REST." Yuh! Sidenote: (a.) "REST" is an idea like "Democracy" or "Christianity," good luck getting any agreement on what it actually looks like in practice, and (b.) better luck having the canonical use be practical.
  
• memcache meme - Gear6, North Scale, so on and so forth. Seems like it's on the open source enterprise creep-in path.
  
• IBM buying SPSS - John's SAS memories - also see James Governor's take on the buy.
• Tech books - what do we have?
• New T-shirt slogan: "there's a cloud for that." re: Rackspace private cloud.
• Tell us what books and fun facts and cities you like on the #ITMguys.

Disclosure: many folks mentioned are clients, see the RedMonk clients list for which ones.

John and I review the week's IT management cloud news:

• Lunch with Doug McClure. What's going on in the BSM world now-a-days? IBM BSM stuff.
• What's the BMC offering? "Working with BMC, IT organizations will be able to extend their internal datacenters to Amazon EC2 via a unified, integrated BSM management solution. Enterprise customers can request computing resources – either internal (physical or virtual) or external from Amazon EC2 – through an integrated self-service portal. Those requests are tracked through BMC’s robust ITIL®-compliant change management system and automatically provisioned and configured in minutes. This self-service interface also supports service de-provisioning and service change requests." John says this seems like a better start than what IBM has been doing (or not) in this area.
  
• IBM Tivoli partner conference - selling a lot of modeling and event correlation stuff, so partners speak to that. What types of partners: government with identity management and other area, storage is classically a strong partner, energy management.
• Tivoli foundations products - virtual appliances with full-stack. Pre-integrated Tivoli stack.
• Rackspace's API announcements (first, getting beta ones, then releasing the spec) - having them and then Creative Commons'ing the spec. As John says, Amazon is Apple and Rackspace is Google AppEngine.
• Maybe PaaS is about easier deploying for developers - EngineYard and Heroku. "All I want is to take a WAR and deploy it": we need a PaaS for Java, where are they?
• "Skip cloud, go right to Hadoop" - John's experiments with Hadoop and IT Management performance metrics, 6 months worth. It's easy to add new, unstructured data to existing data sets (a smart, new insight). For example, tracking email campaigns for effectiveness based on state, etc.
• All of the Hadoop examples I can think of are something along the lines of "retrospective causality analysis": figuring out why complex chains of events happened and then trying to do things in the future to profit from that knowledge. As ever, I try to get more examples of what you'd use this kind of tool for. There's also some storage optimization things with Hadoop.
• Beautiful Data book coming out, I have a review copy on the way. Also, the video from John, like this one of Chris Curtin.
• Personal metrics crossed with the old BMC airport example.
• RightScale: doing DB2 management, RightLink (chef plus Nanite).
• Open Source Cloud Computing Forum with RedHat - which explains all of John's KVM, Xen, libvert Twitterings... cobbler & puppet, and more! And yet, John says, there's no uber-cloud strategy from RedHat.
• I ramble on about how the adoption of public cloud computing in big enterprise accounts are not culturally ready for it: it's the "our customers are not asking for it" answer.
• In enterprises, we need some more CTO input in addition to the CIO role: innovation vs. keeping the lights on.
• We do some cross-podcast pimping to The Agile Executive, esp. the recent podcast episode on Agile Operations.
• Spunk 4.0 and the consumerization of IT.
• I was at the Adobe Industry Analyst Summit this week (see here, here, and here for more), where their CIO showed off a custom UI on-top of their service desk. This raises the question: why did she have to go through customizing it? Why aren't service desks good looking already?
• We go over the OpenSourceWorld and CloudWorld conference coming up. I've got a code for free passes if you want one. John's going to a Java conference in Bulgaria to speak to cloud. And also, Antwerp.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, see the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan and I go over the recent RIA news. My notes aren't as in-depth as the usually are, but here's the high-level outline:

• Ryan's mountaineering. iPhone 3GS - how's that video? We review YouTube vs. blip.tv vs. Vemeo.
• Personal data analytics - makes me remember one of the Azure contest winners, http://myimpulselive.com/.
• Silverlight 3.0 launch - all sorts of overviews out there, and also see the RIA Weekly video if you haven't already.
• SketchFlow, and SketchFlow vs. Catalyst.
• Continental Case with Silverlight; see also Cynergy examples along these lines.
• I give a re-cap of the Adobe Industry Analyst Summit I was at this week. See posts here, here, and here.
• Summary of the Matthias Zeller podcast on portals and composite RIA.
• In talking about a story on Mixpanel, Ryan busts out with "Interaction Analytics" and recalls like Robot Replay. We also discuss how lacing in interaction analytics seems like a natural for RIAs.
• How can we get RIAs to improve the software development process? Seems like Agile and developer-centric cloud computing would converge with RIAs nicely.

Disclosure: Microsoft and Adobe are clients.

Ever since talking with James Ward back in episode #41, I've been keeping an eye on how RIAs might could be used for portals. In going over the customer conversations he's been having, Matthias gives us a pretty good idea. He uses the term "composite RIA" several times, which is a nice follow-on from the "mashup" and "situation application" phrasings.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client.

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, John and I have a fun guest on, Rob England, aka, The IT Skeptic:

• How to tell the difference between Australian and New Zealand accent.
• How did Rob get started doing the IT Skeptic.
• What's up with ITILv3? Do you think we'll ever get ITIL for free? Do things like MOF being Creative Commons put pressure on ITIL to be more open. Rob also suggests COBIT.
• The lean CMDB - having a maximal CMDB costs too much, so you need to have a scale-backed one of some sort.
• What's the gradient of CMDBs out there? The ITIL definition is very clear, but there's lots of people on "the journey" to CMDB. The emphasis for CMDBs is on maintaining the relationships between raw IT and the business services they help deliver.
• How does CMDB auto-discovery mix with reality? An initial baseline/theory is good with discovery, but the problem is what's discovered may not match "reality" - how things are supposed to be - missing all the rouge configuration out there. Process has to be applied to keep things discovered and modeled properly. Ongoing, discovery is good for auditing your assumptions about IT, but maybe not the best way to get the "pure" CMDB model. And then there's all the manual stuff as well, like mapping up the business services.
• What will be impacted by this change? What we need is a configuration process, not a magic tool. The "magic tools," of course help the process, but the process is the overlord. While on the one hand hand, you don't want your CMDB walking out the door - that is, it being all in employee's heads - on the other hand, sometimes that works fine if the process is optimized.
• While we know that change management is good, it seems so painful to do it, so how do you get people to start doing it? "I think change is all stick and no carrot, unfortunately."What's the aspiration vs. usage of ITIL Rob's seeing out there? Lots of people know about it, and aspire to it, but usage... there's 1/2 million people with ITIL foundation training, which means a common language is (probably) being formed.
• John asks about crossing IT Service Management with cloud computing. Esp. of interest here is how a service catalog fits in and linking up cloud stuff with business services. With cloud, the ITSM problem is that you don't have visibility into what's going wrong with your service providers to diagnose problems.
• So what are the other problems with cloud computing cross with existing IT departments? Testing and change management of existing, even legacy IT.
• Having pointed out the problems with cloud computing, we delve into the benefits and try to rig up a sense for the long-term spread of cloud technologies in IT. Rob says it'll be 10 years before the cloud is a mainstream approach.
• The IT Skeptic books: Owning ITIL, Introduction to Real ITSM, The Worst of the IT Skeptic.

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:

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.

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:

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.