What makes the best schwag? How about crap schwag? While at SXSW last year, Cote', Josh Dilworth, and Lauren Sell go booth-to-booth to not just check out the schwag, but analyze and comment on it. Does it work? Where'd it come from? Would you want to get it?

After touring through the booths, we get outside and see the kind of schwag the press gets.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

In this interview, I talks with Sun's Kevin Schmidt and Suresh Potiny about Sun's Enterprise Service Bus product lines, GlassFish ESB and OpenESB. We start talking about the ESB stack that Sun has built up a provides, including more than just the ESB itself, but the NetBeans based tooling as well. Next, we get into the road-map and plans that Sun has for its ESB stack. Then, we end up discussing the broad market and current context for ESBs, be that fitting into SOA environments, both in the "traditional" sense and then also in the emerging types of SOA architectures Kevin and Suresh are seeing. Finally, we up by discussing some of the additional projects around the ESB like Project Fuji.

Disclosure: Sun is a client and sponsored this video.

In this short demo, Sun's Frank Kieviet walks through two scenarios to demonstrate GlassFish ESB and OpenESB in action. First, he builds up a simple zipcode driven scenario to demonstrate using the NetBeans tools to compose a workflow. He then demonstrates integrating in a web-service. Finally, he finishes up by going over the OpenESB ESB community and how to get involved.

Disclosure: Sun is a client and sponsored this video.

While at IBM Software Connect - IBM's annual analyst summit for the software group - James had the chance to talk with IBM's Karen Parrish.

The main focus of the event was IBM's Industry Solution Frameworks and how IBM uses them to with customers. Karen starts telling us about the frameworks and how IBM builds up the program. James then asks several "how's that work?" questions to drive into the details.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this podcast.

While at the IBM Telelogic User Group in Austin, I had the chance to talk with IBM's Michael Lester, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Focal Point. More so than the core idea of product portfolio management (or, PPM), I ask Michael to tell us how products like Focal Point actually attache dollar signs to things like software all through-out the software life-cycle. That said, we do spend a good chunk of time detailing the inner-workings of a PPM product and what it does for an organization, especially when it comes to planning.

Naturally, Telelogic being part of IBM Rational now, we wrap-up by discussing how Focal Point will fit into the Rational portfolio.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

While at the Telelogic User Group conference in Austin this year, I had the chance to talk with Andy Gurd, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Telelogic DOORS. First, we go over how requirements management differs in the "systems" world versus the "IT" world. As Andy notes, many of the differences are around the degree of rigor involved in systems, but also in scale. We then get into what the requirements experience is like with DOORS through the software life-cycle, from idea to creation to deployment to updates.

Being part of IBM Rational now, we also talk about the road-map for DOORS in relation to the Rational portfolio, and vice-versa.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

While at the Telelogic User Group conference down here in Austin I had the chance to talk with RocketGang's Harry Koehnemann. We talk about the evolution, and complexification of the systems market and how the tools for that marketing are chasing after simplifying things. This conversation ranges from how tools can help you avoid bad parts of complexity to a discussion of how workflow processes can address, or make worse, the complexity in systems development.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

During the Telelogic User Group conference down here in Austin I talked with IBM's Neeraj Chandra. We started out talking briefly about the conference itself, specifically Neeraj's keynote. We then talk about the mingling road-maps of the Telelogic and Rational product lines now that they're under one roof.

You may also remember Neeraj from our RSDC discussion, which is worth checking out if you're interested in this topic.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

While at the IBM Telelogic User Group in Austin, I talked with IBM's Danny Sabbah. I take the chance to ask Danny about the integration and intermingling road-map between the Telelogic portfolio and the existing Rational product lines. We discuss how Jazz is being used as a platform throughout the Rational portfolio and also get into a discussion about requirements management.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

In this video from the 2008 Telelogic user group meeting, I talk with IBM's Martin Owen. The broad-topic is a discuss using Enterprise Architecture and how it relates to "business/IT alignment." The nitty-gritty gets down to oing lots of reporting, metrics, and telling people what you're up to. Here, the important thing is tailoring your communication to your audience - tech-jargon or biz-speak, depending on which one you're addressing. And how to go in and apply this: baby steps, incremental ROI, and more.

If you like this topic, you'll probably also like my Recession-proof SOA Talk.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

While at the IBM Telelogic User Group meeting in Austin, I had the chance to with Dominic Tavassoli. We spent our time talking about "the software delivery platform." What this means is the collection of processes and tools you'd use to take software from conception, to development, to testing, to release, and back through again. Sort of a "backbone" for the application life-cycle management an organization does. There's also documenting, best practices, and compliance to industry processes and standards to worry about.

As with most Telelogic discussions what's interesting here is to see how these ideas apply to systems programming - where software is usually running in/on a device other than a traditional computer - and how that changes the needs and the desires.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

Michael gives us an overview of ZipTie, including it's origin and how it ties into AlterPoint's commercial product, Network Authority. Ryan then jumps in to show us the initial discovery, admin setup, and poking around in the resulting inventory.

Background: A little while ago, I sat down with ZipTie's Michael Nels and Ryan Kruse for a detailed demo of ZipTie, the open source network inventory and configuration management tool. That is, ZipTie scans all the devices on your network, figures out what they are, what's running on them, and then gives you the ability to backup and change the network-oriented configuration for each device (it doesn't dip into the application layer, for example, configuring Exchange).

Disclosure: AlterPoint is a client and sponsored this screencast.

Michael gives us an overview of ZipTie, including it's origin and how it ties into AlterPoint's commercial product, Network Authority. Ryan then jumps in to show us the initial discovery, admin setup, and poking around in the resulting inventory.

Background: A little while ago, I sat down with ZipTie's Michael Nels and Ryan Kruse for a detailed demo of ZipTie, the open source network inventory and configuration management tool. That is, ZipTie scans all the devices on your network, figures out what they are, what's running on them, and then gives you the ability to backup and change the network-oriented configuration for each device (it doesn't dip into the application layer, for example, configuring Exchange).

Disclosure: AlterPoint is a client and sponsored this screencast.

Managed Objects' Abbas Haider Ali gives us a demo of myCMDB itself. He first highlights the main page with the tag cloud, communties, and activity stream. Then we get into navigating the relationships between each of the items the CMDB tracks and look over the reporting options that myCMDB provides.

Disclosure: Managed Objects is a client and sponsored this screencast.

Disclosure: Managed Objects is a client and sponsored this screencast.

Back a the IBM zSummit, James also had the chance to talk with IBM's John Shedletsky on a wide range of contemporary mainframe topics, primarily, about using the multi-hosting (to put it in "distributed" terms) abilities that mainframes to bring to drive consolidation benefits. The interesting angles here are that John and James get detailed into much of the "mainframes have been doing it for years" talk that's been going around with the rise of virtualization.

John does a good job of explaining how mainframes have been built, for decades, to be fault-tolerate, scale-up environments. Along they way, he takes the chance to point out similarities to recent efforts like "shipping container computing" and other modern efforts to replicate mainframe functionality.

While at the 2008 zSummit, James talked with two students who'd been involved in the System z academic initiative: Ben Ferenchak and Scott Wetter. James starts by asking them how they got interested and involved in working on mainframes, asks how about their general take on System z, and then talks with them about their career thinking and how System z plays into that.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.

In this three part interview/screencast combo, we talk with Dennis Howlett, Darren Hague, and David Pollak about their work on ESME. Dennis and David spend time talking about how ESME came to be and their involvement, while Darren gives a peek at the code-base by showing us how he added search to ESME.

For a demo of ESME in action and more info, check out the original demo video referred to in a recent post of mine

Thanks to Dennis, Darren, and David for coming together quickly to record their segments!

Disclosure: SAP is a client and sponsored the above video.

After a brief face-to-face overview of zembly.com, Todd Fast gives us an extensive demo of what zembly.com is and how it does "social programming."

We walk through the modification of a simple favorite movies application in Facebook, and then dive into how zembly.com helps "casual programmers" develop, find, and extend applications like these.

I liked walking through this demo because you get to see the workflow of creating applications and see the actual features and services that zembly.com provides. Also, I have some fond reminiscences of the Spicegirls and horizontal scrolling.

While at Microsoft TechEd 2008, James and I had the chance to talk with Brian Goldfarb about Silverlight. We start out discussing the new features, libraries, and other parts of the upcoming Silverlight 2.0 (now in beta).

James then asks Brian about the Deep Zoom demo's we'd seen earlier, which leads us into a discussion about using Deep Zoom for document management, or, at least, digital asset management.

We then talk about the availability of Silverlight. The current beta may be used in production - as Hard Rock, NBC, and others are doing - while the final release will come out sometime in the rest of this year.

Disclaimer: Microsoft is a client and paid travel and expenses for TechEd.

While at the RedHat Summit this year I talked with Aaron Darcy about RedHat's recent announcement of beta support for running JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Amazon EC2, currently in beta. In addition to the general idea, we talk about the types or things customers may do or are looking to do with this offering. Also, I get an update on JBoss in general.

Disclaimer: RedHat is a client.

In the last of our RSDC video series I had the chance to talk with John Simonds of IBM Analyst Relations. We spend our time talking about how John uses Web 2.0 tools and concepts to help out with his day-to-day analyst relations. For example, we talk about his use of Twitter several times with a couple of examples of how he and other IBM AR staff have monitored analysts Twitter streams to find things they need help with.

We then discuss blogging, esp. as it relates to Twitter. Check-out some of the photos of John's from RSDC include "Mr. Black Socks," and also the video he mentions.

Finally, I ask John about the tags they've been coming using for events like ibmrsdc08 for RSDC this year. At the end, I squeak in some therapy for my (personally) vexing issue of two or four character dates in tags - "08" vs. "2008."

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, paid for T&E to RSDC, and sponsored this video.

While at RSDC, Stephen O'Grady and I had the chance to talk with Dave Klavon (Director Quality and Requirements Management, Rational). We start out by quickly walking through the Rational testing and requirements management portfolio, and then dive into the testing silo.

We talk about testing in general and at the end get into a discussion about which aspects of the testing chain would do well in hosted, either as a SaaS or just in infrastructure in the cloud.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, paid for T&E to RSDC, and sponsored this video.

While at RSDC I had the chance to talk with Mike O'Rourke, VP of Development for IBM Rational. We started out talking about the productized Jazz, Rational Team Concert. Then I ask Mike to tell us about the types of customers and users Rational targets in general - ISVs, corporate developers, or others? Finally, being from BuildForge (acquired by IBM not too long ago), I ask Mike about new innovations and thinking in the build world.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, paid for T&E to RSDC, and sponsored this video.

While at RSDC this year, Stephen O'Grady and I had the chance to talk with Ashok Reddy about Jazz and Rational Team Concert, the big announcements of the show.

We start out by talking about the problem-context that Jazz is trying to address, namely, tooling the collaborative aspects of geo-distributed development team.

We then talk about another part of the overall announcement, the open services for life-cycle collaboration.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, paid for T&E to RSDC, and sponsored this video.

While at JavaOne this year, I had the chance to talk with Sun's Vijay Sarathy about VirtualBox, the open source virtualization engine Sun recently acquired. We talked about the general features in version 1.6, Sun's plans for VirtualBox, and then went through a short demo of using VirtualBox to run Windows Vista and OpenSolaris on OS X.

While at JavaOne this year, I had the chance to talk with Sun's Vijay Sarathy about VirtualBox, the open source virtualization engine Sun recently acquired. We talked about the general features in version 1.6, Sun's plans for VirtualBox, and then went through a short demo of using VirtualBox to run Windows Vista and OpenSolaris on OS X.

This is the second part of three of an overview GroundWork Open Source Monitor 5.2 with GroundWork's Richard Trezza and David Dennis, moderated by Cot

This is the third part of three of an overview GroundWork Open Source Monitor 5.2 with GroundWork's Richard Trezza and David Dennis, moderated by Cot

Once again, I ad the pleasure of talking with Erich Gamma, currently lead of the IBM Rational Jazz project. We catch up on the recent developments in the Jazz world, discuss managing large, geo-distributed teams, and then talk about the upcoming release of Rational Team Concert, based on Jazz.

We start out discussing the different parts of Jazz as I observe that I tend to think of Jazz as one unit when, in fact, there are several sub-systems that would seem to be emerging as Rational products. I then ask Erich how people have been using Jazz.net as it's become more open. On the topic of Jazz, Erich then talks about the use of dashboards and other report-like features in Jazz to help monitor teams with an eye towards improvement.

Following up on a discussion in Open Season #13 about geo-distributed teams, I ask Erich to give us his quick-take on how you take a small, local team to a large, multi-site one. He suggests using people to spread the team practices and culture, sort of virally spreading good project management and also says that iterations are key to getting such large teams breathing and synched up.

We then discuss how people can get ahold of Jazz and what the terms are for continuing to use Jazz after the beta trial. For commercial users, that use is unknown, but IBM has recently committed to providing Jazz for free to open source projects and (some?) universities.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, as is Eclipse who's EclipseCon conference we filmed this at.

At the tail-end of SXSWi in Austin, Ryan Stewart and I wrap-up what we've seen and done at SXSW, more or less relevant to RIA land. As we note, the main thing at SXSW is hanging out with people during the day and late into the night. Indeed, I didn't even manage to go to any sessions.

We also talk about the theory that Microsoft could use Silverlight to make parts of the web "go dark" for Google (thus, harming Google's revenues). We then get into a discussion of people making money selling RIA applications, sort of micro-ISVs if you know that term. Finally, we end up with tips and tricks for SXSW, imploring all of you, dear listeners and watchers, to come next year.

Also, we spend some time talking about the character of the folks at SXSW: in summary, they're ready to get down to business, no need for the beginner level stuff, which explains some of the crowd rebellion people saw this year.

Disclaimer: Adobe and Microsoft are clients. See the RedMonk client list for more clients mentioned.

While at Adobe Engage 2008 Cote' and Ryan Stewart talk with SproutBuilder's Carnet Williams and BEA's Pieter Humphrey about how each is using and seeing Flex used in the RIA world. Ryan first talks with Carnet getting and overview and more of SproutBuilder. Cot