Eventually I created this Framework to describe the Carbon Industry…the collection of companies’ with the ultimate goal of addressing climate change. With the help of a few people within the AirMiners community and some outside of that community, I refined the framework. Now I’m publishing the first draft for additional feedback and evolution:

The goal for this Framework is to provide a reference to the Carbon Industry to guide investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs to quickly understand or describe where a specific company is focused on across the the landscape of Sectors working to address climate change.

After you watch the video introduction I look forward to hearing your feedback, there are a few specific areas for feedback that I call out at the end. If you’re a member of the AirMiner’s slack channel, you can post comments on the thread there. Otherwise, please comment here in accordance to my comment policy.

11/3/20 Update: A PDF version of the Carbon Industry Framework Introduction is now available for download.

A little under 2 years ago I was reading articles about climate change, proposed solutions, and active removal of carbon from our atmosphere.  A friend of mine has a background in chemical engineering and happens to have spent most of his career working to remove carbon (and other pollutants) from the waste stream of industrial plants.  During an evening around the back yard fire pit I started asking him about the science behind this and it started my problem solving mind running.  Eventually leading me to the thesis that the way to tackle this problem at scale and in the timeframe needed (the next 10 years or less) was to build a network of distributed Direct Air Capture (DDAC) systems that could be retrofitted onto existing global infrastructure such that we were actively removing CO2 from our atmosphere in small bites (<1MT/year) all around the world and piggy backing the opex on the existing infrastructure.

Some structure was put around this concept and initial research was started.  Shortly after, a new leadership role was also started at Informatica.  Which essentially paused all the side project research.

Fast forward 2 years and we find ourselves in a much different world and I find myself with time to be devoted to the side project again.  So what has changed in the past 2 years? Simply put, and scary, the world is falling behind on the climate change problem. The models of climate change are being proven to have been way to conservative.  And the United States specifically…well, there too many current issues there to list.  And now I agree with others that we will need multiple solutions pulling CO2 from the atmosphere all working together to fix this.

But, there is some positive aspects that have occured over my 2 year hiatus. The people who understand and believe the science have also swelled at the ground level.  And luckily these people are problem solvers. When forced to stay at home during a pandemic, problem solves don’t spend all their time binge watching Netflix but invest that time to work on solving the biggest problem facing humanity. A whole community, AirMiners, has been formed around just active carbon removal from the atmosphere.  And so much information is being shared that by so many smart people, that 25% of the problem I was facing before with my initial research…finding readings to education myself and people to speed that learning process…has now been fixed.

So I’m off and running again on my initial research.  The general idea remains the same, but now there are so many other companies that have started on different pieces of the DDAC system that I have in mind, that I can focus my energy on the areas I can provide the most value: designing a distributed solution to a big problem, building a business model that supports that solution.

Unlike other technology products that I’ve been involved in bringing to market in the past, this carbon removal community realizes that this isn’t about building the next unicorn company, it’s bigger than that.  It’s about saving the planet for humanity’s future. Thus, I’m thankful for all the people who are smarter than me who are helping speed my education here (these are many broad and deep topic areas involved).  And I plan on recognizing all those who help along the way here and share more details of my personal journey in the near future.

As a company grows from small to large and evolves, there are, in fact, no more than two things it must do:

1. Upgrade its algorithms to process data

2. Get more data

Li Guofei’s article A Total Rethinking of Tencent’s Strategy
Translated in Jeff Ding’s ChinAI Newsletter

This quote comes from an interest article out of China (via Jeff Ding’s ChinAI Newsletter).  I find Jeff’s newsletter and this article interesting as part of my investing focus on Chinese companies.  But the article explains clearly a number of general aspects around data, like the impact that information overload has:

In the era of information overload, the search efficiency of “people in search of information” continues to decline, and the distribution method of “information in search of people” has become more popular. Good algorithms can improve the precision of content distribution and increase user stickiness, thus significantly improving the ability of the advertisement to be converted (into sales/cash).

Li Guofei’s article A Total Rethinking of Tencent’s Strategy
Translated in Jeff Ding’s ChinAI Newsletter

We all encounter this daily in our lives, unless you don’t use Facebook, Google Search, or a growling list of free services; remember, if you’re not paying for the product…you (or your data) are the product.

But the flip side of this is how to effectively use data for maximum [cost effective] results in our businesses.  For larger enterprises, this is an evolution of thinking and operating that can’t be driven from the top down but enabled and supported from the top with bottom up adoption. Something that a recent McKinsey article on Why Data Culture Matters covered.

The experience of these leaders, and our own, suggests that you can’t import data culture and you can’t impose it. Most of all, you can’t segregate it. You develop a data culture by moving beyond specialists and skunkworks, with the goal of achieving deep business engagement, creating employee pull, and cultivating a sense of purpose, so that data can support your operations instead of the other way around.

Why Data Culture Matters
McKinsey Quarterly 

I saw this first hand at one of my clients where I helped them implement a big data as a service offering on their private cloud (I was representing the private cloud vendor).  There was a general consensus from leadership that big data was key to the company, a research project was lead by IT to understand who was doing that today down at the BU level, that feed into spinning up a private cloud service to make it easier and cheaper for the current BU’s doing big data, with the longer term goal being that others could learn from these examples and quickly and cheaply experiment with big data in their own BUs.  Unfortunately, I stopped working with that client before I could see if that longer term vision was ever realized (when I left, they were not investing in the enablement infrastructure for that vision).

What has been your exposure to big data usage and strategy within your organization?  Leave a comment on how what you’re seeing/experiencing relates to the above aspects of big data and data culture.  

After a 3 year hiatus from VMworld (It’s been that long since I left VMware?) I spent some time this morning catching up on the announcements from VMworld 2018 with theCUBE/Wikibon team.  I found the discussion of multi-cloud interesting in that there didn’t seem to be a good definition of the term that the discussion was based on (if I’ve missed that from the analysts during my hiatus, hopefully one of them will post a link to their definitions).  So I figured I would also break my blogging hiatus to share some thoughts here.

In my opinion, when you’re talking about multi-cloud there is another level of definition that is needed which indicates who the decision maker is regarding multi-cloud (and thus what their functional needs are).  This loosely connects which layer in the aaS stack you’re referring to running across multiple clouds:

• Enterprise IT decision makers, in their evolved role as a cloud consultant to their BU customers, are thinking of multiple cloud vendors to choose from based on the workload’s (aka, application’s) needs versus cost points (multi-cloud IaaS). This is largely a vendor management function; just like how the larger, sophisticated enterprises had near equal number of Dell and HP servers in their data center 10 years ago (or was that just 5 years ago?) to get better price points during contract negotiations.
• Application Team decision makers, in their drive to get to market faster and scale their applications continue utilizing DevOps and service architectures which pull application functionality from multiple cloud based platforms, build their application using functionality from multiple cloud services (multi-cloud PaaS), or run their functionality on multiple cloud IaaS as a shadow IT or customer of Private Cloud IT teams.  
• Discussions of multi-cloud SaaS is moot because by definition the decision maker of which SaaS application to use doesn’t really care where it is run, just that it’s available. Their focus is on the application functionality to meet their business needs.  All the multi-cloud discussion is below them.

The difference between Enterprise IT multi-cloud IaaS and DevOps multi-cloud IaaS is that Enterprise IT is most likely running legacy workloads that are not service based (VM is the finest grained abstraction) where DevOps is running the service based applications that their developers are building using CD/CI methodologies (containers are the finest grained abstraction).

Enterprise IT multi-cloud is sticky by nature…but as the shrinking legacy bulk will eventually go away (you know, like the mainframe…)

DevOps multi-cloud is dynamic (easy to move) by nature…this is the elusive future opportunity which creates a challenge for technology vendors because of the lack of stickiness. But is another important reason why this application development methodology is so important to enterprises who still see software as a key differentiator for them in their industries.

Over the past 2 years I’ve developed a picture of what almost any IoT Solution, or IoT Application, must have as the various technology bits and pieces.  I first created this IoT Solution Framework while working with potential partners as a way to set a foundation for exploring IoT partnerships and explaining where their stuff fit and where my stuff fit. Eventually, I started to use this framework to compare IoT vendors and understand where they fit in the bigger picture of the IoT market.

By IoT Vendors I’m referring to companies that are selling technology that is used to build an IoT Solution, like a smart thermostat, or a connected machine.  I’m not referring to companies that are selling the smart thermostat or the connected machine, though they are building an IoT Solution which is will match some or all of my framework.

After sharing this general framework with a few people from my network, it appeared that my framework filled a gap in the IoT market.  I’ve refined the framework a bit more and recorded this video presentation to be able to share it publicly.  So, as a way of launching the latoga labs YouTube channel, here is my Anatomy of an IoT Solution:

I’ve taken this framework and applied it to various IoT Vendors that I’ve been talking to over the past few months.  That developed into the IoT Vendor Scorecards that I have started to share in the IoT Lab. The scorecards are designed to give you a quick view of how different IoT Vendors compare based on the seven areas of my IoT Solution Framework. This is not a deep technical overview of these vendors, but a higher level abstraction that allows business and technology executives to discuss their IoT Solution within a common framework.

The current list of IoT Vendors is just a sample based on my recent activity and I expect this list to grow (it has been highly focused on the software side of IoT to date).  I’m working through a more detailed scorecard for each as my time allows.  I’ll be updating the list as I publish those scorecards and post updates on the blog.

What part of the framework do you like the most? What part do you disagree with the most? What areas need further explanation? Who are the important vendors that you think are currently missing from the scorecard list? Please let me know by sharing a comment.

If you represent an IoT vendors, on my list or not, and want to chat please contact me directly.

Borrowing a line:

If you like my scorecard concept…please share them with your friends and colleagues.
If you hate my scorecard concept…please share them with your enemies and competition.

Apple is playing catch up in this area and is obviously feeling the pressure if they are announcing a new product 6 months before availability, something that is very anti-Appleesque.  Though one could argue that this is natural evolution for their product announcements since they all expand the Apple Ecosystem and you need to have developers connecting to the new device before they ship (especially when Amazon’s Echo has over 10,000 skills already). Every time they do this the hope fades a bit more within the Apple fan base around Apple every surprising us again with a killer new technology innovation, but that’s a whole nother rabbit hole to go down.

So when playing catch up, it’s not surprising that Apple would play to their strengths…music. The HomePod was introduced as a reimagined way to do music within the home (we should all be getting good at seeing thru the marketing rhetoric by now).  It’s initial specs look like a great home speaker and integrated with Apple Music gives you more options than time in your life to listen to.  And at the end there was an almost passing remark about the HomePod being part of the HomeKit.  The HomePod page even mentions “it’s a hub for controlling your smart home accessories”.  But, the current specs don’t talk about any local area communications, no Bluetooth, no Z-Wave, no zigbee.

Would Apple jump on the Z-Wave or zigbee bandwagons to quickly expand the Smart Home options and have their HomePod also become one of the core SmartHome bridges?  Again, not very Appleesque. But I would expect to at least have seen bluetooth on the HomePod so all those HomeKit devices that use bluetooth and the AppleTV as their hub would have another way to enter the Apple Ecosystem.  It just makes sense to use the HomePod’s processing power to also control and bridge the smart home to Siri and the Apple Ecosystem, but that is being seen as a side feature to the speaker.  I’m expecting (or hoping) that bluetooth appears in the specs before the HomePod is shipped in 6 months.  And it will be interesting to see what home kit integrations we see when the HomePod final ships.

What this shows is how IoT is an enabling technology but not something that most consumers think about buying directly.  Consumers especially are spending discretionary budget on things they enjoy…like Music.  And the ecosystem power is in pulling the consumer into this larger thing than just music without them realizing it.  So again, while Apple may be late to the home speaker market, they have created something that consumers will understand the need for immediately and purchase.  Compare that to the immediate thought many of us had when the Amazon Echo appears…”why do I need that anyway?”.  I think the HomePod will quickly catching up to Amazon’s Echo in shipments and help push the smarts into the home faster without people realizing it.

• We are still very much in Day 1 of IoT.  Things are still ebbing and flowing as the underlying vendors within IoT figure out what they want to be.
• I noticed a number new (to me at least) smaller platform vendors, though they are at least focusing their platform, or at least their marketing, on specific vertical areas of IoT.
• Pivots are still happening; platform vendors are adding devices and turning into solution providers; some solution providers are ditching their devices to focus on their platforms, and some larger firms are realizing that there is little value for them in trying to be their own platform and instead have OEM’d someone else’s platform (though this is sometimes apparent and sometimes not).
• A few vendors are understanding the ecosystem needs around IoT and were presenting themselves as the ecosystem hub, Samsung specifically…
• …while other ecosystem driven vendors chose not to represent, Amazon Web Services and GE Predix specifically.
• I found it still hard to differentiate between vendors as building block providers, integrated platform providers, or vertical solution providers.
• Customers are better educated on what IoT means and seemed to be asking more specific question around use cases and projects.

It seems that there still is a need for a IoT Solution reference architecture which can be used to both connect the business and technical as well as gauge vendors offering against.  Which is something that I have been working on for a while in the background and look forward to offering up to the community soon.

20170523 Update: I forgot to mention that one of the most interesting enabling technologies that I came across at IoT World was from Matrix Industries. It’s not really the smartwatch they show on their website but the underlying Thermoelectric Technology.  Take heat and turn it into power to charge a battery.  In the world of IoT, and I’m thinking specifically IIoT, there is heat generation that already happens due to the operation of the device. Using a thermoelectric generator (TEG), like the one Matrix Industries has inside their smartwatch, you could power your IoT related sensors and possibly the communication channel (assuming they are both low power enough to be powered by a TEG) as a side effect of the waste energy from your device/equipment.  I haven’t dug into this much in depth, but it’s an interesting potential concept to help create longevity and increase the scalability of the sensors within your IoT Solution.

1. struggled to think big enough with their long term IoT strategy *; they usually couldn’t think past the second stage of the IoT Journey.
2. lacked a general IoT solution architecture as a reference point **; they struggled to understand and compare all the vendors who latched onto the IoT buzzword or called themselves an IoT Platform…

Almost a year ago I presented my vision of the IoT Journey based upon all the customer and partner conversations I had spanning multiple IoT verticals like Automotive, Transportation, Industrial Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Service Sector, and Smart Cities. What I quickly realized was that IoT architecture decisions were being made based on the early stages of the journey and the people building IoT solutions were going to face an expensive re-architecture in the future to fully realize the potential of IoT.

For the past few months I have used my recent down time to document the IoT Solution architecture that I saw as common across all those discussions and used that as my own IoT Solution Reference Architecture to understand the breadth and depth of the various IoT solutions and vendors in the market. After using both the Journey and the Solution Reference Architecture in all my most recent conversations (and being prodded by a few trusted colleagues), I realized I was way overdue in sharing both in more detail.

The generic high level picture most often shown for an IoT Solution looks like this:

Things connecting into the cloud and sending up their data for storage and analytics with users accessing the Solution via either a web or mobile app (or both) to view data send commands down to the thing. When in reality there is much more complexity that is needed and most IoT Solution (should) have an underlying architecture like this:

First, this is a general IoT Solution Architecture, each specific IoT Solution will be more detailed and varied due to business problem specifics, industry regulations, and technical specifics. There is a lot of details, even at an abstracted level like this, and my next few posts will be exploring those details.  I have also converted this architecture diagram into a solution functionality map which I have been using to compare different vendor offerings, I’ll be posting more on that in the future as well.

How does this compare to your IoT Solution reference architecture?  This project spun out of some IoT consulting work that I have been doing with various clients recently.  Please reach out to discuss any IoT projects you may have going on and how I may be able to help you.

* A friend of mine at GE Digital even mentioned that when they do their training courses around IoT for executives, they purposely don’t have them try to think about IoT for their product/offering.  It’s hard for anyone who focuses on the current state of their business to quickly jump to think out of that box.

** Even to this day I’m surprised by how many charts of the IoT Marketplace that you find that don’t differentiate between companies using IoT within their offerings versus those providing the IoT building block technologies used to build those prior offerings.

“That means the top of the company must work together incredibly well. … It has to be people who have great respect for one another and who work as a team.”

“You have to recognize that you have blind spots. We all do. Blind spots move, and you want to not just have really bright people around you, but people who will push on you and people to bring out the best in you. People that amplify whatever you’re good at. And then also the people who plug the parts that you’re not and may never be.”

“…I put them in three buckets: people, strategy and execution. I sort of move between those on a daily basis as to where I put my time. I always think the most important one of those is people. If you don’t get that one right, it doesn’t matter what kind of energy you have in the other two — it’s not enough.”

(also posted on LinkedIn)

All the IoT related discussions  I’ve had starts off with one or more types of Things.

Stage 1 is always connecting that Thing to the Internet (link level initially and eventually data communication level) and then collecting data from that Thing.  I’m actually a bit amazed at how many customers, in early stage projects,  have no vision of what’s beyond that! They are usually focused on just the operational data that can be captured from the thing and collecting it into a big data repository of some sort.  Yet so many don’t focus on the operational aspects of all these things out there…how to efficiently scale their connection to your solution, keep them all organized, and track their state within a lifecycle.  Some ignore this need all together while others try to build this operational capability (taking time away from adding true value).

Stage 2 is the logical extension of Stage 1, I have all this operational data…let’s analyze and optimize! This is where a data scientist may be employed to analyze all the collected data to understand trends.  If we’re talking about Industrial Internet of Things then they are looking to predict when a Thing may fail and/or optimize it’s run time state.  Even for the Internet of Other Things, there is still a need to understand the state of a thing to optimize it’s usage (like turning off the Thing when outside it’s hours of usage).  Being able to allow certain people or systems to send commands to a Thing over a control plane is key in order to mitigate a failure or negative consequence of a failure.  And integrating with other operational data sources in real time to broaden the operational view.

Stage 3 is where most of the more advanced customer’s I’ve talked to have their visions initially set.  They know they need to expose and share the data and access to their Things with others.  And this is where the excitement builds for them as this is where new revenue generation models get defined…and redefined.  This is also where I start to shake my head at a few “IoT Platforms” that have come along recently that claim to help solve the monetization problem of IoT.

Monetization is the secret sauce that you need to create for your IoT Solution.  

Someone else can’t do this for you.  The true root of the monetization challenge is being able to support dynamic ecosystem security, a method of controlling access across the entire ecosystem of people, things, and systems in a fashion where you can programmatically change the access levels. Without that that type of security model you can’t control which different groups of users have access to different aspects of a Thing and charge for the increased value that is provided.

Stage 4 is the constantly evolving stage (not calling it an end state as this journey doesn’t end) that true visionary companies and projects seem to have, one that involves sharing of their data and Thing access across multiple 3rd parties and combining it in real time with multiple 3rd party data sources.  The number of different users and groups who need access to the control plane as well as the number of data sources hooked together on the data integration plane is complex and evolves with the demands of the business.

This is my view of how IoT is a Journey…where do you agree or disagree?

(and yes, there is a platform out there that allows you to build IoT Solutions to meet every stage of this journey…but that’s another post…)

Yesterday I spent a few hours at the Internet of Things World expo in Santa Clara, CA.  One common thread that appeared again and again in conversations was how ecosystem enablement is key to unlocking the promised value of IoT. 

During a conversation about IoT enabling medical devices and the types of data and actions that they need to support, the conversation quickly elevated into how that device needed to be part of a larger ecosystem.  The device manufacturer (the gentleman I was talking to) needs to see low level operational data from the device in order to sell value added maintenance services to the buyer of the device.  But the buyers of that device needs to be able to see all the devices they own and where they live in the device lifecycle (ready for deployment, at a hospital, at a patient’s home, being recovered from deployment, etc.).  And then here are multiple levels of users of that device: The Hospital needs to be able to see data from all devices they have deployed, grant access to slices of the data collected from the device to a doctor or nurse based on who’s currently on duty or assigned to a patient; The patient also wants to have access to the information from that device to feel empowered and part of their care program.  And then there is the HIPAA requirements and privacy concerns regarding the data coming from those devices, how do you support all the above use cases and ensure privacy?  And then consider the security around sending commands to that device to adjust the monitoring parameters or the amount of medicine being dispensed.  

And this was just one of the conversations from yesterday.  Same trend happened when discussing automotive telematics system, a hospitality industry personnel optimization project, a travel industry concierge project, a manufacturing operational monitoring project,  and even a consumer based mobile application for social engagement.  All different vertical or industry focused solutions…same horizontal need, participating in a larger ecosystem.

Many people who start down a path to creating an IoT solution (or just IoT enabling something) don’t realize that the real value that IoT enables isn’t just around connecting and collecting data.  It’s about how that device needs join a larger ecosystem of people, data, and legacy system. Real value starts to be unlocked when there are win-win-win scenarios across the entire ecosystem.  And many of those scenarios won’t be visible immediately but will evolve over time.

After having hundreds of IoT conversations over the past 6 months this is the strongest recurring trend I have seen.  Many times just understanding each of the groups of users who need to interact with a Thing can be a challenge, let alone all the nuances around security and different levels of data and access to the controls of a Thing.  And that Thing needs to interact as part of a large ecosystem that doesn’t just include people but also other things, legacy applications, and other data source.

Are you’re IoT plans being built around Ecosystem thinking?  

Are you’re technology decisions being made with Ecosystem enablement (now and for the future) in mind?

This is one of the core strengths that attracted me to joining Covisint last fall.  The Covisint PaaS has three main pillars of functionality which work in an integrated fashion for ecosystem enablement:

• Identity and Access Management to handle the dynamic security model that is required to enable an ecosystem and not only scale to support Millions of users and things but also handle the complex relationships that exists between all members of the ecosystem.  
• IOT Services to provide realtime messaging for Things and not only describe, manage, and secure the capabilities of each Thing at scale within the ecosystem but also to manage the lifecycle of each Thing as it lives within that ecosystem.
• Messaging and Orchestration to not only integrate Things with legacy applications and other data sources, both internally and externally to an organization, but to also become the single integration point to open up all your legacy application and data.  

Leave a comment and let me know if you agree or disagree with my observation around ecosystem thinking being key to unlocking IoT value.  Let’s talk about your ecosystem…

Shifting away from Virtualization and VMware

After an amazing seven and a half years at VMware as part of their Global Accounts team, a new area of focus has been building for me personally and a new career opportunity came my way that enhances that focus.  After today I will no longer be employed by VMware.  My experience at VMware was career defining in many ways and I look forward to still keeping an eye on VMware as one of the cornerstones of IT infrastructure as well as a stock holder.  Leaving all the friends and colleagues that I’ve built at VMware over the years is hard, but I know that the teams within VMware will successfully execute on the many opportunities that lay ahead.

As a parting gift to my VMware related readers, make sure you bookmark the Getting More Out of VMware webcast series. This has been a critical learning resource for all my previous clients who were heavily leveraging VRA and VROPS within their enterprises.  You can also reference the historical webcasts on virtSanity’s page, thanks to Ryan Cartwright for maintaining this!

Speaking of maintaining, my VMW Launchpad will now be moving into historical snapshot mode.  The Launchpad was a means of sharing the most critical VMware related links for my clients.  Under it was the VMware Network Port List, listing all the ports used across all the VMware Products (a public resource that was built by many individuals across VMware); and my VMware Acronym page, helping to decipher the acronym soup that developed around VMware over the years.   All these pages will not be updated moving forward but will be left in place for historical reference and existing links.

This also marks an end to my Virtualization Roundup (#VRU) tweets.  This was a habit I got into, leveraging that tag when I shared Virtualization or VMware related items on twitter.  And for my previous VMware clients, this will likely mark an end to the account newsletters that I published on a rough quarterly basis.

Shifting Toward Internet of Things (IoT) via Covisint

The new area of focus that I have been working on personally for over a year now has been the Internet of Things.  Initially from a personal perspective as a user of consumer IoT solutions. Evolving to exploring how IoT could be leveraged to help members of the sandwich generation, like myself, assist our aging parents and ourselves with the challenges associated with aging, the needs of maintaining privacy, and the complexity of family being geographically spread.  And eventually leading me to Covisint, a IoT Platform as a Service.

Internet of Things, sometimes referred to as Internet of Everything (IoE), is a term that has been around for at least 4-5 years (if personal memory serves me right).  Over my tenure supporting Cisco as one of my Global Accounts at VMware, I heard that term often from Cisco leadership during internal vendor meetings and quarterly earnings calls.  The simplistic way of thinking about it was devices, billions of them, connecting to the Internet requiring more IP’s and generating more traffic (and cynically requiring more networking infrastructure).  But as this idea has been explored more over the years by many that physical connection becomes just the first step of a much longer journey around disruption of existing business models and customer’s expectations from the devices they own, evolving into a continual ownership experience through device augmented experiences.

Whether that device is a smart phone, watch, thermostat, sprinkler controller, automobile, tractor, or airplane the expectations of the user of that device have changed and that drives a whole new set of business opportunities for companies. Companies that have realized this shift of expectation are disrupting larger established competitors, disrupting themselves, or are on track to become part of the 50% of the S&P500 that won’t be on that list in 10 years.  These opportunities are focused around data collection from the device, a cloud based platform to securely communicate with the device and the user, and true joint value add services for the device producer and owner.  Covisint provides the cloud based platform that any IoT based services would need as part of their software infrastructure, allowing businesses to focus on quickly iterating on providing a new customer experience.

Personally, I feel we are entering the slope of enlightenment around IoT and the eventual plateau of productivity will change the world that we all live in and that my children will see as normal.  Like any paradigm shift of this nature, there are risks involved.  Not just around security but the large impact some of this change will have on business, laws, and society.

That is the focus shift that you will see here at latoga labs.  I have joined Covisint as Director of Strategic Alliances and will be writing more about IoT, touching on the technology of an IoT PaaS, but focusing more on the business impacts of IoT and challenges associated with those impacts.  And there will continue to be the occasional flotsam of other items that catch my interest.  I hope that long time readers of the blog will continue with me on this journey and I look forward to the new readers and their participation.

Another summer is past and another VMworld US is behind us.  Thankfully this year we didn’t experience any shaking or broken bricks like during VMworld 2014! Here is a copy of my annual VMworld summary that I share directly with my clients.

Playback of the VMworld 2015 General Sessions from Monday and Tuesday are already available on the VMworld site (Thursday general session is for attendees only).  Recordings of the 2015 Sessions will be hitting the VMworld site within the next week and be available to all registered attendees.  The archive of break out sessions from the past 5 VMworlds is also available to the general public.

What has to be the hottest set of topics from VMworld 2015 is everything and anything DevOps and Cloud-Native Application related.  The CNA Team has a great summary of all their announcements.

General Trivia

• Registered Attendees: 23,700
• Attendees to DevOps Sessions: 12,470
  • How are you planning on treating developers as first class citizens in your data center?
• Breakout Sessions: 450+
• Ecosystem Companies Represented: 240
• Hands-on Labs Completed: 9,000+
• VMworld Social Media Impressions: 276+ Million

VMworld Product Announcements

• Introducing EVO SDDC and the EVO SDDC Manager
  • VCE Announces VxRack System based on VMware EVO SDDC
• Virtual SAN 6.1 – Already GA! Details in release notes and available for download
• vSphere Storage API’s for I/O Filtering
• vCloud Air Advanced Networking & Security
• Hybrid Cloud Manager
• vCloud Air Disaster Recovery Services: Disaster Recovery on Demand and Site Recover Manager Air
• vCloud Air Object Storage
• vCloud Air SQL
• Project Skyscraper (tech preview) – new set of hybrid cloud capabilities for VMware vSphere (aka Cross-Cloud vMotion)
• vRealize Operations 6.1 – Already GA! Details in release notes and available for download
• vRealize Log Insight 3.0 – Already GA! Details in release notes and available for download
• Introducing vRealize Air Compliance free Beta
• Site Recovery Manager 6.1 – Already GA! Details in release notes and available for download
  • SRM Certified storage replication adapters
  • VMware vRealize Orchestrator Plug-In for Site Recovery Manager 6.1 – Already GA! Details in release notes and available for download
• VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.0

• vSphere Integrated Containers (tech preview)
  • vSphere 6 Instant Clone
  • Project Bonneville – provisioning containers directly to the hypervisor
  • Photon OS
• VMware Photon Platform (tech preview)
  • VMware and Pivotal to Introduce Cloud-Native Application Offering

• Project A² – new mobile-centric approach to delivering and managing applications and devices for Windows 10
• VMware Identity Manager – Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS)
• Horizon 6.2
• VMware Project Enzo

• NSX 6.2
  • NSX Platform Ecosystem continues to grow
  • NSX 6.2: Enterprise Automation, Security and Application Continuity

Recent VMware Releases

• VMware Sphere 6.0 Update 1 – download
• VMware Identity Manager v2.4 – download
• vRealize Operations Manager 6.0.3 – download
• vRealize Business Standard 6.2.3 – download
• vRealize Business Adv/Ent 8.2.3 – download
• vRealize Orchestrator 6.0.3 – download
• vRealize Automation 6.2.3 – download
• vRealize Code Stream 1.2 – download
• Fusion 8.0 – Buy 8 or Buy 8 Pro
• Workstation 12 Pro – Buy
• Workstation 12 Player – Buy

And now are we Ready For Vegas?

So this morning, I was intrigued when I saw an article in my morning newsfeed that told a story about the future of work. Gideon Lichfield perfectly blends futurist and science fiction writer to paint us a picture of a potential future where all this IOT and Industrial Internet innovation is taking us. When all the sensors have been deployed, robots automating all mundane tasks, and algorithms written all that is left for some of the human tech workers is to react to when the system says there is a problem…also known as do what the automation/robots can’t do (at least not yet).

And yet the core human trait of questioning and wanting more still exists.  And how will we reconcile that core need with this potential future that we create?

I found this an interesting (if dark) view of our not too distant future.  I just hope that the worker in the story doesn’t end up being one of my kids. And the irony wasn’t lost on me that I used Pocket’s new Listen (text to speech) feature to read this article (to me) while I got ready this morning…

Note: get registering fast…I’m already hearing of many sessions that are full, especially NSX ones!  If a session is full make sure you get on the waitlist (See page 11 of the Schedule Builder Guide) in case someone drops their registration or a new time is added for that same session.

NSX – Micro-segmentation, Planning, and Deploying…Oh My!

• NET5469 – VMWare on VMWare – How VMware IT Uses NSX for Micro-Segmentation, and Large Scale Private Cloud
• NET5529 – The Practical Path to NSX
• NET6465-BC – Advanced Networking Virtualization – VMW NSX Micro-Segmentation Design Best Practice
• SEC4958-SPO – VMWare NSX and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series: Driving Business and Operational value Through Micro-Segmentation
• SEC5414 – Integrating 3rd Party Security Products on NSX Platform
• SEC5754 – Who Can You Trust? Strategies and Designs for Implementing a Zero Trust Model Leveraging NSX
• NET6613-QT – SDN with NSX – One Year On
• NET6604-GD – NSX Day 2 Operations

vRealize Automation – If you’re going to do it once…automate it!

• NET5362 – Enabling Automated Network & Security Services with NSX and vRealize Automation
• NET5772 – A Case Study in the University of New Mexico’s Transition for Legacy Networking to SDN/NSX to Enhance IaaS and SDDCs

OpenStack – Yes, VMware Does OpenStack…fast and production ready!

• SPL-SDC-1620 – OpenStack with VMware vSphere and NSX.
  • BTW: the record I’ve seen for fastest VIO deployment was 1.5 days from start (just vSphere 6 installed) to finish (VIO running in a HA, redundant production ready configuration, NSX integrated with VIO, LogInsight processing logs for the entire environment, and VROPs monitoring the entire environment).
  • BTW2: It would have ben done in half a day if it wasn’t for the storage network configuration error that VROPS and LogInsight identified…
• SDDC5566 – Successful DevOps for the Hybrid Cloud with vRealize Automation & VMware Integrated OpenStack
• SDDC5839 – vRealize Automation or OpenStack? Uncovering the Right IaaS for Your Business
  • This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes.  A client was struggling with getting another vendor’s OpenStack environment running and operationally stable.  When asked if “the business had cloud native apps that leveraged the OpenStack APIs” the answer was “no”. When asked if “the business had plans to build cloud native apps that leveraged the OpenStack APIs” the answer was “not really”.  When asked “Why the hell are you wasting your time with OpenStack then?” there was no answer.   Tool boxes hold more than just hammers…

Net-Net Two Changes

1. vCloud Hybrid Services is now known as vCloud Air (pretty straight forward)
   • Many VMware products are now becoming avaialable via SaaS, if you see Air in the name, it denotes the SaaS varient
2. vRealize is the new family name to designate VMware management technologies
   • many product names that used to start with vCenter now start with vRealize

Which Cascade across Suites and Offerings

vCloud Air – VMware’s public cloud platform built on vSphere, compatible with your on-premises data center. Available as a Virtual Private Cloud (shared hardware) or Dedicate Cloud (dedicated hardware) instance across seven (as of this posting) world wide data centers.

• vCloud Government Services – hybrid cloud service for US Federal Government agencies adherent to FedRAMP security standards
• vCloud Air Disaster Recover – Recovery as a Service for your on-premise workloads
• vCloud Air Data Protection – Backup and recovery feature for Dedicated Cloud or Virtual Private Cloud instances.

vRealize Family – Since this is a standardizing of product names under one family, see the product rebranding map:

From	To
VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite VMware vCenter Operations Manager VMware vCenter Operations Foundation VMware vCenter Configuration Manager VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator VMware vCenter Hyperic VMware vCenter  Operations Manager for Horizon	VMware vRealize Operations Standard/Advanced/Enterprise VMware vRealize Operations Manager No Change for v5.8.x VMware vRealize Configuration Manager VMware vRealize Infrastructure Navigator VMware vRealize Hyperic® VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon®
VMware vCenter Operations Management Pack for XYZ	VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for XYZ (in Q1, 2015)
VMware vCloud Automation Center Standard/Advanced/Enterprise VMware vCloud Application Services VMware vCloud Automation Center Desktop VMware vCloud Automation Center Development Kit	VMware vRealize Automation Standard/Advanced/Enterprise VMware vRealize Application Services VMware vRealize Automation Desktop VMware vRealize Automation Development Kit
VMware IT Business Management Suite Standard/Advanced/Enterprise	VMware vRealize Business Standard/Advanced/Enterprise
VMware IT Benchmarking VMware IT Benchmarking Starter Kit	VMware vRealize IT Benchmarking (in Q1, 2015) VMware vRealize IT Benchmark Starter Kit (in Q1, 2015)
VMware vCenter Log Insight VMware vCenter Log Insight Content Pack for XYZ	VMware vRealize Log Insight VMware vRealize Log Insight Content Pack for XYZ (in Q1, 2015)
VMware vCenter Orchestrator	VMware vRealize Orchestrator
VMware vFabric Data Director	No change

And while the official stance from VMware Product Management is that there are no acronyms for the vRealize suite….they automatically started appearing, you can reference my VMware Acronym List for the latest acronyms.

This is a data point as the total aggregate OS instances involved is below 250,000.  While the numbers in the graph represent both physical and virtual environments,  the Production side was over 85% virtualized and the Development side was over 75% virtualized.

How does this compare to your own internal OS Distributions?

Some of the interesting points that jumped out at me:

• Maybe I’m dating myself here, but I remember when those Windows and Linux proportions used to be flipped…
• Solaris and HPUX are still breathing…thought I think it’s safe to say they are on hospice care
• There was a larger percentage of development running ESX Nested than running HPUX (even when nested ESX is not officially supported by VMware)
• Windows deployments are lower in Development; the sources of these data points were not using Azure as far as I know, I wonder how Azure might impact a graph like this moving forward
• Unsure how to read the significant delta between Solaris deployments on the Production side versus the Development side

Post a comment if you want to compare your environment to the above.  Since this is a data point snapshot I haven’t calculated any statistical margin of error…for entertaining discussion only.

(Image via vmworld)

In retrospect, the imagery around VMworld 2014 struck a little to close to home considering the 6.0 earthquake that struck the Bay Area on the Sunday before…  Anyhoo, here is my list of the most important stuff from VMworld last week:

• General Trivia
  • Over 22,000 attendees this year
  • over 13,400 Hands On Labs were taken! The VMworld labs will be rolling out onto the public HOL in phases over September and early October, reference the VMworld 2014 HOL Guide  as you see them appear.
  • For a second year in a row, the NSX Introduction HOL was by far the most popular…
  • There were over 440 Days (more than a Year) worth of time spent in HOL at VMworld 2014!  Just dwell on that number for a second…
  • VMware Foundation and over 2,500 VMworld attendees raised $248,460 as part of Destination Giveback
• VMworld Top Items
  • Keynote Sessions (replays)
  • Top 10 Breakout Sessions (replays)
  • Video Highlights
• Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)
  • VMware Integrated OpenStack –
  • vRealize Suite – capabilities of VMware’s existing cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business management solutions in a single offering
  • vCloud Automation Center 6.1
  • vRealize Air Automation – first in a family of new as a service (aaS) cloud management offerings
  • vCloud Suite 5.8 – enhanced policy-based provisioning capabilities
    • vSphere Data Protection 5.8 and vSphere Replication 5.8
    • Site Recovery Manager 5.8 (videos from Jason Boche)
  • vSphere Public Beta, next release will feature:
    • Fault Tolerance up to 4 vCPUs
    • Cross vCenter vMotion
    • Enhanced Long Distance vMotion
    • NSX network properties will be vMotioned
  • New vCloud Air Mobile and Hybrid Cloud Services
  • Tech Preview: vCloud Air Object Storage
• Software Defined Networking (SDN)
  • VMware NSX 6.1 – includes advanced network micro-segmentation capabilities, improved hybrid cloud connectivity, equal cost multi-path (ECMP) routing and VCAC 6.1 integration
  • Arista Networks and VMware Enter Strategic Relationship to Advance Adoption of Network Virtualization
  • F5 Big-IQ and NSX Integration to automate the delivery of application services
• EVO – 3 simple Evolutionary letters
  • the curtain drops…Project Marvin, Project Mystic, Project Starburst were all EVO (hmm, paranoid?)
  • Introducing the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance: EVO:RAIL, single appliance supporting either 100 general purpose server VM’s or  up to 250 Horizon View virtual desktops.
  • Initial set of Qualified EVO:RAIL Partners.  This is much more than a simple OEM of the VMware SDDC solution stack, these partners adhere to strict VMware hardware, packaging, and support specifications.
  • EVO is a family…Tech Preview of EVO:RACK
• End User Computing (EUC)
  • VMware Unifies Mobile, Desktop and Content Management With VMware Workspace Suite
  • VMware acquired CloudVolumes and introduced Project Meteor, technology preview showcasing next generation desktops and applications as a service
  • VMware, NVIDIA and Google Collaborate To Deliver Graphics Rich Apps To Enterprise Cloud Desktops
  • VMware announces New Horizon DaaS Services and Expansion to Europe
• Dev-Ops
  • VMware Teams With Docker, Google and Pivotal to Simplify Enterprise Adoption of Containers  
  • Docker & VMware: 1 + 1 = 3 
  • Tech Preview of Project Fargo, super fast, scalable, differential cloning of a running VM

And while technically this happened pre-VMworld, it’s important to note that vCloud Hybrid Services was rebranded to vCloud Air.

I recently came across the blog series that David Davis, of VirtualizationSoftware.com, guest wrote for VMware on VCOPS which I though was a great resource for those ramping up or looking to dive deeper into VCOPS.  I couldn’t find a list of all the articles in  the series, so I created one (14 posts at time of writing):

1. Why Do You Need More Tools?
2. How to Select a Virtualization Management Tool
3. Evaluating VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite
4. Understanding VMware Center Operations Management Suite Editions
5. vCenter Operations Manager Architecture
6. Installing vCenter Operations Manager
7. Adding Your License in vCenter Operations Manager
8. Understanding vCenter Operations Badges
9. Right-Sizing Virtual Machines with vC Ops
10. Configuring Policies and Groups
11. Understanding and Configuring Alerts
12. Introduction to Capacity Planning From the World View
13. Capacity Analysis of Your vSphere Hosts
14. Capacity Analysis of Virtual Machines

what education resources do you have to help get me up to speed with recent changes?

This is always a loaded question as everyone’s current speed varies as does the type of education resources that work best for them.  However, I put together this list for a client’s architecture team recently as an attempted shot gun answer.  Sharing it hoping parts of it might be useful to others.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

VMware TV’s YouTube channel is the best portal for all kinds of various educational video.  Some of them might be included in resources listed below.

Try to leverage the VMware Learning Path tool to guide you through different learning paths based on solution, your role, or accreditation your would like to achieve.

Use the Product Walkthrough portal for self-paced review of key solutions from VMware.

Take advantage of the VMware Hands On Labs to get hands guided experience with the various product offerings without having to do any install and setup in your own lab.

Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure

• Software Defined Data Center overview videos
• Free online vSphere Education Videos that cover various topics in bite sized chunks
• Free online Site Recover Manager (SRM) Videos that cover various topics in bite sized chunks
• Free online vCloud Automation Center videos that cover various topics
• HOL-SDC-1310: vSphere and vSOM 101 will introduce you to vSphere, vCenter and vSOM
• HOL-SDC-1304: vSphere Performance Optimization reviews basic vSphere performance concepts and tools to help optimize environment
• HOL-SDC-1305: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery will review these topics in a vSphere environment
• HOL-SDC-1307 – vCloud Automation Solutions explores vCAC, Orchestrator, PowerCLI and AutoDeploy working together to solve real-word problems
• HOL-SDC-1321 – VMware vCloud Automation Center from A to Z covers VCAC 6.0 to rapidly deploy and manage services
• Each Product has a resources page which list both short videos and educational material, see  vSphere Resources page as example
• Vmware Training Courses – See the full catalog for all training options (classroom, online, etc.) and course details, my general course recommendations:
  • vSphere Install, Configure and Manager – 5  day course for system administrators to get base line skills with vSphere and vCenter
  • vSphere Optimize and Scale – 5 day course for experienced vsphere admins to provide advanced skills for configuring and maintaining a highly available and scalable virtual infrastructure
  • vSphere Fast Track – intense 5 day course for Experienced system administrators and system integrators that combines ICM and parts of other classes to maximize learning time
  • vCloud Automation Center: Install, Configure, Manage — 3 day course to get vsphere admins up to speed on VCAC
  • vCloud Automation Center: Extensibility and Advanced Administration — 2 day course for VCAC admins to learn how to extend VCAC

Operations Management

• Free online vCenter Log Insight videos
• Free online vCenter Operations videos
• HOL-SDC-1301: Applied Cloud Operations will review Log Insight and VCOPS from a cloud operations perspective
• VCOPS Resources page has additional education items
• Free online vCenter Orchestrator videos (remember Orchestrator comes with vSphere)
• Orchestrator Resources page has additional education items
• Vmware Training Courses, my general course recommendations:
  • Free VMware vCenter Operations Manager Fundamentals is a 2.5 hour online course to help you understand fundamentals
  • VMware vCenter Operations Manager: Advanced Usage and Dashboard Design — is a 3 day course focused on the advanced capabilities such as adapters, customization, and management
  • VMware vCenter Operations Manager: Analyze and Predict — 2 day course for experienced users of vSphere teaches using VCOPS as a forensic and predictive tool
  • VMware vCenter Orchestrator: Develop Workflows — 3 day course to learn to use Orchestrator to automate IT workflows for both physical and virtual environments

Software Defined Networking

• Free online vCloud Networking and Security videos
• NSX Resources page has additional education items
• HOL-SDC-1303 – VMware NSX Network Virtualization Platform will introduce NSX topics and features
• HOL-SDC-1319 – VMware NSX for Multi-Hypervisor Environments will discuss using NSX for multiple hypervisors

Note: it’s always recommended to leverage VMware PSO Credits for education classes.  This can give you a price advantage for groups of attendees and gives you more flexibility on when to attend classes.