Another reason to be on Twitter. If my friend hadn’t sent me the tweet about Cisco Telepresence being on 30 Rock, I might have missed it. (OK – I admit that I probably would have seen it, given that all new episodes of 30 Rock are programmed to be taped on my DVR, and it’s my favorite show. Six Sigma, anyone??)

But still, I could have missed it, and what a shame that would have been. Jack Donaghy (played by the hilarious Alec Baldwin) somehow gets bedbugs and is forced to attend a meeting via Cisco Telepresence because nobody wants to have physical contact with him. So instead of the clear benefits of cost (travel) savings, better/virtual face-to-face communications, the show brings up an interesting side benefit of using Cisco Telepresence - keeping people out of your “immediate” presence. Think about it.  As Jack says:

I can hear your hair growing on this thing!

Or go to hulu.com to watch the full episode

Kudos to our friends at Cisco!!

(Now if we could only have gotten the plug in about using EM7 for Cisco Telepresence management…)

In related news, Dell says it expects to “promptly” close its acquisition of Perot Systems. For enterprises looking to implement virtualization and cloud computing, the merger brings together Dell’s hardware and software expertise for advanced data center implementations with Perot’s expertise around integration, deployment, and management. Merger plans were announced in September.

Technology industry trade association, TechAmerica, released its Vision report – a look at important trends and factors that influence the government market. As we found in our FOSE 2009 survey, the government is transitioning as long-established governing processes rapidly change. Some of their findings:

Inhibitors and Drivers to keep spending in check. Agencies will:

• Spend less to improve fiscal discipline, achieve economies in contracting and realize ROI
• Spend more to improve services to citizens, increase scope and scale, address pent-up demand, make upfront costs of investments and make investments critical to operation

Cloud Computing Implications:

• Threats: may lead to outsourcing government infrastructure, will lead to increasing erosion of margins, new competitors
• Opportunities: need for government clouds as commercial offerings don’t address all requirements

Web 2.0/3.0 Implications:

• Threats: breaks down heirarcy and government/industry relations; newer, faster ways to do business, and inadvertant release of competitive intelligence
• Opportunities: speeds communication and offers broader collaboration

TechAmerica also issued a letter to President Obama asking him to appoint a cybersecurity coordinator at the earliest possible opportunity. In our 09.19.00 Links List we noted that Frank Kramer was rumored to take the position “within two weeks” – looks like “two months” may have put us in the ballpark (if it indeed happens any time soon).

At the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo, Intel talked about the hurdles and potential gains of private cloud computing. Hurdle: there is no blueprint to building a private cloud, so enterprises will have to invest the time and resources to meet user expectations. However, the benefits of private cloud continue to be quantified:

• Cost efficiency – Amazon charges 8.5 cents per hour for a Linux server in EC2. Servers account for 50% of the expense of data center outlays; power and cooling for the servers adds another 23%
• Improving voltage regulators on servers, allowing a two-way server to scale back to 60 watts when idle, would save $6 million per year for a company running 50,000 servers
• Building private clouds with servers using flash drives instead of disk drives uses 90% less electrical for cooling

Despite today’s news that unemployment is the highest since 1983, the worst of the recession may be over for IT pros with certain high-tech skills. Pay for IT professionals increased slightly more than 1%, causing industry watchers to be cautiously optimistic. However, there is conflicting information, as some IT professionals are seeing their pay slashed during company-wide cuts. It may help to look for jobs in the top US hotspots for IT jobs.

Finally, for a harmless break, check out Numberology – a site that gives you a daily number with an explanation of what it represents. Today’s number is $200,000 – from Neiman Marcus’ annual holiday catalog – the cost of dinner with Malcolm Gladwell, Nora Ephron and John Lithgow. Proceeds are donated to a children’s reading charity.

• Clean technology will generate jobs due to billions of federal stimulus dollars
• Venture capital investments rose to $4.8 billion for 637 deals – a 17% increase in dollars from the previous quarter
• A memory chip maker in Seoul reported a net profit of $207 million after seven consecutive quarters of losses
• Western Digital finished Q3 with 44.1 million hard drive shipments compared to 39.4 million shipments in the same quarter last year
• Riverbed Technology’s Q3 revenue increased 12% from Q2 – an increase of 18 percent from the same period a year ago. Their WAN optimization technology helps improve application response times, particularly needed in SaaS applications.
• Apple’s Mac sales increased 17% from last year’s quarter, evidence that for consumers, some things are indispensible

Enterprise spending on cloud computing is expected to increase 28% this year to $3.2 billion, with most of the money going toward public cloud services. However, Gartner estimates that by 2012, IT shops will spend more than half of their cloud dollars on private clouds as costs decrease and management efficiencies increase. While others are debating between private and public clouds, Bechtel has successfully implemented a private cloud using virtualization and automated provisioning – since 2005, they have gone from 2000 IT employees to 1100, and increased server utilization from 2-3% to an average of 60-70%. They have shifted 60% of their applications to the cloud and expect the others to be moved by the beginning of 2010.

We’ve written about the speculation that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun may signal the demise of MySQL. But the backers of an Oracle takeover of MySQL are beginning to speak up, suggesting that the opposition may be trying to squash the deal so that MySQL could be purchased (by Microsoft) if Oracle is forced to sell it. Others say the merger would not damage competition and that the EU should not be involved in the decision.

“Opponents are “spreading what can only be described as fear, uncertainty and doubt. The only possible argument in favor of the EC blocking Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL is that it is damaging to competition, not that it is damaging to MySQL itself. Otherwise we are asking the EC to rule on whether Oracle is open source-friendly enough to own MySQL, and that is neither something that an organization like the EC is equipped to answer nor something that it should be asked to decide.”

Matthew Aslett, analyst at The 451 Group

While technical IT training is important, CIOs are advised of the growing need to train IT employees in a wider range of managerial skills that will benefit the business – hiring, terminating, teambuilding and emotional intelligence to help managers recognize and consider the emotional and cultural effects of the economic downturn.

On Sale!

• Lower prices on all Amazon EC2 On-Demand compute instances, effective on Nov. 1. Charges for Linux-based instances drop 15% — a small Linux instance costs just 8.5 cents per hour, instead of 10 cents per hour.
• Microsoft has cut its per user per month list price for Exchange Online services in half. The new $5 per user per month brings Microsoft much closer to Google Apps Premium Edition.

#1.  Unified Communications. Deloitte’s UC and collaboration solutions include real-time services like chat, IP telephony, and video conferencing in addition to email, voicemail, SMS and fax. Each month they handle about 36 million emails and 8,000 web meetings.

#2.  Mobility. 90% of their workforce is mobile so IT works to meet users’ demands for information anytime and anywhere. Their focus is more on the end result of making sure workers can connect – and less on the devices, network or applications.

#3.  Web 3.0. They are extending social computing by converting information into knowledge. Deloitte’s internal enterprise portal, DeloitteNet 2.0 is accessible on PDAs and includes blogs, Wikis, forums, instant messaging, Web conferencing, D Street – its internal social network that is similar to Facebook, collaboration tools, voicemail and email. They are updating it with more applications, new search functionality, more collaboration tools and mobile PDA applications.

#4.  Cloud Computing. Oglesby noted that cloud computing definitely represents a shift in technology architecture. However, he is taking a cautious approach to allow the technology to mature. (Thank goodness he did rant about cloud computing like Ellison recently did!) Deloitte has not moved to the cloud, but is definitely positioning itself for the move by virtualizing internal infrastructure, storage, desktops, servers and their network. For now, they are building a private cloud to understand the technology and what it means for their business. They’ll look at the overall efficiency and costs to determine whether an enterprise-wide private or public cloud makes sense for them. They also are looking at mobile virtualization. (See Q&A below.)

#5.  Green IT. Because of more pressing economic concerns, efforts to go green IT are scaling back, but Oglesby believes that green IT is still achievable. Some examples – they have virtualized 50% of their data center servers and eliminated 1000 standalone servers. They installed 179 multi-functional devices, replacing 569 standalone printers, 119 faxes and 69 copiers.

Oglesby said that while these 5 changes are visible, there are other less visible challenges:

• Despite the economic downturn, customers (internal and external) still want to receive the same or better levels of service as always. IT is forced to do more with less.
• Customers have a growing impatience with IT departments. They want their expectations met and IT has to keep up with the latest technologies.
• The inability of customers to outline their requirements means IT needs to be subject matter experts with answers. To be successful, IT must talk with and clearly understand what customers really want and need.
• There will be continued difficulty in aligning IT with business. All technology has to have a business benefit – new things should not be introduced if they do not add demonstrated value in some way.

Q&A from the Audience

Question: Exactly what is mobile virtualization?

• He admitted this is a work in progress, but the goal is to run the hypervisor on a PDA and allow it to run multiple OSes. Oglesby noted the convergence of the laptop, PDA and cell phone and is convinced that the PDA is the device of the future. He noted more and more people have ditched their laptops, netbooks and cell phones and now conduct a majority of their business on PDAs.

Question: What are the steps to success for IT?

• IT has to listen to its customers and can’t work in a vacuum. What’s “cool” is not always useful. IT staff needs to be proficient in asking probing questions to get to what the business really needs because people often struggle with articulating their requirements.

Question: What is laptop virtualization?

• The laptop is just a shell with an operating system – the applications and data reside in a data center, which helps meet customers’ security and privacy requirements,. This is important for doing business across borders, where governments have the right to seize and search laptops, PDAs and other devices.

Question: How do you train end users to properly use IT resources. (Apparently this person gets calls at the help desk on how to use Excel.)

• You can’t train end-users. Instead you need to educate and reinforce behavior. He suggested IT provide service – which may mean directing users to the proper resources for training issues. “Not my job” is not acceptable.

Question: How do you articulate the value of innovation?

• Innovation must add value to the business. It’s not the “cool” factor, but how does the technology add value to the business?

Oglesby will be presenting at Interop NY on November 18.

The panelists then gave examples (both good and bad) of how quickly things have changed in one generation when it comes to how the next generation of workers uses technology.

Law firm: older workers use the librarian to help with research. If they use the Internet, they are on CNN, WSJ, and other news sites. Gen Y uses the Internet, Facebook (date, time stamps), MySpace and Wikipedia.

Consumerism is driving IT. Younger workers may have better, faster and more IT resources at home than they do at their job (a reversal from just a few years ago). They know where to get free resources and they are able to cobble together applications to do what they need. They are pushing IT – “if I can do it at home, I should be able to do it at work.”

Skills vs. Experience. Students are learning applications, programs and gaining skills in school (elementary through college), but they still need the experience and a “willing-to-learn-more” attitude to apply these skills to their jobs.

Collaboration vs. Competitiveness. Panelists agreed that younger workers are more comfortable working in teams rather than individually. They feel this is because they work in teams in school and because of the number of available collaboration tools. On the people skills side, they noted that tools don’t resolve conflicts between people that happen when you actually see and talk to them and that individuals and departments often have their own agendas that aren’t exposed in applications or collaborative tools.

Quick learners. Everyone agreed that Gen Y picks up skills very quickly – the learning curve is down from weeks to sometimes days. There is very little tolerance for delay (go to Wikipedia for answers – it may not be right, but it’s an easy answer!) However, they all agreed that being able to apply skills in context in a business setting and making judgment calls still takes time.

Work ethics issues. Older workers think of their jobs as eight hours in the office and not taking work home. Younger workers work at any hour around the clock, come in late and stay late.

Interpersonal skills are lacking. Gen Y texts vs. talks. They don’t write in complete sentences or spell out words. Everyone agreed that being able to talk to others is a key job skill that seems to be slipping away.

• 4.75 million servers worldwide are running without being actively used daily
• 75% of server managers said at least 15% of servers do nothing useful
• 82% admitted they don’t have an adequate grasp of server utilization
• 72% rely on CPU utilization to measure server efficiency

“The problem with CPU utilization is that a server could be busy doing its housekeeping tasks, such as its own antivirus scans, its own backups, its own indexing and defragmenting of hard disks. It will look busy, but it’s not actually adding any business value.”

Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E

Cloud computing was number 1 on the annual Gartner list of top strategic technologies. Other technologies on the list include “Client computing” which is being reshaped by virtualization, cloud and new models for accessing business applications; Green IT, reshaping the data center and “Virtualization for availability” (as in VMware’s VMotion and Microsoft’s Live Migration for high availability)

For the cloud to be a realistic long-term option, cloud costs need to come down significantly, according to IDC analyst Matthew McCormack. He warns that within three years, cloud costs exceed the costs of running your own cloud. He advises businesses to look at their capital and operational costs over the last five years and take a long-term view before moving to the cloud.

 “It could be useful in the short term financially for companies with sever cost overruns. Your data center would have to be really poorly run for it to be more expensive than cloud in the long run.”

Note – at the recent VMworld conference, Julia attended a panel on cloud computing case studies. The most interesting thing from the panel – not one of them mentioned cost savings as a reason to move to the cloud. These companies found the convenience, DR/HA, leveraging of expert resources and the ability to ramp up and down with ease (pay only for what you use) to be most important factors in using cloud computing providers.

Even though IPv6 has been mandated for the federal government, Gartner analysts believe the move to IPv6 isn’t working out. With everything else to invest in – unified communications, virtualization, VoIP and workforce mobility – and the effects of operating in an economic recession, IPv6 is a low priority.

A new report by TechAmerica predicts that IT spending by civilian agencies will slow to 3.4% annually over the next five years, down from the 8.3% between 2005 and 2010. The Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice and Treasury will see great increases in IT budgets, while the Department of Commerce is expected to see the largest decline. Even with lower budgets, agencies will be under pressure to continue to meet White House objectives for improved services, data transparency, cyber security and move toward virtualization and cloud computing.

Richard Stallman, a developer and prominent activist for free software, wrote a letter to the European Commission for Competition urging them to require Oracle to divest MySQL, writing:

“If Oracle is allowed to acquire MySQL, it will predictably limit the development of the functionality and performance of the MySQL software platform, leading to profound harm to those who use MySQL software to power applications…We recognize that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun may be essential for Sun’s survival. However, Oracle should not be allowed to harm consumer interests in the database market by weakening the competition provided by MySQL.”

You’ve probably seen all of the dogs dressed up and of course the kids are cute, but here’s a truly transformative Halloween costume.

2008 – In a year that saw the bottom drop out of the market, the 500 companies on this list finished up the year good enough to show a five-year growth rate of somewhere between 212% and 146,050% (that’s a crazy number, the stuff of dreams). Our own growth rate of 3,208% (I can barely type it) got us the #58 spot on the overall list and what we think  is #6 for our regional list (DC, MD, VA).

Although there are some familiar faces on the list (Riverbed snagged #21 and our friends at Aruba hit #17), we didn’t see a lot of companies from our part of the market – IT Operations Management – which was really interesting when we sat down to think about where our growth really came from. Although every vendor in our space seems to be at least considering SaaS models and virtual appliances to get customers up and running easier and faster, that’s where ScienceLogic started 6 years ago now. 

We were the first to deliver comprehensive IT Operations Management in appliances that were designed to work out of the box. AND to complete the value play (years before its time), we delivered the solution at a price point that midmarket companies could afford; we knew firsthand that these guys had the same IT Management challenges that large enterprises have but smaller pockets and fewer resources. We recently launched a new enterprise-focused product, EM7 G3, but our EM7 G2 product line still remains focused on the midmarket.

Read the press release.

Seems to be the season for outages – or maybe it’s just human nature to want to look at and talk about everyone else’s problems. Whatever the case, it’s interesting to look beyond the hype of outages and disruptions for a quick reality check.

• IBM’s six-hour data center outage and backup system failure crippled Air New Zealand’s passenger check-in, online booking systems and call center and stranded more than 10,000 passengers. Airline officials lashed out at IBM in an email for not taking responsibility of the outage and downtime that cost them millions of dollars in lost revenue as well as customer inconveniences at the end of a holiday:

“In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers.”

Rob Fyfe, Air Newzealand CEO

IBM released a statement and the closest they came to making an apology was:

“However, the likely cause appears to have been a failed oil pressure sensor on a backup generator. We regret any inconvenience caused to our clients or their customers.”

• When it comes to branding, maybe naming your an online back-up/restore service “Danger” is not such a good idea. Danger suffered a server failure and they seem to lack a backup system of its own. As a result, an undetermined number of Sidekick users (maybe 1 million) have permanently lost contacts, calendar entries, photos and other personal info. Help desk 101: back up your data before you upgrade.
• Take a brief look at other recent high profile cloud computing outages as well as an interesting post that argues “if the cloud were really the cloud then outages would be rare“.

A couple of weeks ago Larry Ellison was fined by the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) for false advertising regarding performance benchmarks that had not been released. It seems all is now well, since the TPC has issued its report. Ellison says he is always wary of benchmarks, so he issued a $10 million challenge: if your Oracle database application doesn’t run at least twice as fast on Sun hardware as on IBM’s fastest computer, he’ll pay $10 million. Even IBM is welcome to enter! Also at the event, Sun chairman Scott McNealy reassured Sun customers that they have nothing to fear from Oracle. (Sounds like the doctor telling you “this isn’t going to hurt one bit.”)

You know you’re getting old(er) when you can remember all of the milestones leading up to this week’s 15th anniversary of Netscape Navigator, the first commercial web browser. By allowing anyone to view text and images posted on Web sites, Navigator helped launch the Internet era.

Fish on Friday! Last week the police and FBI charged 100 people as part of Operation Phish Phry, one of the largest cyber fraud phishing cases to date. FBI director Robert Mueller described the events as a “cyber arms race” between criminals and law enforcement. Funny that Mueller himself almost fell for an online banking phishing attack. His wife has since banned him from banking online.

There are reports that Brocade, with a market cap of $3 billion, is shopping itself for sale and that HP and Oracle are the most like suitors. For either, acquiring Brocade would help fill out their data center LAN and SAN switching portfolios. There seems to be no end in sight to the number of huge acquisitions in the industry as everyone can now afford a McMansion.

Compuware, in a move that shows how bullish they are on the cloud, is acquiring web application performance management Gomez for $295 million. By acquiring Gomez, who delivers its offering through a SaaS model, to Compuware’s SaaS revenues, Compuware becomes the world’s leading SaaS infrastructure management provider. The string of marriages between companies who monitor/manage software and cloud services providers is another indication of how the rapid move to the cloud.

David Linthicum has posted four things that are driving cloud computing, a follow-up to last week’s list of things killing cloud computing. On the good side he lists:

• The cloud computing hype – a true business buzzword; moving to the cloud is now politically correct in most IT circles (except anyone within a 25-mile radius of Larry Ellison)
• Cloud providers (also on the kill-list) – they are progressive and innovative in offering new services via the cloud
• The down economy – by reducing costs
• Quick cloud wins – quick results – enterprises are going from the decision stage to having cloud resources available within days.

NIST has published the “System and Network Security Acronyms and Abbreviations,” a glossary of acronyms and abbreviations of commonly used IT terms. Leave it to the government to take 25 pages to get from A (address resource record type) to Z (zone signing key). So far there are only two acronyms for virtualization (VLAN and VM), none for cloud computing.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) claims its cloud computing service is safer and more reliable than Google’s. Since its launch last year, DISA’s RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment) has been running at 99.999% availability (vs. 99.99% for Google Apps). For now, these results are for a test environment – will they hold up in production?

Watch out Pepe – Ballmer’s in town! During his visit to France for the opening of Microsoft’s French headquarters and research center, Steve Ballmer delivered his 10-minute speech in “careful, well-pronounced” French.  The love was flowing – Ballmer loves France and France loves Ballmer. His reward? Permanent residency status in France. They just don’t make cartoons like they used to.

Dell’s CTO says the $3.9 billion acquisition signals their strategy of establishing itself as a full-blown enterprise IT supplier. Some are saying that Dell needs to do more to take on IBM and HP. And others are predicting that this is an anchor acquisition with more deals to come. Offense.