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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week John and I discuss several things:

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

Disclosure: see RedMonk clients for clients mentioned.

In episode 50 (!), John and I discuss:

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

Better show notes soon...

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

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This week, John and I meander around several topics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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John and I caught up earlier in the week. Despite it being a short time between this episode and the last, we found plenty to talk about:

• Man! It's hotinhur!
• John's Cloud Week videos - John Adams from Twitter, Chris Wensel on Cascading, ControlTier.
• The "science" meme at Velocity - R, Mathmatica, and doing stats. Coté also remembers that Sara Dornsife now works for the R company, and the Zed Shaw talk that included R. I ask John what you'd use this stat stuff for, obviously charting historic data, but also doing predicting.
• Chef vs. Puppet - also cfengine is mentioned in this context. What other "alliances" does OpsCode have around Chef? EngineYard, (maybe, if John remembers) RightScale. Also, they got $2.5M in funding (we mistakenly remember $5M).
• Eucalyptus - talking through their layered up, (seemingly) "swappable" cloud platform and how they're thinking of making money off it.
• IBM CloudBurst demo (this one, or this one, or another one? - how was that? John likes the Service Management hook-in, self-service portal.
  
• Is "private cloud" slowing down "cloud computing." And getting at traditional IT shops "hav[ing] that ability to, kind of, 'API' themselves."
• Are SLAs and KPIs calling out for "better" operational stuff in IT like private cloud?
• This gets us into webappVM - deep instrumentation; "webappVM is building a self-monitoring application cloud for web applications, bringing enterprise-level application management capabilities to public and private clouds" from their site.
• FiveRuns Dash - generic-ish, Web 2.0 style metrics. This gets us onto FiveRuns memories. Also, former FiveRuns CEO OT is now at Zenoss as their CMO.
  
• Google Ops Head goes after blood at Structure 09, .Net at MySpace
• Kuleto's review
• John [was] helping run CloudCampColumbus this week. He's trying to get some Tivoli folk out there.
  
• Coté interested in pictures and anecdotes of Detroit. [We'll see if John snatches some.]
• I mention that I'm thinking of strumming up interest in barcampESM II (see the first for reference) - is there enough interest for that kind of thing this year? Also, I'm lazy.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs (Puppet), IBM, and Zenoss are client.

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During the second night of Velocity, in the piano-filled sunken lounge of the Fairmont Hotel, John and I talk with Reductive Lab's Andrew Shafer, who walked up just in time to be the guest for this episode.

We start out talking about Reductive Lab's big news of the day, getting $2,000,000 in funding. Andrew tells us what Reductive Labs plans are for the moment: working on some additional offerings on-top of Puppet that have been wanting for awhile and, as with all newly funded open source companies, focusing on the community.

We then turn Velocity itself as I ask Andrew and John what they've seen and liked at the conference so far. This gets us into a conversation about what a "traditional" enterprise operations guy would think of this Velocity. As I put it, it'd be fun to do an "Alice in Wonderland" with one of these operations guys and see what they thought about the high-scale, web operations focus of the conference.

Latching on another trend, we discuss how the web operations folks at Velocity seem to have less silos in their "IT departments" (groups of 3-10 folks, usually) and how "doing everything" effects the approach and tools vs. traditional enterprise organizations.

We discuss some of the other tidbits from the conference sessions of the day: focusing on queueing more, the mythical flickr provisioning systems, etc.

I then try to extract some other IT Management items from Andrew, but, having focused on Reductive Labs of late, he's got nothing. So I ask him how he keeps up with IT Management news now-a-days. In place of RSS feeds, he uses Twitter. This gets us into a discussion of the efficacy of RSS vs. Twitter vs. both and so on.

Catching up on the news since Thursday, we mention the RightScale and Hyperic/SpringSource partnership. I then briefly go over the AccelOps launch from today.

We wrap-up by talking about the rest of the week, where we think we'll be moving into "the dry-cleaning cloud" at Structure.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs, SpringSource, and AccelOps are clients. As is IBM.

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This week, John and I are joined by Ethan Galstad, the "father of Nagios." Having caught up on the news in the previous episode, we spend the entire time talking about Nagios, Ethan's history with it, and Nagios Enterprise's present and future.

First, Ethan gives us a quick overview of Nagios, the open source monitoring framework used by (Ethan & co. estimate) 250,000 users world-wide. Following this, we start out talking about different scenarios where Nagios is used. And then I get ask Ethan to give us a brief of architectural overview of Nagios. John asks about events vs. collecting all data and Nagio's take on that divide.

In the context of enterprise installs, John asks Ethan if he see lots shelf-ware out there. That gets Ethan to talk about several sites he gone in that use Nagios along-side Big 4 offerings. Next, I ask Ethan about the commercial services around Nagios. They're building up several support deals, and have been doing some service engagements.

John asks about Nagios scaling - the biggest installs, how many nodes typically get used. I also ask Ethan a question I get asked a fair amount myself: why hasn't Ethan started a company like others have done in the open source IT Management space? After discussing it, this gets Ethan into a discussion of how he's like to see Nagios commercialized, keeping closer to the open source way of thinking than doing things like, say node limits.

John gets into forking open source projects which leads to the forking of Nagios a month ago. Ethan tells us what his reaction at the time and then the resulting community management Ethan and Nagios folks have been doing afterwards. We also talk about ICINGA, the recent fork of Nagios.

Finally, him being up in the Twin Cities, I ask him what the tech scene in Minneapolis/St. Paul is like.

Disclosure: IBM, Zenoss, GroundWork, and Hyperic/SpringSource are clients, as is HP. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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This week, John and I catch up on several weeks worth of news, cramming a lot in:

• John in China. Seems like there's lots of open source IT Management in China. Industrial park Waixi for cloud stuff - see Mike O'Rourke RSC video for more, that Coté references. John thinks IBM must be pushing a lot of iron (hardware) over there. Of course, we talk about the food in China, which John says is fantastic.
• IBM's Cloud announcements - Rational tools in the cloud, CloudBurst, Virtual desktop stuff. CloudBurst: 42U rack VMWare ESX with Tivoli Monitoring and Tivoli Provisioning manager. John Willis getting exciting about IBM Blue Cloud!
• Here, we get into talking about different approaches the private clouds: dramatically changing the role of IT, or playing along with the "way it is."
• In "good, old fashioned IT Management" news, there have been several recent releases: GroundWork, Zenoss, Spiceworks.
• John's recent Hadoop adventures... the trend of mass data/BI vendor talk going on now.
• Microsoft STB Analyst Summit - also, Management Pack for Novell SUSE Linux. SDM/SML/Oslo. Also, MOF usage (by chance, see this ITIL/MOF decoder ring).
  
• Also: Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 - Bjorn Axell summerizes a little video from the SCE team. Also, SC OpsMgr is coming out with a new release in July: check out overview post on it.
• CA gets Cassatt's IP - probably for automation and cloud stuff.
• John wonders, who's the Big 4/Little 4 of cloud computing? We solve it with an inside joke.
• RightScale has Mårten Mickos on their board. Eucalyptus friendship there? Also, Ubuntu has Eucalyptus bundles in it.
• Google Wave - see also Stephen O'Grady's take.
• SalesForce Force.com free app, Sites. The chance to build on SalesForce.com and Intuit's Partner Program seem interesting.
• Coté will be around for Velocity, CloudCampSF, Structure. Also, in August, I'll be at OpenSourceWorld, which appears to be free for some now.
  
• SolarWinds IPO.
  
• Seems like CITTIO shut down while I was out. Also, a 451 write-up of Nimsoft getting big.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, GroundWork, Zenoss, Spiceworks, Intuit, and Cloudera are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients that might have been mentioned.

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This week, traditional IT Management seems to dominate our discussion, which is kind of refreshing for how much glad talk we've been doing of late. We discuss:

• IBM Impact has been going on this week in Las Vegas. After explaining what that is and skirting around our light coverage of it (neither of us was there, though RedMonker James Governor has been there all week) we discuss how IBM acquisitions have been generalizing the conferences. This also leads us into a discussion about conferences in general I've been having a lot recently: large vendors are looking to get into doing more, smaller conferences. John reports on hearing about how the crowds went wild at the prospect of "never having to install WebSphere again."
• "Enterprise" means (a.) complexity and high performance, but also, (b.) accepting and dealing with old stuff, legacy.
• This gets us into talk of disruption - Kindle driving more book sales - but can tech companies defend against tech disruption.
• Nagios forked to ICINGA. GroundWork's take, and the Open Sourcers' Dilemma.
• SpringSource buys Hyperic - John and I go in-depth, covering who SpringSource is and the happy-path for IT department shopping at SpringSource + Covalent + Hyperic. The general up-shot between the two of us is pretty positive, actually. Coté is wrangle up some scheduling to talk with SpringSource, so perhaps there'll be an update/clarification.
• Citrix Synergy was also this week in Las Vegas - there's a helpful links wrap-up page from them. Their Dazzle cloud service-catalog (as we understand it) looks interesting. Also, on the cloud front, it sounds like they're adding Application Virtualization into their cloud bucket, C3.
• Coté is a judge for the Microsoft Azure contest, which should be fun for seeing the types of applications people will be building on Microsoft's PaaS. Also, see Jeffrey Schwartz's story on the topic. (For more on Azure, check out the interviews from MIX09.)
• John re-caps what he's heard about the Federal Summit on Cloud - he strongly recommends Ruv's write-up. As he said over in Twitter, "I can't believe how high a priority cloud computing is for the new IT agenda in Washington. The fact there is a Cloud Czar says it all." Of note is that the (US) government now has a definition of for "cloud computing."
• Tap In Systems - we've both been hearing about this outfit. RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady is setting up a briefing with them, so perhaps we'll have more to report next time.
• Conformity - identity life-cycle management for SaaS applications - more details here.
• Spiceworks 4.0 - in alpha now, very interesting: help desk, portal, network map.
• John notices an ousting at SugarCRM, of John Roberts - I get John to explain what SugarCRM does.
• Phurnace migrations - this gets us to talking about IBM in Amazon EC2. John likes the pay-as-you go pricing that's relatively new.
• We recap the (in)famous McKinsey cloud report.
• John will be at Interop - embracing the cloud, cloud summit session. May 19th and 20th.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, Spiceworks, Hyperic, SpringSource, and GroundWorks are clients.

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John and I are back after a few weeks hiatus (I've been traveling too much, see above). There's tons of news to pick from, and most of what we go over is cloud related since that's been coming hot and heavy recently:

• The Killer Cloud - John's government consulting.
• I ask John what he knows about vSphere. He's not too hot on it as a private cloud; we discuss "hyper-visor virtualization."
• We get into a discussion about "workloads" you'd put in a cloud and the risk-profiling, lacing in John's military chatter and my notes from a recent IBM cloud talk.
• We once again arrive at our "get rid of all that annoying IT process" candy-land of cloud computing. I ask John what kinds of applications people are putting in these candy-lands: new stuff, or just the regular workloads? John says he's seen standard LAMP stack stuff and a few other items.
• IBM cloud explosion - what exactly is all this cloud stuff we're seeing from IBM? Here, here, etc.
• GroundWork Starter edition - $4,000 starts you with 100 devices.
• Snorkle - Sun + Oracle. John gets me to re-cap my post on the topic.
• Cassatt closing - David Dennis had a nice write-up, but I ask John to add in his take which seems to be: "provisioning on steroids might be a cloud."
• OpsCode (Chef) funding, and Eucalyptus too.
• The Bowling Kid - John's son Daniel can bowl a mean game.

Also, we finally have John's new "IT Management Guys" hit theme-song.

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This week, John and I are back on Skype for That Fine Audio Quality. We spend most of our time talking about all the cloud news this week:

• Manifesto Gate - John gives an overview of the hoopla around the The Open Cloud Manifesto. It's trying to level the playing field and why would people like Amazon who have the high hill want to level down? The Conspiracy Theories fly! Microsoft vs. IBM vs. The Grays!
• This gets into a brief history lesson on cloud standards: OVF virtualization container stuff at the DMTF, Elastra XML markup, 3Tera, the CCIF.
• Would the CCIF transform into some sort of Cloud Foundation? All things aside, John says this was a very productive week. They seem to be putting together a legal entity and a website. Also, you outta sign up for the CCIF Google Groups thing, the Cloud Forum.
• This draws out a comparison from me to the open document world where you get down to subjective arguments about complexity and openness.
• What's the IP for APIs? This gets us into a side-discussion about IP in IT. Principals or profit? We get into a long discussion about the "morally right" thing to do with IP in software. While we do an elephant's load of arm-chair lawyering, we predictably get nowhere but more loads.
• We discuss the IT Skeptic's recent comment on private clouds, namely, his pointing out the need for re-training for the private cloud: "Great: when cloud techs are two a penny, we'll look at it. Not only do we need to retrain our developers to rearchitect our existing core systems, and our testers to test stuff they can't see and which is different every time they run a test, but we also need to retrain our operations staff to manage an environment that isn't even onsite or owned by the same organisation. Now there's a learning curve."
  
• Speaking of, Rob England of the IT Skeptic has much books online. I am liking Owning ITIL.
  
• Enterprises like to customize things. They still regard all the separate layers as things to standardize on: OS, application... and thus don't seem to like appliances where there's many different OS versions running around. We discuss this layer addiction, gold images, and other things.
  
• What the hell is the goal of all this cloud, SaaS stuff in context of IT Management? A simplified IT environment, driving towards SaaS stuff. Compare everyone having a server to SalesForce's mythical 1,000 servers.
• ITSM/BSM quandary preview: how do you manage something that doesn't exist, like an "IT service."
• Quick overview of the HP Cloud Assure stuff: see white-paper. Looks like it uses "80 global points" around the world to scan (public?) cloud stuff - white-paper says it requires "no installation of software or agents on the networks or servers where your applications reside." Also, see the HP Software as a Service stuff they have. It seems like they rolled that in/used it for Cloud Assurance. We need to follow-up more on this, esp. since RedMonker Stephen O'Grady was at their recent analyst day.
• ControlTier and Puppet reference case - this gets me into a long overview of the model-driven approach to IT, or the "developer/operator workflow."
• Preview of living off a Netbook, sponsored by Zenoss!
• It's John's birthday. He's now the "Wised Cloud to everyones silver-lining."

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

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Recorded last week, in this episode John and I catch up on the IT management and cloud related news, like:

• BMC & Cisco: using BladeLogic for the Unified Compute, Mainframe 2.0 thingy. Talk with BMC was all about "model first" approach to virtualization automation which is like what the Puppet guys talk about.
• Cloudera - packaging for Hadoop, "Cloudera's Distribution for Hadoop" (RPM); web-based config tool for Hadoop; wants to be a "stand-alone data management company."
• Sun Cloud (El Reg coverage, even better detail here) - Hadoop interest. Hosted at Switch Communications in Las Vegas - nice Ashlee Vance piece on them from awhile back.
• There's also several rumors we go over: IBM and Sun and some more nutty ones.

Disclosure:IBM, Cloudera, Sun, Groundwork, and others are clients.

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As ever, your co-hosts are John M. Willis and Coté;. This week, we discuss:

• SIGCSE education conference - John was there to see Alice, but there was much more. I ask how people are ranking how important (or not) it is for The Kids to learn programming? John starts out referencing a McKinsey video from Eric Schmidt McKensey. Along these lines, a book I've been picking at recently, Born Digital, is a good overview of what "The Kids" are like re: technology, though I can't stand to read through it.
• We comment on Google booths at conferences; they seem to be too much focused on recruiting vs. showing off their wares. That said, the Google booth at SIGCSE was handy for John: they showed off Summer of Code, now on Google App Engine.
• Azure (shipping later this year, Ballmer says) - John got the rundown from a Microsoft booth person. It's a PaaS, at the moment, not elastic (but maybe when they go GA, some better stuff here). Architecture: when you put an application in, like Google AppEngine, they abstract the OS and file-system, but there's BLOBs. Each process (or applications, at least) you run is in it's own Hyper-V machine. It has also work(load) manager, that is, built in queueing.
• Was there any queue'ing/async/ parallel programming sessions? Are people talking about that at SIGCSE? Professors were debating focusing on teaching functional vs. procedural programming - whereas now the dominate thing is object oriented.
• Education people having problems setting up cloud-based apps, thinking like operations folks. Bringing cloud-knowledge to the university. John collected his "cloud for edu" recommendations in a recent post.
• Acquia announcements: "DAMP" installer, cloud-bases search with Apache Solr, and doing one-stop-shop cloud hosting (backed by Amazon EC2/S3/CDN). The BitRock based telemetry stuff is interesting as a leading indicator as well. Cloud: "Acquia also entered the hosting business today with the availability of cloud-based Drupal hosting, providing customers with a one-stop shop for Drupal hosting and enterprise-class support. Targeted at large scale sites seeking to scale Drupal to millions of users and page views, Acquia's Drupal hosting delivers support for multiple server deployments, with high availability and failover support. Pricing is usage-based, offering large-scale websites with a cost-effective mechanism to grow their site to meet changing traffic demands." Acquia has posted some (relatively) extensive roadmap info.
• TAG summit with Thomas Friedman
• Running SAP on IBM-crafted clouds - as John says in the piece covering it, "If you can do it with SAP, then you can do it with everything. I think that's the statement they're trying to make."
• I recommend a piece on VDI from Brian Madden, who actually knows what's going on in VDI land much more than our rambling selves.
• John goes over the new GroundWork execs (CEO & CFO). This prompts me to go over the way I advice startups when they're looking for executives. See also Matt Asay's interview.

Disclosure: IBM, Groundwork, Acquia, and Microsoft are clients.

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• Living off Star Buck's cards - Net 30 is fun!
• Graft in John's family.
• VMWare EU: vShield Zones, cloud project renaming.
• Following VMWare's VDI news, we talk briefly about the VDI market itself.
• What's up with The Kids coming into companies? John says what one BigCo CIO said and we speculate more. The upshot are some subtle changes about expectations and (maybe) computer literacy. Still, I'm skeptical that so called "digital natives" will all be computer wiz-kids who'll wave of help from the IT department.
• AWS is still madeningly cheap
• ManageEngine On-Demand - at $5/node/month this is also maddeningly cheap
• John's Paglo Challenge - he wants to see that $1/node/month.
• This gets us into a general talk about monitoring pricing.
• Solaris on HP announcement - we reprise the "Solaris missed the Linux boat" folk-lore.
• Citrix/Microsoft - most hyper-visors free now, managing them is not.
• For IT Management spending - the rule of spending time, or spending money has carried over from open source.
• Longjump PaaS, Appcelerator Titanium and how RIAs are another approach to changing how applications are delivered and, thus, what the IT department does.
• Cisco Blades & Plumbers
• Austin company AlterPoint bought by Versata.
• SHARE is next week in Austin, TX.
• What are the good cloud conferences? SYS-CON Conference in NYC, one in Mountain View get good audiences. One in Vegas during Interop during May 18th. Executive Cloud Summit where John is chairing two panels. John will provide a better list soon.

Disclosure: IBM, AlterPoint, Microsoft, Appcelerator, and Sun are clients.

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This week, John and I hit up a lot of private cloud talk but go over some big "traditional" IT Management news as well. We discuss:

• John's TechTarget piece on Pulse 09
• I put the Pulse 09 videos in the IT Management Feed - here and here. Did that freak anyone out? More of this or less?
• We discuss the open source pieces Coté wrote. John also points to SolarWinds and ManageEngine. How much more does SolarWinds make than Zenoss, Hyperic, etc.? Here's an old SolarWindows number: $61.7 million from 2007.
• Microsoft Virtualization partnering with RedHat - James has the IP-angle on this as well.
• CohesiveFT VPN-Cube - beta with Amazon EC2 use, you could have a private network in EC2.
• HP paycuts - can John re-explain what The Finance Abyss problem is again? I think I've forgotten. John has no good answer, but maybe this funny presentation helps.
• New features in Amazon SimpleDB.
• 3Tera having 350-400 customers - how does their private cloud stuff stack up against the ITIL-light stuff we saw from IBM and other enterprise cloud people?
• Is this "enterprise cloud" stuff just replacing the meat-cloud in the enterprise. Here, the meat-cloud used to back RBAs and service catalogs - maybe automation. Coté tries to wedge in the Lotus Open Collaborative Platform and the Lotus in a virtual box for SMB stuff.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as are RedHat, Microsoft,

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Earlier this week, John and I were at IBM Tivoli Pulse 2009 for all of the exciting cloud announcements. We spend the bulk of the episode talking about those announcements, but get to other IT management news as well.

The agenda ended up being:

• The cloud talk and announcements from Pulse. See IBM's press release on the topic, and also the collection of Pulse announcements.
• IBM software in Amazon EC2 - pricing released as well
• Application development on clouds: beyond just load-balancing, web app clusters, and HA. It seems like it's something along the lines of learning parallel programming for cloud computing. Interestingly, from another angle - the death of Moore's Law - Grady Booch spoke to the change needed here back in an interview as RSDC 08.
• What is the self-provisioning part of IBM's private cloud stuff? Is that just RBAs re-branded? What's different & new?
• The Consumerization of Corporate IT: It seems like private cloud driven self-service takes away some of the nasty responsibilities that the IT department has: making the internal customers feel like they own the services more so don't look to IT to own those business services.
• John tells us about his CloudCamp Toronto adventures. See coverage over at his blog for more.
• Sun is building a cloud, but are people insane to go against Amazon? See Savvis as well. Actually, we conclude that it's early enough in the market that there's no insanity. Remember AltaVista?
• GroundWork 5.3 out - GroundWork seems to have wedged itself into the high-end category, competing more directly with Big 4 vendors. Is that success based on the nagios install?
• Service-now.com numbers I got from last week: "Booked almost $20 million in recurring revenue in the first half of FY09. Three consecutive years of triple-digit revenue growth. Cash-flow positive for the last year and a half. 237 enterprise customers using our IT service management SaaS, most are former HP and BMC customers"
• Are people more ready to run their monitoring stuff in the cloud, one Quest guy at CloudCamp Toronto said so.

Also, see the two IT Management video specials we recorded at Pulse: one with John and one with James.

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

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This week John and I cover much cloud talk and some general news items:

• What Pokens do?
• On the Media about cellphones in Japan.
• Kindle numbers
  
• Enterprise software catering to the highest paying customers, do open source companies?
• Why don't enterprises in-source their IT management coding?
• VMWare open sourcing their VDI client.
• Novell acquiring more companies? How to predict what people will.
• Free NetQos Symposium in Austin
• Obama Millions - John says it's good to be a project manager now.
• Camps: April 4th, 2009 is barcampESM, while cloudcampAustin is on April 7th, 2009.

And don't forget to follow (and add to!) the itmanagementguys tag to see what we're following in-between episodes.

Disclosure: many companies mentioned are RedMonk clients, see the RedMonk client list.

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This week, John and I discuss:

• Poken Promotional Party Parade - lucky listeners will get a free Poken! (Listen to learn how).
• Cloud definitional news: taxonomy madness. Hoff-layers.
• What's this taxonomy stuff told us about the essence of cloud stuff?
• Will cloud storage be the real killer app for the cloud? Will our kids know the word "quota"?
• WTF on netbooks, man? E.g.: "Ten per cent of online computer buyers now owns a netbook and almost 20 per cent of mobile PCs sought out by buyers in December 2008 was one of these mini-laptops." I guess this helps with the lads.
• John gets bitch-slapped by Robert Scoble.
• Would someone send me a netbook? I want to try a week on the netbook + zoho/Google.
• Dates: barcampESM (April 4th, 2009); CloudCampAustin (April 7th, 2009).
• no longer iloviT'ing - one of John's enterprise contacts switching to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, 2-3k server environment.
• Hyperic IQ reporting with JasperSoft.
• How does what SQLStream do fit to IT Management stuff? Real-time data-warehousing.
• IBM Cloud Initiative.
• Jane Curry Zenoss events paper - man, she's good at this stuff.
  
• Keep up with our stuff and thing we don't get to on del.icio.us: itmanagementguys tag in del.icio.us.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned. My brother-in-law works at Idera, pictured above.

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In this episode, John and I discuss:

• Go and comment on Coté's nomination for the Texas Social Media awards!
• Cloud Camp ATL
  
• Cloud Camp Austin?
• Paglo MSP news
  
• Splunk partnership news
  
• Zenoss funding? Not exactly: they secured a line of credit.
• Spiceworks 3.5
  
• Dashboard-cum-widgets
• Hyperic jcollectd
• Native WMI support in OpenNMS
  
• WMI, CIM, and the missed boat thereof
• Cloud Interop Summit
  
• Blue Mountain Coffee, Australia, and Blue Mountain Labs
• Lotusphere entering IBM into SaaS. Is "good enough" good enough?
• Moonshine
  
• Nice interfaces on-top of IT Management space, e.g., the recent myCMDB article on that topic
• SearchDataCenter.com Product of the Year Awards: Splunk
• Luke has a beard! (See above.)

Disclosure: Splunk is a client, as are IBM, Microsoft, Hyperic, and Spiceworks. See the RedMonk client list for more clients mentioned.

Note: It seems I forgot to post last week's episode. Here it is, late. Apologies!

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In this episode, John and I discuss:

• Grid stuff in on-demandenterprise.com: here and here
• Using Twitter as a news source
• Kaavo cloud console announcement
• Inside the PR machine
• Opscode Chef - John's interview with them
• EngineYard Vertebra, buddies with Amazon on Solo
• Ruby in the IT management space?
• What (scripting) languages do IT people like/dislike?
• Will the enterprise have to transition to act like web companies?
• EMC Atmos - storage cloud and EMC memories - Atmos is the vault
• Spiceworks 3.5 coming out next week [see my note on 3.5 from this week as well]
• Slideshare Puppet podcast
• Salesforce Customer Service in the cloud
• Platformizing all these closed systems out there, the Jon Udell angle on community calendars and such

Disclosure: IBM and Reductive Labs (Puppet) are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

(Warning: we manage to let slip 2 or 3 four letter words in this episode, so be warned if that offends.)

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For this special episode of the IT Management podcast, we go over our whacky predictions for 2009. John and I lucky to be joined by Dave Rosenberg (see also his Open Sources podcast with Matt Asay), self described "man about town," and IT Management Podcast regular Matt Ray, community manager at Zenoss.

Very quickly, we first review the 2008 whacky predictions (from our first show, how cute!), all of which were, indeed, whacky save one, which was a sort of timid prediction.

And then it gets into the whack-job free-for-all with all four of throwing out our tech world predictions and discussing each. Sprinkled throughout the truly whacky predictions (Apple buys Sun), we have some pretty rational ones (Eucalyptus and Cloudera becoming big deals).

Here's an incomplete preview, whacky and sane:

• Apple launches its own cloud
• A net-celeberty lives off their iPhone for a year
• US government web-sites get APIs
• Amazon starts a marketplace for virtual goods
• A major cloud data break occurs
• Google buys Yahoo! Or maybe Viacom
• Open source startups begin to consolidate as they miss numbers
• The return of paying for software, even at low cost. App Store!
• Amazon buys DHL
• Netbooks become low-cost thin clients

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, Cloudera, and Zenoss are clients, as was Dave's former employer, MuleSource. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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We join Amazon EU, launching AWS in Europe. This gets us into a discussion about the geographic importance of cloud computing when it comes to performance and regulation.

This gets us into a recent conversation I had where a vendor had been trying to convince a customer to get into way over-priced cloud computing. Sometimes, on-premise will be just fine, not to mention cheaper.

I bring up a recent write-up by Dave Rosenberg about using cloud and SaaS at one of his past companies, and then John tells us about listening in to the recent Oracle on AWS call. We re-cap the Zoho CloudSQL news as well.

As I was at Cisco C-Scape this week, I go over the cloud and IT related content and impressions I gathered over in San Jose.

Mixed in somewhere here we talk about counter-intutive interview tips like: something they want you tell them the question is confusing because that's what your job is going to be like.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

John and I get together at the beginning of this week to make up for last week's holiday skipage. While there's not a lot of news items & announcements, we manage to pull out a nice 90 minutes of several topics (out of order):

• John is putting together Cloud Camp Atlanta, Jan 20th, 2008.
• Sun is supporting Alice, an educational programming environment that John digs.
• On the topic of Sun, we do the favorite parlor game of playing "what will happen to Sun." See Stephen O'Grady's excellent write-up on that topic, as mentioned, as well.
• The Groundwork Opensource/HP pricing dust-up. We spend a long time analyzing both sides, and generalize on the theory that it's always best to argue against numbers with words.
• Online gambling, possible data-analysis in the cloud, and how that all relates to the cyberpunk, data-haven thriller Islands in the Net.
• A brief comment on my Data Center Automation and Cloud call with CA this morning.
• The forming of a new power-center in the IT department: The Hyper-Visor Police. Just like the feudal kingdom of the DBA, it's clear that there'll be the group that controls virtualization and uses that control for much power in the department. I for one welcome out new IT overlords.
• How virtualization is making operating systems less of a constraint and more of a piece of middle-ware, or, The Big Blog Theory of Virtualization.
• We talk about Doug McClure's recent podcast series (check one here or just subscribe to his feed), which gets us into an extended discussion of what a "transaction" is vs. a "services" and how that all relates to top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to IT management.
• Finally, I mention that Zbigniew Brzezinski's Second Choice is a good, non-IT book for understanding what "thinking strategically" means using the example of American foreign policy.

Also, check out the sweet potato casserole recipe John mentioned, and, as I mentioned, Royer's out in Round Top, Texas - damn good food and pies.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned above and in the podcast.

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Late on a Friday after a week of somewhat thin IT Management news, John and I still manage to pull out some interesting topics:

• John's experience with change management in the enterprise. Though we don't mention it, check out Niel Nickolaisen's piece on ITIL vs. MOF.
• CA's announcements about Amazon, SaaS offerings, and general cloudage.
• Amazon and CapGemini. John mentions moving SharePoint to the cloud, which also brings up the Microsoft Online Services Suite news.
• We talk about Rivermuse at length, me having spent some time looking at it more this week. John seems more informed and articulate on the topic than I do.
• I cover the cloud/SaaS related news from Adobe MAX, the conference I was at earlier this week. Also see the Adobe SaaS round-up from last year that I mention.
• My time at the IBM Software Analyst Summit this week: it was less about products and more about how IBM goes about doing the business side of things. Namely, the agenda was about IBM's Industry Solution Frameworks, that map various types of businesses to the software that can help them, and the way that software is put together and used. That said, there's some Tivoli stuff mixed in when it comes to entering new markets via Maximo and Micromuse.
• The Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Cross Platform management pack for Suse Linux, which I incorrectly say is GA'ed: instead it's slated for release in early 2009.

Also, I forgot to mention an endorsement for John's Cloud Droplets podcast be sure to check those out. I've been behind on my Debriefing podcast, and it looks like John has picked up the slack in a fantastic way.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, Hyperic, and Zenoss are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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Not having recorded for a couple of weeks, we had a huge crop of IT related news to go over:

• John starts out talking about encountering iTricity folks in Europe (they partner with IBM for cloud computing) and his recent cloud-talk while in Europe.
• We go over the VMWare tooling released by Hyperic, Zenoss, PacketTrap, and then the GroundWork releases.
• In talking about VMWare, I talk about a recent briefing with recently un-stealthed Replicate.
• I re-cap some interesting items from Spiceworld, Spicework's first user conference.
• John tries to pry some information about recently signed up RedMonk client Cloudera from me, but we instead talk about Hadoop in general.< ;/li>
• John then re-caps a conversation he had with the openQRM gang. This gets us into a discussion of the disconnect between monitoring, management, and provisioning: you rarely find those features under the same vendor-roof.
• Finally, we go over the Microsoft BizSpark offering and how it could relate to IT management startups.

And, there's more of course - like why companies might actually benefit from being in stealth mode rather than "flailing" about in public. We also spend time talking about pulling in Web 2.0 IT management innovations (and IT in general) into the enterprise.

Disclosure: IBM, Hyperic, Zenoss, GroundWork, Spiceworks, Cloudera, and Microsoft are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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Being in Brussels for Tivoli training (see waffles above), I ask John to give us his usual take on the character of the IT Management people he's encountering on the road. We both agree that the European IT Management folks he tends to deal with tend to be extremely straight-forward, at least compared to the sugar-coating goodie nice-guys we're both used to in America.

While there isn't a lot of news to cover for this episode, I ask John to walk us through troubled economic times he's been through in the past. More so than just targeting the effect on IT - and how IT can survive bad money times - I ask him how it effect IT Management.

After discussing that topic for the bulk of the episode, John gives us his take on the Novell plans to acquire Managed Objects and I reprise my analysis of as well. We also talk about the virtualization numbers out on Microsoft's market share in that space, and John tells us about the uptick in PowerShell he's seen, at least in one study. Somewhere along the way we end up talking about BMC's IT Masters acquisition of a few years ago as well.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as are Microsoft, ManagedObjects and BMC.

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John was occupied for this podcast, so I rounded up two stand-ins: Tarus Balog and Brandon Whichard, both returning guests.

Among other topics, we discuss the recent finding in the wild of OpenNMS, maps and dashboards in IT Management platforms, Novell putting in plans to buy Managed Objects, CMDBf being demo'ed, and we get general updates on OpenNMS and Zenoss from Tarus and Brandon.

Disclosure: Zenoss is a client, as are Managed Objects and IBM. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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This week, John and I manage to balance out time between traditional IT Management and cloud talk. While we discuss IBM's cloud announcements of earlier this week, we also talk about the idea of predictive analytics (from Tivoli, BMC, and others). Also, we talk about "virtual reality" (Second Life and friends) and how that might not be such a crock of...crock. For the fun-bunch out there, we give a short take on the IT Skeptic's book, Real ITSM, which is well worth checking out.

Disclosure: IBM and BMC are clients, as is Sun. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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This week, John "The Cloud to Everyone's Silver-lining" Willis and I start out talking about the recent spate of cloud-bashing, from Messieurs Larry and Stallman. Partly in response, I point out a nice piece from Savio Rodrigues in reply to all this trough of disillusionment talk. Bouncing off some Gnip gnews, I ask John about the revenue for things like Amazon EC2: can you really survive off $0.40/month/customer? We also discuss the implications of Windows running in the cloud, on Amazon EC2.

Mid-way through, we're joined by Zenoss's Brandon Whichard. We start out discussing the idea of "market-places" that I've been seeing getting attention of late (see yesterday's debriefing that mentioned Zoho marketplace). Brandon points out the common theme here: the return of making money off software.

Having worked with Brandon over the years, I ask him for his take on IT Management (he having departed into Identity Management for 4 years and recently come back). After John asks about the next part of the enterprise stack to be commoditized, we get into a lengthy discussion of reporting in IT Management: it never seems to do perfectly what users want, why is it that?

Disclosure: Zenoss is a client, as are Microsoft and IBM. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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This week John and I return to our laxidasical agenda, covering a disparate range of topics:

• I start out asking John about The IT Skeptic's recent book and new website, since John mentioned it to me the other day.
• The myCMDB screencast I recorded this week leads us to start talking about CMDBs in general. Keep your eyes peels for that screencast here soon.
• Having met with a local Planview-ite, I talk about project and portfolio management in IT Management; namely, that it ain't too sexy in IT Management but sure seems valuable as far as tracking cash. Also, this reminds me of BMC's recent ITM buy.
• John asks me my opinion of when you should and shouldn't virtualize, which launches me off into a long soliloquy on the topic. The primary suggestion is for IT departments to focus on operation efficiencies over anything else: vendors are going to figure out how to make the same amount, if not more, money, so cost savings will be temporary from that front - don't fall into Moore's Law fantasy on that front. The real benefits have to come from people saving time and being more effective.
• Having attended the IBM zSummit analyst event, I give a short update on how IBM is talking about it's cloud engagements. John and I still agree that IBM needs a cloud product, but from my perspective they've improved greatly since the "don't call it a come-back, I've been here for years" messaging at Pulse.
• Finally, I give my brief take on PacketTrap's newly released Perspective product: what I call a "general IT Management Platform," something that monitors and manages anything with an IP address, including applications and middleware.

And, there's of course more, including an opening discussion of U.B. Funkeys and kidrobot figurines at the Austin branch of the hipster bookstore Domy.

And, check out the sponsor for this episode:

At ITKnowledgeExchange.com, engage in a community of IT peers like yourself, asking and answering their toughest IT questions. Visit ITKnowledgeExchange.com today.

Disclosure: Managed Objects, BMC, and IBM are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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As promised last week, we get back to topical news and commentary this week. John starts out talking about super computers briefly, then we discuss super computers. We then discuss Citrix (whose Santa Clara building is pictured above), 3Tera, and VMWare's recent cloud talk. I ask John how 3rd party cloud suppliers are tackling licensing for elastic deployments, we bump up against cloud standards, and we close out with me mentioning VDI stuff and asking how it "feels" to folks, like you, dear listeners.

We also squeek in talk of multi-core coding (see the Grady Booch video I mention) and how identity and IT management will, no doubt, find a lot of work all the buying up going on in the financial sector at the moment.

Identity management gold fields in financial world M&A

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In this fantastically rich episode, we talk with Jane Curry, of Skills 1st, about her recent evaluation of Nagios, OpenNMS, and Zenoss. This evaluation resulted in a 148 page draft paper, "Open Source Management Options," which we glide through in this episode, hitting on the pluses and minuses of each platform from the stand-point of looking for a network management platform.

Book-ending the discussion of Jane's paper, we first discuss some early history of Tivoli and network management in general. On the other end, we briefly talk about the recent spate of virtualization news (which we'll get to next week) and talk about my recent trip to Finland, pictured above.

Also, as you'll hear at the start, this episode is sponsored by ITKnowledgeExchange.com, so go check them out for getting answers to your toughest IT questions.

Disclosure: Zenoss is a client, as is IBM.

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John Willis and I kick off another episode talking about the Tivoli Agent Builder training he's currently doing. This scoots me down memory lane to where I once worked on a similar hunk of software for BMC.

We then talk about the telneting and other remote command-shell applications available for the iPhone - seemingly no SSH, though. Tracking back into IBM land John asks briefly about the iLog acquisition, and we talk about a new open source event management startup in the works.

Finally, we wrap-up with me amazed at the explosion in cloud-hype chatter out there and we spend a pretty large chunk of time talking about thin desktops right before I wrap up by plugging my recent piece on collaborative IT management.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as is Adobe. Check out the RedMonk client list for more RedMonk clients mentioned.

Craig tells us about his research on telcos using open source IT management software, like OpenNMS. Check out his site for more. My voice gets crackly towards the end, sorry about that.

As Matt works on the architecture of OpenNMS, I drill him about OpenNMS's, you know, architecture: the different components, how they talk with each other, and more. If you're someone who makes IT management software, you might like this one.

Wherein we discuss how Bill's employer came to use OpenNMS.

Tarus gives an overview of what's been happening at DevJam and OpenNMS in general. Before wrapping up, I ask him how OpenNMS does product management, that is, determining what features get in.

After discussing what Ben does with OpenNMS, we pick up the conversation about project management in OpenNMS. And we also talk of dice-nerdery.

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In this episode, we're joined by Tarus Balog of OpenNMS and also Matt Ray of Zenoss. John Willis gets on half-way though after a Skype-blow-out.

We start out talking about OpenNMS, of course, and then get into some other topics:

• What "network management" means.
• Using Perl for scripting in IT Management.
• Using ZipTie for asset management.
• John's 10 enterprises using cloud computing.
• And figuring out the division of work-loads between cloud and on-premise applications.

Them's the highlights I jotted down while we talked. There's more locked up in there, like Tarus' take on cloud computing.

Disclaimer: Zenoss is a client, as is AlterPoint and IBM. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Download the episode directly right here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically.

In this episode, John and I start out talking about training for IT departments.

We then get into a discussion of Managed Objects' myCMDB for which James Governor and I had a briefing earlier this week. The first question people have been asking me - John included - is "was the IT Skeptic right?" Also, see this guest post over in McClure-land.

After this, we pull up our favorite topic clouds, briefily mentioning the "WHAO, COWBOY! SECURITY FREAK-OUT! CODE-BROWN! CODE-BROWN!" piece on the need for more security think in cloud land.

Finally, we wrap up with the idea of "Grounded Clouds," or making sure to connect up your cloud stuff with all the on-premise software that exists out there. We get into commenting that most cloud providers probably have little idea about what "enterprise workloads" are (listener challenge: how many can you name?) and thus would be hard-pressed to figure out what to even migrate to the cloud. Less cynically, we talk about the interesting write-up of Cybernet moving its payroll system to EC2. This is the kind of think we need to see more of.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, as is BMC. For other RedMonk clients mentioned, see the RedMonk client list.

Download the episode directly right here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically.

In this episode, John and I use my past week of cloud conferences to - largely - explore more of the question of what monitoring and managing cloud computing would look like. We start with a brief mention of Microsoft's Hyper-V being released (congrats to them!), then get into a discussion of Hyperic's CloudStatus.

Lacing into the tail-end of that, we move to a sort of spastic run-thru of the Force.com, Velocity, CloudCamp, and Structure conference I attended this week.

Finally, John starts walking through some of the monitoring metrics he's been thinking about for cloud computing.

As ever, our recording was cursed, so pardon the technical scattle towards the end.

Disclaimer: Microsoft is a client, as is Hyperic. See the RedMonk client list for more clients mentioned.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the feed to have episodes downloaded automatically.

After a long abcense, John "johnmwillis.com" Willis and I return for this episodes. We do some "admin" house cleaning at first, for example, figuring out what happened to the Zenoss jacket in the No Country for Old IT Guys series. The answer is pretty simple, turns out.

Next, I mention the iTricity/Blue Cloud announcement iTricity of this week, which gets John on a commentary about trying to figure out what the Blue Cloud stuff actually is and what it's made up of, comparing to other cloud management systems out there like RightScale, Elastra, 3Tera, the use of Puppet and others.

After getting cursed by the echo effect, I pull in Matt Ray, Community Manager for Zenoss, to join us. He gives us an update on the recently released Zenoss 2.2 Enterprise. John and I then of course ask Matt Ray a bunch of Zenoss related questions, esp. around ways people are using Zenoss and developments in the Zenoss community.

We also decide to life the ban on cloud talk after a multi-episode hiatus, so we get in all sorts of discussion around that. I note that the conversations I get into now-a-days around "The Cloud" are largely definitional ones: that is, "what exactly is this cloud stuff?" We get into what we think that answer is, but more importantly we discuss what's left untouched in IT management by all the current cloud talk. I also ask the question, are enterprise applications ready to run on these clouds?

I close out by briefly covering the recent Spiceworks 3.0 release and their new number of users: 350,000.

Thanks to Matt Ray for being Johnny on the spot and jumping in ;>

Disclaimer: Zenoss is a client, as are Spiceworks, IBM, and Reductive Labs. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Download the episode directly, or subscribe to the podcast feed.

While at BarCampAustin3, John Willis and I talk with Mark Hinkle, of Zenoss. Mark being the guest, we spend most of the time talking about Zenoss and the roll of open source in IT Management. We also discuss the marketing benefits of Zenoss had at barcampESM.

We then touch briefing on the OpenNMS/Cittio hoopla.

Disclaimer: Zenoss is a client. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the feed for auto-magic downloads in iTunes or other podcatcher.

As ever, I plan on getting around to a more detailed description soon.

This week, we had to do a quick recording while I was leaving the Austin airport.

Getting a little out of the realm of IT Management, but still touching base as needed, John tells us about a visit to the Technology of Georgia Tech Summit, namely, about wikinomics.

In doing so, we get to an interesting discusion of how lowering barriers to entry helps all sorts of fun things out.

We then discuss a recent teaser post of John's, Seven Core Competencies for Enterprise Innovation.

Disclaimer: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

Download the episode directly, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher.

As with last week's episode, I'l write a very brief summary for now and insert in a longer write-up later.

This week John and I start by talking about having the flu - I know, exciting. We very quickly move onto this episodes John's Tales from IT Management Past with an overview of the Tivoli Framework. I start by asking John what the deal is with people having that "ask me to tell you why it sucks" twinkle in their eye when they bring the topic up. The story is much more complex than just that, as always.

We then get into an extended, vendor name-check laden, discusion of John's recent Level 2 Cloud Provider Matrix, focusing on Mosso, Amazon, and RightScale.

I ask him about people like Bungee Labs who are working at the top, application layer of cloud computing.

Finally, we wrap up with a discussion about enterprise IT folks' perceptions that Amazon, Google, and others are running on the Post-it Note IT Process.

As always, check out the ITManagementGuys tag in del.icio.us for additional IT Management things we noticed this week but may have missed talking about.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client. Check the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the feed for auto-magic downloads in iTunes or other podcatcher.

In this episode, we have special guest William Vambenepe, IT Management blogger and "architect in the application and middleware management part of Oracle’s Enterprise Manager division" as he puts it.

I'm going to try a new tact here for timelessness and write-up the lengthy description later in favor of posting the actual audio quickly. I figure this will be fine as the lengthy text is mostly for archival purposes and those subscribed to the feed will get their episode sooner rather than later without blocking on text they may or may not read. With that said, here is a brief summary:

We talk with William about what Oracle is up to in IT Management, and then, launching off a recent post of his on Microsoft and SML, get off into the tasty weeds of SML, CML, and friends. As it turns out, William was on the spec for SML, so he's a great source of info.

We then get into our usual cloud discussion, going over some companies John and I talked with this week, the need for SLAs for things like S3 going down, and other cloud management topics.

William introduces the fun topic of "the Hollywood model," except applies to IT Management rather just software development in general. I note that this seems like an interesting way to theorize about what the cloud work-culture would look like.

Thanks again to William for guesting, he was great fun and hopefully we can get him back again ;>

Disclaimer: see the RedMonk client list for any RedMonk clients mentioned.

Hosted by John Willis and myself, as always.

Download the episode directly, or subscribe the podcast feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to auto-magically get each episode.

The itmanagementguys Tag

First, we throw out a little pro-top for you: if you want to see a good idea of what we'll talk about each week, check out the del.icio.us tag "itmanagementguys". Also, if you want to stick something on our radar, feel free to tag it with itmanagementguys yourself and we'll consider it.

Acquia, Drupal, and CMS

John then jumps into a post from Acquia's Jeff Whatcott on the continuing quest of Acquia to shake off the category of CMS from Drupal. On the topic of open source, I mention this year's funny statement from Gartner on open source: by 2012, 80% of software will use open source. As I summarize, if you're not using open source by now, make sure your boss doesn't know 'cause you should be fired.

We get back to the topic of Drupal being a CMS or not. In summary, there is some truth to the idea that platforms like Drupal, django, and Apache Cocoon aren't "CMS" systems in the classic sense, but are used for largely the same goals: making public web sites, if not with richer "write" abilities.

What up with VCs Hating Services?

And then we launch into an extended discussion of the VC/Open Source services paradox/lie. As I note, I've discussed this idea with several people. What is it? In summary, the train of thought is that telling a VC that you're going to base your business on providing services and support is VC poison. If you're an open source company, VCs don't want your money-pipe to be based on humans doing things.

And yet! It seems that most cash-outs of VC funded open source companies are based primarily on the acquiring company wanting to provide services around the open source project. For example, Sun buying MySQL for $1 billion dollars. Not to mention the billions of dollars of revenue that companies like IBM, Sun, Accenture, and others make from services. More pertinent to the topic at hand, a huge amount of IT Management sales are around services: getting a legal copy of the software is a tiny part of the monetized elements up getting an IT Management suite up and running.

In short: it doesn't seem to make sense that services, which can generate billions in revenue, are VC poison. The paradox/lie here, though, is that most open source companies base their business models on services and support. What exactly do VCs think is going on otherwise? But what do we know?

Applications in the Cloud

Next, we jump into the "what and how are applications going to be run in the cloud" bucket on the topic of Google Team Edition. Team Edition allows people to create Google Apps installs around email addresses instead of domains, like how you identify your company and school affiliations in Facebook. I get all excited about this being a way to subvert IT, but John reminds me that he who controls the network controls the cloud: the IT department can just block access to google.com or whatever. Darn!

John's Cloud Layers

With our foots in the door of our cloud-crazy talk, we jump into the cloud portion of our show. John mentions and we discuss his 0-3 level analysis of what cloud computing is. Without summarize the entire post here (just go read it!) the point is that there's virtualization at the bottom, some smattering of "grid" through-out, then a total un-caring of your IT's physical layout - topology even! - towards the top, with a very service oriented (vs. systems/software) perspective on things at the top. Or "SaaS" as we used to call it a scant 60-90 days ago.

At the high level of cloud computing - a new way of running IT - I add more color to the tragic tale of the "Little 4" phrase, namely why I put openQRM/Qlusters in there originally. Part of my thinking was that the openQRM method of managing IT seemed new at the time and thus, while not a platform for IT Management as we know it, it was something new and different at a platform layer. But, as I admit, I was probably also just charmed by whurley.

We then get into a discussion of how provisioning plays into managing a cloud/grid. John recalls promises of cloud-by-provisioning from Tivoli years ago. Then I launch into a painful metaphor of pass-by-value and pass-by-reference for two different ways of managing clouds: sort of provisioning vs. federation. Even I have no idea what I was talking about.

John then tells us about checking out Cassett in reference to his cloud-craziness. Both them and 3Tera, he says, promise a way to deliver "utility computing." They both seem to be promising the same results. While John doesn't quite know which one is better, or whatever, his guy tells him that more closed systems - perhaps the pass-by-reference metaphor - would work better as there's less moving parts.

Supercomputers

At this point, I segway into "the Parade section of the newspaper" and bring up some Cray talk I had recently. First, I was astonished that there were still Crays around - who uses the term "super-computer" anymore, right? Second, I learned that Crays being built today are massive: several sizes bigger than my house. Just one computer, bigger than my house! And, there is no more sexy phrase in systems than "vector processing."

John then tells us about his time at Exxon where they purchased the first Cray for commercial use. Apparently, there was no I/O system on the Cray, so Exxon couldn't load up all of their seismic data from tape. He recalls a call with Cray, including Seymour Cray, where the Cray folks were confused as to why they wanted to load data from tapes.

Hadoop, MapReduce, and IT/Business Alignment

What with super-computers out of the way, I admit to John that I have no idea why he cares about all this Hadoop stuff. How does this apply to IT Management?

The summary is that all the fancy greek talk of Hadoop reduces - HELLO! - down to being able to quickly search over massive data sets. What's important here is that previously un-usuable information streams are (potentially) usable if you "index" them with Hadoop. The point here is that IT can provide the business side of the house with new sources of information to make decisions: "how are our sales doing for widget X world-wide, right now?" and so on.

John tells us about how Rackspace is using Hadoop to look over mega-sized mail-logs. The connection here is to start thinking about how this stuff gets you new ways of doing IT Management, if not the holy grail of "IT/Business Alignment" - never mind the blinky lights, give me the data!

As early examples, you can look towards Splunk, Paglo, LogLogic, Prism Microsystems, and others. See James Governor's coverage of Log Management as a category for more thinking.

When it comes to being able to do something with stupid amounts of data, more high-powered, direct advertising comes to mind. For example, as I say, most of the reason money-hogs are interested in Facebook is the huge amount of data about people available. People are expressing interests and passions, group affiliations and friendships. For a money-hog, this means an easier way to find reasons to get cash from these people. Do you like summer sausage? Does your boyfriend like summer sausage? Why not buy some! All that Gillmorian Attention/Gesture stuff just might be onto something, if, you know, spam-y.

Sun openxVM

Getting towards the end of the show, I give a review of Sun's openxVM platform and strategy. I was most recently PowerPoint-stuffed at the Sun Analyst Event last week, so I brain-dump on the Sun IT Management plans.

Whatever Happened to Chargebacks?

We round out the show with another arcane topic from the past: chargebacks. Chargebacks are essentially internal billing between the IT department and "the business." As I note, it seems like charge-backs aren't as precise as they used to be probably, as John points out, because we no longer have the accounting ease that centralized mainframes bring.

Disclaimer: Sun is a client, as are LogLogic and Prism. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned above and in the podcast.

This week we starts out with a review of John's monitoring panel at barcampESM. As he's said in other forums, he was pleased with the result. I then mention announcements and whitepapers around the Common Model Library (CML), which is a further evolution of the SML family of IT Management data models. There's a large cross-vendor effort, similar to the CMDBf, but there doesn't seem to be any open source folks - who knows if they weren't invited, or weren't interested.

We move into out cloud talk episode of the episode, with me mentioning that I'm seeing the emergence of a bunch of "EC2 Juniors" sprouting up, like Rackspace's recent virtualization announcement. John tells us he's been digging into cloud talk quite a lot - into Mosso, Rackspce, and 3Tera.

We touch on 3Tera briefly, who John talked with recently. Recalling a past briefing with them, I explain that they're basically cloud-in-a-box software that allows you to build your own grid, or build it out somewhere else. John then clarified that Rackspace's offering is just to run your VMWare server, not quite the same as running a cloud for you. Mosso, on the other hand, has a more virtualized, grid-driven setup.

I ask John what he seems people running in the cloud - what type of applications. So far it seems like public web site applications like WordPress, drupal, and web servers. Before digging too much more into that discussion - which we pick up later - we dig into 3Tera more. 3Tera creates and sells the software to run a grid along with the management console for setting up and tying together components in the grid. You buy the software, and either install it in your own data center, or one of the data center providers that 3Tera works with. There's lots of drag-n-dropping to combine together load-balancers, databases, and web services.

After John's detailed discussion of what 3Tera does, I jump back to the discussion of what people will run on these grids - what "work-loads" people can move to it. I re-cap the briefing Stephen O'Grady and I had a while ago with 3Tera and the frustrating we had around this question. We were thinking, sure, this grid stuff sounds great, fantastic. But, let's say we run an SAP install on-top of it, something goes wrong, we call up SAP support, and the first thing they ask us is "what operating system are you running it on?" If we tell them it's some grid technology they've never heard of, we'll probably get the support boot.

The point is, when it comes to enterprise, business software, there's a lot of work to be done now to get existing business software to run, supported on all this new cloud stuff. Currently it seems to me we've got great technologies for running web site stacks and infrastructure for ISVs building out their own software. But for business users, for "enterprises" running other people's software, there's a huge gap in the glue-tooling between existing business software and being able to run it "in the cloud." We don't have any idea what this would look like, whether it's one of "the children of the VNC" type applications of what, but there doesn't seem to be anyone working on the problem.

My suggestion, of course, is that this is a chance for a business or two: a framework that retrofits existing software to run in the cloud. Sure, the "real" solution is for software companies to write their new software "grid native," but that'll take a long time. Check out EnterpriseDB's cloud edition as well.

John points out that this retooling could accelerate if Wall Street finally gets wise to the cost savings available by running stuff in the cloud. His premise is that there's a waste in the duplication of running data-centers, on-premise things. But, if investors got wind of how much savings were available - if Mad Money Jim Cramer were yelling about it and pressing red bonkers-sound buttons - the IT world would figure it out right quick. We joke that this would be "the ultimate business/IT alignment."

The reward, as we get into, is the promise of cheaper and easier to run IT. On the face of it, this means less people. While good for "business," bad for those people who get laid of. I ask John, "what about the IT guys out of jobs?" and as he points out, technology has always seemingly reduced jobs and at the same time required lots of people to run. That is, it'll probably be all right. More specifically, by way of anecdote, John says there's so much "busy work" in IT now-a-days, that sopping up that busy work - like getting a developer Oracle instance spun up - is the real goal, which would free up people to do more important work, which there's no lack of.

I then ask John what he meant by an earlier comment along he lines of ESM not going anywhere. He clarifies that he means nothing much is going to change in ESM, and then tells us about Doug McClure's idea for a Systems Management Database. Essentially, a unified console and central "brain" that sucks in monitoring data from all sorts of different agents, devices, and everything else - a layer above everything else that creates on place to look. While this sounds like what ESM is supposed to do in the first place, the slight difference that I glen is that the SMDB is supposed to unify the fragmented groups and tools that exist in IT shops. Rather than assume one tool will do away with those different silos, it instead accepts them and provides a new view of them.

Out of the cloud and friends, John asks me about the possibility of Microsoft/Yahoo! now that Microsoft has an extended an offer to buy. I tell him the results of my Twitter poll, asking if people thought Microsoft would do right by flickr and del.icio.us. Pretty much everyone replied that they were worried that Microsoft would mess it up. I point out that it'd introduce a whole lot of new technology and cultures to Microsoft that Redmond wouldn't have brought on itself otherwise: OpenID, LAMP-like stacks for hardware, and general non-Microsoft IT. (Also, see another RedMonk take from James Governor.)

We round up the the episode by talking about the recent Hyperic release, touching on performance fixes and Nagios importing. I note that it seems like all of the open source IT management platform folks are gearing up their performance chops to go for the enterprise management space rather than just the mid-market they're ostensibly known for. On Nagios, I paint out that the Nagios importing could enable either replacing or working with Nagios instals.

Finally, John asks about the RedMonk 5th Birthday party next week in SF - come on by for a drink if you like! And then he points out RedMonk's recent award as part of LinuxWorld's 2008 Open Source Business Leaders series.

Disclaimer: see the RedMonk clients list for a RedMonk clients mentioned in the podcast.

John Willis moderates this panel from barcampESM '08 in Austin Texas on the topic of monitoring, if it matters, how it connects to "higher level" IT management ideas, and overall discusses the current state of monitoring in the IT management world.

The panelist are a nicely diverse set from Zenoss (Erik Dahl), OpenNMS (Tarus Balog), IBM Tivoli (Heath Newburn), and BMC (Chip Holden).

Disclaimer: IBM, Zenoss, and BMC are clients.

This week, we're lucky enough to bring an episode recorded face-to-face. John came to Austin for barcampESM, so we recorded this up in his hotel room with a mute Doug McClure thumbing through trade-rags in the background and watching the "priceless" moments. As I was leaving the "studio," oddly enough, a hotel dude came by to drop off some cookies. What up with that?

You can download the episode directly or get it by subscribing to the podcast feed.

As an admin note, for those who'd like to just subscribe to the IT Management podcast, I've created a new feed that will download only those episodes.

Show Notes

My notes this week will be much more clipped than last week - hopefully I'll be responsible enough to fill them out later.

First, we talk about some DevCampTivoli news. Namely, John explains why he thinks they'll be successful in getting the "closed source" people to contribute. More importantly, he points out, they're going to skip all the time to install and setup the software in question by using virtual images.

We then get to a conversation about CIM and other DMTF standards. John says he found a nice looking application modeling standard that appears to have disappeared. I ask John what the deal has been with the industry not widely using DMTF standards, and this launches into a nice tale of old, starting with Tivoli, going through Microsoft, and ending with Dell. As I mention to John, it looks like the DMTF's Winston Bumpus will be at barcampESM, so perhaps we can get some DMTF talk going on. Also, see the interview I did with Winston a little while ago.

We also continue our discussion of cloud computing, talking about 3Tera briefly and then discussing John's use of EC2 in training and for running his website.

Finally, we end up by talking about the biggest open source news of the week, Sun's $1B buy of MySQL. Being the IT Management podcast, we dig around for how this could effect the open source companies in IT Management. In summary: if there's an open source buying frenzy, it'll be good for some of those guys.

More importantly, we reach back to a conversation we had at lunch about how open source IT Management folks respond to the question: "what do you do for BSM?" Most of them, John says, seem to be at the dashboard level of BSM tooling. We then talk about what the open source and closed source folks in IT Management have to offer each other. The open source folks, as they've shown, can move incredibly fast and innovate both when it comes to technology and business. The closed source folks have maturity and stronger BSM folks. Back to the "2008 will be big for open source," both of us say how we hope at least one of The Little 4 and Big 4 get together and see what benefits can be had by combining the best of both worlds.

As we mention in the podcast, we're going to try to do some recordings at barcampESM - hopefully John's panel at least.

The name of the virtualization company in Austin who's name I forgot is Surgient. Also, in the area of names we forgot, thanks to Damon Edwards for the kind words on episode 001.

Disclaimer: Sun and MySQL are clients, as it IBM. Check RedMonk's client list for other clients mentioned in the podcast and above.

In this first episode of what I'm planning on being a weekly or semi-weekly podcast, John Willis and I launch the IT Management Podcast. As you know, dear readers, I have an unshakable interest in IT Management. It's always been a pleasure talking with John in the past (RedMonk Radio #42, #44, video 1, and video 2), so I thought we'd cook up a sort of commentary/news round-up show as Ryan and I have done with RIA Weekly.

If you've got things to contribute, topic or guest suggestions, or would like to be on yourself, feel free to drop me a line.

So, enjoy the show. Here are some detailed notes if you'd rather skim:

barcampESM

We open up by taking about barcampESM, an even John has been working on with whurley and Mark Hinkle for sometime. The final dates are the night of Jan 18th and then the day of 19th at J Black's in Austin, on 6th Street. John tells us about a panel discussion he's planning on monitoring; it looks like we got Chip Holden to be the BMC panelist.

Monitoring

Speaking of monitoring, I ask John where he sees monitoring's value in the IT management landscape. As both of us relate, it seems like most people de-value the place of monitoring in favor of the higher level IT management tasks. By "de-value" we mean, of course, spend less time and money. The perception is that monitoring is "done" and that it's largely a commodity. While this may be true, it could also be the case folks have cut too close to the bone.

John points out, of course, that now that we have plenty of higher level IT management functionality, the underlying data becomes even more important. As the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out."

"The Cloud"

With the renewed interest in The Cloud from all the discussion of The Big Switch (no little amount from here, dear readers), we spend quite a bit of time talking about what Cloud Computing means for IT Management. As John says, "Cloud computing...what are we supposed to do? You know, what is ESM supposed to do?"

John talks about his attempts to get Google to tell him about their IT Management technology and practices are as sort of an answer to his question of the role of the IT department when everything's behind a URL.

We don't have any definitive answers, but we have plenty of speculation and possibilities to throw out.

While it'd be great to see people like Google and Amazon tell the world more of how they do Cloud IT Management, we both agree that, really, that knowledge is a large part of Cloud Provider's trade-secrets: the "closed" part of their otherwise "open" systems.

Drupal & Acquia

Since I know that John is a nut for Drupal, I lurch out a bit from talking about IT Management o discuss Drupal and the new open source startup, Acquia with him, written up earlier this week.

While Drupal is a bit difficult to get up and running compared to things like WordPress, John says that it's proven incredibly powerful for him. Indeed, he's been looking towards using Drupal as an IT Management knowledge base.

I ask John if there's a good chance for doing Drupal management, and he points out that like FiveRuns, if there's a community of users putting stuff into production, then, sure, there's room - maybe even a good market - in tooling the management for Drupal.

FiveRuns

Related to FiveRuns, I point out a recent announcement from FiveRuns partnering with Atlantic Dominion Solutions (not a UK hosting company, that was another announcement) to help manage rails installs in Amazon EC2. That's the first time I've heard of someone doing management of EC2 instances - though, I'd assume there's others.

Nagios Checkin

I ask John if he's heard anything about how going commercial has gone for Ethan Galstad of Nagios. John just points out the partnership with GroundWork, but says he hasn't heard anything else.

A New Website for the Open Management Consortium

Next we discuss the happenings over at the OMC website, namely a new site with forums and blogs. As I note later in the episode, things seemed to have died down a bit on the OMC mailing list, but there's been a noticeable spike in activity with the new site launch.

Does ITIL Mater?

Spring-boarding off some recent activity in the new OMC around the topic, I ask John to tell us about the continued discussion around his does ITIL matter? discussion in the Tivoli mailing list and elsewhere.

As with most "schools of thought" that include certifications, John says he's found that people who are certified tend to be ITIL supporters, where-as newly exposed people tend to be skeptical of it.

Trying to figure out how much ITIL is actually out there, I ask John if he's ever walked into a client's shop and thought, "ahhh, ITIL!" finding a place that's gotten themselves all ITIL'ed up. Very quickly he says, "no." But, he's seen success with CMDBs and change management. This tends to match with what I hear and see: help desks and CMDBs are what's out there for the most part.

We talk about the long schedule that IT Management standards and practices tend to go on. Unlike web standards where the standards lag behind the in-use reality, IT Management standards tend to be way ahead of their actual implementation.

Spiceworks 2.0

Moving away from the "E" in "ESM," I talk about the recent release of Spiceworks 2.0. Of note is their user base number of 200,000 and the "product pages" they've included. Product pages center around devices, software, and other "IT Assets." Spiceworks attaches reviews, user comments, and trouble-shooting to these product pages, building up a tasty looking database of IT data.

Rumors!

John points out a recently Motley Fool piece on Microsoft buying Yahoo! (re-viving that old story), which makes me recall a recent post from Ryan Shopp outlining a scenario of Cisco buying BMC. As I point out, the "who'll buy BMC" parlor game is a favorite one among IT Management folks.

Predictions

We round out the show with predictions for 2008:

John's Dance Partners

John has been thinking about combinations of people in 2008, like:

• Oracle, EMC, Dell
• HP, Citrix, SAP
• Amazon, RedHat, BMC

As John says, all it takes is one nutty combination like above to kick-start a whole chain of them. Kind of like we saw a BI acquisition spree last year.

Who knows if this whole "Cloud" thing will pay off or if it'll just be blue skies in '08.

He ends saying "Google...everybody," which raises my favorite, perennial topic of "when is Google going to really go nuts for Enterprise stuff." Put another way, John asks, "who's gonna own the cloud for the enterprise." Who's JP Morgan Chase going to go to? John says IBM is the best well positioned at the moment, but we both agree that you (someone like Google or Amazon) can acquire Enterprise feel goods.

The Little 4

I lay out a prediction that some of The Little 4 will either slow down or get acquired by an existing vendor. While I'm not saying that they're in a bad spot, several of them have been around long enough that they're entering the debutant time of their lives.

More, big tech companies like to innovate by acquiring, and the open source IT Management companies have to look pretty attractive for innovation, but more importantly for a leaner, quicker (see Zenoss' recent switch to 30 days cycles) way to deliver monitoring and management.

We spend quite a bit more time talking about acquisition dynamics in the space and John's feel that some folks at large folks still don't "get" paying for "free" software.

Disclaimer: IBM, BMC, Spiceworks, Zenoss, GroundWork, FiveRuns, and SAP are client.