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.

This week, Ryan and I have "Silverlight/WPF Rock-star" Robby Ingebretsen, Director of Interactive Development, at IdentityMine.

In the fourth episode of RIA Weekly we have two guests: Chuck Freedman from Ribbit and Tony MacDonell of Teknision. We talk about Ribbit, "Silicon Valley's first phone company" and then dive into some of the RIA-related CES talk with Tony.

Ribbit

Ribbit is billed as Silicon Valley's first phone company and it allows developers to make and receive phone calls right from the browser in their applications. We discuss a little bit about Grand Central and innovation and how it relates to voice on the internet. Chuck explains how Ribbit works. Developers can download a component and drop it into their applications. That component connects to the Ribbit back end to make or receive the call based on the API call. We then talk about how audio/video capabilities tie into RIAs. Chuck says that right now a lot of people are using Ribbit in the enterprise with big applications like adding email to voice. On the consumer side they're seeing it in widgets and some smaller browser applications.

Coté mentions how something like Ribbit and treating voice like text is light years ahead of what the phone companies offer right now. He also asks Chuck about how Ribbit is playing the larger space. Chuck responds that their goal right now is to build the developer community and they are looking at hooking into a number of services like IM, Twitter, and Facebook. One application they're working on is an application for disabled veterans who have trouble picking up the phone to dial when they do fund drives. The veterans can use Ribbit to make the call from an application.

Coté asks what the ultimate business model is and how Ribbit makes money. Chuck says there are some things in the works around notification services and transcription services. On the topic of voicemail Coté wonders if things like Ribbit makes it easier to "switch mediums" between voice and IM and email. We talk to Tony about the value of voice on the web. He really likes the idea of being able to use Ribbit to do things your phone doesn't normally do. Being able to leave voice messages on Web 2.0 sites; using the phone as an input. Tony says it would be great to incorporate the Finetune service and these new web based voice applications.

Coté asks Chuck about whether or not Ribbit will have a Silverlight version and expand outside of Flash. Chuck says that right now Flash is the only technology that can handle the voice as well as they need it to. But he adds that they're hoping they can incorporate it better into Ajax and other RIA technologies as they add features.

Teknision and CES

Tony tells us about some of the applications they were involved with at CES. They worked on an application with Intel on ultra mobile computers (UMPCs). Tony said a lot of these UMPCs run Windows or Linux, so they're meant to be full blown operating systems. Intel approached Teknision to create an application that would be intuitive and fun on those small form factors. They took Finetune and the AIR runtime to create a UMPC application on the new Intel devices.

Coté asks about whether these RIA technologies are getting demand on tiny devices. Tony says that there is a lot of interest and that Teknision is doing a lot of mobile. He talks about Flash Lite 3 and some of the Chumby applications that he's seeing. He and Coté talk about different ways to use the accelerometer and integrating it with applications. Tony says that he thinks the Chumby really appeals to a lot of different kinds of people.

Tony talks about Finetune on the Nokia N95 and how people can now play video and audio right from their phones. We then discuss Flash on the iPhone. Tony and Ryan both provide their own antedates of Flash on the iPhone. Coté asks Tony about Teknisions broader RIA technology and what they're doing with Silverlight. Tony says that they don't do "flash code" but that they focus on interface design. He says that Flash is more of a customer driven reqiurement because Flash is everywhere. Ryan mentions that Microsoft has a lot of diverse properties they can use to leverage Silverlight including Xbox, Zune along with all of their servers and media properties. Tony says one problem with Silverlight is that there isn't a lot of incentive for people to use it right now. Coté corroborates that with his analyst experience and how important the designer developer workflow is to RIAs.

Silverlight News

We discuss one of the big news items from last week, that the Olympics will be exclusively stream video online using Silverlight. Tony mentions that TSN.ca showed the World Junior Hockey championships and required Silverlight. He noted that Silverlight worked well and that the streaming was perfect but that there had been some install issues for some people. Coté and Tony also get into Windows Media Format video and how pervasive that is on the internet. We get into how that will affect Silverlight adoption.

Rumor News

Ryan talks about a rumor (since proved false) that Microsoft is buying Limelight technology. We talk about the role CDNs play in rich Internet applications and Coté mentions how data storage companies could be in a great position to capitalize on the surge in heavy media and applications on the web.

Disclaimer: Microsoft and Adobe are RedMonk clients.

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.

This week Ryan Stewart and I talk with André Charland of Nitobi. We cover some brief RIA news from the past few weeks and then get into RIA predictions for 2008. Thanks to Kurt Brockett for the predictions suggestion.

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the podcast feed.

Who's André

Well, exciting and stressful are synonyms, right?

André starts out telling us about Nitobi's business in Ajax widgets, their hosted web usage service Robot Replay, and then their book Enterprise Ajax along with upcoming training videos.

André and friends have been on several past podcasts of mine here, here, here, and here.

Usability, User Experience, and RIAs

After a brief note on the holiday vacations we each had, André mentions the recent 60 Minutes piece on software usability which leads into a discussion of what usability and user experience people are or aren't doing in the RIA space. While Microsoft put out a recent white-paper on the topic (sort of), Ryan says he hasn't seen many UX people taking up RIA concerns, for example on the IXDA list. We talk about what might be differences for usability concerns with RIAs: André mentions the low switching cost between applications and then we discuss the usability of data portability.

Designer/Developer

We then discuss my old hobby-horse: will this while designer/developer theory really pan out, or will it just be more of the same? The classic problem of the UI designers and the programmers not getting along is the one to get over here, and past attempts like JSPs in J2EE loom as not too successful attempts to harmonize the two. Ryan and André point out that this time, the initiative is lead more by designers than developers, and that they're seeing more developers who are actually a merging of the two. (James and Dan McWeeney spoke on this topic on RedMonkTV sometime back.)

BlazeDS

In contrast to the front-end concerns of the designer/developer question, we then talk about Adobe's open sourcing of BlazeDS, a sub-set of their LiveCycle Services. BlazeDS, boiled down, is a messaging framework and protocol between the server and the browser, intended to be used, of course with Flex.

Using Anne Zelenka's new book on web working as a launching point, we talk about the role of collaboration in RIA's in 2008. I ask what this often over-loaded term "collaboration" means in the context of RIAs. The answer is essentially boils down to sharing artifacts (like a document or spreadsheet) in group rather than passing them around in email or other forms. More importantly, as we touch on in much of the rest of the episode, we're looking for "unified collaboration" that better integrates together all the existing tools we use into one place, like IM, document sharing, desktop sharing, etc.

2008 RIA Predictions

After talking about ways of coping with inboxes overflowing from vacation, we move on to RIA predictions for 2008.

Silverlight 2.0

Ryan starts out saying that Silverlight 2.0 is going to be a big deal. André agrees, saying that once they formalize the generic user interface elements - like buttons - it will indeed be something to watch, not to mention the ability for Microsoft to spread runtimes.

JavaFX?

I mention that 2008 will be the year for JavaFX to get finalized. But then move quickly back to Adobe and layout my hope to see Adobe complete their move to providing applications in the form of a hosted Office contender: they've already got Buzzword, Share, and Connect, just lacking spreadsheets and presentations.

Rails' Effect on RIA-land

On the more industry-wide perspective, I outline the scenario where Zed Shaw's rant kicks off (or is just an early indication of) rails disenchantment, pulling rails developers into the RIA world. Or, on the other hand, if rails gains in popularity, pulling attention from the RIA world.

Integration

André returns to the topic of RIA integration, reaching back to the collaboration integration topic and explains how that could become a big deal in 2008.

RIA Code-generation Frameworks

We then talk about frameworks that spit out RIA's for you, like GWT, RAP (see our screencasts on RAP), and the recently announced Microsoft Volta. André has seen some interesting anecdotal uptake of these "spits out RIAs" tools.

JavaScript Updates?

As if reading my mind, Ryan then asks about ECMA4 and JavaScript. As I say, I like to ask every year "who's minding the JavaScript store?" It seems like development in JavaScript is more around frameworks and monkey-patch updated rather than aggressively updating the technology itself.

Apple

We raise everyone's favorite RIA dark-horse, Apple. Ryan and André seem to share my dim-outlook that they'd do much in the area of RIA as we know it. Instead, and I joke, they'd probably say they already have a good tool-chain for user interfaces: just buy a Mac! On the other hand, as Ryan says, with webkit and QuickTime, it seems like they've gotta be up to something.

Amazon Web Services & Component-services for RIAs

We close out with a question from Ryan about how things like Amazon Web Services will play with RIAs. André notes that Nitobi has uses AWS to great success for their Robot Replay site and imagines that RIA people will see much use and good from AWS. I agree, noting that while other companies make claims to have similar capabilities, Amazon is the only one who makes it drop dead simple to use. Pulling up a layer from the infrastructure AWS provides, André notes that it'd be great if other services - like Buzzword - were broken up into services and components that could be re-used. For example, why write you're own rich editor when you could use a Buzzword component?

...thanks again to André for calling in!

Disclaimer: Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun are clients.