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 to have episodes auto-magically downloaded in iTunes or other podcasther.

Ryan was kind enough to edit this episode write up these notes - yuh! - so the "I" refers to him ;>

Coté and I introduce ourselves and Bill Higgins, a front end developer for Jazz. Bill starts by explaining what Jazz is and says it started a couple of years ago with the goal being to create a collaborative development platform. Since the idea is focused around collaboration so one of the main parts is being able to support multiple interfaces. It was primarily done in Eclipse and when Bill came on he started to work on the web interface for Jazz. Coté contrasts the current quick development process with larger cycle projects and Bill says that Jazz is actually on a pretty quick turnaround time.

Coté asks if when they were building Jazz in Ajax if they looked at other technologies. At first they started with a Java server side application according to Bill and after 3-4 months it wasn't going to work. They got permission to choose whatever technology they wanted and it was right around the time Ajax was starting to take off. Bill reminisces about a Joel Spolsky talking about the Google auto suggest app from before Ajax really took off. Bill says that one of the biggest barriers initially was that there weren't a lot of resources. They looked at a lot of the original platforms and eventually chose Dojo. He says that currently it's about 40% Dojo and 60% custom code. Coté asks if it was a good idea to turn Ajax based on the info they had now and Bill thinks it is. Ryan asks what the other options were and Bill talks about some of the other server side technologies they looked at. Ryan asks about the Eclipse RAP project and whether or not they looked at that since the project's rich client is based on Eclipse. Bill responds that since it was very early they looked at it but didn't go with it.

Coté wonders how big a deal it is to have two separate interfaces for things and what the challenges have been to keep up. Bill says that one of the things they wanted to do was make the back end sophisticated so that they could specialize on each and make both interfaces high quality. Bill talks about it being difficult to have good UIs on every level if you try to reuse code and methodologies. Bill talks about their server side and how they started with EMF but eventually moved to REST because it made it much easier for both clients to talk to the back end. Reuse of the services made it easy to reuse code and one of the benefits of REST is that you can easily use it within multiple clients. Coté asks Ryan about BlazeDS and whether or not BlazeDS could be used as a REST layer. Ryan isn't really sure how that would work and wonders if you could use BlazeDS on a rich client like Eclipse.

Ryan mentions Bill's Uncanny Valley post and asks Bill how he thinks about the converging of a web interface and a desktop interface and how you plan for that. He talks about his experience on Jazz and how it's not a good idea to steal user interface elements from other platforms. It looks out of place. Ryan asks about how a platform can build user interfaces that look great everywhere and notes that some AIR interfaces look out of place on some platforms. Coté calls it the "WinAmp" problem because you could re-skin the application and the user interface was always so out of place and bad. Bill says the cool design shouldn't stand out, the content should be front and center. Bill brings up the example of Cloverfield as using visual effects in a background way to enhance the experience.

Coté asks the question is it better to have really good functionality and a crappy UI or a really good UI or crappy functionality. Bill says it depends on what you're trying to do and gives the example of an application that you'll be using in your jobs for a very long time and says capabilities are very important. We come up with the idea of the "F8 people" and discuss when those simple, low-fidelity interfaces are beneficial. Coté notes that we don't have a "civilian user" and a "power user" in the RIA world. Ryan agrees and says that he believes it's just because RIAs don't have power users. Bill notes that those interfaces are perfect and people know them so you don't want to mess with that. Ryan says that he thinks there might be a UI that could make them more productive but Bill notes that people don't want to learn new things and change can be bad.

Coté mentions that he and Ryan have switched from Google Reader to using NetNewsWire and what that means for interfaces. Bill still uses Google Reader and Ryan noted that his big requirement was that he could get access to the feeds from anywhere. We compare feeds and talk about the Newsgator guys.

We dive into a talk about the Blu-Ray and HDDVD wars as Coté informs us that part of the Bu-Ray spec requires Java to be on every player. He says it's a JavaME implementation. Since most of the players are supposed to be networked enabled, that opens up some interesting possibilities for building applications. As an example he gives the Alien v. Predator movie which has a Java game on the Blu-Ray disc and you can create a character which then might move around based on where you're watching the movie. It's a cool idea for RIAs on non-traditional devices.

Finally we talk about the differences between the web and the rich client space and how the functionality is starting to converge. Coté brings up the HTML5 spec and the new features that have been added to the spec but haven't been implemented quite yet. Bill talks about the fact that a lot of the standards innovation comes from other companies creating proprietary system that pushes the boundaries. He mentions Alex Russell's post about innovation as a good read.

In the news we talk about Flash on the iPhone, and the some of the new browsers that are coming out including Firefox 3 Beta 3 and the new WebKit versions.

Disclaimer: Both Adobe and IBM are clients. See the RedMonk clients list for other RedMonk 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.

Stephen O'Grady and I finally embrace out podcasting destiny: to start a (more or less) weekly podcast on the topic of open source. While I note it's Valentine's day, Steve notes the much important occurrence that this date marks: the start of baseball.

On more open source topics, we start out discussing Sun's acquisition this week of VirtualBox. We both agree that we haven't heard an incredible amount about VirtualBox until now, but that the overall RedMonk community has told us to check it out, evidencing their interest, in the recent past. On the overall note of virtualization, we speculate that there's an interesting "family tree" of virtualization to be ferreted out: did all this PC virtualization start from the same original clutch of people?

As a to do item for ourselves, we note that we're not too clear on the proprietary vs. open source license that VirtualBox is available under.

This launches us into a discussion of Sun's dual-license (I incorrectly start out by calling it "dual source") approach to open source as account to us at the Sun Analyst Summit last week. Stephen points out that this "Fedora model" of delivering open source software is something that we'll probably see more and more of. He uses Sun's Project Indiana as an example of this model in action and an example of the difficulties it can cause with existing communities, such as the OpenSolaris community. In doing so, Steve gives a pretty nice overview of the stink-up around Sun creating an OpenSolaris distro.

Relevant to this, Steve points out that the influence of the MySQL model will probably bleed into Sun. Even more so, I note that it's my hope that the MySQL folks put together a sort of "The MySQL Way" manual to pass out to all of Sun.

Steve notes that Sun clearly has an affinity for the GPL license, MySQL being so, as well as Java, and the GPLv3's Sun Open xVM.

I then see if Steve has a snappy phrase for what Tarus Balog have called "shareware open source." In this model, a company offers a "purely" open source version of their software, but then offers a closed, proprietary "extensions" and features on-top of the open source version as a for-pay only distribution. Steve says that he would just call this the Fedora model.

Moving onto - we hope - non-Sun talk, I ask Steve to go off on what he sees happening the open source acquisition scene. Though we try to avoid Sun-talk, this topic is of course driven by Sun spending $1 billion on MySQL. When it comes to that valuation in question, Steve notes and I agree that if we knew the valuations that other potential MySQL acquires placed on the company, we might better appreciate why Sun ended up paying $1B. That is, we speculate, there must have been several other potential buyers, and Sun offered the highest price, driven by the offers that other put.

Steve then recounts a recent posting on the topic where he outlines the idea that large tech companies like to acquire innovation rather than do it themselves (my phrasing, here, for the idea). That is, better to acquire a company that's moved he ball forward, innovation wise, than rely on internal innovation at large companies.

We also get into a discussion of open source companies providing network enabled services on-top of their open source stacks as a route to monetization. On that note, Steve prompts me to discuss the Spiceworks model of making money while giving away software. The key to the general idea is to get a huge amount of volume when it comes to your install base and then focus on monetizing a relatively low amount of that large volume. The large the overall number, the more money there is in even "small" conversion rates. Spiceworks follows this model by giving away a free software stack to a very targeted demographic - IT admins at small companies - and then selling that channel of attention to advertisers.

Google, of course, is another version of this high volume, low conversion model in that Google gives away it's services (largely) for free and collects money through ads on a small percentage of all of the transactions between Google and it's user-base.

Sun's model is, as I call it, "the pink dot" model wherein Sun's looking to get as wide a distribution of Sun IP across the world as possible, and then focus on turning some profitable percentage of those dots "green": getting cash for them.

In noting another open source "volume embedded platform," Sleepycat (acquired by Oracle several years ago), we mention that Mike Olson (former CEO of Sleepycat, and then Oracle VP) has recently left Oracle, hoping to take some time off to ski. After the skiing, we both hope to see what exciting adventure Mike's up to next.

On the note of this volume/pink dot strategy, I note that I've often worried about the sustainability of an open source model for smaller companies. Reflecting on discussing I've had with people recently, including Tarus of The OpenNMS Group, I note that as long as you're fine with working a fair amount, it seems like a profit can be squeezed out from that model.

As we note at the end, we'll hopefully be back next week, shooting for weekly episodes. More importantly, we'll try to hustle up some guests for you, dear readers.

Disclaimer: Sun is a client, as is Spiceworks. See the RedMonk client list for other 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.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes and other podcatchers for auto-magic delivery.

Ryan Stewart and I start by reviewing the fun of the RedMonk 5th birthday party, but then jump right into a brief discussion of Kevin Lynch getting promoted to the new Adobe CTO. Kevin Lynch came from the Macromedia effort and had been heading the "platform group" at Adobe, Flash, Flex, and AIR. As I note, this is a nice signaling from Adobe about the importance of RIA's in their future: rather than promoting someone from the Creative or PDF side, the Flash family was given an executive role. As Ryan says, the Flash family of products are core to Adobe's future.

Then we jump into a JavaFX update. I was at the Sun Analyst Event this past week. But, the interesting news of JavaFX was mentioned by The Register and picked up by the Java Posse: the JavaFX folks are going to use, or integrate with, the Adobe toolchain. As we discuss, I don't know what this means and the Sun Java client folks wouldn't tell me. But the intention is to work with the Adobe creative tools rather than build up the equivilent in the NetBeans world.

Ryan, of course, likes this idea being an Adobe person. He notes that Adobe has been trying to figure out and refine the designer/developer tool-flow themselves, coming out with Thermo in response to Microsoft's Blend and Expression. On this topic, I mention a post by Jesse Warden on how much he hates "code-behind" in Microsoft world. I wasn't sure what this code-behind stuff was, so Ryan explains that it's a way of separating out code from the UI layer. This sounds like the kind of thing a more purely developer mindsetted person would love, but a quick-and-fast designer would think was overly complicated. If you're never going to progress beyond "1.0" of a project, why worry about keeping your project "clean."

Our further discussing gets to an interesting point of a potential conflict between developers and designers: developers assume there's a lot more stability in your code base, putting out dependencies to all sorts of parts of the project. Designers, perhaps, are a bit looser with keeping things stable.

Ryan asks for more details from the Sun Analyst Event, and it turns out I don't have much but happy talk to give him: they've got a team of high paid people working on JavaFX, so it's not just a last minute after thought to compete in the RIA world.

Pulling one of the points from my Sun Gambling on Utopia post, I note that part of the overall Sun for success is an opening of the American telcos to have less locked-down handsets. Obviously, JavaFX fits into this scenario as a money-maker, as it does for Adobe who's recently into mobile as a growth platform. Until that time, though, we've just got the web.

While on the topic of handsets, Ryan throws in a Google Android mention, raising the clarification question from me "does Android have a UI layer?" The answer is no. Both of us aren't sure if you could, for example, port the Flash Player to Android, or if the platform is locked down like the iPhone to such options. This raises a review of the seeming opening up of Apple's mind about an "iPhone SDK": the message started as "web applications are all you need, why would you need an SDK" and slowly evolved to promises for something else...which we haven't seen yet.

Ryan than asks for my thoughts on the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal. As I warn, I give terrible answers to questions like this because I tend to think optimistically. That said, I paint the negative scenario first: Microsoft buys Yahoo! and kills the potential goodness by converting Yahoo! "from PHP to ASP." That is, Microsoft imposes their technology platform on Yahoo!, the assumption there being that Yahoo! is everything buy a Microsoft shop.

This is the natural - bad - thing you'd expect from Microsoft as an "Elder Company." They've built up their own software stack and their core-belief, along with the promises they make to customers, is that this Microsoft stack is best possible way to do software. So, naturally, they'd want to convert people over to The Best Stack.

As the more positive track, I note that we've all been waiting for Microsoft to deliver on the whole Ray Ozzie vision of SaaS. Though Microsoft never uses that term, they led us on to believe via Ozzie's memos and notes that something more web-native was coming. So far, not much there, at least that's stuck. So, buying Yahoo! is perhaps delivering on that strategy.

See this week's The Gang for more on the "Microhoo" topic. Also, RedMonk's own James Governor hit up the developer angle quite well when it comes to Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I then try to hit Ryan back by asking what he thinks about Oracle buying BEA. But, being a front-end guy, he rightly doesn't get too excited about middleware. That said, as we've discussed in previous episodes, Oracle has been using Flex a lot recently. Ryan asks me what BEA gets Oracle.

I say that Oracle is quick moving into being a middleware holding company, and BEA brings some assets that are worth holding: Tuxedo, WebLogic, and their whole SOA/Portal screed. While RedMonk hasn't figured out "an in" at Oracle - though, we've tried, we keep hitting a brick wall of un-interest - from our experience with a former client who was acquired by Oracle, Sleepycat, they seem to acquire companies and at the very least just keep that company going with minimal "mucking around" with the company. There was that whole Fusion Middleware vs. Fusion Architecture hoopla which seems to have been deftly swept under the rung in favor of keeping the PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Oracle Financials people happy rather than re-writing - Fusing, if you will - those three mega-products into one stack.

Getting back to Microsoft and Yahoo!, we note that Microsoft buying Yahoo! would be kind of awkward for Silverlight: Yahoo! is one of the high-posting users of Flash and friends, so owning one of the primary successful customers cases for a Silverlight competitor would be, you know, weird. Once again, the negative path is to assume that Microsoft would go through the pain of converting Yahoo! over to Silverlight. As I noted in a recent FiveRuns TakeFive interview, I have a dim view of re-write success.

We wrap up with a review of future guests we're working on: Alex Russell from Dojo, Alex Barnett from Bungee Labs, and Bill Higgins, the Ajax man from IBM Rational Jazz.

Disclaimer: Sun, Adobe, IBM, and Microsoft are clients. See the RedMonk clients list for other RedMonk clients mentioned.

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.