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With the special numbering of 9,000, we kick off Ryan and I's highlights of Adobe MAX 2009:

• Quick rundown of Adobe MAX 2009 announcements such as: Flash 10.1 with much focus on mobile, LiveCycle ES and mobile access.
• Check out PNC's Virtual Wallet.
• Ryan having just given a talk on the Adobe Collaboration Services, I ask him to give us an overview.
• Of the services and announcements, I like Shibuya which is Adobe's service for doing an App Store. This brings up our favorite topic of small development shops - even of one - having a viable revenue pipe.
• Experimental code using putting FXG into the canvas tag and other sneak previews. (Check out some more HTML 5 vs. Adobe "fun" over on Apple Insider.)
• iPhone app development with the Adobe tool-chain. Be sure to check out the "iPhone in a blender" video which is sure to further win over Apple's hearts. And, see the PhoneGap approval we reference.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and paid travel and hotel for Adobe MAX. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

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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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In this episode, "in the field," I'm joined by Adobe's James Ward again who I happened to run into at the RedHat Summit/JBoss World conference this week. Being at a (half) Java class, I spend most of the time asking James (who spends much time speaking with Java folks) what uses of RIAs he's been seeing in the Java world. We also talk about layering RIAs on-top of cloud services, like Salesforce. Being at a RedHat conference, I ask him to give us the matrix of where Flash (Player, Flex SDK, and Flex Builder) works in the Linux world, across 32 and 64 bits. He does a nice job of laying it out with plenty of context and history.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Sun.

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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.

In this episode, Ryan and I talk with SAP's Craig Cmehil about the upcoming SAP Hacker Night at SAP TechEd. Naturally, we spend a lot of time talking about RIAs in the SAP world and community as well. The news is slim this week.

Here's the show run-down:

• Craig RIA Hacker Night - Craig gives and overview and preview.
• I then ask Craig to tell us how RIAs fit into - and show-up - in the SAP world. We go over some examples of how RIAs are used in the SAP world.
• Ryan then asks about the speed of RIA adoption in SAP technologies.
• Check out the new Netflix app on the XBox. Beyond just browsing movies, you can have "parties" and watch movies with friends. Coté doesn't know what to make of this, but it's an interesting consumer RIA, connected thing. Like a VCR with an IP address.
• Augmented reality watch - Yelp app, and another iPhone app Craig spotted.
• Capgemini using Adobe Catalyst for RAD development.
• Apple Tablet rumors.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Microsoft.

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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 this episode, we're joined again by Andrew Shafer to talk about Agile Infrastructure (or "Agile Operations" as some folks call it).

• The in problems in IT that cause us to start wanting Agile Infrastructure. The high-level problem is enabling change (that works) more often: configuration drift, intentional complexity, walls of confusion everywhere, hero-driven incentives. Israel also mentions the theory that you have to change up your incentive structures often so that people don't get locked into incentive-driven thinking vs. "doing the right thing," so to speak.
• Leading us into the practices, Israel asks Andrew about including the operations folks in the Agile team, just as you do developers, QA, documentation, and so on. This gets into a discussion on "fractal teams." We then get into other practices and technologies that help with Agile Infrastructure:
• Version control - getting beyond .bak files. You need some kind of version control system. What do you put in there? All your configuration files, to start with. Perhaps your scripts next. Puppet and other tools can help do more. The tools, really, can be the same as used in development: git, subversion, CVS, and so on. In fact, Andrew says you should really use whatever development is using for consistency.
• Always ship trunk
• "Dark launches" - staging the release of features to test back-end tasks before exposing it to the user, and then finally giving the user access to the new system. This lets you test out the impact of the "background" tasks in the production system of new features without exposing it to users.
• An over-arching theme here is to reduce the fixed cost of deployment, trying to get it to zero as much as possible.
• Some other practices: test-driven infr, deploy early/deploy often, tagging everything with who/what/when, time synchronizing, and a few more.

This week, Ryan and I are joined by (hopefully soon to be come regular) guest co-host Mike Downey, 3 weeks into his new job as a Silverlight Evangelist and with a wicked mic. We open up talking about the RIA usage Mike saw in the field during 6 months as an independent consultant, and then go over some of the highlights from the RIA world since last we talked:

• What has Mike been seeing in the field? More emphasis on UX for behind-the-firewall applications.
• I also ask Mike what kind of software development process he saw these folks using.
• Both Ryan and I circle around the question of "selling UX" in corporations, asking around that topic several times. Mike has several interesting observations from the field that he shares.
• NBC football in 720p HD via Silverlight. Mike tells us what functionality will be in there: very DVR-centric.
  
• SXSW panel proposals - Ryan has an interesting one on "beyond mice and keyboards," Coté has a panel on HTML5, and Ryan rounds up other interesting looking ones. It's a lot of help if you got vote for and/or leave comments on these: then they might get picked!
• Seadragon.com - Deep Zoom on your own. Here's a door at a Chiang Mai temple - not a mega-high resolution photo (2048 x 3072, 6.3 megapixels), but fun nonetheless.
  
• RockMelt browser - stealthy startup working on a new "browser." Is this a Facebook browser, or a sort of Compuserve/AOL walled-web thing?

Disclosure: Adobe and Microsoft are clients.

In this episode, John and I spend a lot of time horsing off, but we talk about some on-topic things as well:

• The most important news of the week: John has an iPhone. (And yes, Wal-mart does sell the iPhone.)
• Lower Amazon prices - John details this. The Deli case. No word on the Deli, but there is Memo Jokes.
• How do you setup a Windows box, esp. virtualization. John says ESXi, the free VMWare client.
• SpringSource and cloud foundry - deploying and managing Java apps in public clouds.
• Last episode, John had commented on the valuation for other Little 4 types in light of the SpringSource price. Zenoss' Mark Hinkle got back to John on this topic.
• We get into enterprise/corporate uses of PaaS - using Heroku and EngineYard as proxy for thinking about how Azure and Java in the clouds might pan out for corporate developers vs. IT staff.
• While the quick and easy approach is awesome, I ask John to recount some IT disasters he's seen when there's not enough IT process and too much "quick and easy" think.
• What's up with devopsdays? In Belgium Oct 30 - 31st - John will present there on the Ubuntu elastic cloud with Chef. From this Patrick Dubous guy. Maikin Piss!
• itSMF Fusion conference - Sep. 20-23rd in Dallas. Is that anything? Agenda looks nice and ITIL-y. Mike Walker in Atlanta runs the ATL itSMF.
• "Cloud Brokers" and extradition free countries - but seriously, John explains this idea of "cloud brokers."

Disclosure: Zenoss, IBM, Microsoft, SpringSource, and others mentioned are clients.

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, Ryan and I go over the recent RIA news. My notes aren't as in-depth as the usually are, but here's the high-level outline:

• Ryan's mountaineering. iPhone 3GS - how's that video? We review YouTube vs. blip.tv vs. Vemeo.
• Personal data analytics - makes me remember one of the Azure contest winners, http://myimpulselive.com/.
• Silverlight 3.0 launch - all sorts of overviews out there, and also see the RIA Weekly video if you haven't already.
• SketchFlow, and SketchFlow vs. Catalyst.
• Continental Case with Silverlight; see also Cynergy examples along these lines.
• I give a re-cap of the Adobe Industry Analyst Summit I was at this week. See posts here, here, and here.
• Summary of the Matthias Zeller podcast on portals and composite RIA.
• In talking about a story on Mixpanel, Ryan busts out with "Interaction Analytics" and recalls like Robot Replay. We also discuss how lacing in interaction analytics seems like a natural for RIAs.
• How can we get RIAs to improve the software development process? Seems like Agile and developer-centric cloud computing would converge with RIAs nicely.

Disclosure: Microsoft and Adobe are clients.

While at the Adobe Industry Analyst Summit this week, I caught up with Matthias Zeller. Having been at Adobe for sometime, he's had an interesting history with RIAs from the work he did with SAP (where he's a mentor) and now onto the Adobe Genesis project (see blog too) that he's been working on in recent times. As Matthias says, he's been traveling around to talk with customers a lot recently, specifically around how they use and would like to use portals and situation applications.

Ever since talking with James Ward back in episode #41, I've been keeping an eye on how RIAs might could be used for portals. In going over the customer conversations he's been having, Matthias gives us a pretty good idea. He uses the term "composite RIA" several times, which is a nice follow-on from the "mashup" and "situation application" phrasings.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client.

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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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[audio http://media.libsyn.com/media/redmonk/agileexec002.mp3]

After having some coffee here in Austin, Israel Gat and I braved the Texas heat a little while longer to record a conversation about the recent Agile Roots conference, how Agile has spread in recent years, and some of the potentials that cloud computing plus Agile might bring.

We go over the Agile Roots conference that Israel was currently at: one of the themes, Israel says, was a sort of retrospective on the Agile Manifesto (put out in 2001). Also, as Israel points out many times, there was a good mix of people that made the "hallwaycon" enjoyable. Part of this, it seems was due to the somewhat unconference-y feel of the event: while it had a formalized agenda, there was room for less structured, unconference-style sessions and discussions.

Based on this, I then ask Israel to summarize what his and other's people take was on where Agile is today. In my words, it seems like Agile thinking has, largely, gone main-stream. In fact, as I chime in, large corporate development tool vendors like Microsoft with VisualStudio and IBM with the Rational line are bringing in and using significant Agile principals and practices.

Next, we get into the "Agile Operations" conversation folks from Reductive Labs have been having of late. Esp. when cloud computing technologies (like virtualization, automation, and SaaS-think) are brought into the operations side of the house, Agile principals seem especially well positioned to take advantage of cloud technologies. This gets us into a discussion of how cloud delivered software (SaaS, pretty much) might help free up some time and resources in the traditional software delivery process, primarily, by not having to support many different versions, but also (some what paradoxically to that) allowing bette customizations per customer.

From here, I lay out the theory that with cloud computing, there seems to be some efficiency gains that make it possible for smaller teams to develop and sell software instead of having to hook-up with larger software companies to get efficiencies of scale. While this discussion, as Israel gets to, has been happening a lot in the startup world (startups need less capital up-front to buy hardware and such, and thus, need less funding), it hasn't been reflected on much in the plain old ISV world. Israel lays out an interesting "out source (most) everything" model for software companies.

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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, Joshua Marinacci joins me to talk about more about JavaOne and JavaFX. We discuss:

• Josh's coffee places: Allen Brothers, Dutch Brothers.
• Josh's take on JavaOne and CommunityDay.
• In talking about Kenai and Zembly, we get into a discussion about moving parts of the software development process into the cloud.
• We then talk about the Java Store, which he's been working on in the recent time. See his recent Q&A on the Java Store.
• The difficulty of collecting money in these stores - figuring out regional tax laws, income tax, etc.
• JavaFX 1.2 - lots of control improvements & additions. Redoing GUI concepts - separating styling from controls. Button, slider, checkbox, but some things missing: table, tree, combo box. No more layout managers, there's containers. No ties to AWT and Swing, everything is skinable with CSS. Also: charts. Linux and Solaris support.
• JavaFX tools? Updates Production Suite for CS4. More people working on the open source Eclipse plugin. JavaOne showed sneak-preview of the design tool. Also the other fun JavaFX Wii-mote and motion sensing demos during the Gosling talk. See the JavaOne Toy Show replay.
• Also, we rat-hole on JavaFX profiles - desktop and common, and I'd expect mobile out there. But Josh, says they're trying to limit them.

Disclosure: Sun is a client.

In this episode, sponsored by Reductive Labs, I talk with returning guest Luke Kaines (of Reductive Labs) and RedHat's David Lutterkort. David has been an active member of the Puppet community for several years now, and we spend much of our time talking about the projects he's worked on that incorporate Puppet. We also get into a discussion of how RedHat internal IT uses Puppet in their for their own applications from development to deployment.

We start out talking about Augeas, one of the projects David is currently working on. In my horkly words, it provides a "configuration file normalization API." That is, Augeas provides a layer to read in, modify, and then spit back out all sorts of *nix configuration files, each with it's own syntactical essentracies. For Puppet - which spends much of it's time updating those configuration files - the connection is obvious. Indeed, as Luke says, it wouldn't be far fetched to think that, sometime in the future, Puppet would consider replacing it's current config file engine with Augeas. In the meantime, there's some docs on using the two together.

Next, having been around Puppet awhile, I ask David what other uses of Puppet he's been seeing recently. This draws up a conversation about how RedHat's internal IT uses Puppet through Genome through their internal application development process to build development boxes and servers. We get into a discussion of how this use of Puppet effects the development cycles and tries to address the "wall of confusion" between development and operations.

We next talk about Cft (pronounced "sift") that provides a sort-of command line recorded for admins to build up Puppet manifests. We wrap-up by talking about Cobbler which sets up and configures Linux machines over a network. And, of course, how Puppet interlaces therein.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client and, as mentioned, sponsored this podcast.

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This week, Ryan and I are back with a bevy of RIA topics:

• Adobe Flash tools in beta: Catalyst and Flash Builder. See Ryan's round-up as well. There's a big, multi-city, global user group tour as well.
• JavaFX at JavaOne - Larry likes it; JavaFX for OpenOffice? Java Store (desktop), Java Warehouse ("will eventually be used by TV and mobile service providers to create their own 'private-branded storefronts' for programs that run on their platforms"). See Project Vector post from Jonathan. So, you have the Warehouse which is the repository and "back-end" for applications submitted by developers (the apps are to be focused on Java and JavaFX desktop apps for now) and then the Java Store which is the consumer-facing store-front. In the future, the Warehouse may be a supply channel to other store-fronts, e.g., TV and mobile-based things. Also, see Joshua's piece on new features in JavaFX 1.2, like Linux & Solaris support, chart components, etc.
• The Rise of the "HTML5" Meme - seems like we have Google + HTML 5 + Mozilla/Chrome as a new, emerging RIA/UI silo. After Google I/O last week, there was some zero-sum, horse-race framing around Google Wave being a front in killing off Flash and Silverlight. See also Ryan's HTML 5 vs. Flash features comparison. And, though not mentioned in the episode, see the recent Bespin updates.
• PhoneGap has been leaping in popularity. See a previous episode with Nitobi's Andreé Charland on PhoneGap too.
• Silverlight release date? July 10th event as reported by The Register.
  
• After reading a brief piece on .Net RIA Services, I wonder if there's pattern collections for other RIA technologies?
• piece linking up ADO.NET Services (Project Astoria) with Silverlight. A RESTful approach to connecting with the back-end.
• Reflecting on my recent vacation in Thailand, I speak to explosion in (unlocked?) cellphones over there and the abundance of pirated software available everywhere.

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This week, Ryan and I are joined by Dave Wolf from Cynergy Systems, a firm that specializing in RIA development. We spend most of the time talking about Dave's take and Cynergy's involvement in the RIA space, but we get to a handful of news items at the end:

• Last week we mentioned a "working with RIAs" report they did with Forrester. We go over the suggestions and tips - small teams, rich experiences don't come from cubical farms, but open places where you can "smear monitors," getting designers and developers to work together. Moving beyond the "isolationist" phase of J2EE and web app driven development. Using mutual-respect and tooling.
• Grooming developers and designers to fit into this milieu, applying the usual cultural fits for tech-people. Also, "you only use full-time employees" - talent becomes a competitive advantage for Cynergy.
• We talk about the kinds of things they work on: telcom expense management, retail banking, fleet management, hip-hop site. Also, software companies realizing they don't have to compete "feature-by-feature" as taught by the iPhone, growth in ISVs that is.
• Ryan asks if the iPhone is the best way to pitch RIA to "the boss." Pretty much, Dave says. It's a good example of how RIA tricks and whatnot can be powerful and useful.
• What kind of interest are you seeing with Microsoft Surface?
• "Desperately trying to get away from The Mouse." 60 years later, we're still using the same input device - "Mouses are strange."
• How do you choose the RIA framework to use, out of Flash, Flex, Silverlight, WPF, etc? We ask Dave to go over the types of applications and audiences ("users") that each technology works well with and doesn't work well with. The IDEs on both sides are good.
• Ryan draws out more of Dave's negatives about each platform - this is all an attempt to get back to the desktop - Flash Platform struggles a little bit with the designer/developer workflow, the life-cycle for the software between the designers (with PSDs) and the developers (with Flex and other code). Microsoft's difficulty is player penetration, learning through the difficulties very quickly - catching up with Adobe/Macromedia's 10 years in 2 years - "the ability to chase tail-lights."
• All that said, Dave says, we believe they'll be a duopoly in our work in the future.
• We discuss the old idea of having one UI instead of many: moving beyond "least" in "least common denominator" - applying the multi-screen, multi-modal thinking to applications - making it OK to have 5 UIs, for example.
• What's the experience been like with maintenance, across many versions of years of the RIA-based software?
• Moonlight 2.0 Preview - see some other coverage from Mary-Jo Foley and Tim Anderson.
• Don't forget to leave a note in the Flex Builder for Linux "bug" listing.
• Ryan mentioned the New Your Times AIR app write-up, the Times Reader 2.0, which talks about how the Times used and RIA for their readers and why.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Microsoft is a client as well, as is Sun.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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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While at CloudCampAustin recently, my good friend Zane Rockenbaugh of Dog Food Software brought all his fancy podcasting gear again we recorded another short series in the Profiles in Courage episodes. In this second episode, we talk with Rackspace's Todd Morey.

Being one of the co-founders (along with Jonathan Bryce) of Rackspace Cloud, or "Mosso" as it used to be called, I jump right in and ask Todd to tell us the history of how the Rackspace Cloud came about. Todd had been working on UIs at Rackspace. As such, they had access to really chap Rackspace servers on which they developed some "side applications," but found the administrative tasks - like dealing with hackers - to be a hassle. Hence, Todd and Jonathan started looking into something more, well, "cloudy" as we'd say now.

We then jump into a name game discussion. First, where the name "Mosso" game from and then, we discuss why "cloud computing" won out over "utility computing." We discuss the awkward feeling, at least early on, of "cloud": as Todd puts it, "it sounds almost a little too magical." But, now that its been here awhile, we all agree it's a dandy term.

Getting back to the history of the Rackspace Cloud, I ask Todd to tell us how the Mosso idea evolved over time. We go over several times where they had to, essentially, figure out where to apply constraints on the system. This gets us into a discussion of when an application requires too much customized access and thus, doesn't fit well into Mosso, but would fit better in more traditional hosting.

On the topic of applications, Todd brings up email (or "messaging" as some like to call it when thrown together with calendaring and, sometimes IM) as one of the best examples of a cloud-bound application. Along those lines, we discuss some customers who're using the Rackspace Crowd.

Thinking back to a conversation Todd and I had back at SXSW, I ask him to lay out his thinking about how (what I'd call) Collaborative IT Management applies to cloud computing. Rackspace acquired Slidehost last Fall, who had a large, active community around its knowledge-base. Todd speaks to thinking he's been having recently about applying those practices to the wider practice of cloud support. This gets me thinking about how the traditional, packaged software role of "technical writers" could transition into this community gardening world. Never mind writing manuals, we need skilled people to document the day-to-day finds and helpful advice from the community.

Closing out on a completely non-technical topic, since Todd lives down in San Antonio, I ask him about Fiesta, the yearly, city-wide party. He gives us the folkloric story of how it came about and tells us what its like, complete with the "royal court."

While at CloudCampAustin recently, my good friend Zane Rockenbaugh of Dog Food Software brought all his fancy podcasting gear again we recorded another short series in the Profiles in Courage episodes - or, "Profiles in Courager" as we dub this one. In this first episode, we talk with Lombardi Blueprint's Barton George.

He starts out telling us what Lombardi is doing at a cloud conference: they have a SaaS version of their Business Process Management (BPM) product. Recalling the Lightening Round presentation Barton gave (by virtue of being a CloudCampAustin sponsor), I get Barton to tell us how being SaaS vs. on-premise makes the BPM offering different and, we hope, better. One of the aspects we talk about is the ability to update Blueprint more often, "streaming" features into the product, as Barton puts it. This prompts me to ask Barton if people actually want all those updates.

I also ask Barton if hosting something as a SaaS makes customers think they should pay less for the software. The (cooked-up) reasoning being: it's less hassle to setup and run than on-premise, so it seems like "cheaper" so you'd think to pay less. As you might expect, Barton says, no, people still will pay for the value (functionality that helps make money) that the software brings.

Being a conference interviewer himself, I ask Barton George to tell us about the brief video interviews he does. We then procede to dork-out about hand-help cameras, like the Flip mino that Barton uses.

Throwing out a broad question, I ask Barton to pull from his previous experience working in open source at Sun and tell us what he thinks of the current state of the open source world. It's always fun to ask someone who was previously an insider what they think once they get on the outside. Barton's answer confirms what most people seem to be saying: open source is very close to mainstream now. This gets Barton to recall his first, big public talk wherein he happened to follow Richard Stallman. Barton says he was a good, down-to-earth speaker.

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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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Both of us being back from our travels to the other side of the world, Ryan and I finally get back together to catch up on the RIA news:

• I was off in Korea - thanks to Ryan, I met up with Jung-woong Lee (Kevin), of SundayToz, while I was in Seoul. He was an excellent host taking me out to dinner and some drinks. I also tell about the open source talk I was there to give and seeing Koreans watch TV while driving!
• AIR used for the Tesla.
• Harping on Evernote needing an AIR or something interface - they got APIs, man!
• RIA's in New Zealand, where Ryan was for awhile.
• Right before this recording, Ryan was a guest on enterpriseGeeks. This leads us into a discussion of RIAs in the SAP world, wherein I point out the upcoming Inside Track in in Lima, Peru.
• Flash runtime for TV - this leads into a discussion of the Adobe Open Screens project being about a year old now. Recently, I talked with a reporter on that topic, so I looked through all the news to catch up. Also connected to Open Screens, Adobe and Nokia announcement some cash-money winners.
• The new GMail interface for the iPhone is pretty nice.
• Snorkle - Oracle's on track to buy Sun, so we discuss how JavaFX fits in or falls out of this, in addition to general Oracle buying Sun talk.
• Link dump: Mark Monster's series on Silverlight RIA Servers (1 and 2), Forrester/Cynergy write-up, Apache Pivot.
• Microsoft NAB announcements, like Smooth Streaming.

As a side note, if you want Flex Builder on Linux, go leave a comment on the bug/feature report for it 'fore it's too late.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Microsoft and Sun are clients as well.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, while Ryan was living in the future (or, "down under" if you prefer), I had on a guest co-host, Charles Lowell. You may know him from one of my other podcasts, DrunkAndRetired.com. I had Charles on because he's something of a UI specialist and has done much work with Swing, Ajax, and dabbled plenty in Flex and JavaFX. I wanted to take this chance to get one developer's perspective on building rich user interfaces and, as you'll see, some specific RIA frameworks and issues as well. Here's roughly what we discussed:

• Charles tells us his development history, esp. with respect to to UI's, like Swing and Ajax
• He tells us how his passion for ruby was translated into his current passion for JavaScript and the different UI glue-work he's been doing over the recent users.
• I ask Charles to detail the work he did at is company, The Front Side, with Freestyle, the Ajax UI->web server protocols and state sharing. We discuss the problems with the framework they developed, particularly with storing state on both the client and server side and how that makes garbage collecting a pain.
• Now an indie-programmer, Charles works with several different clients developing UI's. Recently, he tried to pitch using JavaFX to a client and he tells us how that went - not too well.
• This gets us into a discussion of JavaFX and the technical and business reasons to use or not use it. He likes focusing on JavaFX as a way to do Swing better.
• More generally, we talk about The Market's desires when it comes to RIAs and rich-UI functionality. Charles is see a lot of pull for UI functionality that's difficult to deliver in Ajax, but easier in more traditional desktop GUIs or, we hope, RIAs.
• Getting to the only, major, even slightly-related RIA news of the week, I ask Charles how Oracle buying Sun purchase effects his view of JavaFX.

One items we didn't cover was Adobe's "Strobe" project. If you're interested, I gave a small amount of commentary in this week's Numbers post. Ryan has a small write-up as well.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Sun and Microsoft are clients as well.

Kicking off our Agile Executive podcast series, I talk with Clarke Ching. We start out discussing two of Clarke's books Rocks Into Gold and a longer version he's working on. We then discuss the relation of Goldratt's The Goal.

I ask Clarke to talk to his point that breaking things into smaller chunks end ups costing less. He says:

• In bigger projects (vs. smaller ones), we end up building more low-priority things, thus "wasting" time
• With a focus on delivering small chunks that work we get higher quality, rather then wiring up lower quality stuff

After this, I ask Clarke how he's sorted out the boot-strapping problem of getting Agile started in organizations. He recommends:

• The Weetabix Sell - selling the benefits, not the ingredients or "process"
• Set expectations that it's going to be hard work
• find quick wins, preferably "without doing anything"

Finally, I ask Clarke to give us a report on the Agile scene across the pond, which he does nicely.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan and I got over lots of mobile related news, sprinkled with some social networking items:

• Adobe/Facebook deal - somehow I missed the MySpace Silverlight SDK - Cf. Tim Anderson's commentary.
• Silverlight Mobile talk over at Silverlight Hack - Good round-up of the history of Silverlight Mobile from TechEd 2007. Sounds like release is a year away. Speculation about it taking longer. Nice discussion in the comments.
• Also, .Net Services demo from MIX09 up. See also the Steven Martin overview.
• CrunchGear Palm Pre Demos - several nice videos demo'ing applications like Pandora. Notice the background running, notifications bar, etc.
• PhoneGap wins a Web 2.0 Launchpad award.
  
• RIM App World - Blackberry app store - I have no Blackberry, so I have no idea. "RIM expects about 1,000 applications to be available this week, with more in the future. App World is initially available for BlackBerry users in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom. Users have to first download a smartphone application to connect to the App World Web site, via cellular or Wi-Fi links."
• RIA Download sizes from Mike Chambers - how much does this matter? Ryan says that Adobe does studies on completed downloads, and there is a significant drop-off at some point.
• Any Korea RIA action in Seoul? Ryan says that Korea is way ahead of everyone else.
  
• Ryan's last post on ZDNet.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe sponsors this podcast and is a client, Microsoft is a client as well, as is Sun.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they're yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Rise of Community Marketing

In the fifth episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Sara Dornsife, self-professed Community Marketing Geek.

With a title like that, I ask Sara to tell us about a recent blog entry of hers describing the bloating of the marketing role as represented by job postings: doing traditional marketing and comms, community management, open source, events, and everything else. Sara says this is probably due to consolidation in jobs, companies cutting back and combining jobs together.

What Community Marketing Does

Blindly feeling out the elephant more, I ask Sara to tell us about the day-to-day activities of Community Marketing. It centers around "scaling up" community interactions; that is, figuring out moving beyond one-on-one interactions in the community of users for a product, service, etc. We compare these efforts to traditional marketing and advertising tacticts, where broadcast mediums seem to be of lessoning effectiveness.

Open Source Lessons Learned

Earlier that morning, Sara and I had both been on the SXSW panel, "Lessons Learned from Open Source." We discuss what we discussed in that panel: namely, that open source a business model, on it's own, isn't too whiz-bang beyond acquisition exists. Zane asks if and how open source is used for marketing value.

We further discuss open source as a business model: my quip that you make money off open source by selling closed source; the troubling paradox of software quality and selling support; open source driving down costs & commodifying "over-priced" markets.

Doing a barcamp

Switching to conferences and events, since Sara was one of the main organizers for barcampAustin, I ask her what goes into unconferences like barcampAustin. "Not a lot of sleep," she says. To hear Sara tell it, most of the work was done in the 8 days prior to the event, including booking Paradox ("18 and up welcome!"), rounding up sponsors, and more.

Picking the venue drives much of the format: the number of rooms you have in your venue determines how many sessions you can have at once, which, of course, determines how many sessions you have. The costs are low because people volunteer and sponsors donate all sorts of drinks and burritos. Sara estimates that barcampAustin was at about $25,000 for a 24 hour event.

Why do a barcamp?

The question, then, is why do this? For Sara, this is the kind of event she would be arranging in her role as Community Marketer, not to mention that she likes the local barcamp guy, whurley, and simply enjoys putting together and attending the event.

I ask her how she'd sell barcamps to corporations. The pay-back, for the cheap price, is a bucket of whuffie (good will and social capital) and an audience that's more passionate than passive. The lack of "the corporate smell," Sara says, brings higher quality attendees.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they're yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Building a SaaS

In the fifth episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Scott Diedrick, Director of Development at Mumboe which provides a SaaS for contract and agreement management.

Being the head of development for a Software-as-a-Service business, I start out asking Scott to walk us through how you build a development team and plan to deliver a SaaS. First, we talk about picking a technology stack: whether it's rails, Flex, Ajax, or whatever front-end. Picking a stack is an important first, of course, because that drives the sorts of developers you hire. As a SaaS, you have to get your data-center lined up; while Mumboe has it's own somewhere, Scott would recommend Amazon EC2 for new startups.

SaaS Development Teams

Next, we move onto the developer profiles. Scott puts a lot of emphasis on developers with user interaction skills. SaaS's are often updated and refreshed much more quickly than packaged software, driving the importance of usability. Out of a team of 6 developers, Scott has two people focusing on usability and UI. Since Mumboe has a try-before-you-buy plan, a good interface is key to Mumboe's marketing and sales process.

Thinking about the tense relationship between developers and UI folks in my past, I ask Scott to tell us how the day-to-day goes between the UI guys and developers: the designer/developer workflow/collaboration, if you will.

SaaS Project Management

Next, I ask Scott to tell us how the development methodology and project planning is driven by SaaS's ability to deliver early, and deliver often. After launching, they were on a cadence of two week iterations to work out bugs and get feature refinements in quickly. But as they moved into adding "big features," they'd need more than two weeks. Also, Scott points out, that a monthly update to the software drives a lot of new work for marketing, docs, and sales, all of which have to update their own material and knowledge for the new releases. With more frequent releases, comes more churn.

Is the hassle worth it? It sounds like so: customers see fixes and new features every two weeks, instead of six months or more. Customers, of course, enjoy this rapid feedback loop.

The Austin Condo Scene

Closing out, since Scott lives in a fancy condo over in East Austin, I ask Scott to comment on the condo scene in Austin. Scott divides it into two parts: the low-rise condos (usually a half or a mile away from downtown) and the high-rise condos (in downtown).

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

Ryan and I have been traveling around frequently these past two weeks: SXSW, MIX09, and EclipseCon. While I was traveling back to Austin from EclipseCon, we finally pinned down to record a recap. It's heavy on the Silverlight and MIX09 coverage, but there's plenty of other RIA news as well.

• First of, as always, David Tucker over at InsideRIA does a good job rounding up the RIA news. For Silverlight, it's hard to beat Dave Campbell's Silverlight Cream link-ups over at WynApse.
• While we missed talking about it, check out some of our SXSW commentary and info: see Profiles in Courage interview with Mando Escamilla for a discussion of desktop RIA/Ajax and check out the two RIA Weekly specials from SXSW: JavaFX with Josh & Ryan with Augmented Reality.
• Silverlight 3.0 - (Tim Heuer's overview is great) deep linking, graphics improvements, more expansion of APIs and UI controls/widgets. Media: H.264 and AAC (moving out of an encoding ghetto mentality)
• .Net RIA Services - uses LINQ to connect stuff up together. A middle-man for access between the front-end and back-end (or "data-tier").
• SketchFlow in Expression Blend - "SketchFlow is a fun, informal, flexible, quick and powerful way to sketch and prototype rich, dynamic interactivity with Expression Blend." - Christian Schormann. See Christian's Blend 3 write-up and also another quick take on Blend 3 updates.
  
• Sorting out the Expression brand: what is Blend vs. Expression vs. Expression Blend? ...vs. Expression Design.
• Soyatec Silverlight on the Mac, Eclipse4SL.
• Out of browser support - Ryan answers the big question, how is this different than AIR.
• $25,000 JavaFX Coding Challenge. Develop an app with JavaFX 1.1 and NetBeans 6.5.
• Web standards wrangling - Ryan, then Dion.
• Ryan points out Tim Sneath's post on Windows Azure as a good source for understanding how Azure fits into the RIA world. This gets us to discussing the role cloud computing might play as the back-end for RIAs.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Microsoft, Adobe, and Sun are clients, as is Eclipse. Adobe sponsors this podcast.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they're yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

The Unfollow Quandry

In the fourth episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Alex Muse of Big in Japan.

We start out talking about the new online etiquette quandary: is it polite to unfollow someone in Twitter? How do you sort out this gift economy stuff when the gift is your attention?

The Dallas Tech Scene

Being based up in Dallas, I ask Alex to profile the tech scene in the Dallas area. Alex says that he's sort of frustrated with the tech scene in Dallas, jealous of Austin's and, of course, the bar area. From this, Alex and some bar-bound friends started up bi-weekly happy hour events up in his parts. This kicked of Spring Stage, where the drink-together idea is spread to different tech scenes nationally. There's some impressive outcomes from Spring Stage: Alex knows of 6 startups that have grown from it.

Here, I ask Alex to profile the technology tribes up in Dallas. He says there's some rails guys and increasing mobile interest. Pulling back from the hotness technologies, I ask what the other, more traditional tech silos are like: for example, Sabre/Travelocity is up there, along with Match.com and about 4 other online dating sites. In the past, there was QueCat, which we all fondly remember

Dallas vs. Forth Worth

Wrapping up, I ask Alex to tell us what Dallas folks think of Fort Worth folks. From an outsider's perspective, "DFW," seems like one big metroplex. But, from within, Dallas is "totally different" than Fort Worth.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they're yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

The Austin Tech Scene

In the third episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Mando Escamilla of Symbiot.

Him being a local, I ask him what he thinks of the Austin tech-scene. He says it seems "obsequies," more specifically, that it's highly fragmented and not too well connected. It seems, he goes on, that tech people are not too social with each other. Why? Perhaps because of the city is spread out, maybe because there's no big name employers, maybe it's another reason.

Rails Update

I then ask Mando to give us an update on the rails community. To hear him tell it, the old school rails folks have made up with the merb folks and are successfully preventing community forking.

Desktop Ajax?

From here, we get into a discussion of RIA's, specifically about desktop RIAs. While he's been skeptical, Mando recently started using a new Twitter app, Spaz. This gets us into a discussion of using desktop RIAs to develop Ajax applications, as opposed to using Flex or another non-HTML language. Here, I dig deeper to get Mando to tell us if he'd move to desktop application development using this model. We brain storm about what'd this look-like and how you might transition to it.

He's still reluctant to move from web applications, but he's starting to creek open the door a bit on the possibility. Still, he likes that Spaz is all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but on the desktop. (See more commentary on this in a recent post of mine about RIA's at SXSW).

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as are Microsoft and Appceletor.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they're yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

The Human Relational Database

In the second episode of Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, Zane and I talk with Mark Cathcart, Director of Systems Engineering at Dell. I start out asking Mark about his life in the IT world, starting off, as he put, as a relational database where he shuffled punch cards to look up demographics and other info through the punch card hatch.

After this, we dip into Mark's time at IBM working on systems, in particular a little stint he had in the hospital making "scribbly diagrams" and working on one of the earliest IBM laptops.

Chips, man

Pulling ourselves from the IBM days, Mark tells us what he's up to at Dell. This gets us into a discussion of laptop chips, ARM processors and the trick the power button plays on you.

Getting to one of my favorite boondoggle ideas, I ask Mark what he thinks about the looming problem of multi-core programming. The core issue is getting developers to start doing multi-threaded coding as the normal course. When you cross the difficulty of caches, locks, and all that with the ease of virtualization, Mark says that there's "no point" in worrying about it too much for the average application developer.

Mainframe Heated Curries

Next, I ask Mark to tell us about his thoughts on cloud computing. While it's not in his current wheelhouse at Dell, he points to Dell's Jimmy Pike. Here, Zane's server room scotch tasting fantasies elicits a story from Mark about warming his curries in cruise-line IBM mainframes.

Pulling out another pet-topic, we discuss netbooks, which Mark doesn't have much of an opinion of, liking larger machines. Somehow, this gets us to talking about the Office ribbon.

The Singles Car

Finally, we close out with a non-tech topic. What with the Austin commuter rail coming in, eventually, I ask Mark to tell us about the idea of "The Singles Car" in New York and if that'd work here in Austin. As Mark says, "I don't think it needs it here in Austin. there's enough cool places to go that you don't need to hang out on a train to meet someone."

Disclosure: IBM and Dell are clients.

While at barcampAustin this year, my pal Zane Rockenbaugh (Dog Food Software) and I recorded a series of interviews with barcampAustin and SXSW attendees and friends. We dubbed it Profiles in Courage, and now they're yours to enjoy.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Cloud Boy

Zane and I kicked off Profiles in Courage, barcampAustin edition, talking with Jesse Silver, co-founder CloudCamp and the CCIF. We jump right in and start talking about "large, New York banks" are using cloud computing. From there, we get Jesse to tell us about the history of CloudCamp. We go over the unconference format and the sponsorship options. Part of the idea of CloudCamp - as with all "camps" - is that local folks take over organizing camps regionally: so there's CloudCamps in San Francisco, London, Atlanta, and one coming up April 24th and 25th in Austin.

Selling Cloud Standards

Tacking back to cloud computing in general, I ask Jesse how he'd reply to a common reply I get about cloud standards: I'm a (cloud) startup, and I don't have time to worry about standards bodies. This gets us into a discussion of the current cloud standards efforts.

Get Into Software

Finally, I ask Jesse what he thinks of the software industry now, is it a good field for "The Kids" to get into, or is it tapped out? Jesse's answer - painfully summarized - is that software is in and helps drive everything, so of course it's good to be in.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan and I are joined by Appcelerator's Jeff Haynie.

Here are some highlights and show notes:

• Jeff being on, we start out talking about the Appcelerator SDK and their desktop application framework, Titanium.
• SOA become dominate on the server, but with RIAs and "connected applications" on the desktop, it seems like SOA (if only in the simple version) is mattering on the desktop more and more.
• I ask Jeff what kind of usage are you seeing for desktop RIA stuff? Rather than look at the question as one about SOA's, he starts suggesting that desktop RIAs are just desktop applications frameworks and platforms. Jeff uses Skype as an example of something that'd do well there. Going after a real, cross-platform GUI toolkit, application development stack. Titanium example: gaming, video surveillance. Also, bringing the web developer skills to desktop development.
• Ryan asks how Jeff deals with complaints about native UI vs. cross-platform UI? Historic example: Java GUIs looking the same everywhere. But then, there's web-native apps that look like GUI apps, like Miro the video player. Also 280 North Atlas stuff.
• Titanium supports several web-languages on for desktop programming, like PHP, most interestingly.
• Appcelerator's business model - yes, there is one. "Open Source 2.0." Goal is later this year to introduce some cloud-based services.
• This cloud-based service model prompts us to talk about Acquia's cloud-based services announcements this week: hosting drupal, search services, etc.
• Ryan mentions Todd Biske's further discussion of RIAs and portal.
• Jeff gives us a nice, pat wrap-up quote on what desktop RIAs are: "building desktop applications with web applications."
• HBO with Flash? Ryan and Coté asked for more info, but there was not really any forth-coming. We each hope this means we can watch HBO shows on-demand, even if we have to pay for them.
• Ryan asks about video support for Appcelerator, more generally, for open source. Jeff says that right now, it's Silverlight and Flash. They'd like to see OGG/Theoria as the container/format.
• It being next week, we go over SXSW: Adobe Awards panel, Ryan's panels & session, all 3 of them! Chris Bernard's curated SXSW lists; Coté recommendations, namely the free meat party. As we did last year, we'll try to get a few video episodes of RIA Weekly out.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Appcelerator, Microsoft, and Acquia are clients as well.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

I was catching up with one of my analyst colleagues recently and thought our conversation would do well as a podcast. Indeed, in the course of the resulting RedMonk Radio episode, we end up talking about some of the more interesting findings Vishwanath "Vishy" Venugopalan (@midtownninja in Twitter) has come across after taking a survey of virtualization use out in the wild.

Here're some of the highlights of the discussion:

• Vishy's time on Wall Street as a developer. The development is all about getting advantage with data & information.
• Virtualization talk - what's it looking like out there in the data centers? Talking with small and medium businesses about their virtualization efforts: a lot more virtualization out there than expected.
• The first wave of virtualization management problems. Charge-backs, managing pools of resources.
• How do people really think about applying charge-backs in companies? It's a pretty foreign concept for most x86 based companies.
• Dividing up the virtualization world into tribes - but still, the basics are needed, no matter which tribe you're part of
• Finally, I ask Vishy about my current pet topic: What's up with Netbooks?

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan and I are joined by Intuit's Alex Barnett. We spend most of the time talking about Intuit related topics in the RIA space, but get to the week's general RIA news as well.

We discuss:

• Alex Barnett and the Intuit Partner Platform
• Intuit moving to "Connected Services" to evolve into the future where being only the desktop isn't such a good idea. Moving into the cloud, that is.
• AIR and Flex layering on-top the Intuit Partner Platform - accessing QuickBooks data and process. Examples: Universal Mind mapping application to see where your customers are. They've got 12 applications in IPP so far: people waiting for full transactional data in QuickBooks.
• Marketplace Intuit takes 20% revenue-share, collects the money, and pays the develop.
• Are internal Intuit folks using IPP? Or, at least RIAs? Indeed, quit a bit, Alex says. For example an Intuit project called "view my pay check," on workplace.intuit.com... 400 small businesses using it for over 4,000 employees.
• What would people charge for these "mini-applications"? How does this change the procurement cycle. Monthly cycles, 10's of dollars a month.
• What types of things do people use AIR, or "occasionally connected" applications for? One of their theories is that AIR is a good transition app for moving people comfortably from the desktop to a purer SaaS.
• How does RIA UX play into the appeal here? "Simple" things like drag-and-dropping are astonishingly handy for users.
• QuickBase's offer to take on Coghead users.
• Appcelerator Titanium PR2 - we're getting an Appcelerator guest on next week for more details.
• Bespin - pure open web based IDE that's, as Alex puts it "astonishing."
• Brandon Wiley's p2p data-sharing thing, service, Ringlight

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client - as is Appcelerator - and sponsored this podcast.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

• 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.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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,

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan Stewart and I are joined by Sun's Joshua Marinacci. We discuss several topics:

• JavaFX update from Josh. JavaFX 1.1 with Mobile Support.
• Partners for JavaFX Mobile. Ryan asks about the types of applications people are doing: games, cloud things, things for looking up movies, and other geo-location things.
• Coté asks what the story for existing hand-sets is. You can get Over-the-Air updates for some existing version of Java ME, this is one of the options that Sun sells. They also build the embedded JavaFX runtime.
• Sun will be selling developer phones with JavaFX during JavaOne.
• We talk about design-oriented tool use that Josh has done in the JavaFX world. Also, they'll show a designer-centric tool at JavaOne.
• JavaFX downloaded 100M times already.
• Ryan asks about the media and video codecs in JavaFX to clarify that story.
• Coghead shuts down - we liked Bob Warfield's coverage.
• What's this GridIron Software dev/designer workflow stuff? The product is called Flow. It seems track relationships between different Creative Suite files and do version control. Is this ALM for the dev/design workflow? Also a sort of "asset management" and browsing thing, kind of like Bridge scaled down to a project. See screencast. It's $249.
• The FX is out of the FlexSDK kerfuffle.
• Microsoft's research project, Social Desktop. Treating your desktop applications like a web site, with a URL.
• Josh and friends launched JFXstudio.org

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Sun and Microsoft are clients as well.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week there was a ton of mobile news from most major RIA communities due to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We saw the release of JavaFX Mobile, a laundry list of Adobe announcements, and lots of marketplace/app store news including from Microsoft. Ryan and I spend a good deal of time talking about the Kindle, the culture of GPS trail tracking, and our hopes for more open "app stores" in the mobile world. Here are the details:

• Kindle 2 - how much of a platform is the Kindle? Is it a cul de sac, or something that can augment Web 2.0 info-junkie shakes?
• "Everybody has an App Store" - Microsoft App Store - Retail stores
• Adobe Marketplace - still no buying, but link to buying.
• JavaFX Mobile - in addition to launching, Sun announced several partners: Sony Ericsson, LG Electronics, carriers like Orange and Sprint.
• JavaFX momentum: in month of Dec. had record downloads of 50M Java SE 6 Update 11. There's not a lot of sizzle beyond JavaFX executing on plan.
• Adobe Mobile Congress Announcements - Palm joining Open Screen (means: they'll work with the Adobe tool-chain and runtime), $10M Adobe/Nokia fund (how can you get that cash?), Flash Lite runtime for Nokia and Windows Mobile phones. Scoble has a good summary.
• Check out the list of current Adobe Open Screen partners.
• Trail GPS tracking - what's up with this culture?
• Moonlight 1.0 GA - we're interested to see what the open source world does with this and encouraged by the open source angle this brings to the RIA world.
• March Madness On Demand with Silverlight: "Today, CBSSports.com, in partnership with CBS Sports and the NCAA, announced that they have selected Microsoft Silverlight to deliver live and on-demand high-quality video coverage of the 2009 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball March Madness Tournament, starting Thursday, March 19. Broadcast via CBSSports.com’s NCAA March Madness on Demand service, Silverlight will power a hi-definition quality video player that will deliver an enhanced video stream to online tournament viewers. After downloading the Silverlight plug-in, viewers can upgrade their March Madness experience from the standard player, which streams 550 kb/s, to the Silverlight player, which delivers up to 1.5 mb/s of enhanced tournament action. Both video options will be offered free of charge. The NCAA March Madness on Demand service will launch on Tuesday, March 10, and feature historical highlights from past tournaments until the first day of action on March 19. For more information, and to download the Silverlight plug-in, users can visit ncaa.com/mmod." (quote from an email I received on the topic.)

As always, if you want to keep up with things we're looking at between the week, check out the "riaweekly" tag in del.icio.us, feel free to add your own!

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as are Microsoft and Sun.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan is back (yay!) and we've got some exciting items to cover, just for you, dear listeners:

• Snow-shoeing in Japan; Adobe MAX Tokyo; Spark project
• NTT DoCoMo project with location-based stuff.
• What'd the Japanese think of Catalyst.
• Josh says JavaFX Mobile coming out soon- what's the Java ME relation?
• preDevCamp - coming to 60+ cities near you! More from whurley as well.
• Netbooks!
• What's RIA development like (or what would it be like) on Netbooks, like SproutCore. We've got Photoshop online, picnik in flickr...so it seems like you could do some pretty good RIA development.
• Flash on the iPhone stories...again.
• Yammering about Yammer, they have an AIR app. RedMonk started using it, and Adobe folks have been using it.
• Scott Guthrie on Silverlight 3 & 4 (Ars story, El Reg story): H.264 video, cool 3D graphics using GPU, better UI framework stuff.
• This week's Poken give-away.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Microsoft.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Coté joined by special guest host James Ward while Ryan continues week two of his Japan journey.

Here are the topics we cover:

• Update on James and Bruce Eckel's bookFirst Steps in Flex
• Omaha Steaks - James lives in Omaha.
• Portals and RIAs; Anvil.
• What kinds of applications are portals being used for?
• Do we even call these things portal? Lotus Expeditor seems like an interesting examples of Portal-meets-RIA.
• "The case against Web apps."
• Titanium number: "We've had over 5k developers give it a try and well over 20K+ downloads in the past 30 days." -Jeff Haynie
• Revisiting why desktop integration is nice.
• GMail has offline support.
• Offloading performance intensive stuff to the cloud for desktop RIAs, like searching Coté's email.
• TweetDeck gets funding
  
• Flex in new versions of enterprise software: WorkDay, ZipTie, others.
• The Flex SDK open source hoopla (here & here), and, see the recorded webinar on the topic.
• The Poken Give-away. Free Pokens for lucky listeners! (Listen in on how to try and get a free Poken.)

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as are Microsoft, Appcelerator, and IBM.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

Ryan is on vacation this week, but returning guest Bill Higgins was kind enough to step in as guest co-host. Bill, as you may recall works at IBM on the Rational Jazz platform. Much of his work focuses on the UI layer thereof so it was a nice chance to talk with someone who day-to-day thinks about, designs, and develops in the UI layer.

Bill and I discuss:

• An update on Jazz
• Comparing GUI 1.0 concepts to GUI 2.0, in the Ajax space
• Silverlight for videos from the inauguration to the XBox
• IBM and RIAs
• WebKit
• What does "desktop integration" really mean for RIAs?
• Adobe open ups RTMP

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe sponsored this podcast and is a client, as is IBM. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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!

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

In this week's episode, Ryan and I start out by picking up a conversation about Evernote (see screenshot of the OS X client above) we'd been having before recording. Aside from explaining what Evernote is - and taking a trip down memory lane on tablets and Microsoft OneNote - I talk about how it seems like it'd be perfect for being and RIA. We then go onto news about:

• Spout Builder
• Ryan trying out Windows 7
• Silverlight for the inauguration
• Overlay.tv
• Brightcove
• The role RIAs could play in the portal world
• LiveCycle ES in Amazon EC2 announcement.

Also, here are the shared notes, in Evernote, that I mention at the beginning.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Overlay.tv is a RedMonk client as well, as is Microsoft.

Download the episode directly here, subscribe to the RedMonk Radio podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded to iTunes or other podcatcher, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

In this sponsored episode of RedMonk Radio, I talk with Karl Pietri of Slideshare, along with Luke Kanies and Andrew Shafer of Reductive Labs. We discuss how Slideshare uses Puppet to manage all of it's data-centers, spread across geographies, their own on-premise servers, and the cloud via Amazon EC2.

First, we go over the Slideshare architecture (a Ruby on Rails shop) and how that drives the layout of the data-center. Karl then tells us how Puppet is used to manage the different servers, highlighting how they use it for private/public cloud mixing. On this point, I ask Andrew to compare Slideshare's use with others in the Puppet community.

Getting down the to the day-to-day operations, we spend the last part of the show talking about how Puppet fits into Slideshare's release management (via SVN) and how it's effected the relationship between development and operations.

Finally, we wrap up with a semantic-check on the word "pager": are sys admins still running around with beepers still?

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client and sponsored this podcast.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan and I wrap up the news from the Holiday break. We spend a lot of time talking about non-computer "screens" for RIAs: Netbooks, GPS units, and XBoxes. We also cover and comment on Curl's use of AMF and a handful of other RIA related stories.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe sponsored this podcast. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week Ryan and I cover the RIA news items of the week and discuss the discussion around the word "workflow" in the phrase "design/developer workflow." Before getting to the second item, we cover and comment on the news:

• A short review of Bruce Eckel's and James Ward's First Steps in Flex (which I think we incorrectly referred to as Thinking in Flex).
• AIR 1.5 was released for Linux, but there's an annoying hiccup.
• Seadragon Mobile - use Deep Zoom on your iPhone. Coté thinks it's pretty cool: check out the screenshots.
• Ryan asks if there's been any JavaFX news since it's been out, which there hasn't been, but putting on the apologist hat, hey, it's the holidays. He also points out a nice piece briefly summarizing the RIA landscape at the moment from Redmond Developer.

Finally, we end up talking about a point James Governor has been making: that word "workflow" is pretty terrible, it's more like "designer/developer collaboration." This leads to a discussion of user experience in RIAs (or the lack thereof).

Happy holidays!

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun are clients. Adobe sponsored this podcast. 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.)

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

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.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

 

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.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

In this episode, Ryan and I are joined by Sun's Danny "The Janitor" Coward to follow-up on last week's JavaFX news (be sure to check out Danny's excellent The Planetarium for fine Java client news).

As you can imagine, we talk about JavaFX for the first part of the show. As Danny is at Devoxx (née Javapolis) we ask him about the RIA talk going on there as well. We then briefly talk about what's going in on Java 7, the next major version of Java.

In this context, I talk again about one of my favorite emerging RIAs, Bluray add-ons and networked applications, like those found on Disney's Sleeping Beauty Bluray release which I saw a talk about at this week's Cisco C-Scape.

In the news portion of the show we go over:

• Appcelerator's release of Titanium, an AIR competitor.
• The Adobe/SpringSource partnership around hooking up AMF to the Java would via the Spring Framework.
• Google Native Client of which Ryan and I are a bit perplexed by, but then Danny (I believe) helps us out by pointing out it's just another platform for application deployment.
• Microsoft MIX is tragically scheduled to over-lap over SXSW Music this year. That said, as I advice, you should start working on your justifications to expense a trip to SXSW interactive this year to hang out with - I mean, "network" with - the round-corner cool kids who do all your RIA thought leadership and use. Feel free to contact me if you need some advice - really!

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Appcelerator and Microsoft are clients as well. See the RedMonk client list for other RedMonk clients.

Photo credit Enigma Photos

My guest on this podcast is Chris Preist. Chris is a principal scientist at HP Labs, based at HPL's European research centre in Bristol, UK. HP Labs and Forum for the Future, together published a report called Climate Futures(6.7MB pdf). This report goes through 5 possible scenarios for how the world will respond to the climate changes we are seeing, or as they say on the Forum for the Future page:

Climate Futures analyses the social, political, economic and psychological consequences of climate change and describes how different global responses to the problem could lead to five very different worlds by 2030.

Chris was one of the authors of the report so I asked him to come on the show to discuss it and what followed was a fascinating discussion.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

I finally nab our man Ryan Stewart for this episode. We catch up on all of the Adobe MAX news, getting Ryan's takes and highlights. For example, we spend a lot of time talking about Alchemy and how it should/could be used to extend the Flash Player. I also ask Ryan about companies like Cynergy, Universal Mind, and EffectiveUI - the sort of the third-party consulting shops building up in the Adobe RIA ecosystem.

We then talk about the release/GA of JavaFX 1.0, due out this week sometime. Both of us are actually impressed with the technology itself and potential developer-base that Adobe has.

Finally, we close out talking about Zoho CloudSQL. Interesting in it's own right, I point out how it's a new back-end for RIAs to build on-top of, in addition to all the existing PaaSes of course.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsor this podcast. Sun is a client as well.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

For this special episode, Coté is joined by fellow RedMonker James Governor to talk about James' take on Adobe MAX EU, in Milan, Italy. There weren't any new announcements, but it's good to get James' unique take on what Adobe is up to. For example, we spend the first part of the episode talking about ColdFusion and how Adobe is and could be giving it a second-wind. We also talk about the speech to text functionality in CS4 Premier Pro and pull back to some old software development theory with Conway's Law.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

(Photo from Ben Ostrowsky.)

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast.

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.