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.