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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.

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:

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.