Rounding the wagons?

So the tin providers can see the differentiation end coming, they can see the need to drop their high margins are vast & costly sales structures and move into other areas.

A few of these talk a story, but very very few of them appear to be able to do something meaningful or lasting.

Consolidation in the infrastructure stack market - lots of blogs talking about this, lots of disruption and issues, lots of risk & downside for the customer.

Oracle made the first move with an application provider acquiring Sun in order to control their own destiny re infrastructure and have better control of their own margins, but despite this they have a dead h/ware business that they are desperate to force onto customers (although I think few Oracle people understand the word customer, most seem to  interpret it as fund payer for their Porsche & holiday homes). Increasingly we now see that Snoracle's applications are 'only provided' or 'only supported' if bolted to the tin albatrosses bodged together by themselves.

EMC and their pet VMWare are nibbling around the edges purchasing software development tool companies, acquirin some serious individual tallent and now into the DW/BI and eventually database area.

If I look at HP, they have lots - but several areas they are lacking in (excusing the clear lack of sales, marketing & product proposition talent) are :-

• Database
• Middleware
• x86 Server Operating Systems

If I look at IBM, they have everything except direction, sales, marketing, focus and conviction...

SAP buying Sybase was interesting for a number of reasons :-

• Removes the last major (meaning deployments in existing data-centres) RDBMS from the table for those infrastructure companies desperate to have a plat in the database world (eg EMC, HP etc)
• Will further muddy the water with SAP's database usage relationship with Oracle
• Might knock some sense into Sybase's management team
• Doesn't seem to add much obvious additional value, synergies or savings for SAP
• Will likely start a bidding war for other 'platform tool' players in the mobility market - although all of these will be competing with the networks & the device providers themselves...

But when do we see the first IT infrastructure company buy a business application software provider? Would you put money on EMC or HP acquiring Teradata, SAP, SAS, Amdocs, Comverse, Sage, Tibco

Is anybody interested in acquiring Citrix? BMC? Symantec? RedHat? Novell?

Of course all of the infrastructure companies are courting Microsoft for partnership scraps off the table in the SMB application areas.

So whilst the masters of FUD fight their whispering battles against each other, the account teams become increasingly desperate and high-maintenance and the manufacturers fight each other (eg Snoralce Vs Intel/HP) as far as I can see it's only the customer that loses - quality, clarity, options, stability all reducing...

Metric, SI & ISO matters

So watching @rootwyrm & @bradhedlund argue about DC design and facilities so time back reminded me of one of my main pet hates. That of people that still use imperial measurements!

Heck even the country that defined them has (mainly) moved on to SI & ISO units. So you can imagine quite how irritating / depressing / demoralising it is to hear technology people talk about lbs, feet, BTU etc

Metric is very simple, more precise and used in the majority of countries. KPIs and measurements matter seriously, and in this global culture it is vital that everybody uses & thoroughly understands exactly the same dimensions and measures.

But yet even in this age of iPads & Android phones, IT vendors still use archaic measurements in their specifications & benchmarks.

Woe betide the first provider I hear offering me 14lbs of cloud servers. or 5/16th of a TB/s bandwidth...

Alarm Bells

So in my experience everybody has their own individual hot buttons, the topics that trigger those alarm bells in your head. The statements that make you stop what you were doing, and sit up to actually pay attention to the meeting / conference call / video conference you were supposed to be enduring / participating in.

Now for me these alarm bells can be areas I have particular specialist expertise in (started small and reducing daily), topics I have a passion in (growing), FUD, or just things that leave me initially dumfounded.

Naturally in the last few years I've had plenty of these, a couple of recent ones that come to mind are :-

1) "Writing data to a CD at a person's desk and keeping it in a drawer is more secure than storing it on an array in a corporate information management platform within a data centre"

2) "We need physical segregation between virtual servers" (Now depending on the context this can be valid in order to enable fault tolerant services, however 90% of the time its used by non-trusting tin huggers.)

So once I'd closed the PowerPoint deck that I was inevitably editing at the time, asked for a replay of the conversation & recovered my composure - I thought for a while (quite a while in fact, in order to self censor the expletives).

My first conclusion was a simple one - "Are the TeleTubbies now working in IT?". My second conclusion was probably of more use - "IT is moving too fast and leaving many people, processes, definitions, roles & techniques without time to adjust - let alone time for diverse disciplines to align.". My third conclusion was "people still look at partial, incomplete & inaccurate cost models - and have little actual or mental methods for valuing risk or consequence"

Not a radical, new or difficult set of conclusions at all really - but ones we don't seem to be making any real progress on. But something that are vital for us to resolve urgently in order to prevent the IT technology hermits detailing the future.

Oh and (with the exception of @Beaker) I continue to believe IT Security dudes live in an entirely parallel independent universe with no concept of reality, consequence or costs!

Kindle - IT companies take note

So as per my previous blog entries show, I'm a major personal fan of Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. It's really improved my reading experience and consumption.

So why do I think Kindle is important to IT companies? Well to put it simply it's a great cross-platform framework for information delivery and consumption! I can seamlessly access & synchronise the same eBook content on an iPhone, Android phone, PC, iPad & Kindle ereader.

Yes Kindle can read & display existing Adobe PDF files, but they are nowhere near as usable & visually readable as eBook format documents.

There are also some other interesting advantages :-

* built in secure channels for charged, or less public, content

* ability to automatically push & receive updated document versions

* the annotations & highlighting capabilities allow peers to share 'user feedback & content' associated with the document & topic

So Gartner, when will you deliver your reports & papers via Kindle's secure subscription channels?

So EMC, HP, HDS, IBM, Cisco, Netapp, Oracle et al - when are you going to deliver your whitepapers, product manuals and documentation in eBook format?

From a marketing aspect, just bundle a kindle (or iPad running kindle) with your enterprise data-centre products - stock it full if your documentation and watch your happy customers...

Still here

Yes I'm still here, yes I'm daftly busy right now on all the wrong kinds of work - overall my mood could probably be best described by :-

Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be able to finish and publish the 90+ partially written blog posts and move back to more IT infrastructure related topics...

@Twitter Vs @Twitdroyd

So this weekend was an interesting one in the twittersphere. On Friday twitter decided to suspend UberMedia client products for some rather unclear reasons.

Now for years there has been tension between platform owners and platform access gateways. With the company behind @twidroyd rumoured to 'gate' up to 20% of twitter usage there are clearly bigger games at play.

So what did I personally learn from & get reminded about from this :-

1) my main usage of twitter is now via my Android Nexus One phone

2) Twidroyd is by far the best android twitter application - I tried twitter www mobile, twitter native app, tweetdeck & tweetcaster. Whilst tweetcast was the best it was still frustratingly poor compared to @twidroyd

3) I now use twitter as my first point of call to gauge the pulse on both the IT industry & world events

4) That I spend money, and am now 'dependent' on, cloud services that I have no SLA or control over

A minor blip for sure, but I'm expecting quite a few more of these in the future as providers go through the wrangling re who "owns" the customer & the data they create...

End of availability

Just a quick post this morning, no it's not about my seemingly new role as "GrumpyHermit" but rather about vendor product churn.

You see in the last two weeks I've had two supposedly global 'top 5' IT infrastructure vendors casually inform us that four of the products we standardise on worldwide will no longer be purchasable in ten days time!

Now naturally we have agreements in place re minimum 18 months availability, and 6 months advanced notice of any EOA date - but nowadays these get treated with the corporate equivalent of "meh" by suppliers...

Naturally this has all sorts of impacts to WIP projects, our design & build teams and our competency centres re build images & operational readiness acceptance etc.

This is further compounded by the vendors increasingly operating "build to order" policies with little or no stock held in channels, thus causing inevitable delays around each sku change. Of course it doesn't help that this increased rate of change appears to be hand in hand with a reduction in core quality & testing by suppliers.

So please vendors I implore you to remember that diversity is the enemy of efficiency and drives real world customer costs through the roof... Please give some serious thought as to how to abstract the customer from the now constant hardware & firmware changes masked in so called 'benefits' (it's 5% faster, 7% greener, 3% cheaper etc) that need new configs, new drivers, new testing, different interop skus etc.

From my perspective, if its not a "direct field replacement unit compatible" then it generates real cost and pain - not dissimilar to that of changing suppliers...

Oh and whilst I'm on the topic, why isn't there a standard (ISO, DTMF, ANSI etc) on product lifecycle definitions & lifecycle events?? And don't even get me started on the concept of major & minor product version numbering standards and conventions between products & vendors...

The current situation on all these areas is chaotic, unacceptable and untenable. The IT industry is slowly killing itself through unwanted & unwarranted 'change for changes sake' that is driving a real but often unreported cost time bomb...