Author Archives: admin

Blue Sunrise

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I openly speculated last January about who might buy Sun Microsystems since investors were trading shares for Sun’s cash value and little more. This morning Internet cables were buzzing over IBM’s alleged discussions to buy Sun for about double the current share price. If the rumors are true this will go down in the annals of the technology market as one of the great milestones, and perhaps not a good one. IBM is if nothing a shrewd entity. Outside of Congress, making a $6B investment is not trivial for anyone and IBM will certainly invest more wisely than the set of currently elected simpletons. Yet doubling the going price for all shares of Sun is a seemingly extravagant gambit and indicates that IBM sees something of value that the market does not, and they want to keep competitors away. What does IBM want to acquire? When walking down Sun’s product … Continue reading →

Virtual Position

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When I read rumors that Oracle is buying one of our former clients I wonder what we did right. Long ago and in the earliest phase of their interesting existence, we consulted to Virtual Iron. We helped with event management, presentations and removing kinks from their messaging when Virtual Iron was vending a lost cause. In those long ago days, Virtual Iron was selling sophisticated virtualization systems that not only let you divide one big server into many smaller servers (what most buyers perceive as virtualization) but they could glue several servers together via Infiniband switches and thus make many small servers look like one huge box. They were a few tiny steps away from private cloud computing, though they did not know it nor was there an industry buzz word to propel their value proposition. Virtual Iron was in what I call the ‘bottleneck bypass business’, which is always … Continue reading →

Cloud Cover

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No sooner did I speculate on who will make a run at providing p-cloud (private cloud) management tools than VMWare comes charging like malcontent bull in a Pamplona ally. Like Apple before it, VMWare is co-opting a single letter of the alphabet to brand a series of products. Apple owns ‘i’ and VMWare now owns ‘v’. I hereby establish my claim to ‘g’ for everything I create, such as g-confusion and g-discontent. One of VMWare’s initiatives is vCloud, which is one component of their broader Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) gestalt. VDC-OS – a clumsy acronym in an otherwise slick acronym flooded market – seeks to virtualize the data center in very broad terms. It already has select virtualization components for CPUs, storage and network and a 2009 roadmap for central management. What is interesting about their announcement this week is the addition of a security module. Though conceptually there … Continue reading →

Slippery Slump

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Financial forecasters foretell that the technology sector leads the economy out of recessions. Which means we are in for a long one this time. I decline to scare my fellow technophiles into believing the end is nigh. It might be … I just lack any specific evidence indicating eminent doom. North Korea and Iran are persistent wild cards but they have nothing to do with technology marketing. They are strictly consumers of high tech products like rockets and reactors. Yet as recessions go, this one will be worse than average. Today the Federal Reserve – co-progenitor of the current recession, thank you Mister Greenspan – downgraded their economic forecast. Far from being Depression 2.0, the outlook is still glum with unemployment rates and GDP shrinkage rivaling the late 1970s. The Fed’s dower description of the economy echoes what Computer Economics predicts – that the recession will not bottom out until … Continue reading →

Glass Breaks

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One rule of marketing is to test your campaigns before launching them. This is so basic that those who fail to do so will fail in spectacular ways. Sounds like we are talking about Sun again. We are. This morning I received a quasi-spam from Sun promoting Glassfish, their Open Source web application platform. Since I have been delinquent on studying Glassfish and seeing where in the web app ecosystem it fits, I immediately jumped to the Sun Microsystems web site. Sure as sin Glassfish was not only prominently displayed in the left side menu of downloadable goodies, the home page banner was a big blue ocean with a glass fish swimming therein. I clicked into the download menu and as expected there was a “learn more” link. So far so good. The link points into the Java development web site … to a blank page. “Learn more by learning … Continue reading →

Partly Cloudy

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In recent conversations with industry activist and profiteers, I have concluded that there is a hole in one market and another market that is morphing from maturity. I sat with Robert Eve, the marketing VP at Composite Computing, during a recent IDC briefing. Composite is in the data virtualization business, making seemingly endless pools of unrelated data more usable. We mutually concluded that the advent of certain technologies (commodity hardware, exponentially expanding bandwidth, cloud computing) combined with near real-time business pressures will reduce or eliminate traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) operations. Things are moving fast in business and computing technology is changing data center options. If you are opening a business or already have one then you need SalonTouch spa software. Speed will overrule other decisions. Not everyone believes this trend.  I exchanged email with Bill Hewitt, the CEO at Kalido. His company — which lives in the more … Continue reading →

The Once and Never King

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We are about eight years behind schedule. Around the millennial epoch I helped SuSE whelp the SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), a product that is till on the Novell price list. Growing frustration with Microsoft viruses, continued vendor lock-in and the inherent lower cost of an Open Source desktop were hailed as the beginning of the end of Microsoft’s dominance. Yeah. I didn’t believe it either. SuSE arguably had and still has the best alternative to a Microsoft desktop, and considering that it is not Vista, perhaps the best desktop available. But like many good technology solutions it never took the market by storm despite continued frustration with Vista, continued vendor lock-in and the inherent lower cost of an Open Source. Market dynamics and realities stopped SLED’s march. “The reality is that (the Linux desktop) is a slow, gradual, unstoppable growth,” said my buddy Jeremy White at CodeWeavers, a crew … Continue reading →