Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Microsoft's getting squeezed at the high end of the PC market by elegant Apple computers running OSX and at the lower end by less expensive desktops and netbooks running Linux. The web metrics firm also said Internet Explorer's market share fell below 70 per cent for the first time in more than ten years, to 69.8 per cent. IE lost 1.5 points in November alone, dropping a total of 5.8 per cent market share so far in 2008, with one month still left to go. Competing web browsers Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari gained 0.8 per cent and 0.6 per cent market shares respectively during November alone, according to Net Applications. If those trends continue, Internet Explorer will fall beneath 60 per cent market share in 2009. Source

Eventually it all comes down to cash and selling power. VMware has been having trouble selling purely because it just doesn't have the kind of DNA and animals in their shops who are as capable of selling the products for recessionary times. Of course, you can sell when the times are good. You can also sell when people are in dire need to replace hardware and want to cut costs, but how can you sell if those IT managers and CxOs start asking you questions such as: o Why should I invest in this new technology? o Why should I not just consolidate my systems traditionally, bung all web servers on one big fat server and create application pools, bung all the DBs into one and create multiple instances? o Why must I train my staff when I barely have cash to train them on apps? You know how it goes, these questions have never stopped coming, and in harder times it gets harder, we all know it. All these messages are being sent out to all employees across the globe. But... You can still sell....

We are heading for a cold and chilly K-wave winter (coincidentally I see that it is a Dutch link). This according to some will have started by 2008 and may, if the past few years has been any baseline, continue until 2014. Although there are numerous variables that may be thrown in. One major positive variable that is, if no sinister forces try to steal away our freedom and thoughts*, capable of generating and spreading enormous amount of wealth globally, is the internet, the web. This wealth is, as Alfred Nobel said, contentment and depending of what will keep you content in the future, you may have access to acquire it immediately. The variable will definitely be the today much hyped and clearly misunderstood phenomena we call Cloud Computing . During my last keynote at a recent CloudCamp in Brussels, we had several vendors- including Microsoft, Amazon, Quest etc, and we were struggling to understand what Cloud Computing really was. I just thought of it while discussing with someone...

Update 1 : Nick Carr apparently saw some flaws in Tim's analysis, see below. Tim has been evangelizing this while we were still in our nappies. Listen to the man! Types of Cloud Computing Since "cloud" seems to mean a lot of different things, let me start with some definitions of what I see as three very distinct types of cloud computing: Utility computing. Amazon's success in providing virtual machine instances, storage, and computation at pay-as-you-go utility pricing was the breakthrough in this category, and now everyone wants to play. Developers, not end-users, are the target of this kind of cloud computing. This is the layer at which I don't presently see any strong network effect benefits (yet). Other than a rise in Amazon's commitment to the business, neither early adopter Smugmug nor any of its users get any benefit from the fact that thousands of other application developers have their work now hosted on AWS. If anything, they may be competing ...

Although I would also have loved to have the author: Ask me in advance (Obviously I'd have obliged) Told me later (instead of me looking into my logs to find where the link came from) Maybe, just maybe, thanked me as well Nevertheless, it is good to be mentioned (and get unjar'ed while I'm emitting) :-) The Economist page where you can read the snippet, and obviously I downloaded the full copy. Here is the detailed acknowledgment page on sources the author used to write the report.

IDC reporting: “The cloud model offers a much cheaper way for businesses to acquire and use IT - in an economic downturn, the appeal of that cost advantage will be greatly magnified. This advantage is especially important for small and medium businesses, a sector that will be key target in any plan for recovery.” Three market forces are helping drive the shift toward cloud computing, according to IDC: the search for growth (and revenues) in important new segments, including emerging markets like Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) as well as the small and medium business sector; the shortcomings of traditional approaches in capturing the growth in these increasingly important markets; and competitive pressures from new players with little to lose and everything to gain from pushing the new model. Source

My quick analysis: When you want to encapsulate everything in your data center in one box and call it "VDC-OS", it is wither a great ambition or a fool's dream. Why a great ambition? xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx Why a fool's dream? xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx Maritz passed us both by, though, by declaring not only that VMware would continue as the high-end virtualization vendor of choice, but that the entire IT ecosystem was evolving past its dependence on the operating system into a kind of mesh world in which applications, data, servers and security are all handled behind the scenes and IT departments would have godlike powers of integration and management based on cloud computing, virtualization and a firm reliance on VMware management technology. That's a bold claim no matter how often it's been made (by Novell, IBM, Microsoft, HP and others, under various buzzwords and in various guises over the years). Microsoft, in fact, is making the same claim again (though ...

Naveen Mishra, Senior Analyst-Servers of Gartner finds that the market size is very small at this point in time, but the growth in the coming months and years will be rapid. While there is no sequential pattern observed in the adoption of virtualization-no pattern exists for server, storage, desktop, application or other infrastructure virtualization-a close observation shows that it is primarily servers that have caught up and storage virtualization is witnessed in the datacentre environment in the Unix space. However, the emerging trend is x86 server virtualization, which most companies including Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, VMWare, Microsoft, Citrix etc., are driving consciously with their products and solutions. The virtualization scenario is currently purely need-based and is a priority area for CIOs for areas where it proves itself with benefits. For instance, at Gati Ltd., G S Ravi Kumar, CIO has gone in for storage virtualization as a first ste...

First lets do a Real-Time Market Analysis While all those estimates, tempered and then with a correction of $1Bn, are only mentioning about a market of just 1% servers that are virtualized! In Europe and in APAC there is not just growing interest in existing Citrix and Microsoft customers but also several "neutral" customers to go ahead and adopt Citrix and Microsoft virtualization. Many customers are looking for heterogeneous answers and want a complete answer to their TCO and not an inflated story about "doing it all with VMware". The customers are keen on all solutions but are still maintaining the sentiment of: "Just do the right thing for us". That leaves a lot of consulting and implementers with bigger responsibility. You cannot afford to sell a "one-vendor fit all" package to customers anymore. Technological advances such as Cloud Computing While price correction (read = reduction) may not be the only answer to VMware's woes, it certai...

"ACM SIGKDD is pleased to present Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan with its 2008 Innovation Award for his important contributions to the advancement of the data mining and knowledge discovery," said Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, chair of ACM SIGKDD. "Dr. Ramakrishnan's visionary research on techniques for scaling data mining algorithms to large datasets, and on mining ordered and streaming data has significantly influenced ongoing developments in the industry." The award is given to one individual or one group of collaborators who has made significant technical innovations in the field of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery that have been transferred to practice in significant ways, or that have significantly influenced direction of research and development in the field. The previous ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award winners include Rakesh Agrawal (IBM), Jerome Friedman (Stanford University), Heikki Mannila (Helsinki University of T...

So what the heck is a Ceiling Gap? As an executive on my day job and a part-time consultant for JP Morgan, I have a lot of questions thrown at me from time to time. I see challenges rise and I see people fall. I see technologies rise and I see trends evaporate. I see subtle transitions and I see loads of promiscuity. Anyways I get enough "data" in my head and I have this sense of urgency, the insatiable urge to find a way to solve the loss of the untold. That could ... save the planet. Help the world reshape the global economy and watch the innovation which is deeply embedded within the layers of the the inclined ceiling from where all the ideas drop into baskets and creative destruction ( Joseph Schumpeter was nutty enough to have seen it happen 70 years ago when the world was in a much more turmoil than today) takes place. So anyways I have been toying with the idea of the middle , the place that needs a solid filling and it is that space that is the gap. We all talk abo...

This is a really scary story but I need to also hear from people who are doing something worthwhile to make it better. Be it Obama or McCain, this one is the toughest to crack an probably the one that may make any U.S president hero, if he got the balls to take the U.S economy and future towards the intended and desired future. Anyways here's the BusinessWeek's article: The economic crisis has been triggered by what economists call "structural shifts" in the global supply and demand for commodities, coupled with the meltdown in the mortgage markets and the ensuing credit squeeze. But this crisis is now moving into a whole new gear, creating a new set of economic conditions that have yet to be named. Call it "the frozen economy." As pain reaches deep into the daily lives of ordinary Americans—irrespective of their creditworthiness—it will trigger unforeseen consequences for every corner of the marketplace. Nearly two-thirds of Americans already say they are...

Watching folks panic and start picking up glass-balls and attempting to predict the future made me worry a bit. I got drawn to it and indeed fell prey to the trap. So I got myself thinking and wrote up a little piece of what we ought to expect from this evolving market. Real-Time Market Analysis We are at the brink of a cylindrical upstaging . VMware is more challenged than any other party we have to mention today. KVM is the least worrisome of the rest. Microsoft's Hyper-V has its own trajectory and will soon define and refine its own strategy as it goes on embedding (maybe they'll just call it embedding and still do the old fashioned hulky-bulky way) its "virtualization technology" into all their core-applications (where they draw a revenue of $12Bn yearly, more or less). Citrix's purchase of Xen is indeed still an edible, digestible and maybe at some time in the future a launchpad (I am not saying disposable) to its future directions. Could that be a pos...

And what does it do? Secure and Agentless Inventory The Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool provides secure, agent-less and network-wide inventory that scales from small business to large enterprises. It collects and organizes system resources and device information from a single networked computer. Assessment tools often require users to first deploy software agents on all computers to be inventoried, but this tool does not. MAP uses technologies already available in your IT environment to perform inventory and assessments. These technologies include Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Remote Registry Service, SNMP, Active Directory Domain Services, and the Computer Browser service. Assessments can be completed on the following Windows platforms: Windows Vista Windows XP® Professional Windows Server 2003™ or Windows Server 2003 R2 Windows 2000 Professional or Windows 2000 Server Windows Server 2008 Comprehensive Data Analysis The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solu...

Hmm, not a really promising figure that. So it is safe to assume that the desktop virtualization is a hype and will/can eventually cost you more dollars than the current setup. Think about it: The chips are getting energy efficient and fast, the disks are getting cooler and cheaper. And to play the devil's advocate here, then you have a consultant who's blowing hose in your ears telling you that your desktop is really better off being hosted on some distant, remote, out-sourced server? (Do bear with me as I am exaggerating here) But that "conservative figure" of $1.8Bn is not really excitable, far from it. I've heard numbers , back in 2007, to be in the range of $ 1.5 Bn as well.

LAS VEGAS – April 29, 2008 – At TechWeb’s Software 2008, Stratavia ™, the leading provider of data center automation software for Fortune 1000 organizations, today announced the results of a study it sponsored, conducted by research firm, Enterprise Management Associates . The survey revealed insights from 169 IT professionals from organizations with over $100 million in annual revenues. The research results indicate the biggest single cost factor in enterprise data centers is staffing expenses, as companies experience skills shortages, difficulties attracting and retaining staff, high error rates from manual intervention and language issues when outsourcing offshore. Findings include: · The biggest single cost factor in enterprise data centers is staffing costs. Over 35% of respondents believe that this is the largest single cost in operating and managing their data center – more than hardware (26%), more than software (22%), and five times as much as a current ‘hot’...

Industry leaders who have founded largest companies in the world and are still leading them successfully, even in these turbulent times, such as Larry Ellison , William Gates , Steve Jobs already knew how to do business . I had been wondering lately if B-schools like Wharton are really worth anything at all. In this age when we are looking at the East and South (Africa and S. America), we are not into any of those ivy cuddly alumni circles anymore. We are doing businesses with people who have learned the business the hard way. The real world way, the path the likes of Ellison, Jobs and the Gates took. So I will be writing these multi-part series where we'll do school to school analysis. I'll try to call up the PR per school and ask them simple questions as if I were applying for a admission and would like to have things like these answered: Why would I throw away 2 years and spend 100,000 to 200,000 dollars into a school? So expect this multi-part series to be a amalgam of r...

I chatted up with Laura a few days back and she clarified things which appa"rant"ly are put differently everytime someone speaks of it. Laura did mention that all she was pointing out to the facts: - VMware is a leader here BUT it is bound to face some serious heat this year. We expect some really heated 3 quarters ahead! - Microsoft is not hte only contender, Citrix, in my opinion is the bigger contender here! - Being the sole and only market leader is no fun, its time to see some value and healthy competition in this market. And VMware realizes that it is not easy. My full analysis on the article and my RTA session will follow, we'll take it a step further and mix it with our upcoming noveau ideationist series where we will help firms work on a more effective M&A strategy to identify, acquire and go to the cloud target. Anyways here is one of many such articles on the web: "VMware is the champion right now, but everyone's looking to take them down," sa...

Mine are down here ;-) Part 1 Part 2 And the rest you'll find'em here.

Original blog content is at CEB blog, here's a snippet: A lot, I am suspecting. These guys are working hard with their noses buried in the Xen stack. A lot is built around the "Delivery Model" and that is what makes the Citrix strategy, my kind of strategy. I have been evangelizing the GDM (Global Delivery Model) for quite some time now. When I read (present tense) a book (for instance that of Peter Drucker) that is covers almost three quarters of the century backwards or if we go even further backwards when I read (present tense again) Marx's manifesto, somethings tell me that we are missing the point somewhere, we are getting the point within the containment but missing it in its totality. Someday I will tell you about the "puddle convergence" in more detail. Software companies are like puddles, lots of ripples are happening, and they get significantly bigger but they stay , somehow, stay contained in their puddles that they defined. There in no "Funn...