The most interesting thing about the "leaked" Peanut Butter memo is that it's probably generated some of the most positive publicity Yahoo! has had in a while.
Eventually when Information Rights Management matures as a strategic priority inside companies people will be able to make it incredibly difficult to pass on such information to unauthorised third parties. Just like Mission: Impossible (The TV show not the couch jumping movies), your content will have the ability to self destruct.
Though I'm sure we'll all still wink at the camera when high level memos, usually seen only by senior executives, "leak" to the press. ;)
Jeremiah asks which Enterprise software vendor will be the first to buy a blogging platform. It's a question I gave some thought to myself at the start of this year and I've concluded that the answer might well be none of them.
Wordpress is infected with the GPL which means the code is valueless and Automattic is one of those companies which can be rendered valueless should the talent walk or someone does to their support model what Oracle are trying to do to RedHat's. Trust me, if WordPress support turns into a big money spinner you'll see people move on that business.
Six Apart has assets beyond people, and they've moved into the advertising business with Livejournal and Vox. While you have people in their late teens to mid-twenties showing other people their latest piercings & new tattoos on LJ you have people in mid-twenties and beyond showing people pictures of their new pets on Vox. One wonders if an Enterprise Software Company sees their growth coming from running consumer level social networks? That's more a media/advertising play than a technology play. Typepad is for Bloggers with a capital B while Movable Type is something which could find a place in Enterprises but I wonder if it won't/doesn't run head first into Microsoft SharePoint when it does?
One also has to ask if Six Apart could turn out to be hideously overpriced since it's one of those web born entities which went off and did what it said it would, instead of making huge pronouncements before limping off to die somewhere as most web born entities tend to do? If it's cheaper to just develop the functionality for existing ECM products that's what a lot of ECM companies will probably do. Buying someone like Automattic or Six Apart would have to be a pure eyeball scooping exercise.
Of course all the above is subject to Storagezilla's 27th law:
You've put your personal opinion in print, now the universe will go to the trouble of making you look really, really dumb.
Interesting announcement from EMC last week, if any software provider wants to use the Embedded Documentum platform as their content management foundation they can do that today with the OEM edition. It's bullet proof, so go build something no one else has thought about before with it.
I agree with Microsoft, somewhat. Their VirtualPC offering isn't mature enough for broad consumer adoption, indeed I'd go as far as saying it just isn't mature regardless of where you choose to use it.
VMware on the other hand, now I've been using that since it was in beta, long before EMC spotted that it was a goldmine and snapped it up. More and more people come to the free player and server products every day, good for them.
Of course while it's easy to think that this is a slap against VMware or to a lesser extent Xen ('cause you know consumers are lining up to try and get Xen running on their systems), the cold reality is that Microsoft are finding it increasingly difficult to grow their consumer OS business. It's ubiquitous so with Vista's multi-tiered offerings what you're really paying for is go faster stripes, alloy wheels, a Corinthian leather interior and a rear spoiler.
If gamers are to be beleived you're also paying for a 10% performance reduction over running the same game in WindowsXP, so unlike the MacOS X reference builds I won't be running out to spend my money on Vista anytime soon.
IBM's Sam Palmisano is holding a press conference in Second Life.
Had I spent my college time doing something I was interested in instead of the stuff I wasn't I wouldn't have spent my time hanging out in the computer labs using Mosaic, looking bored as other people showed me what eventually became Linux, and spending the rest of the time playing MUDs. Years of running from the text descriptions of monsters in MUDs, a year of free time wasted in World of Warcraft, and a good six months of evenings squandered playing Dungeons & Dragons Online may have left me cynical, but isn't this just LiveMeeting or WebEx the next generation?
Second Life is being pitched as the new MySpace, everyone else is doing it so you're lame if your not. You need that avatar to be "relevant". The problem with being the new MySpace is that you highlight how lame and irrelevant the old MySpace was in the first place.
We're probably less than a year away from something else being the new Second Life, and then it starts all over again.
He doesn't refer to MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) but he does deliver a gut punch to the MAID concept. When asked if he shuts down his PC at night he says he doesn't as the power up process is the most stress you can put a drive under besides dropping it. He believes that if you keep the heads flying drives last longer, hence the reason he never powers any of his systems down.
You can read that here.
I like startup people as they're always up for a fight, Jed strikes me as one of those people, and he's been more than gracious about taking questions about the new age of that thing we currently call backup and recovery.
I don't believe in kicking people when they're down (Kicking them to put them down is just fine), but the quote above rang a lot of bells for me. Through various circumstances I've spoken to numerous current and ex-CA employees and they've all echoed the sentiment above. The most recent instance being just a few months ago in a shared taxi while traveling to an airport.
It always goes something like this: Computer Associates wasn't responsible for what happened to Computer Associates, someone else was. Not us. Them.
Every time I hear the "Not us. Them." refrain I consider the fact that they say "to" and not "at". Fortunately CA is so large that even if it stopped booking business tomorrow morning it's sheer inertia would carry it through into the next decade. There's time for that cultural transformation yet.
They appear late at night, TV advertisements asking if you're over worked and under paid? Then they ask if you're willing to fix those problems with a bright new career...in Information Technology.
I usually spot these ads out of the corner of my eye at stupid-o-clock at night while I'm sitting at home in front of an LCD display attached to a computer with a VPN connection back into work. At the time there's probably half a dozen browser windows/Java apps, some DameWare clients, and a few SSH sessions open all at once. There's headphones and very loud music involved too.
Now the question these people should be asking is if you're over worked, under paid, and absolutely refuse to let any issue go without wrestling it to the ground and beating it's brains in first? If so, they should say, you probably already have a bright career in Information Technology and should log off and go read a book.
Preferably one which has a thing called a plot, and won't be found in the technology section of the bookstore. You recall the technology section, it's that place where you meet everyone else in the business when you're not meeting them at trade shows.
One of the more interesting news items this week, besides the fact that Josh has given up blogging about EMC, would probably be Symantec's OpenStorage API announcement.
Of course immediately it was declared by some folks that this disk embracing strategy was a move to kill off the VTL market, a market in which EMC has a commanding lead with it's EMC Disk Library range, but the reality is that the VTL market serves more than customers who are dumping tape, it serves tape customers who have decided they just want rid of the physical limitations of tape for operational backup and recovery. For these folks tape for deep archival purposes is just fine and they'll happily live with it for years. They just don't want to live with it from day to day.
Having restored terrabytes of information from lots of multiplexed LTO media back in my 24x7 operations days I don't want to live with it from day to day either. Now people don't have to.
There has always been backup to disk happening somewhere, EMC NetWorker added the ability to write to File Type devices, writing backup data to a directory on a filesystem, a decade or more ago. EDM was writing backups to Symmetrix volumes years ago, and people have been using BCVs/Snaps/Clones/etc for incredibly fast volume level backups since that intelligence was first added into storage arrays. Indeed with Replication Manager and/or PowerSnap for EMC NetWorker you can manipulate/backup & restore those array created copies in numerous ways and in an application consistent fashion.
The industry has B2D pretty much licked, Symantec are just trying to draw all the pieces together under the control of their API. Being the incumbent enterprise tape backup software vendor gives them a number of advantages, size for one. But it also lands them with a number of disadvantages...size for one. The fact that they are the incumbent tape backup software vendor and have to carry that legacy with them could be the "Microsoft quandary" all over again. Where your biggest issue is in trying to move your existing base to your latest technology. Unlike the desktop OS business the backup software market has some veracious competitors with their own big ideas, and with backup being a continuous pain point customers are always willing to listen even if they don't plan on buying. It's going to be interesting watching players large and small position themselves over the next few years.
Getting back to VTLs the rise of SATA/LC-FC drives and in array tiering made backup to disk a reality. Global de-duplication is the technology which will make it the standard. None of that is news, but it's shaping up that if you want to win customers in the backup market you'll have to take Virtual Tape Libraries that extra mile, make and use them smarter not just faster than existing tape libraries.
At heart VTLs are the next generation of what was the original backup appliance, the physical tape library. Now that the industry has moved the backup appliance from tape to disk it's time to begin building in the intelligence which was always lacking in the previous generation. Time to make it more than just emulated tape. It'll be even more interesting to watch VTL & backup software vendors getting these next generation backup appliances doing things which backup admins might never have considered.
Something like OpenStorage won't kill VTLs, it'll help them evolve.
I've only written a few bits and bobs about different EMC replication/info protection technologies since it's a long and detailed conversation to have. Chuck is having that conversation on his blog right now.
Read it and you probably will learn something new.
