Coté Memo #053: There's a lot of earth for software to eat
Follow-up
It's been awhile. The family and I were on vacation for a bit in Paris, and then I was at the OpenStack Summit.
Tech & Work World
Quick Hits
Why Podcasting Is Bigger Than You Think – Edison Research (Annotated Tab Pile) - there's a thought-technology battle going on to convince people that podcasts are a viable advertising medium. Sounds good to me. SquareSpace, right?
Dell World 2014: No to Wall St, Yes to Cash - I missed DellWorld this year for this first time in 3 years, tragic. This is a good summary. We have some coverage of their cloud marketplace as well.
Nine ways to botch a customer case study - we need more customer cases in the cloud era, very detailed ones of who's doing what.
Las Vegas Conference: CA World
The longer you stay away from a conference in las Vegas, the weirder it is to be here for one. Or, maybe, it's just that it's always weird. I'm here for CA World now, which is an odd, interesting conference: attendance and sponsorship seems sparse but they have some good DevOps messaging.
I was last at CA World in 2010, where the message was a resounding "cloud or die!" There's a similar message around "the application economy," which is pretty well aligned to what I'm always going on about: developers are important, you business people should be hiring them to write applications. Coming from CA, a company never really known for having much to do with developers, this is a odd message, but it's the one you're stuck with in an IT - SaaS = what? world.
CA has good messaging and solutionaring around DevOps. They have release management (from Nolio), mock testing ("service virtualization" they call it), and monitoring of course, APM notably. They have lots of parts, and can put them all on a slide well. They're also very clear about their approach being solution oriented: not DevOps products, but just ways of combining their tools together.
After a discussion with a fellow attendee, the question in my mind is: what's the unique thing about CA that'd make you go to them for all of this? Their answer would likely be breadth of tools and integrations. The usual for a large company.
For as much effort as they put into DevOps - by my count, the most out of their class of companies - they don't come up in the DevOps world much. One theory is that DevOps has, thus far, been product and commercialization resistant. Another might be that the message simply hasn't gotten out. Another could be that the "DevOps market" is so small that nothing would register.
There's a lot riding on mainstream "enterprises" committing to the idea of writing more and more custom software: that whole "software is eating the world" but. It feels true to us techies, but there's a question of the rate of change and if it's net-new growth. I'm also unsure how a company structures itself to take advantage of more enterprises needing to develop software.
As a round-about example, I've been looking into Docker and cloud orchestration software. There's so many projects built around those problems: there's even too many! In a software eats the world world, there's almost too many options, making it hard for a company to cement in competitive advantage (the reason customers come to them and pay a premium over competitors - the reason companies make profits).
It's just day one of two I'll be here. Perhaps all the answers are tomorrow.
Fun & IRL
With kids on vacation, you watch a lot of TV. That Regular Show is pretty good.
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NEXT WEEK! Come hear me yammer on about DevOps: I'll be in Toronto (Nov 18th) giving my DevOps and cloud talk with TechTarget
We'll be doing a free webinar on DevOps for enterprises later this month. Check it out!
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