[Coté Memo #14] RAX still into IaaS, I think; what's Pivotal do again?

Meta-data

Hello again, welcome to #14. Today we have 22 subscribers, so we're +/- 0. I'd love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io.

See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote.

Sponsor

451 Research, is having it's big cloud conferences this Fall, Oct. 6th to 8th. I'll have a session or two on developer relations and marketing, and other analysts will be talking about their area. Anyhow, if you're interested, I have a discount code you can use: go to the registration page, and enter the code MC200 to get $200 off the registration price.

Follow-up

One of you suggested that I should send this in the morning, like at 6am, as many folks' brains are done "reading" at the end of the day. That makes sense - perhaps I'll switch-up to Mailchimp (who owns Tinyletter, as I recall, so I assume migration is seamless) and see if they have scheduling.

Tech & Work World

Still doing IaaS...I think

Sometimes headlines confuse things in so much as they simplify a convoluted vendor move. Rackspace has been trying to reposition itself as a "luxury cloud" (my words), something more than "just another cheap cloud." Nothing wrong there. Brandon Butler (one of the finer cloud tech reporters) had a headline this morning that Rackspace is "bowing out" of the IaaS business, which isn't exactly the case, but pretty good for a headline. The other tech reporters were equally befuddled. For 451 clients, Carl Brooks has a pretty good write-up that should help explain it all.

What does Pivotal do exactly?

Pivotal was kind enough to give a 2014H2 updated to us analysts this morning. They're an interesting company. Here's a draft of the report I'm writing up on them:

Pivotal recently provided an update on its business, providing a good opportunity to explore one of the more delightful bar conversations in the tech world: so what exactly is the deal with Pivotal? It's always slightly confusing given the breadth of the Pivotal portfolio, but we think the company, and the broader "EMC Federation," is positioned as a new, "full stack" for building the custom written enterprise applications used by the Global 2,000.

Pivotal's portfolio and connection to the so called "EMC Federation" gives them an expansive portfolio, but we feel that Pivotal's core message reduces to "hello, Global 2,000 enterprises. The middleware stacks you use to build and run your enterprise applications are not so good now. Ours is better, so you should use it for new applications development and to re-write old applications."

To that end, Pivotal's stack is composes of core middleware components and a PaaS (Cloud Foundry) and Big Data tools. Middleware is, of course, always needed to to write applications and currently many businesses are seeking to make sense of all the data in their companies to help drive daily decisions about how to run their business. Thus, as companies are writing new enterprise applications including Big Data functionality is high on the list. Along with offerings infrastructure and systems management offerings from EMC and VMware, one can imagine a "full stack" diagram that includes all the products - and services - Global 2,000 company needs to build its custom written software.

Why do this: margins, as IBM's software business shows, are insanely high. Lock-in - cough, cough - strong dependence on your stack once it's installed is highly achievable... enterprises change slowly, so they're long term customers not these fly-by-night mobile app kids who might just flap away or Wave goodbye to applications on a whim.

Matt Aslett, one of my 451 colleagues, pointed out that EMC reports on Pivotal financials, which I haven't checked out yet.

The secret to writing is...to write

I somehow have managed to get three reports mostly typed up this week after almost of month of not doing so. No magic was applied except just sitting down and doing it. It goes to show you that you just have to sit down and do it, as all the writers, great and otherwise, will tell you.

Fun & IRL

No fun today just work. (Oh, we got a dog. Man. Dogs!)