Coté Memo #24 - "Can everyone mute their line? I just heard a toilet flush" Also: Zenoss

Aug 20, 2014

Meta-data

Hello again, welcome to #024. Today we have 31 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.

Follow-up

Several people have asked me how I like Tinyletter. It's features are anemic, but just enough. The reason I chose it over Mailchimp was because it took me too long to figure out how to actually just email something in Mailchip: too many knobs and dials for what I currently need. So, there you go.

Tech & Work World

Chart Porn: what the open source kids like

Top Open Source Provisioning and Management Tools

Near as I can tell, this is a sentiment survey ("what do you like?") not a "what you're using survey."

Looks like Red Hat is doing well in the storage area, owning the top two:

Don't go all ape-shit just yet, I'm not sure what the demographics are and, again, I think this is just sentiment. I asked Alex for more demographics.

Also in The New Stack world, I was on the podcast today where we discussed SaaS displacing regular old IT.

Check out this chart from 451's cloud wave 6 on that topic, are y'all building out traditional or cloud stuff now, and then in 2 years:

Pretty tasty.

And here's yet another survey from an Austin outfit on the topic of "so, y'all using cloud or what?"

Zenoss update

I finally got a briefing from Zenoss to catch-up with them. It's been my fault for not getting it on the books. As you may recall, I started covering them way back when and infamously came up with the phrase "the Little 4" to describe them and their peers. All these startups were using open source production and business models to go after the Big 4. It sort of didn't work out. Hyperic has since been snatched up, Groundwork is still kicking around, and the other one shouldn't have been in that list (hence it being "infamous" and laughable that I came up with that phrase - luckily, few remember it).

In addition to getting a new CEO, they're re-targeting larger enterprises (10,000+ nodes instead of 100's) and have done much rewriting of the backend to use things like Hadoop, neo4j, and Docker. Their revenue seems well too, and have boasted 27% y/y revenue growth and 93% renewal rates and told me they have over 250 "enterprise customers" (paying).

Hey, sounds groovy.

I'll have a full report up sometime soon (just needs a tad more polishing), for 451 clients of course.

"Can everyone mute their line? I just heard a toilet flush"

If you're like me, you spend a fair amount of time on conference calls. I'm always threatening to write what I think would be a best seller: Discovering the Mute Button. Honestly, what the hell is people's problem with keeping themselves unnmuted when they're not talking?

I like this study that @pkedrosky Tweeted today:

What you're doing during conference calls

I try to move the content in meetings in email and IM as possible. It seems to work, sort of. There's some people who just can't bare to type more than 1 sentence in email nor read more than that. I call them: people who were not programmers. Learning how to communicate and make critical decisions in text (email, chat, etc.) is a vital skill programmers have to learn early on and, man, is it nice once the group gets good at it. And then everything is documented.

Yeah: people, what's the deal with them?

(There's more from this survey and an infographic from Intercall.)

Fun & IRL

No fun today, just work.