Coté Memo #25 - VMware's Cloud, Novell health-check, all with the face like this

Aug 21, 2014

Meta-data

Hello again, welcome to #025. Today we have 32 subscribers, so we're +1. YEAH! 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

Not really follow-up, but I was considering disabling the archive on Tinyletter and posting these on my blog instead. I get a fair amount of "readers" (I think) who aren't "subscribers," so I figure I might as well get them over there. Anyone object?

Tech & Work World

What exactly is VMware's cloud?

We had one of our better recordings of Software Defined Talk today. The meat of it was getting Matt Ray to tell us what the VMware cloud platform is. He gave a refreshing take that I really appreciated.

If you like this newsletter and podcats, you should subscribe to Software Defined Talk. It's sort of all faces of the same thing, man. (Plus, I whipped up that fancy new cover art with some fine Roboto Slab!)

Novell - how they doin'?

We spoke with Novell yesterday to catch-up on them. I'll be writing a short report on the topic soon. As I mentioned in the podcast, I think Attachmate has done a good job managing that portfolio.

Here's some first-typing for your enjoyment, including all those TK's I need to fill in:

After being acquired in TK{ year } the company has carved down to what we'd characterize as managing end-user IT: file sharing, collaboration, and end-user device management. This speaks to much of the core heritage of the company which more or less started the whole "group ware" craze in the 90s that took advantage of LANs to help companies do email and share files. In an era of cloud file sharing, it's hard to remember how crucial and mind-blowing that was.
When it was acquired by Attachmeate, the company had a larger portfolio, notably with the Linux distro company SUSE (acquired by Novell in TK{ year } for TK{ amount }). and an identity business. SUSE now operates as a separate entity (as we covered extensively of late) and the identity tools business was moved over to another Attachamate asset, NetIQ to consolidate portfolios. The application development asset, TK{ Xiamian - rather, group that did it an OSS project }, was also spun out of Novell which is now finding traction in the mobile development space.
...
The company says it has TK{ # } of customers, with 60-70% of them coming from the four spaces mentioned above (federal, healthcare, finance, and education). While some large enterprises with 100,000+ employees use Novell, the company says their "sweet spot" in the 2,000 to 5,000 employee (or student) range. Also, Novell continues to support a large partner ecosystem, with an estimated TK{ # } of partners. These partners tend to sell further down market than Novell, servicing the 500 to 1,000 employee organizations.

Hey, one of their CEOs went on to run Google.

Fun & IRL

"Why are you opening up that package while I'm telling you know not to open it up?"

Dealing with a 4 year old is full of odd conversations that go nowhere. You tell The Boy to not do something and they immediately do it, and the do it again.

It reminds me of an excellent Bill Cosby bit that had me laughing out-loud the other night. If you're a parent, do yourself a favor and listen to it:

Also, Merlin's Bill Cosby stylings, you know, "with this face like this."