Coté Memo #29: vRealize almost explained, Compuware gets bought, 1 year at 451

Sep 02, 2014

Meta-data

Hello again, welcome to #29. Today we have 36 subscribers, so we're +3 - good job, subscribers! I'd love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io. (If you're reading this on the web, you should subscribe to get the daily email.)

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

Follow-up

Tech & Work World

1 year at 451

Today marks my one year anniversary at 451. I'd just come off sucking down two weeks of left over vacation at Dell, and go all setup to start analyzing. Over the past year it's been great to re-engage with my old industry friends and new ones, and get back to writing regularly, something I'd been sorely missing while I did strategy and M&A at Dell...which doesn't really reward speaking about what you think publicly too much.

Along with the other teams in 451, my team re-organized our coverage areas into new practices: Development, DevOps, and Middleware and Enterprise Platforms.

We've also done a good job stoking the fire of our DevOps research, which I really enjoy; you may recall that Jay Lyman, on my team, published one of the first analyst pieces on DevOps in 2010!

Anyhow, enough self-aggrandizing. If you're not a client - or at least have a trial - you should check it out. If you end up not wanting to fork over some cash to get behind our paywall, I'd be interested in hearing why so we can noodle on fixing that.

vRealize

After last week at #VMworld, I'm forcing myself to write a 1,500-2,000 word report on vRealize. The issue, as I discussed in our Software Defined Tech podcast recoding today, is that I have a mixture of NDA and public knowledge, so sorting through an already confusing pile is difficult.

To that end, there's actually a good PDF that VMware has explaining the new portfolio (vendors usually are bad at this), and even a an install guide which looks like tasty.

Also, on that page, you can see a 2012 IDC market-sizing and vendor overview of cloud management and a 451 paper on cloud management and automation from Nov 2013 (these types of 451 reports ain't cheap, so enjoy the freebie).

Finally, it'll be posted as a proper episode tomorrowish, but Matt Ray does a good job explaining "the VMware cloud" in the Software Defined Talk episode we recorded today.

Also, this plea for VMware to fix up its APIs from Matt Wrock is good reading. Remind you of anything?

Thoma Bravo buys Compuware

Compuware revenue by product area

Thoma Bravo is adding Compuware to it's portfolio (pending closure of the deal, I believe). Dennis Callaghan on my team is writing up a 451 Deal Analysis that I'll link once it's published. We discussed it in a "bonus episode" of Software Defined Talk today, esp. as it related to the full life-cycle of software companies, where PE companies figure in at the end to either strip mine (or more likely in this case) try to pull the old fountain of youth trick.

It's also interesting to look at the rest of the Thoma Bravo portfolio and think how Compuware would co-existing and integrate with them, and look at how Attachmate broke up Novell as a possible model for Compuware. Thoma Bravo is invested in Attachmate, you see, so they no doubt have some staff and strategy-think cross-over.

If you really want to dig deep, check out the FY2013 annual report and the most recent quarterly presentation, for FY2015Q1.

Fun & IRL

No fun today, just work. I made a pitcher of sangria yesterday and I need to go polish it off: