What a difference 7 years makes. Denise Dubie of NetworkWorld takes an optimistic view of the challenges IT faces and will overcome in the year to come. During the industry collapse of 2001, IT was more of an expensive line item – to be cut as necessary by the CEO. Today, IT pretty much across the board is more strategic and at the core of business delivery and value; IT may be in line for restructuring but it’s certainly not on the chopping block.

ChannelInsider polled solutions providers to come up with their take on which vendors they thought would go out of business or be acquired in 2009. While the title of the piece, “Tech Vendors That May Not Survive 2009” is slightly misleading since the consensus is that pretty much all of the companies will survive and even thrive, it’s still an interesting look at where they think these companies are headed.

Tom Kaneshige at InfoWorld writes about IT doing less with less. A Gartner survey found that in 2008, CIOs spread resources to deliver something to everyone, but the general shift now is toward concentrating on fewer projects that deliver results quickly, cut costs and basically getting their IT houses in order. We saw an early marker of this in the survey we ran at Interop NY. Attendees told us they were actually tackling the practical projects that should and could get done. Not a bad thing to focus on showing results quickly these days…

The news out of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) seems more subdued than in years past. The economy and the depressing layoff/unemployment news seem to be sucking some of the joy out of this exuberant and often over-the-top show. Instead of touting the new whiz-bang feature-laden gadget, some companies are focusing more on value proposition and getting the most bang for buyers’ bucks. Certainly, corporate travel is down and despite a press release titled, “2009 International CES electrifies and elicits optimism for global economy”, attendance at the show was also down by over 20%. But my favorite marker so far must be this tidbit on how taxi drivers and the local Vegas strip clubs are doing. If this writer’s unscientific survey can be believed, CES was hit hard by the economic downturn.

And on a happy note, just in time for the weekend – like many others yesterday, we were riveted by the real-life drama of the US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River yesterday. I must admit more than 7 years later, I still have a tender spot, perhaps never to be fully healed, when I hear about disasters and emergencies in NYC. The great news: everyone was saved, flight attendants proved their safety expert chops, pilot Sully is a hero, and NYC – from the passengers on the plane to the people on the water ferry and everyone else who helped – showed again the best that people can be to one another.

So I was very interested when I heard that Opus Interactive, a customer of ours, had “joined the VMware vCloud initiative as a VMware Service Provider”. I talked to Eric Hulbert, CTO of Opus Interactive, to get some details directly from the source.

Eric shared our own caution about making “cloud-ready” announcements. There have simply been too many companies talking about cloud solutions that lack any substance – usually based on definitions of cloud computing that are hazy or just too broad. The backlash against the cloud hype is often quite justified. But in Opus’ case, there are real components that if they don’t add up to a “full” cloud computing solution just yet, are well on their way – and enabled by VMware’s program for service providers (VSPP).

Opus Interactive is serious about virtualization, which is an indispensable tool in their stated goal of creating a high-density micro-data center with the smallest footprint possible. They are 100% wind-powered and have already virtualized much of their data center, reducing the amount of hardware necessary to run the business and driving down costs to produce even more competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.

VSPP for vCloud provides a rental model of VMware licenses – e.g., for Enterprise ESX or VDI. VMware Service Providers report on their customers’ virtual machines (vm) and pay only for what is actually used. This model lets Opus Interactive quickly spin up a vm to get a new customer up and running in about an hour and stay very cost competitive at the same time; Opus offers their vClustr entry-level virtual server for only $99.

Cost-effective, rapidly scalable computing “on-demand” based on shared resources, managed by “expert” third-parties, enabled by virtualization technology and pay-per-use vm licenses. Cloud computing? Instead of thinking about a single definition of cloud computing, perhaps it’s more relevant as the market matures to think about a continuum of cloud computing. And by that definition, Opus Interactive is providing cloud services, enabled by VMware’s VSP program. Next on the schedule, automated provisioning and perhaps in the future, API’s that make it even easier for application developers to test and deploy apps on Opus Interactive’s cloud platform – which, by the way, uses EM7 for its core management solution.

After Interop Las Vegas you may have seen our analysis of the data that we collected and delivered in our NOC view.  I thought I’d recreate the same data for NY and do a short comparison.

1) Like in Vegas, uptime for the network 100%.  This is no small feat considering that we introduced a new wrinkle in NY, taking down the primary NOC while the education portion of the show was still going on.  This was a forced failover to the backup systems, and it went flawlessly.  I’d like to give a little credit to EM7 on the 100% uptime as it caught a failover to battery power that allowed AC to be restored before a series of critical equipment would have gone down.

2) Again like Vegas, the average monitored device in the show network didn’t even hit 10% CPU utilization.  Still lots of computing overhead availabe in the show network.

3) The NY show network wasn’t nearly as busy as in Las Vegas, sustaining an average of only 27Mbps of usage (versus 56 Mbps) in Vegas.

4) Power consumption for the network and NOC in NY clocked in at 445kwh per day, about 25% less than the Las Vegas show.  This wasn’t because the equipment was any more power efficient, but instead because the show was smaller and therefore there was less network gear.

5) Finally, a stat we didn’t track too carefully in Las Vegas, but that I find interesting.  During show hours the wireless network average 1,100 users attached.  That’s a lot of people and a lot of wireless devices.

The good news is there was nothing too unexpected in the data, overall the smaller show led to a smaller number of tickets and smaller consumption of resources across the board.  We hope to have the opportunity to work with the InteropNet team again next year and take a look at this data year-over-year for each show.

By all accounts the show did go on, and we have some very interesting results to share with you all.

Take the Top Challenges question. Once again, “Supporting New Technologies/Enabling Innovation” was most popular. But that’s a no-brainer and as one memorable respondent told me, “the definition of what I do”. What was more important was seeing the big jump that “Reducing Management Costs” made on the list, from #5 last year to #2 this year and only 1 percentage point behind #1. Tightening the belt is top of mind for everyone. (As I write, the Dow closed down today over 700 points)

Overall, IT professionals told us they were tackling the practical projects that should and could get done – from deploying Security Information Management solutions to getting Asset Management and Inventory Tools in place. For the first time, we saw a close correlation between what people said was important and what actually got done. Of low importance and even lower actual deployments – ITIL and CMDB, IPv6, Green IT and Cloud Computing.

And perhaps people “fessed” up about virtualization. Instead of the usual “high importance, not so many deployments now, but more deployments planned” theme we’ve been seeing around virtualization adoption, this year the very hot trend seemed to lose a bit of steam. Across the board, the numbers were down for virtualization management, with close to 50% of respondents telling us that their businesses were less than 10% virtualized (4% of that with no virtualization at all).

2008 Detailed Results – showing trends year over year

Comparison of Results from Interop NY 2008 vs FOSE 2008 (government IT)

Does Oracle run the world? I would have to say no but Raj (Larry Ellison is his idol) and the 40,000 Oracle customers that descended upon SF last week might beg to differ. What do James Carville and Mary Matalin have to do with enterprise software? Pretty much nothing, except for the fact that they delivered the opening keynote for Oracle OpenWorld. (And that’s the only and last politically-oriented thing you’ll hear from me as we run up to the election). For a surprisingly funny and extensive photo gallery of the eye-popping event, check out cdye1’s photostream on Flickr.

But UB40, Elvis Costello and Seal aside, Oracle OpenWorld did offer training, certifications, and always entertaining speeches by Ellison. Ben Worthen’s favorite – “Larry Ellison’s Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant” delivered to analysts on Thursday. From Ben’s slightly-edited excerpt:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

So did everyone catch that? Cloud computing is complete gibberish and idiocy, but apparently Oracle’s already been doing enough around it to advertise the fact. I will have my cake and eat it too!

We’ve been pumping out the posts from the shows we went to – let me tell you, live-blogging is hard when you’re trying to share apparently miniscule amounts of bandwidth with 14,000 other attendees – and we have even more to share as we step back, contemplate and describe how some of the announcements, info and especially roadmaps fit into our overall picture over here at ScienceLogic.

For example, we released the results of our annual industry IT survey last week. Twice a year – at FOSE (for Government IT) and at Interop NY (for enterprises) – we take advantage of the fact that we have a big beautiful booth at these shows and offer a fabulous ScienceLogic t-shirt in return for a couple of minutes time with attendees living the problems we try to solve. Instead of telling people what their problems and priorities are, we like to ask.
Interop NY Survey – Trends and Challenges
Detailed Reports on Trends and Comparison to Government IT

And I just had to share this one because it is so bizarre. Are VMware and Paul Maritz guilty of plagiarism? You have to check this out to get even part of the picture. Apparently this guy has posted his slides (we know they are from VMworld 2007 because it says so in the lower-right-hand corner…) which prove that the “virtual datacenter operating system” idea was his idea a year before it showed up on Maritz’s keynote this year. Hmmm. And then after posting all these slides and making all the connections between his presentation and Maritz’s, he says he’s just kidding about the plagiarism. Can anyone sort this out and let me know?

I’ll tell you who wasn’t kidding when I went by their booth at VMworld – a certain chargeback vendor and VMware “partner” who was quite shocked two months ago when they walked into a meeting with VMware about future roadmap. Apparently, the slides they saw (preview of VMware’s announcement re adding extended chargeback capability within vCenter management services) were mighty might similar to slides they had given in a presentation to VMware about their own roadmap. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide. And I’ll also say, their strategy to combat this – support for Hyper-V coming early in 2009.

Interop NY 2008 was up considerably in size from the show in 2007.  According to Lenny Heymann, the GM of Interop, this is a trend that they expect to continue.  My personal experience was that the size of the vendors was also up this year.  I think there were so few startups that “Startup City” was pulled from the show completely.  In any case, the show floor was full and there was plenty of attendee traffic to go around.

Definitely helping out from a traffic and draw perspective was the addition of the Web 2.0 Expo – Interop was co-located with both Mobile Business Expo and the Web 2.0 show. It seems like that buzzword still hasn’t lost most of its luster.

From the InteropNet perspective, the main feeling was one of being rushed.  With the show only lasting two days, and the InteropNet team only having a couple of days of ramp up time, everything was compressed into a much shorter period than in Las Vegas.  While this would normally be a challenge, it’s an even bigger challenge at the Javits where the InteropNet team was allowed to do almost nothing ourselves because of union rules.  You’d be surprised how frustrated you can make a network guy who’s told that he has to stand there and watch the electrician plug things in, rather than just doing it himself.  The only thing faster than the InteropNet team getting the Interop NY network up, was my pedicab ride to the InteropNet Booze Cruise. (Editor’s Note: Louis has edited out the high-pitched screaming accompanying the ride.)

In any case, everything came off without a hitch, and EM7 performed flawlessly catching a couple of power outages that last day and alerting everyone before the batteries on the UPSes had a chance to run down.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll analyze the data from the show to see how many tickets were handled, amount of bandwidth consumed, etc and we’ll do a comparison to Interop Las Vegas.

We’re (both ScienceLogic and me personally) looking forward to Interop 2009.

Yesterday, she posted a terrific blog post about Interop NY highlights and included a blurb about ScienceLogic that I wanted to include here. I have written earlier posts about how difficult it has been to gain smart, insightful coverage for our solutions with technology media. And I have to say that Sevcik and Wetzel get it!

It’s an interesting thing. When we talk with our customers, they bring up the value of having a single integrated solution – either they get it right away before they even buy it or they tell us about it after they’ve bought and been able to replace multiple solutions that usually never talked to each other. Most media and analysts, on the other hand, tend to gloss over this. It’s a core part of the tradition-bucking decisions we made when we first brought this product to market. And five years later, it’s astonishing to us that this seemingly practical way of looking at the total solution is still unique to us in the market. Other companies may talk about “single pane of glass” but the effort it takes to make that a reality is a tradeoff few make for the benefits. With EM7, it’s literally out-of-the-box. But more than a “single pane of glass”, an integrated solution like ours delivers a “single source of truth” – with synchronized fault, performance and availability information that just makes sense for troubleshooting and keeping your apps up and running 24/7.

And we’re not resting on our laurels. We’ve been hard at work on the next generation of EM7 management products and have taken the same approach to think “outside of the box” to deliver true innovation again in 2009. And Sevcik and Wetzel will be among the first to get a close-up on why and how we’re doing this.

A few excerpts from their post:

“We noticed yet more specialty network management vendors, leading us to wonder how the market can support such a plethora of them, and we felt empathy for IT teams that have to master yet more interfaces.”

“Application performance management and application acceleration vendors were well represented. Such products play well in today’s climate because they allow enterprises to get the most out of existing IT investments instead of buying more “stuff”. One particularly interesting vendor we talked to was ScienceLogic. They are integrating IT infrastructure and application monitoring into a single, not-very-expensive platform that will serve mainstream business well. This is smart, and we predict they will give the CA’s, BMC’s, HP’s and IBM’s of the world a run for their money.”

Check out the blog post here and keep App Performance View on your radar..

We chatted about the growth of the show and how much that growth reflects the industry itself. Since the bust earlier in the decade both Interop Las Vegas and New York shows have grown year over year – not just in attendees and exhibitors but in topics covered in the conference tracks. As any of us who are in the space know, it’s a rapidly changing market and Interop strives not just to cover the latest trends but also to get ahead of them while still making sure that they are relevant.

The show’s mission overall has expanded beyond “just” networking to cover performance and new trends like virtualization, cloud computing and SAAS that all affect network performance. It is a mirror for the demands on the network (and network admins) and the convergence we see going on that make managing the network so complex today.

Responding to criticisms about the lack of interoperability at the show, Lenny says, “Our special sauce is interoperability.” And in fact the expanded mission of the show ensures that there are more interoperability issues to deal with and he invites the community to comment and share feedback on this core mission.

Last, we talked about InteropNet. We’ve loved our participation in it this year for a variety of reasons – from the opportunity to work with other cool vendors in an intensive and real-life/real-time environment to the true sense of camaraderie and “getting it done” that everyone shares on the InteropNet team to the wonderful atmosphere of hard work AND hard play that you have to experience to believe.

We talked with Lenny about how he measures InteropNet “success” and the answer was illuminating. They’ve got high expectations at Interop; they expect the network to just work, so the focus is actually not on uptime and SLAs – that’s a given. “Nothing less than perfection works here.” (Let me tell you, after my horrible experience with the super slow and inaccessible network at the VMworld conference, that is definitely not always the case. Maybe InteropNet should sell its services…hmmmm…) Rather, it’s about being able to showcase technologies and strategies for networking and interoperability – or as we’re interpreting that, basically “walking the walk – which in the end is what InteropNet is all about.

See the full video here.

The Results:

Which hypervisor(s) are you currently using?

• 72% VMware
• 17% Using something else
• 9% Hyper-V and VMware
• 2% Hyper-V

(based on 46 responses)

So the VMware responses were in line with what we thought, although I’ve seen numbers up to 90% share of the market. And about 10% are at least playing with Hyper-V – pretty good numbers just a few months out from launch. But look at 17% using a hypervisor other than Hyper-V and VMware!

We know from talking with people that several brought up Xen. I have to tell you that other than from media and analysts, we never hear about Xen (Citrix), which is why we didn’t include it in the survey as a specific selection. Perhaps it took the introduction of Hyper-V, with the attendant marketing juggernaut, to break people of the VMware-only habit. Xen couldn’t really carry that “heterogeneous” hypervisor environment message on its own, but now that Hyper-V is available, the genie’s out of the bottle. Bears watching.

On another note: We were more successful in hanging onto our marbles on day two – people seemed more in tune to the poll and less focused on collecting giveaways than on day one! [Note: no attendees were irrevocably harmed during the execution of the polls. ] At Interop Vegas, May 17 – 19, 2009, we’ll be about a year out from Microsoft launching Hyper-V and will make sure to ask the same question then to track changes in hypervisor adoption.