Links List 10.10.08

October 10th, 2008 by Julia Lim

You cannot turn around without bumping into another bad news story about the economy. From layoffs (10% of eBay’s workforce, 7.5% of HP’s) to the bailouts to the $7 billion loan the state of California needs to make payroll this month. Really, 7 beeeellllyon dollars? How many people shook their heads and felt sorry for the people working at financial services companies, all the while thinking that the tech sector was a pretty secure place to be (as long as you weren’t in the IT department at a financial services company)? Well, now apparently comes the wake up call for tech. Oh yeah, a bunch of those startups and not-so-young-anymore startups are FUNDED. They’re not making MONEY – or at least certainly not enough to actually be PROFITABLE, given the way they’ve been spending on payroll, sales and marketing to grow as quickly as possible. To get to that visibility and magic number of customers which means a big payoff for the investors and the founders. From the reports, it’s back to basics time, or at least that’s what the VCs are telling their portfolio companies. Cut costs. Layoff people. Focus on selling. And get profitable. Duh.

So can open source weather out the economic storm? Emerging from the dot-com bust, open source has matured, its legal framework and values are established, and serious players are in the game. But as this post on ZDNet points out, consolidation is on the way. “IDC renamed its LinuxWorld Show in San Francisco next year Open Source World – a clear shot across the bow at O’Reilly’s OSCON.” Will open source (from free to lower-cost alternatives to commercial software) flourish in a time of tightening budgets or will projects quietly go away for lack of funding (VC and that pesky business model thing) and, let’s face it, the “extra time” of IT pros tasked yet again to do more with less?

It’s October 2008 and Charles Babcock writes, “CA Embraces Virtualization As Future of Data Center Management”. Beyond keeping up with what competitors are doing, I enjoy this article for the masterful way it depicts the nightmare that is working with traditional frameworks. Too slow, too expensive, too complex, too many modules – it’s all in here. And somehow, I don’t think that was the point of it. So, $154,000 for CA Data Center Automation Manager – which can “consult” the CA CMDB (pricing starting at what do you think, something like $500K to a million – don’t forget those services) plus CA Wily APM (Introscope 8 and Wily Customer Experience Manager 4.2; pricing anyone?) metrics that get fed back into Data Center Automation Manager to help determine the virtual machine resources that are needed. Plus can also integrate info from CA Endeavor’s software change management tracking and CA SysView and in future with CA Management Suite for Mainframe Linux, potentially. I am not kidding about this list. And, we’ve been hearing this for a while – “Unicenter” the brand goes away and is replaced by “CA NSM”. The brand goes away. Why retire a successful brand? Ah.

I love this post on EMC, “Eleven Things You Didn’t Know About the World’s Largest External Disk Storage Company.” Although I guess I really don’t know much about Joe Tucci, since #11 says:

“Contrary to conventional thought, it is not true that the EMC President/CEO is the older, gentler brother of the fictional patriarch of HBO’s hit television series.” Hunh. I just googled him, thinking maybe it was a resemblance thing. Nope."

And on a much lighter note. A funny from Dell. 2 years later, I just stumbled across this Proprietaryville , Jibjab-ish video, called Dell the Journey. Legacy systems being escorted onto the Retirement Home bus. Michael Dell as knight in shining armor, singing no less. Joe Tucci and Larry Ellison showing up as heroes leading the charge against Proprietaryville (yes, funny in and of itself). And my favorite, “Now let’s go kick some proprietary apps.”

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October 10th, 2008