ReadWriteWeb, Blog Posts and Content

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. Christmas time seems to be appropriate for the sentiment. I’d like to say/write thank you to the folks at ReadWriteWeb. The web is evolving incredibly fast, blogs have become a phenomena and according to some it’s already being replaced with microblogging.

Web offers many choices to people and to me RWW model offers the best return on my (time) investment. What makes RWW different?

Content with substance.
You can tell that it’s not just blurted out. I was surprised to read that the blogs play “breaking the news” game like the traditional media. Erick Schonfeld had written:

“There is not much time for story-telling (except for weekend posts like this one). It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis.”

Breaking news is clearly important to a lot of people. Techcrunch provides is very useful to many, as it has millions of readers (including myself). However from my perspective, “breaking blog post” is not as valuable as well throughout, researched one. It won’t kill me if I read about a hot new startup a day late. I rather read about it with supporting information that provides context. That requires research and takes time.
Many RWW posts are like references, often contain in-depth analysis, compare & contrast different players, philosophies etc. I can imagine that it takes time to write them. But as a result, they don’t become stale as fast as”hot news” posts. I wonder how much traffic RWW gets, through google hits for older posts. I suspect it is significant.

Comments rock
I prefer reading blogs like RWW, Techcrunch, A VC a day later. Significant part of the value provided by these blogs is the comments added by the readers. Reading the posts later give me a chance to read the comments on the posts, which are as valuable(if not more) as the post itself.

I suspect the next innovation for the conversations on the web will come in the comments space. I think we desparately need better tools to manage comments (for the readers). An obvious idea is digg like system for comments, to get good comments bubble up. Amazon book reviews may be a model for this.

Practicioners beat reporters any day
RWW has number of contributors who are not primarily reporters but practitioners in the field. Personally, I think hands-on experiences of someone in the field is many times more valuable than a (no offense) reporter. It helps that RWW writers are using heavily the cutting edge web tools themselves and share their experiences.
When the subject steers outside the expertise of the regular contributers, it is best to get a guest writer to contribute rather than fumble a shallow opinion based post that does not add any value.I hope RWW will continue to have subject matter experts contribute. It is not easy to find these people and blogs like RWW play a critical role in bringing talented people to daylight for all to enjoy.

A new year resolution for me: I have to get better at being concise. In summary, a big thanks to RWW. Hope their business rewards them sufficiently for the excellent service they provide.

IT management, build vs buy, open source, and clouds

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Build vs buy has long been a critical decision point for large organizations. Service providers in particular have often chose to build in house solution to manage the infrastructure for variety of reasons:

package solutions were not able to cope with the size (scale and performance)
unique requirements that not met by packaged solutions
maintaining control over how the solution evolves
strategic differentiation from competitors

Obvious disadvantages of the in-house build solutions is the potential high cost of ongoing develoment and maintenance, dependency on small number of people, etc. It is understandable that developing every solution in-house for a single organization is a costly proposition regardless of how big the organization is.

Like it or not, most service providers have been driving towards using packaged solutions whenever there is a viable solution in the market. Problem with the packaged solutions is the proprietary nature of them. Hard to find skill sets in proprietary products, lack of innovation by the vendors, feature set not meeting the requirements, scalability challenges to meet the needs of large organizations, and integration hurdles significantly diminish the perceived cost savings and strategic value of these solutions.

Open source solutions offer an alternative that may be best of both worlds. Organizations can can collaborate in developing solutions that meet their common requirements, giving organizations the opportunity to share the cost of development and still have control over the solution, etc. Open nature of the open source solutions make integration much easier as well.

Yet there are no significant open source projects in IT management driven by these large organizations. Most open source solutions is product of companies or handful of individuals, and typically target the SMB market. Service providers invest massive resources for in-house development, often have multiple teams with dozens of developers. Moving the development of these solutions into open source projects would offer significant benefit to these organizations. I’ve seen projects in “maintenance mode”, meaning none of the original developers are around anymore and no one knows how the solution works, and no enhancement is possible.

There is clearly a failure here, inability to collaborate, corporate barriers to share, etc. Whatever it is, it’s preventing these organizations to take advantage of what open source development model would have to offer.

So what does all this have to do with the clouds? There are significant parallels between the needs of cloud providers and traditional service providers in terms of IT management solutions. Scale, multi-tenancy, strategic role of the tools, need for flexibility, open interfaces etc. mean that it is not likely that cloud providers can use packaged solutions offered by Big 4 and others.

The good news is that these companies have open source in their DNA, and already use it heavily, typically using open source components to build internal solutions.They have not been so far collaborating to build solutions specific to clouds as open source, but it is more likely to happen than traditional service providers.

It is already safe to say open source software is the de facto choice in the public clouds. What remains to be seen is whether this meme will transfer through the firewalls into the private clouds. My guess is that it will. Simply because open source tools will be ahead in meeting the management needs in the cloud from scalability to integration. Thought leadership is important and open source tools like Hyperic is paving the way for the open source tools to play a leading role in mangement in the cloud. Will the cloud providers play a more active role in development of open source tools for the management in the clouds? It would serve them to learn from the troubles faced by traditional service providers.

Making vs. Taking

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Image via Wikipedia

If you’ve never read Seth Godin’s blog (or books), you should. It’s full of gems. One of his recent postings was on a subject that is very relevant for us, hence the title of this post is borrowed from his.

“That’s the choice most of us make when we launch a product or service. We can make a market or we can take share from a market.”

Software products are particularly hard to describe by their nature and it does not help that IT terminology is polluted. Even commonly used terms like network management, event management, etc. mean very different things to different people. As a result, we often face using existing products to describe new ones:

“This is just like the Gillette razor, but cheaper.”

“It is just like HP OpenView, but better/cheaper/works…”

As Seth indicates, this strategy takes advantage of the recognition established product has and makes it easier for the potential customer/user to compare & contrast.

I think this explains why HP OV (NNM) is still the yardstick new monitoring tool vendors use to compare/define their products even though HP OV has been stagnant for over a decade and not even close to be the best tool from a technical perspective.

RapidInsight is different than the alternatives in the IT management market. It is meant to be. We’ve designed it with the hindsight of having lived with the the shortcomings of traditional solutions currently in the market. But articulating this difference in the market is challenging.

So far, RapidInsight customers have been direct contacts. We knew the customers’ well, hence we could articulate what RapidInsight is, why it is better than alternatives, etc. within the context of the needs of these customers. But when you go to the broader market you don’t have the opportunity to talk to each potential customer at length, if at all. Direct access to customers is where smaller companies run into difficulties. We need a way to articulate what RapidInsight is, and why it is worth fir anyone to invest their time to learn more about it.

So we face with the choice Seth states eloquently in his post. Should we try to take market share by identifying RapidInsight with existing solution or should we try to make the market? The answer should not be that difficult. We’re way too small to make a market. We can easily say “RapidInsight is like Netcool, only better . An open source IT event management solution” It’s probably better marketing position for us. From a technical perspective, this is an inadequate description of our product. I want to talk about why focusing only on consolidating events, restricted proprietary languages, storing data in relational databases are flawed approaches and why one needs a built-in CMDB, object based data store, use of standard based dynamic scripting language , etc. Yet I have to accept that “making the market” is out of our reach, however “right” it feels.

So it helps when others join in describing why consolidated event management is not sufficient and we need more It turns out, HP has just announced a new product/release, HP Operations Manager,OMi.

The blog author (shouldn’t a blog have info on who the author is?) describes HP OMi as a “next-generation consolidated event and performance management product“. What make OMi different? It sits on top our HP’s CMDB, which means it has access to service dependency information and have access to availability and performance data. It sounds like folks in HP understand that consolidated event management alone is a positive but insufficient, and why a solution that models and consolidates all IT operations information is needed. That will be great if they can educate the market to why. May be then, we can say RapidInsight is like OMi, but only better

RapidInsight: An Open source IT Operations/Event Management solution

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It’s official! If there is anything I suck at, it’s predicting how long it’ll take to develop software. Granted I’m not alone in this flaw, but it’s not even funny how far off I was.

Almost a year ago, we’ve made some major decisions in the company. One of them was the move to open source. Not only developing our software as open source but also replacing existing components with open source ones wherever possible. As you can imagine, this required major (colossal?) changes to existing software. We found excellent open source solutions for web development, data storage, etc. that were similar to our in-house developed solutions, but we had to invest significant time to migrate to these technologies. I thought it would take us 3 months, doubled the amount to give some room and thought 6 months would be a realistic estimate. Well let’s just say it took longer but we’re there. Today, we’ve released RapidInsight v3, an open source automation, integration and presentation solution for IT operations management. Although it took about a year of hard work, I think it was worth the effort. It was not easy to shed what we developed specifically to fit our needs with external more generic solutions, but going forward the payoff is already clear.

I’ve written a (too) long post on iFountain blog about the history of IT Event Management (as I see it), the need for a different approach, what drove us to develop RapidInsight and why I think it’s different (and better) than alternatives currently available, open source or otherwise. But I think there is a significant gap in open source management tools in this area. RapidInsight does not compete directly with any of the open source IT management tools currently available (that I’m aware of).

There are number of open source management tools such as Nagios, OpenNMS, Zenoss, Hyperic, etc., for monitoring, Puppet, ControlTier, ZipTie for configuration/deployment automation, etc.RapidInsight does not directly compete with any of these tools. I think there is significant potential value in integrating RapidInsight with these tools, using RapidInsight built-in CMDB, to integrate IT management information, and to provide single interface (both for users and programmatically). Potential uses of RapidInsight is listed over here.

We’ve already started working on integrating RapidInsight with open source monitoring tools. Provided that these communities share our belief that there is value in the integration, we will continue improving the quality of the integration.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Any feedback would be much appreciated. Please feel free to contact me directly or go over to our development site and participate in shaping RapidInsight.

Watch this space for the news on integration with your favorite tools. Better yet, tell us what you’d like to see integrated first!

Announcing RapidInsight as an open source project and getting slammed for it

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At iFountain, we’ve embraced the open source business model since the beginning of 2008.
Since then, we’ve been working on not only moving our code but also our development practices to open source. We’ve established a separate site for open source development, ifountain.org, where everything is out in the open, source code, documents, discussions, project plans, issues, etc. We’ve also defined what we mean by “open development“ and we try to live by it.

So far, the development is still done by iFountain employees. It should be no surprise to anyone, it wasn’t to us. Building a community is not easy, and takes time. Int he foreseeable future, we don’t expect a lot of external developer help (though it would be more than welcome) but we hope that we can establish a community that would guide where the project is heading. Most IT management folks (including this one) are not software developers, hence they may not be able to contribute code, but they are the subject matter experts, have first hand knowledge of what is needed in the field, hence can help the project immensely by guiding it with suggestions, feature requests, evangelizing etc.

The importance and value of the community for a project, even one supported by a commercial entity, is well explained and understood, so no need for me to repeat it here, needless to say, we will continue to build our community as the project takes shape. Sooner the better.

Netcoolusers is a lively mailing list based community and I started following it after I got my NCC back in 2000. There has been several discussions on the list about alternative web based interfaces that take advantage of web 2.0 technologies, etc. in the past. Several people had were interested in alternatives, stating that Webtop does not meet their requirements and some had to build in-house solutions themselves. I had not mentioned RapidInsight in the list at the time, even though it was such a solution since it was a commercial product.

Today, I’ve sent an email to netcoolusers mailing list announcing the RapidInsight open source project in the list, as it is directly relevant to the Netcool community. Email had brief summary of the motivation for the project has come from, gave some highlights and included a link to the open source site, where interested parties can learn more about the project and take a look at the demo, download the software etc.

Next think I know, I was kicked out of the mailing list by the administrator (Jim Popovitch) for “unsolicited commercial solicitation”. You can take a look at the email and judge yourself. I certainly don’t see it as such. There is well established precedence where open source projects are mentioned freely including ones by the mailing list admins. I replied to Jim’s email explaining my point of view and left it at that. As much as Netcoolusers is a “community”, it is controlled by two people afaik, and there is no mechanism for due process. They make the rules and they are the judge and the jury.

Just sigh and move on… But it didn’t end there.

Others responded to my email, asking questions, naturally unaware that I can no longer respond to their emails, as there is no indication that I got kicked out. Then came this email from another list admin, Jacob Steinberger. Now hold on a minute! How about distorting the facts, and spreading misinformation. Is that not against the TOS of the mailing list? No? How about just plain decency?

Jacob writes: “While the email initially looks like a great thing to help the IBMuse Netcool GUI move in a direction that we have longed for the last half of his email and Blurry’s forwarding of his private email, shows that he (and iFountain) are out to make a buck.”

The last half of my email lists some of the RapidInsight features describing why it may be off interest to users, and asks for feedback and participation. That somehow suggests that I have evil intentions to “make a buck”? Oh no, iFountain will offer support for an open source project, run for the hills! bad, bad boy!

What I described to Blurry was that we plan to follow what’s referred as the JBoss model, as it is well established in the market. The product will be available with GPL v2 license and we will offer support and professional services. Having said that, bear in mind, I did NOT even mention any of this in my email to the list.

“Trying to sell something, whether it’s a product, consulting services or support, is strictly against the TOS of INUG. Any violators of this policy will be removed from the list.”
There is nothing about a sale of product or services or support in my email to the list. Just the announcement of availability of RapidInsight as an open source project, that’s it. Announcement of an open source project is not a sales offer. The information on our intend to offer support was in a private email to Blurry as he asked about it directly. He chose to forward the information to the list when he found out I got banned from the list.

If that’s not bad enough, he did not stop there:
“Additionally, when a potential vendor’s website (iFoutain’s) states …

Thou shall have unrestricted access to the software. The software products will be available for download from the website without barriers. The community will be able to download and start using the software right away.
… yet requires you to create an account to download software, you have to sit back and go “humm”.”

My email to the list included one link to the ifountain.org site. From there, there is a link to download the mentioned software directly, no user accounts needed. And as I mentioned above, not only that, the source code and all its revisions (subversion) are also available directly from the site without any user restrictions, as it should be for any open source project. Why all the haste to judge?

Banning someone from the list based on rules and interpretation of those rules you’ve defined yourself is bad enough. Bad mouthing someone with false information when they can no longer respond is simply wrong. I’ve emailed Jacob before I posted this to give him a chance to correct himself but have not heard back from him.

living three waves at once: reaching from agricultural age to information age

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I’m writing this post from Findikli, Turkey, a small town on the Blacksea coast of Turkey, near Georgian border. Sitting in the terrace of my grandfather’s house, connected to the Internet via broadband. I keep repeating this fact to myself (and others) likely due to some level of disbelief. It is indeed remarkable how things changed.

25 years ago, this town was not connected to the phone network. It was possible to call someone by “registering a call” with the operator. One would have had towait in front of the phone for hours for the operator to connect the two parties. It all changed with Ozal, starting 1983, opening up the country and the economy to the world. And now, I’m sitting here with a broadband connection, integrated with the rest of the world, as I would be back home in Switzerland or anywhere else in the developed world.

I sit in the terrace and looked around to the sea, to mountains, yet people insight often capture my attention. A remarkable transformation is happening and one does not have to look very hard to see it. Couple of women are carrying down tea leaves down the hillside with huge baskets on their back. Tea farming is hard work. Three harvests a year and the terrain here is mountainous. One of the women has a mobile phone in her hand, clearly texting (and quite fast), mobile penetration is very high. Houses here have all the amenities, from dishwasher to satellite TV. Tea factories still the biggest employers.

The coast is much better connected to the rest of the world. 40 years ago, taking the ferry was the best option to travel to far away cities. Once could have arrived to Istanbul in about a week!, IF there were no weather problems. Now there are numerous flights, and coastal highway connect the towns to each other.

There has been significant migration from these towns on the coast to large cities as my parent have done a long time ago. Migrating to larger cities has been the only viable option for many to move out of the agricultural lifestyle and join the industrial era. Now, people here are not only better connected physically but also technologically.

I’m curious to see how the information wave will alter this society once again. One thing is sure, people here are accustomed to change and adapt to new things with ease, and this is their strongest suit.

It’s been 4 years since my last visit here. This year, I’m able to stay over three weeks, because I can continue working here!

Busted knee and venturing into an ER in Switzerland

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I was so jealous of TravelGal’s Swiss medical experience that I’ve decided to give it a try myself, and proceeded to fly over my bike while descending “La Dole”. Seemingly minor cut in my knee turned out to be a lot deeper and stuffed with pieces of gravel, and after a reluctant visit to the ER in Hospital Nyon, I’ve ended up a tube that goes into my knee with a drainage and a full leg cast to prevent me from moving my knee. Not what I had in mind for Sunday!

They’ve just removed the drainage but the cast needs to stay for another 10 days apparently. After that they’ll check whether the bourse is infected and close the knee for good if all is well.

As far as the Swiss hospital experience goes, it was quite nice indeed. I was quite puzzled to put it mildly watching them get ready for what seemed to be a surgery and using words like anesthesia where I was just expecting them to clean the wound and put some stiches. We’ve started talking in French where I tried to figure out what on earth was going on and was told about risk of bourse infection. After a while, noticing that my french is not exactly fluent and I did not understand what bourse is, the doc asked what language I spoke and switched to English with ease. Turns out bourse is bourse in English as well but he described what it is and I got the general idea, and resigned to watch him work on my knee with some disbelief, slowly realizing that my injury may be a tad more serious than I thought initially. Little later I glanced at his name tag and saw that he had a Turkish name! Not sure what the odds are to running into a Turkish speaking doctor in an ER in Switzerland, but I’d imagine not that high. It turns out he was born in Germany, quite impressive individual to say the least.

Now, I’ll have to figure out how/whether I can make it to London next week for a project. Are you allowed in a plane if you have a full leg cast and can’t bend your knee? wonder what I have to do ..

Turkey Germany Euro 2008 semi final

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I’m about to head out to the train station to go to Basel to watch the Turkey – Germany semi final match. Having had the fortune to watch the Czech game in Geneva, I’m excited that I’ll be in the match regardless of the outcome. I’ll also be meeting with two friends from University which adds to the fun!

Football is dominating the agenda in Turkey these days, which would be fine, if only really important issues were not overshadowed. Never mind judicial coup attempt that threatens the country’s future, never mind military abandoning its principle to meddle into politics and risk damaging its credibility irreversibly.

I hope we win tonight, but there are other areas where we should compete.

(refers to the deaths in Tuzla dockyards)

Can Tasktop bring order to chaos?

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*** Update ****

This post still seems to get quite a bit of traffic via google so I wanted to note that the information in this post is not out of date. Since the time I’d written this, Tasktop folks have added Firefox integration which was my primary complaint.

**************

I’m not a developer but play one on TV youtube. Well OK, I don’t even play one on youtube, but I work with developers day in and day out, hence I’m an eclipse user by association. This is how I first run into Mylyn. The simple brilliance of the idea was striking to me. I liked it immediately, thought it was a great developer productivity tool and suggested to the team.

I do think that I loose significant amount of time context switching as I often work on different things in parallel. A tool that would keep the information organized around the different tasks I work on simply makes sense. Then I heard of Tasktop and realized that now the idea that I liked so much in mylyn was available outside development environment and got excited.

Tasktop uses the tasks you work on as the context. When you browse the web or open the documents while you work on a task, web pages and docs are automatically associated with the task you work on. If you close the task, they get closed and if you reopen the tasks, they get reopened. Simple idea and effective.

So having loved the idea, I downloaded an evaluation copy of the software and started using it to see whether I would stick with it. I started using it exclusively and after some getting used to what is what, I was comfortable using it. We use Jira for issue management in the company and I use gmail as my email client; tasktop is integrated with both which made is easy to get going. Working with Jira this way is really nice and a lot of my tasks originate from email so gmail integration is very useful. I got my tasks in and started using the tool happily.

Tasktop uses an embedded safari based browser. You can launch external browsers but it is meant to be used with the internal browser. Determined to like the tool I gave it a go. I didn’t last very long with it. I found myself going back to Firefox repeatedly and having to do some manual work with Tasktop which is not the idea. It looks like Tasktop bets the product on the assumption that people will not mind switching their browsers and will use the embedded browser. They may be right. I’m guessing that they target the corporate world which overwhelmingly uses IE and don’t think IE users have a particular loyalty to their browser and may welcome the embedded tasktop browser. This is not the case for me. The browser is the most important application I use, and no way I’ll switch to something else that easily. I think Tasktop folks may be underestimating the resistance people may have to switching browsers a bit.

There were couple of other minor issues, but they were not show stoppers that would likely to get fixed as the product matures. At the end, the experiment was a failure in my case due to the browser issue. I find myself forgetting to switch back to tasktop etc. which defeated the purpose of tasktop. I still think this is a great idea that has a very good chance of succeeding in the corporate world. It may have harder time with the usual early adaptor crowd however. I’ll keep an eye on tasktop to see where it goes.

EDS HP IBM and professional services in the IT management sector

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This week HP has announced to acquisition of EDS for $13.9 billion. Naturally, the acquisition of such size got fair bit of attention in financial circles, talking heads analyzing the numbers and speculating what it may mean for two companies in very broad terms.

With this acquisition, HP becomes an IT services behemoth, second largest only after IBM, and going forward, competition between IBM and HP is expected to be fierce, especially for large outsourcing deals. Obvious enough.

Yet this deal will likely to have massive impact on IT industry in general, not just outsourcing sector. Following IBM closely, as a strategy, HP has just created the second vertically integrated one stop IT shop for customers, providing everything from hardware to software to services. To appreciate the importance of this acquisition, I believe we need to consider this deal along with other acquisitions HP made recently (Mercury Interactive, Opsware, Peregrine,Trustgenix,Tower Software, SPI Dynamics, Bristol, etc.)

With these acquisitions along with already substantial Openview family, HP has a large portfolio of IT management software and now a large services organization that can deliver solutions using these tools. Naturally, HP services organization will still have to collaborate (when it has to) with 3rd parties to meet the requirements of their customers and not just push HP software, just as IBM professional services do, at least in theory.

In practice, experience suggest that it’ll become increasingly harder for other vendors to compete with internal HP products. Projects will have to justify why they need to use 3rd party products instead of internal ones and often the path of least resistance will be to use internal ones unless the customer explicitly dictates otherwise.

I think this is a major problem for any player that is not a one stop shop IT services provider. Software companies without substantial IT services organizations as well as independent IT services companies and systems integrators may find themselves cut off from significant portion of the market.

HP has a large and effective ecosystem. The mutually beneficial relationships HP has with its channel and integration partners has long played a significant role in HP’s success in the IT management market. With this move HP is no doubt jeopardizing its relationship with its ecosystem. It is not surprising however that HP thinks the risk is worth it, and the gains that will come from becoming a one stop shop will more than compensate for the loss of business it generates through the ecosystem.

Enterprises have long been working on reducing the number of suppliers and work with handful of preferred ones and the allure of one supplier that is responsible for everything seems to be too hard to resist for many.

The impact of loosing the channel may be greater than anticipated. Independent services organizations that partner with software companies acquired by IBM in the recent years have been finding themselves competing with their old partners and some of them have been making moves to alternatives. With HP adding a large services organizations, it also becomes a competitor for any services organization that may previously be a partner that sells and implements software products from HP’s or IBM’s portfolio of products.

BMC CEO was quick to move in to take advantage of the coming conflict and characterizes EDS acquisition as “declaration of war” by HP to its ecosystem. BMC also has been in an acquisition binge lately, acquiring BladeLogic, Emprisa Networks, RealOps and Proactivenet within the last year but BMC does not have a large professional services organization so it makes to position itself as the supplier of choice for professional services companies that will be alienated by the HP EDS acquisition. CA may also make a similar move having assembled a solid set of tools through acquisitions (Concord, Aprisma, etc.).

However, if HP’s strategy works out and HP software products starts to gain marketshare, it will not be surprising to see further consolidation in the market in the form or pairing between services organizations like Accenture and software companies like EMC, CA and BMC.

IT market is more and more looking like a Highlander movie. There can be only one a few.