Next week I’m making my way back to the Bay Area to attend the Cloud Connect un-conference that is being held Jan 20-22 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The conference is being held in the unstructured un-conference style which I prefer. It allows more time for meeting people and talking about what…
I first met Lew Moorman, Rackspace’s Chief strategy officer, at Rackspace’s big Cloud Event back in October. It was at this event that Rackspace, through acquisitions as well their friendly annexation of Mosso, positioned itself as a major cloud player. I caught up with Lew during the slow time over the holidays and we chatted…
The day after Christmas, the whole multi-generational family made the trek out to Fredericksburg, a little slice of Deutschland in the middle of the Lone Star state, for some yummy beer and schnitzel. We had a great time, particularly with the 80 degree weather, but the real sights appeared on the way home. As we…
As the year 2008 draws to a close one more Lombardi Blueprint release has just just gone live. The login-screen has been cleaned up (except for the coffee stains) and “Twitter-fied.” The release, code-named “Quiet Riot” (in keeping with the official Blueprint code-naming schema) is characterized by a bunch of cool new features (you can…
These days when people describe cloud computing you’ll often hear them dividing it into three basic groups: Application Clouds (aka Software as a Service or SaaS) Platform Clouds (aka Platform as a Service or PaaS) Infrastructure Clouds (aka Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS) Besides self-interest (a cloud-based app helps me pay my bills), I…
This morning on Twitter, Rich Sharples, Director of Product Management for the JBoss EAP (Enterprise Application Platform) and former Sun compadre, sent out the news that JBoss was adopting the Google Web Toolkit. Here is what Rich had to say in his blog a few hours later: Today Red Hat announced a couple of things…
A couple of weeks ago Alex Moffat, chief engineer for Lombardi Blueprint, jetted out to Mountain View to record a video at Google headquarters. The video, which is in YouTube’s new 16:9 aspect ratio (the only way you want to watch Lawrence of Arabia or Blueprint demos), is part of a series of developer videos…
Yesterday, Dave Marquard posted a cool video on the Lombardi blog that provides a great introduction to Blueprint. The video, which is less than three minutes long, was created by Nachi Chidambaram, a Lombardi Business Process Management Analyst. Check it out below. For those who prefer to read — Spoiler Alert! The video starts out by showing…
A while back I posted a podcast with Steve Burge of Tillamook where he talked about how Tillamook, a cooperative, made up of over 150 dairies, took on a process mapping effort to turn 100 years of “tribal knowledge” into documented processes. Since the story was a great example of tackling a process documentation effort…
When I attended the RackSpace Customer event back at the end of September I was impressed with the talk that Paul Bell of Dell gave (Paul reports to CEO Michael Dell and is responsible for all business operations for Dell in North and South America). Dell and the Cloud(s) (sources: my hand + the football…
When our kids get older, we’re looking forward to having traditional Thanksgiving dinners like we remember. At this point, however, given their attention span and energy (one being short, the other seemingly infinite) we decided to go out to a family friendly restaurant that comes with an outdoor area for the kids to romp around…
Last week Phil Gilbert and Rod Favaron, our President/CTO and Chairman/CEO respectively, held a call with analysts. Since Lombardi is a privately held company these weren’t financial analysts but rather industry analysts like Gartner, Ovum, the 451 group etc. That being said, the call which is usually held twice a year, is run very much…
Morphis is a company that provides currency supply chain management software and counts among its customers the U.S. Federal reserve as well as central banks, ATMs and armored car companies around the world. Process mapping was the furthest thing from their minds when they started in business but they quickly found out that if they…
Last but not least in the three podcasts I taped at the Rackspace Customer Event is my conversation with John Engates, Rackspace CTO. Like Lanham and Jonathan, John was a very approachable and likable guy. I checked out John’s presentation earlier in the day and then caught up with him in the afternoon to chat….
At the Rackspace Customer Event the week before last, I caught up with Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce. Jonathan walked me through how Mosso, now officially a Rackspace division, got started and where he sees it going. Take a listen: >> My chat with Jonathan (10:52): Listen (mp3) Listen (ogg) Jonathan chillin’ in the Baroque Westin…
Last week I attended the Rackspace customer event down in San Antonio. On the first day of the event I was able to grab sometime with Rackspace’s CEO, Lanham Napier. We chatted about going public, the company’s recent acquisitions and its foray into the cloud via Mosso. Take a listen: >> My Interview with Lanham…
Last week I attended the Rackspace Customer Event (Lombardi Blueprint is hosted at Rackspace) down on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. It was a great event and I sat in on some cool talks as well as grabbed some time with several of the Rackspace execs. Later this week and/or early next week I will…
If you’re not familiar with the name, Tillamook is a 99 year-old cooperative made up of over 150 dairies that produces high-end dairy products. The award-winning cooperative, officially named the Tillamook County Creamery Association, is located up in the north west corner of Oregon. Until recently, processes were passed down from artisan to artisan in…
Yesterday at PDC, the big Microsoft developer fest, Ray Ozzie got up and announced the beta launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s entry into the cloud computing arena. (It may be beta but you’ll notice they already have a snazzy logo) This wasn’t a big surprise to anyone since they had been doing some saber-rattling in…
As product manager Dave Marquard announced this weekend, the October release of Blueprint is now out. In keeping with the project naming schema of an alphabetical list of “bands-from-the-70’s-and-80’s-that-are-at-least-somewhat-cheesy” we are up to “P” and “Poison” (check-out the whole list here). Poison is the 11th public Blueprint release and the 16th overall (releases usually come…