The week before last Dell EMC held its first Dell EMC World here in Austin. The event was full of keynotes, breakouts and Dell EMC and partner booths. On the expo floor a stage was set up where partners and various Dell EMC employees, from Michael Dell on down, were interviewed as a part of Dell EMC World Live.
I was fortunate enough to participate in two of the live sessions, one about speeding up app development for the digital enterprise, and the one embedded below. The session below was entitled “Stop Hitting Yourself. Tips for Succeeding at Digital Transformation” and featured Richard Seroter and Michael Cote of Pivotal as well as myself.
Check it out
Some of the ground Cote, Richard and I cover
How Uber delivered a Digital-transformation wakeup call to ordinary enterprises
Evolving your business to being a software-enabled business
It’s not about software for software’s sake, it’s about developing a more intimate relationship with the customer
The last 20 years for IT has been about driving efficiencies rather than improving the customer relationship
Moving from silos to platforms
Often support will come from the CEO down and the developers up but it’s the those in the middle who have the toughest time
Extra-credit reading
Speeding Up App Development for the Digital Enterprise – A conversation – Barton’s Blog
In the last two weeks I’ve had the opportunity to participate in two podcasts. The first was the wild and wacky Lunduke & Whatnot (with Matt) show where System76 founder CEO, Carl Richell and I talked with our hosts about pre-loaded Linux laptops.
In the second, which was recorded last week at SpringOne platform, Michael Cote hosts me as we talk about the evolution of Free Software/Open Source as well as the history of Hawaii and it’s foods.
Check them both out below.
Some of the ground Lunduke, Matt, Carl and I cover:
[First I video bomb the intro by mistake]
How long System76 and Dell have been selling Linux preloaded on laptops
Mandriva as Lunduke’s favorite Linux distro
How System76 went from Carl’s basement to an office and a portfolio of 60 offerings
Why both companies went with Ubuntu first and why only Ubuntu
What are the biggest issues that System76 and Dell face when producing Linux laptops
Podcast #2
Open source and devs at Dell and the changing nature of OSS
The second podcast is audio only and, like the one above, is chock-a-block full of information and zaniness. Here’s how Cote describes the occurrence:
“I’ve had a theory that the hard-line philosophy of open source has softened in recent times. Rather than thinking closed source is to be avoided at all costs, I think most developer types are a lot more willing to accept closed source bits mixed in with open source bits. That is, open core has “won.” I discuss this topic with my long time pal, Barton George, while at SpringOne Platform, plus the work he’s doing in the developer and OSS worlds at Dell. We also talk about Hawaiian food.”
After a bit of a gap I’m continuing the my series from DevOps Days Austin. After Damon Edwards kicked off the event, Michael Cote of Pivotal took the stage. Cote presented “The coming donkey apocalypse — what happens when Devops goes mainstream.”
Take a listen (you can find his slides below):
Some of the ground that Cote covers:
What DevOps as a community needs to focus on next to expand
Unicorns (eg Uber and Netflix), Horses (eg top banks) and Donkeys (mainstream organizations)
Today we come to the final interview from DevOps Days Austin. I began the series with an interview with Andrew Clay Shafer who gave the first-day keynote. Today I close, with perfect symmetry, with Michael Cote of 451 Research, who gave the keynote on the second day.
In his keynote, posted below, Cote presented findings from a study 451 did on DevOps usage. I caught up with Cote to learn more. Take a listen.
Some of the ground Cote covers:
Tracking tool usage as a proxy for DevOps
How they focused their study on companies outside of technology
What they found and given that, what advice would they give to
IT
Vendors in this space
Investors
How Cote would advise a mainstream CIO looking to get into DevOps and set a strategy
The basic theme of the paper is that Web companies set the agenda for the IT industry and enterprises can benefit by understanding and following their practices
The paper’s key themes:
Web companies are characterized by Open Source software and a three-tiered architecture:
A scale out infrastructure
A data tier that utilizes big data
An application tier supported by a proliferation of development languages
Developers are kingmakers and must be supported and allowed to innovate
DevOps is a key trend that brings developers and operations together to reduce friction and increase velocity
If this looks at all interesting, please check it out. It should be a quick read and hopefully we’ve written it in away that is accessible to a wide audience.
If you’ve been following my tweets you may have heard about “Project Sputnik.” While I’m not quite ready to talk about it, I wanted to give some insight into the program that’s helped get it off the ground.
Innovation Incubation
At the beginning of the year Dell launched an internal incubation fund with the idea of rooting out innovation throughout the company. The thought was that there are probably a bunch of cool ideas tucked away in the heads of employees at all different levels of the company, ideas that would ultimately benefit our customers if given a little protection and help to get off the ground.
The three Dell employees behind it, Nnamdi Orakwue, Michale Cote and Matt Baker act like a mini internal VC firm hearing pitches from employees. Those projects they approve get a small amount of cash to build out their idea for six months. At the end of six months the projects will either get their training wheels taken off and folded into business units, apply for more funding or disbanded.
Enter Sputnik
The program is just getting started and the first project green lighted was Project Sputnik. I’m very excited about it and am looking forward to be able to talk all about it in the near distant future. Stay tuned…
This is the 26th year of the SXSW (South by Southwest), the annual music, film, and interactive conference. Everybody whose anybody, and even a few who aren’t, are here. Yesterday the 10-day event kicked off. As a company, Dell is a big participant and sponsor from panels, to music lounges, to an entrepreneur’s UnConference, to education, to gaming.
As for the Web|Tech vertical we have taken our own guerrilla approach to participation in this shindig in our own backyard. Besides going to parties that customers and partners are throwing, Cote and I have organized a series of informal “chill and chat” meet ups for developers and tech types.
Last night we held our first soiree at Opal Divines. Here is a mini-montage I made featuring a few of the attendees:
I asked the folks to say who they are, where they’re from, who they work for and what they hope to get out of SXSW.
Last week we held Dell’s first Dell World event here in Austin, Texas. The two-day event was targeted at CxOs and IT professionals and featured an expo, panels and speakers such as CEOs Mark Benioff, Paul Otellini, Steve Ballmer and Paul Maritz as well as former CIO of the United States, Vivek Kundra. And of course, being Austin, it also featured a lot of great music and barbeque.
At the end of the first day Michael Cote grabbed sometime with me and we talked about the event.
Some of the ground I cover:
Dell World overview and our Modular Data Center
(3:35) Talking to press/analysts about our new Web|Tech vertical and our focus on developers
(6:00) The event’s attempt to up-level the conversation rather than diving into speeds, feeds and geeky demos.
The Dell Modular Data Center on the expo floor (photo: Yasushi Osonoi:@osonoi)
A few weeks ago Michael Cote joined Dell from the excellent analyst firm, Redmonk which focuses on software and developers. Cote who spent five plus years with Redmonk has joined Dell in our corporate strategy group, focusing on software. I for one am very glad he’s here and feel that he’s joined at the right time in Dell’s trajectory to make a big impact.
I grabbed some time with him to get his initial thoughts and impressions. Here are his thoughts both witty and wise.
[Note: So there’s no confusion, this Michael Cote is Dell’s second Michael Cote. The first is the the former CEO of SecureWorks which Dell acquired.]
Some of the ground Cote covers:
Intro: Man is it hot, Cote’s background
(0:34) Why Cote made the move: going to the other side of the fence
(1:55) What is his new position and what will he be doing: his cloudy focus
(2:44) His first impressions: serious about solutions
Today at the W hotel in Austin, Dell held its bi-annual analyst summit. Today’s event is the third in a series of analyst functions organized around the theme “Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era.” The first event was held in San Francisco in March of last year and the second came six months later in Boston.
Today’s program
Today’s event was broken into three sections. The first section featured presentations by
Karen Quintos, SVP and CMO
Dave Johnston, SVP Corporate Strategy
Brian Gladden, CFO
Steve Felice, President, Consumer, Small and Medium Business
Paul Bell, President, Public and Large enterprise
In the case of Steve and Paul they also each featured a couple of customers on stage.
The second section was a solutions panel moderated by Brad Anderson, SVP of Enterprise solutions and featured members of his team who manage strategy, storage, networking and computing platforms. The final section of the day was also a panel. This featured the GM of Dell China, the head of Dell’s OEM business, Dell’s GM of Public and Large Enterprise in Europe, Middle East and Africa, the head of Dell Channels and the GM of Dell Small and Medium business solutions.
How did we do?
To see how the event came across, I grabbed some time with Redmonk analyst Michael Cote and we sat down for a chat (I’m hoping to grab more analyst feedback at day two tomorrow):
Some of the ground Michael covers:
What his clients ask him about Dell and what, as a result was he looking for today
Dell’s focus on solutions and de-emphasis on technology
Is Dell putting on its big boy pants?
The value of expanding on Dell’s success in select verticals
Last Friday I got together with Michael Cote of Red Monk and John Willis of Canonical for a podcast. We met up at a nearby coffee shop and chatted about a whole bunch o’ stuff.
You can listen to the actual podcast on Cote’s blog.
Dell’s cloud building business, focused on a small group of hyper-scale customers (Azure and Facebook being a couple I can name), delivering a high volume of highly customized machines for these customers.
Some of the learnings we’ve gained with working with this group.
Our intent to take this effort to a much wider group of customers and offer complete cloud solutions made up of hardware, third party software, a reference architecture and services.
Michael Cote of Redmonk welcomes us all. (credit Dave Nielsen)
This past Saturday, Cloud Camp Austin was held down on the UT campus. There was a very healthy turnout and a lot of great discussions were generated.
Sequence of Events
After opening salutations, camp got underway with a series of six five-minute lightening talks delivered by the camp’s gold sponsors.
My lightening talk: Mapping Processes in the Cloud (credit: Dave Nielsen)
The Main Event
From there, Dave Nielsen, the man who originally developed the cloud camp format (and who took most of the pictures in this post — see them all), guided us through the process of coming up with topics for session discussions. That process, appropriately enough given that this was an unconference, began with an “unpanel.”
The Unpannel: Michael Wilde of Splunk, (not sure), Dustin from Canonical, Cote, myself (credit Dave Nielsen)
All Together Now
The way it worked was the room first brainstormed a list of topics they were interested in discussing/learning more about. Anyone who thought they were an expert on one or more of these topics got to get up from their seats and form a five person panel at the front of the room. Each member of the panel then answered two questions from the board and as the question was answered the audience was asked if the topic had been covered by the answer or if it warranted further discussion in an afternoon session
(L->R) Dave Nielsen leads us through our unconference set up. Canonical's Dustin Kirkland and hero-for-hire John West lend a hand.
A Schedule is Born
After the panel, as a group we all decided what the final sessions would be and who would lead them. To lead a session you could either be knowledgeable in the area or completely clueless but wanted to learn about it.
The completed schedule: three sessions ran at a time and there were three time slots (credit Dave Nielsen)
Coming Soon
While at camp I did a couple of video interviews, one with Dustin Kirkland of Canonical and one with Todd Morey of Mosso/Rackspace. I should be posting those in the next few days. I also found myself on the other end of the microphone being interviewed by Mr. Cote. That should be appearing in the near distant future on his blog.
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 find the first group above the most interesting as well as the most tangible for the average bear.
So what does the board think?
A couple of weeks ago the Data Center Advisory board over at Searchdatacenter.com was asked to weigh in with their thoughts on cloud computing. RedMonk analyst Michael Cote offered up his SaaSy perspective as follows:
IT managers should be looking at converting their on-premise infrastructure to what we recently called “Software-as-a-Service” and now the bucket of “cloud computing.” If your email isn’t in the cloud already, there should be a fantastically good reason, like regulations that prevent off-premises email.
Can you host your instant messaging in the cloud? How about file sharing and basic intranet functions? Even things like SharePoint look attractive. Essentially, you want to inventory all of the low-priority items you have on your intranet and ask if it’s cheaper to move them off-premise.
Although I would have chosen a less pejorative term than “low-priority items,” I think Cote’s advice is spot on. He then goes on, while warning against irrational cloud exuberance, to clearly list the key advantages of move apps to the cloud:
Top of the list tends to be cost (both up-front and ongoing, especially when it comes to upgrading and maintenance) but also flexibility and new functionality that come with cloud-based applications.
Posted by Barton George 
