XP might be the operating system
that will never die, but most free support for it will on April 14.
Redmond magazine found some readers who
weren't too impressed with that little bit of news, and we're guessing they're not the only ones.
How do you feel about free XP support expiring? Send your thoughts to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 09, 20092 comments
It might not be true that there's a solution for every problem. But in the technology industry, that's not really such a big deal. What matters in tech is that there's a problem for every solution.
You've probably noticed that while software vendors love to refer to their applications as "solutions," we jaded, ink- (or pixel-?) stained wretches use words like "applications," "offerings" or even "wares." (We don't say "programs" much anymore because "software program" just sounds like something that would run from a floppy disk -- the original kind -- on a computer with 64K of memory. But we digress.)
A very important component of selling software applications, as any partner knows, is identifying problems -- preferably problems clients didn't know they had -- and then, infomercial style, whipping out a "solution" (with some services included, of course) to solve those problems. Most of the time, that's a totally legitimate practice, as companies sometimes don't realize how much more efficient and profitable a certain application, along with some guidance about it, can make them.
But sometimes those "solutions" cause problems of their own, problems that need solving by, well, another "solution" or application or whatever you want to call it. And that's what HP is talking about this week as it beefs up its Business Service Automation (or BSA, not to be confused with the Boy Scouts of America) line of software to cover virtualization storage and operations. The left-coast vendor invited a few press types, your editor included, to its Marlborough, Mass. location this week to talk about the problems virtualization can cause and how HP's applications can solve them.
Another digression here: HP's Marlborough site is a low-slung, rambling facility that sits at the edge of the earth, on the very fringe of what might be considered Greater Boston, with the hills of Western Massachusetts (and, presumably, oblivion for many Bostonians) beckoning on the horizon. The place has cubicle farms that would make Monsanto jealous -- apparently, almost everybody at HP, including a lot of executives, has a cubicle rather than an office -- and a bit of history, as well.
RCA originally built the building, which digital (yes, the long-lamented digital Equipment Corp., small "d," please) later bought. If you stand perfectly still, you can almost hear digital Co-Founder Ken Olsen saying, "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home," a quote that's usually taken way out of context but is nonetheless pretty darn funny. Anyway, the ghosts of technology past roam in Marlborough, harkening back to the days when Boston-based companies mostly dominated the tech world, before Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people yanked the industry to the other side of the country. End digression.
Some smart folks from HP spent much of the three hours or so that this get-together consumed talking about the problems virtualization causes. Oh, they understand the problems it solves. But their point -- and it seems valid -- is that virtualization might cut technology costs, but it can actually drive up operations and management costs if left to grow like kudzu.
Basically, the message is that virtualization is complex, and finding the right people to administrate it can be difficult; and for all the good that virtualization does, it can actually be a bit of a nightmare when not properly managed. Hypervisors are easy to set up, which is nice, but that ease of setup can lead to excessive proliferation of virtual machines, as well as a network of connections to servers, storage and the network that becomes unmanageable, with the connections themselves becoming very hard to detect and manage.
"In the physical IT environment, if you needed additional capacity for a marketing program you were going to run, you expected a month to get that capacity," said Bob Meyer, worldwide lead for HP virtualization solutions. "Now, with a server and hypervisor, I can set it up in minutes. I can set up a server much faster, but I'm really just pushing bottlenecks. I have a new environment, much more mobile, much harder to see."
That sounds like a problem. "Virtualization and daily operation overhead are the things that yield a monthly bill," added Michel Feaster, senior director of products for HP's Business Service Automation line. "That is a cost that will only increase unless you do something dramatically different. Customers get into production and see an explosion in their storage costs. Storage is allocated but unutilized. The capacity for each virtual machine is often not used."
Hmm, that's another problem. There were actually a bunch more, but you get where we're going with this. Virtualization is a "solution" that needs another "solution." And for HP, that other solution is automation. Forrester Senior Analyst Glenn O'Donnell, who also made the trip to Marlborough, chimed in that, "We see virtualization and automation being inextricably linked. There's no way to separate the two. You cannot do virtualization without automation."
Well, then. Good thing HP is on the case. The two latest additions to BSA, announced this week and already available, are all about virtualization automation. HP Storage Essentials discovers virtual servers and provisions storage to virtual machines. The idea is to optimize storage capacity and allocation in virtual datacenters, thereby eliminating that problem of paying too much for unused storage.
HP Operations Orchestration (we'll refrain from calling it HPOO) automates workflows and repurposes servers and storage. Operations Orchestration users management interfaces from virtualization vendors, including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. The goal, again, is to let companies reduce operational costs and, ultimately, help IT develop an internal cloud of services that would replace the notion of having individual pieces of infrastructure dedicated to particular departments or tasks.
"Provisioning servers is tactical, but changing business services is strategic to the business," Feaster said.
And, HP says, it's a solution to a problem caused by a solution. Or something like that.
What's your take on virtualization automation? Where are you in your rollout of virtualization technology? Share your story at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 09, 20092 comments
If Rome is the Eternal City, then it must run on Windows XP. Even with considerable hype around Windows 7 continuing to swirl, Microsoft said this week that customers will be able to downgrade from Windows 7 not just to Vista (as if anybody would do that) but to XP.
Redmond columnist Mary Jo Foley
has the dish, as usual.
OK, we love XP. Everybody does. It's familiar and useful, and it still does most of what most of us need an OS to do. But at some point, isn't it going to enter a Willie Mays-with-the-Mets stage of its career? (For our foreign readers, that's another baseball reference; soccer fans, you might want to go with George Best with the L.A. Aztecs -- if you're old enough.) When does XP become antiquated? Our feeling is pretty soon -- when Windows 7, or maybe the first Windows 7 service pack, comes along and sends the legend into retirement.
Speaking of downgrades, we've been hearing that Microsoft's process for doing them is...well, not great. If you have any stories or complaints about it you'd like to share, share them at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 07, 20091 comments
For the next few weeks, we'll be featuring the
RCP (the magazine) Platinum Partners, those companies whose partner programs are the best fits for the Microsoft partner according to the magazine's readers. Today's profile? Well, it's no surprise: It's the old pro,
Cisco.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 07, 20090 comments
Monday just wasn't a day for sun. Or for Sun. Here in Greater (and wetter) Boston, dark skies and drenching rains
washed out the season opener for the Red Sox. (For our non-U.S. readers, the Red Sox are the local baseball team.) And over on the other coast, Sun Microsystems saw talks of a possible acquisition by IBM fade like...well, like a sunset, we suppose.
OK, so technically the talks broke down over the weekend, as these things so often seem to do, with IBM formally withdrawing its massive $7 billion buyout offer on Sunday. Still, the deal appears to be a washout on Monday (when we're writing this), just as the Sox game was. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the IBM-Sun breakdown story, followed up on its scoop by reassuring us that IBM will bravely soldier on despite this setback.
But IBM's health was never really in question. Sun is the company that has had some troubling financial news in recent years. And, oddly enough, Sun is apparently the party that walked away from the deal, with ex-CEO and current chairman, the supposedly retired Scott McNealy (he lives!), opposed to selling the company he co-founded.
McNealy's move has already drawn criticism from some quarters, with pundits comparing Sun's resistance of IBM to Yahoo's thus far not-so-successful resistance of Microsoft. The thinking there is that Sun is worth about as much now as it'll ever be worth, so now is the time to sell.
Here at RCPU, we've long respected McNealy as a technology visionary and a feisty competitor, but we do wonder whether he's a little bit too proud of his baby right now. Consolidation is normal in any industry, but we at RCPU aren't always huge fans of it when it comes to technology companies.
Sure, a buyout by a bigger firm can boost a smaller company's coffers and foster innovation. But purchases of one big vendor by another often have the opposite effect, with the buyer and the bought spending more time trying to merge operations than actually combining forces to come out with cool, new stuff.
Sun has always been an innovative company with a West Coast culture; it's not that IBM's not innovative, but Big Blue's button-down approach might not fly with folks who currently work for a pony-tailed CEO in the person of Jonathan Schwartz. Then again, as we said a couple of weeks ago, if IBM can end up being the company that saves Sun's technology, the deal might be good for the industry -- if not for Microsoft partners, who would (eventually) face a bold new competitor, especially in the cloud computing market.
Sun's financial situation is difficult, to say the least, and while we'd like to see Sun survive as an independent company, the pressure coming from Wall Street might be too much for the defiant McNealy. We suspect, as many other watchers do, that the deal might not actually be dead yet. The big question now is: With rain forecast all week for Boston, will IBM buy Sun before the Sox play their first game? Probably not, but stay tuned.
What's your take on IBM and Sun? Can Sun survive on its own? What would a merger mean for Microsoft partners? Send your thoughts to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 07, 20091 comments
This one's for teeny tiny businesses that might otherwise be looking at (gasp!) open source.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 02, 20090 comments
In our continuing series of the
best "other" partner programs for Microsoft partners to work with, we come to...wait, what? That can't be right. Dell?
Yes, the former titan of direct sales turned channel champion scores well in our survey, despite some of the comments we've received about the company at RCPU over the years. Read more about Dell's successful partner play here.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 02, 20092 comments
We're going old school -- like, long-before-your-editor-was-born school -- to
set the mood for this one. Microsoft's been talking open source again, which usually leads to anger in the open source community, double-talk from Redmond and confusion for the rest of us.
Not long ago, Microsoft dropped a white paper on how great a job it's doing of "actively participating in open source." You can download the white paper here, but we'll warn you that the PDF crashed your editor's Firefox browser multiple times but worked fine in Internet Explorer (seriously). That's just a word of warning. That's all we're saying. Any irony you might derive from that little revelation is purely your own and not the responsibility of RCPU.
Microsoft's history with open source is controversial at best and disastrous at worst, and it's hard to get a read on how the company really feels about non-proprietary technology. We're guessing that most folks in Redmond hate it, but regardless they clearly acknowledge its importance and want to do something about it. Some seem to want to interoperate with it and embrace it; others seem interested in patent-bashing it to death, and still others seem to see the whole thing as a standards battle. Nevertheless, open source is clearly on the radar in the Pacific Northwest.
So Microsoft is addressing open source -- perhaps in a somewhat contradictory and confounding way, but it's addressing it nonetheless. That's fair to say. But -- and this is what we've been leading up to -- the notion that Microsoft is "actively participating in open source" seems a little misleading. Oh, sure, it's a vague enough statement; there probably isn't a company in the industry that isn't "actively participating in open source" in one way or another, and given that Firefox is the official browser of RCPU, we figure we're "actively participating in open source," too. Just about everybody in the world who uses a computer probably is somehow.
So we're not calling anybody in Redmond a liar here, but we are left with the distinct impression that Microsoft is trying to make itself out to be open source-friendly, almost accepting of the model and much more a part of the open source community than it really is. Oddly enough, the whole white paper doesn't really read that way, and overall it's not a bad assessment of the Microsoft-open source relationship. But phrases like this in the introduction jump out at us:
"Microsoft's open source strategy is grounded in recognition of the value of openness to working with others -- including open source communities -- to help customers and partners succeed in today's heterogeneous 'world of choice.'"
Suitably vague, of course...and we're not impressed. Why go on the defensive, Microsoft? Why pretend to want to have anything to do with open source? Is anybody going to buy this stuff, anyway? We wish Microsoft would just say what it means and drop the niceties. Here's what we'd like to read in the introduction of Microsoft's open source white paper. Remember, this is RCPU talking, not Microsoft, but it's how we suspect most people in Redmond feel:
"Frankly, Microsoft isn't a big fan of open source because it's a competitor and, like any business, we're not so fond of competitors. And frankly, we don't want to work with open source, Google, Apple, IBM or any of our other competitors because, like any company in any industry, we want customers to buy everything they possibly can from us and then upgrade it later on, or come back and buy it again and again. But we recognize that customers don't always do that (although we honestly can't figure out why, given how great our stuff is), so we'll open ourselves up to interoperability and cooperation to the extent that customers and partners demand it, and to the extent that we're not giving away intellectual property. We'd still like to see Linux go the way of OS/2, though, and we're going to do everything in our power to make that happen."
Of course, no company would come out with a statement like that, but wouldn't it be fun (and refreshing) if one did? All we're saying here is that Microsoft is in business to make money and not to pretend to care about open source, and there's nothing wrong with that. Talking about meeting customer demands is great, but buttering up open source with lawyer-vetted copy just seems silly. All the soft-pedaling coming out of Redmond feels stilted and disingenuous, and we really don't think it's necessary. Stop pretending, Microsoft. Just be what you are. It has worked pretty well for you so far.
What's your take on Microsoft and open source? Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 02, 20092 comments
Think Microsoft's in a hurry to get this thing
out the door? Yeah, so do we.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 01, 20093 comments
It's no surprise that HP scored well in the reader survey for the inaugural
RCP Platinum Partner Program, an awards program for channel programs that are a good fit with Microsoft solutions. Microsoft and HP have been strategic partners for decades, and HP carries many of the product categories partners are looking to sell -- from PCs to servers to storage to printers to software. In addition, Microsoft and HP have a joint program called the HP/Microsoft Frontline Partnership specifically for their joint partners.
Read more about RCP's award profile of the HP PartnerONE Program or read the entire RCP Platinum Partner Program report.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 01, 20090 comments
A couple of things before we start. First off, your editor isn't the biggest of April Fool's fans, so you won't be getting any fake news today. Second, we've promised this before, but this time, we mean it: Due to, well, lots of stuff, RCPU is going to get shorter...pretty much starting today. Try to keep the cheering to a minimum, please. Anyway.
A new -- or ostensibly new -- computing model is always a wonderful excuse for an old-fashioned slap-fest between mega-vendors. And so it is with cloud computing. When something called an Open Cloud Manifesto, which didn't even appear to be supported by the organization that sponsored it, appeared Monday, Microsoft immediately (and perhaps unnecessarily) slammed it.
Now, Microsoft and IBM, among other big names -- but not Amazon and Google -- are in some sort of weird negotiations about openness in the cloud or...something. (Microsoft and some other big vendors are also trying to convince the government that cloud computing is secure, but that seems to be another matter altogether -- one that's mainly driven by hunger for government cloud computing contracts.)
Manifestos, calls for standards, oddball negotiations, meetings among vendors about interoperability...we've seen all this stuff before. And it mostly means nothing. The fact remains that the market will decide how (or whether) cloud computing shakes out, whose model wins and whose goes down in flames. (Either that or one vendor will sabotage the whole market and steal all the revenues for itself, but we're not going any further with that thought.)
And when companies finally do get comfortable in the clouds and need to exchange data, the big cloud vendors -- should there be more than one left -- will find a way to make their systems work together, not out of a magnanimous sense of friendship but because their customers are chomping at the bit for a solution.
That's the technology industry. That's capitalism. That's the way we like it. "Manifesto" is a very 20th-century word to us, and not one that has often had a positive connotation. Let's leave it in the past and move on with the future -- a future of fierce competition and, hopefully, great innovation.
What's your take on where the cloud is moving? Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on April 01, 20090 comments
We're always encouraged here at RCPU when vendors talk about cozying up to partners, so we welcomed Novell's recent revelation that the company is trying to
get partners more involved in deals. But, clearly, there are still some details to be worked out, as reader David points out:
"Next time you meet with Novell, find out what they plan to do about companies that use SUSE for their solutions. I see a big push for existing partners; if you look at the channel, most of the partners are service-based and rely more on partner consulting services than on new product sales. We have the only FIPS 3 identity-based encryption appliance available that utilizes a Novell solution stack, and yet since we are new to the market we can't get any help from Novell. I would be very interested to hear Novell's take on assisting new companies that bring their product to market utilizing a Novell stack. Are they only committed to companies with a customer base, or are they willing to incubate and assist companies coming to market? What kind of incubation assistance from Novell is available? SUSE is still new to them, and if Novell doesn't step up and do like Oracle, which provides incubation assistance for companies, how will Novell entice companies to risk bringing new products to market on SUSE? I'm not knocking Novell; we are just struggling to gain customer acceptance all on our own and feel our investment has been all one-sided and haven't seen support that we had hoped for."
David, you bring up a lot of good questions that we obviously can't answer, but we will say that our impression is that Novell's revamped partner strategy is very much a work in progress. And while we don't spend a lot of time writing about Novell -- RCPU is a Microsoft-focused newsletter, after all, at least in theory -- we'll bring this up next time your editor talks to his neighbors in Waltham, Mass. Or perhaps somebody from Novell will read this entry and respond. We'll see. But as with any undertaking that's really just getting started, a little patience might be in order, although we understand that you need a lot more than patience right now.
Meanwhile, Jim thinks RCP Editor in Chief Scott Bekker is all wet in his analysis of Dell's moves to bring distributors into its channel mix. Looks like Dell still has some explaining to do to get parts of the channel on board:
"I think I still have my copy of Dell Direct around here somewhere if you would like to refresh the memory banks on where they stand. OK, enough of the wet noodle slaps...
"Have you considered they also sell to Wal-Mart, Sam's Club and Staples? Is this really who we should be competing against? Last time I looked, the profit margins on these deals was 2 percent to 4 percent for resellers. Hard to pay commissions, much less make a living with those numbers. We're a small company dealing with other small (10-20 seats) companies so maybe this doesn't apply to everyone, but I have been burned by Dell in the past, and see them as nothing more than a nuisance and lower-end vendor in my area."
Have a response, a comment, a question or a rant...about anything? Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on March 26, 20091 comments