John Willis's Blog

Anyone up for a cool mashup challenge?

botchagalupe — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 03:55:55 GMT

The other day Valleywag.com published a complete list of all the attendees at TED and there were some really famous names there. When I saw the list I thought this could make a really cool mashup. If you took all the names and then try to find who are the most popular in descending order (using something like enterprise search (Hadoop)). I thought about doing it but, frankly it would take me to much time. I was just thinking out loud that if someone who was up to the challenge could do this it would educate dopes like me and create some really cool publicity for this site.

It would/could be a lot more sophisticated than this but...

Aaron LeBerge 26,900 hits

Adam Dell 892,000 hits

...

Al Gore 7,730,000 hits

Anyway this is the stupid kind of stuff I think about when the kids go to bed.

Thanks for listening

John

Demystifying Clouds

botchagalupe — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:43:43 GMT

I posted a rather lengthy article about utility cloud computing today if you are interested. I tried to remove some of the hype around all the cloud talk going on. Here it is if you are interested:

Demystifying Clouds

However, my next and more important challenge is how to start the discussion around management of cloud utility computing. Is there a place for IT management and what will it look like. I have looked at AWS and I am starting to look at 3Tera as well. If any one is interested in this discussion let me know.

Thanks

Welcome to Gloversville

botchagalupe — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:31:54 GMT

I became a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan after I finished the first page of the Tipping Point. I have read Blink

and I usually listen to it over and over again on long automobile trips

with my audio copy. Now with the advent of pod-casting I have become a

junkie for anything Gladwell. In fact I would pay good money to hear

him recite the Yellow Pages or Yellow Book.

Recently, I used one of my audible.com credits to download a pod cast of Malcolm Gladwell with Robert Krulwich at the 92nd Street Y. As always he was brilliant. However, in this clip he talked about a town up near Albany NY called Gloversville.

At the beginning of the 20th century Gloversville was the epicenter of you guessed it "gloves". As Gladwell describes, if you were to visit Gloversville in the early 20th century you probably would have found the place quite boring. However, if you really cared about gloves this was the place to be. Here is a quote from one of Gladwell’s writings about Gloversville.

It's hard to imagine anyone caring so deeply about gloves, and had we visited Gloversville in its prime most of us would have found it a narrow and provincial place. But if you truly know gloves and think about them and dream about them and, more important, if you are surrounded every day by a community of people who know and think and dream about gloves, a glove becomes more than a glove.

Does this sound familiar?

BarcampESM - Every Picture Tells a Story

botchagalupe — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:38:05 GMT

http://www.johnmwillis.com/wp/barcamp/barcampesm-photos/

Getting Enterprise Developers on board with ESM

botchagalupe — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:19:07 GMT

Alex Honor of ControlTier posted a cool suggestion for BarcampESM called "Getting Enterprise Developers on board with ESM". Incidentally, this was actually tried once before and it was called The Application Management Specification (AMS). AMS was developed by Tivoli in 1995 to expand the original Desktop Management Forum (DMTF) work for managing distributed applications. Around that time I taught "Tivoli Plus Module Construction" classes to Tivoli OEM partners. We used all of the AMS specifications for the vendor product integrations. Tivoli had a really cool toolkit/wizard called the "AMS Module Designer". The Module Designer would enables an application to become management ready throughout its life-cycle. The AMS spec included the following:

Application Distribution

Application Installation

Dependency Checking

Application Monitoring

Application Configuration

Operational Control

Deploying updates and new releases

Application component relationships (BSM)

Security Management

Application Response Time Management

The Module Designer would output generic specification files that then could be used by any vendor that did ESM. If you were a vendor that did software distribution you could abstract the application distribution, installation, and configuration specs and implement them using your vendor specific technology. Likewise for event management and monitoring vendors. Although the idea was great most non-Tivoli vendors refused to back a specification that was developed by Tivoli and it never went anywhere.

If you want to see more on the history of the Module Builder I will be posting a blog entry about it on my site johnmwillis.com

John

BarcampESM Will Rock!

botchagalupe — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:15:27 GMT

whurley nailed the venue, its going to be at J Blacks on 6th St. The game plan is to have a party Friday night at J Blacks starting at 6pm and then the camp will run all day Saturday. I am looking forward to meeting everyone.

John Willis

How Will You Shine?

botchagalupe — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 04:50:01 GMT

Sorry for the off-topic entry but here goes...

If you are interested in open source and education and helping please take a look at this...

http://opensourceinthehood.com/?q=2008/01/05/how-will-you-shine-podcast Open Source in the Hood

BarcampESM - Cloud Computing an ESM

botchagalupe — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:27:22 GMT

I have added another suggested session for Barcamp ESM in Austin on 1/18/08.

Cloud Computing - Where does ESM fit in?

(John Willis, Johnmwillis.com)

+How is cloud computing going to affect ESM? What should ESM vendors

be doing today and what will the future look like? Google if you a

listening ... I am calling you out ... If you really want to help

"open" then please come and lend a hand.+

If you are interested please contact me. Also, if you are really interested please blog or put some pressure on Google to pony up. The probably have an exceptional amount of data on this subject and It would be great if they could "share" and participate.

See my post about the mild spat I had with Chris DiBona at OSCON last year in reference to this topic.

They Might be Giants

Mission Impossible

botchagalupe — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:53:14 GMT

The IBM ESM Integration Story

Last night, I attended a Tivoli User Group (TUG) meeting in Atlanta.

One of the presentations was on IBM's new Tivoli Service Request

Manager product. During the presentation, my mind started to wander,

and I wondered how difficult it must have been for IBM just to get this

far in its story.

In the past five years it has acquired at least eight companies in the

enterprise systems management space alone. I am not talking about just

the coding efforts. I just can't imagine the cultures, the management,

and coordination it must have taken just to be able to show the

Powerpoint slide of its integration road map. So, before I tell you the

two questions that I posed to the presenter, let's do a little

refresher.

Chart of IBM ESM Related Acquisitions

YEAR	ACQUISITION	ESM PRODUCT INTEGRATION
2003	Think Dynamics	Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM)
2003	Rational Software	IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager ITCAM
2004	Candle	IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM)
2004	Cyanea	IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM)
2005	Collation	Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM)
2006	MicroMuse	Tivoli Netcool , IBM Tivoli Network Manager for IP (ITNMIP), Tivoli Business Systems Manager (TBSM)
2006	MRO Software	Tivoli Service Request Manager
2007	Cognos	TBD

Think Dynamics

The major changes in the traditional Tivoli stack started in 2003

with the acquisition of the privately held Think Dynamics. Think

Dynamics provided provisioning and orchestration technology. My

uneducated guess is that, by the end of 2007, more than half of the IBM

customer base has not fully converted from the old Tivoli Configuration

manager product.

Rational Software

In that same year IBM purchased Rational Software. I believe that

IBM has had reasonably success with the penetration of its Rational

products. HP, however, still has a strong hold in the testing market

with the Mercury tools. Rational products have leaked into some of the

enterprise systems, products such as IBM Tivoli Composite Applications

Monitor (ITCAM), which is primarily used for synthetic transactions and

transaction response timings.

Candle

Most IBM insiders will tell you that IBM purchased Candle for its Z

penetration and residuals. Somewhere along the way, however, it

realized that it could gain mammoth savings by shelving its IBM Tivoli

Monitoring version 5 upgrade development effort and by just using the

Candle product as the new ITM version 6. Very similar to the Think

Dynamics customer transition story, it has been difficult for many of

IBM's monitoring customer to make a clean conversion over to the new

Candle technology

Cyanea

Cyanea was small three-year-old company that IBM had invested in at

an early stage with an 11% holding. Cyanea has been integrated into the

ITCAM family of products.

Collation

Collation was probably the best per-price acquisition that IBM has

made in the last few years. The Collation discovery application will be

the linchpin for all the Tivoli products. The new name of the Collation

software is called Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager

(TADDM). TADDM puts the "C" in IBM's CCMDB. IBM describes its CCMDB as

both discovery and CMDB. In my opinion, you can't have one without the

other. If IBM actually pulls off this massive integration of all these

products, it is TADDM that is going to make it sail.

MicroMuse

This acquisition will put the final nail in what we Tivoli old

timers have called home for the last years. Netview, which actually

came from the original HP Openview code base, is finally dead. The new

IBM Tivoli Network Manager for IP products is the official replacement

for Netview. Now, IBM claims that it is the only vendor that can do the

whole layer 2 through 7 stack and that it can do layer 0 as well. Also,

IBM says that its go forward strategy for event management and

correlation is the Netcool Omnibus product line. What , no more TEC

Prolog? Good riddance. IBM is saying that Tivoli Enterprise Console

still has a shelf life until circa 2012; however, I am not waiting

around. Another area where MicroMuse has made a big impact is the

replacement of the Tivoli Business Systems Manager with the Netcool RAD

and Impact products. I wasn't a big fan of TBSM 3.x; the new TBSM 4.x

(Netcool) stuff is much better. Also, make sure that you now call it

the Tivoli Business Service Manager.

MRO Software

The IT service request story over the last ten years could make for

a great adventure novel. In 1997 IBM paid $200 million for a company

called Software Artistry. These were the boom years for Tivoli. Sales

were vertical, champagne was flowing, everyone was feeding off the

trough. Even lowly consultants such as myself were driving Cadillac

rentals and staying in the Ritz. IBM was selling a great integration

story in the late nineties. Between 1996 and the end of 1997, IBM had

acquired Tivoli, Unison (Tivoli Workload Scheduler), and Software

Artistry. No other company in the enterprise systems space could tout

that kind of integration story (sound familiar?). The Peregrine and

Remedy replacement business was on fire. Then, the year 2k and the

dot-bomb fizzle came. IBM unloaded the Service Desk product to none

other than Peregrine Systems for an undisclosed amount of money.

Meanwhile, all those poor customers who had to convert from Peregrine's

Service Center to Tivoli's Service Desk now had to convert back. A few

years later, Peregrine bought Remedy, and there was practically only

one vendor doing service request management at the enterprise level.

Somewhere along the way, Peregrine pulled an Enron and had to unload

Remedy on the cheap. The "M" (John Moores, owner of Peregrine) sells

Remedy to the B and C in BMC. In 2006, guess who has the best ITIL/CMDB

story? Somewhere along the way IBM gets religion and realizes the error

of its ways and tries to start an ITIL strategy. It realized that,

without Asset, Problem, Change, and Config software, you are stuck with

just vapor. In 2006, IBM acquired MRO Software, and in 2007, it is back

in the game with ITSRM.

Cognos

The ironic part of this from an ESM perspective is that Tivoli used

to have a product that OEM'd Congnos. It was called Tivoli Decision

Support (TDS). TDS took Tivoli's DM 3.x monitoring data and built cubes

using Cognos. It was a nightmare to implement. IBM Tivoli has recently

announced the Tivoli Common Reporting product (TCR) for common

reporting for all of its Tivoli portfolio. TCR is based on the Eclipse

BIRT open source product. I am guessing, however, that this might

evolve into a stop gap. Why would IBM pay $5 billion for a company with

over 3500 employees and continue to use BIRT as its reporting tool?

My Questions

Now that we have completed the refresher, let me get to my two

questions. My first question was really more of a comment: "It looks

like you have around two more year to go for complete integration." The

presenter disagreed with me and wanted to say that his demo was proof

that I was wrong (see my joke about demo's... My Views on OSS ESM (Part 4).

He went on to say that Gartner said the same thing a year ago and

changed its story a few months ago after seeing the demo (see thoughts

about this in My Views on OSS ESM (Part 1)).

Ok, the demo, sure. So, when I asked him if he could tell me one

fortune 5000 comnay that is currently running an integrated solution

with TPM, ITM, TADDM, Netcool OmniBus, and ITSRM, he said that he cold

name only one company that was running three of the five. I rest my

case. So, is IBM's ESM integration story a mission impossible? For any

other company, I would definitely say, "Yes." But IBM has a lot of

resources to make this all happen. If it does make it all happen, it

will have the best story in ESM.

Do You Hadoop?

botchagalupe — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:27:53 GMT

Cloud computing in 2008 will be white hot. Hadoop is the dirty

little secret behind a good portion of cloud computing. Google, IBM,

Yahoo, and Amazon are doing the Hadoop. In 2008, a lot more companies

will be following their lead. Last year, Google sponsored an initiative

to introduce Google 101 at the University of Washington (see Business Week article). IBM has also jumped into the game by teaming with Google to address Internet-scale computing initiatives at a small number of universities. IBM has also announced a competitive solution to Amazon’s web services (AWS) called “Blue Cloud” that will also be based on Hadoop. All indications are that clear skies are ahead for Hadoop in 2008.

So my question to you is ... Will you Hadoop in 2008?

Links…

May a “Blue Cloud” rain good fortunes upon you

I seem to have my head in a cloud today .. yuk yuk yuk

Hadoop

Great Post on Cloud Computing Concerns

Does ITIL Really Matter?

botchagalupe — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:03:21 GMT

I know this question has been asked many times before but in the

enterprise space it seems that ITIL is always a given. My thoughts are

maybe changes in the IT industry might change the need for ITIL. To be

clear on this I am not proposing to know the answer to this question.

Some Industry Considerations

Five years ago when I would teach a class to enterprise customers I

would always ask all the customers how many servers do you manage? On a

good day I would get maybe 10k and only a couple of super

infrastructure banks would answer above 20k. Recently I have been

attending a number of open source meetings and I am meeting people who

tell me that their infrastructures have over 100k servers and I finding

more and more that these numbers are actually small in the new WEB 2.0

world. I have talked to some consultants who are working with RackSpace

and they have told me they have over 100k servers. A recent article by

Robin Harris suggests that Google might have over a million cores. I

can’t image how many servers Amazon is farming with their S3/EC2

offerings.

Changing the Game

Companies like Facebook are adding 350k user’s a day and doubling

ever six months. Virtual World networks like Second Life and Kaneva are

growing with numbers that are mind blowing. How do companies cope with

change in these types of environments? My belief is that they have two

options. One, they go and blow and don’t focus on traditional ITM/ESM

techniques or two they change the game. If you look at what Google is

doing in Portland on the Columbia River, they are indeed changing the

game. They are using free software and cheap hardware to build what

they call “Power Provisioning for a Warehouse-sized Computer”. I

recently attended an IBM session where their development lab in Markham

Ontario is completely virtual and is run by a giant provisioning system

called Tornado. IBM developers in this facility select their

provisioned system from a self service portal and its all on demand.

Perhaps the best example of a company changing the game is Amazon’s.

Amazon processes over 4 million purchase transactions per day utilizing

over 150 different network services to deliver these successful

transactions. They are building their infrastructure based on the

Google Three Rules.

Cheap Servers - Mass produced low end servers, free software. Energy efficient switches and unmanaged switches.
Expect Failure - Cheap hardware will fail. Therefore build recovery into the software.
Scalability - Create monster scalability. Google has created clusters that exceed 8000.

Enterprises like Google and Amazon are defining a new type of data

center. I compare it to RAID 1 for servers. Plan for failures the way

large companies plan for redundant electricity. This kind of future

could normalize IT to the status of electricity that is a true

commodity. If you take a closer look at Amazon’s Elastic Computing

Cloud (EC2), today you are guaranteed 99.999% availability for your

servers and your total investment is a light switch and service bill

with no ITIL required.

John Willis

johnmwillis.com

Infrastructure 2.0

botchagalupe — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:50:37 GMT

Last Sunday, the day after BarCampNashville, I had lunch with Luke Kanies, the owner of Reductive Labs

and the author of Puppet. It became a working lunch due to all my

questions about his product. I first met Luke at OSCON 2007 during his

Puppet session. I hadn’t planned to attend the Puppet session because I

was really trying to focus on monitoring and availability at the time

since I had stepped out of the configuration management space.

Luke gave a great presentation, and I became really interested in Puppet. Back in the day, I used to work with all the Tivoli

products and used to be as knowledgeable of the Tivoli configuration

management tools as I was of monitoring and event correlation.

Somewhere along the way, however, the Tivoli products became way too

complicated for one person to be an expert with all their ESM

offerings. In fact, my litmus test for a product is that, if I can’t be

the smartest person in a classroom with a particular product, then I

won’t teach that product. If I stop teaching the product, then I have

ceased to be the smartest person with it in the room. Luke

says that we should rename ESM and that he hates software. In fact, he

calls himself a professional software hater (’wareHater). In describing this distaste for software, he coined the term Infrastructure 2.0. He basically claims that he created Puppet because he was embarrassed by the current state of computer administration.The current state of configuration management products can be separated into two categories:.

Large Commercial Configuration Management Tools, which include

IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager (ITCM)
BMC Configuration Management (formerly Marimba)
Microsoft Systems Management Server
HP Opsware
Bladelogic

And Open Source Configuration Management Tools, which include

Cfengine
Puppet

+Note: I did not

include IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager and Qlusters in these lists

because they are used much more as provisioning products than as

configuration management tools.+The deeper that I probed with my questions during our working lunch, the more I started to really like his product. In

my view, Puppet differentiates itself from almost all the current

products in the configuration management space in two key ways. One,

Puppet tries to define all its resources in human terms (i.e., what

Luke calls a cross-platform semantic abstraction).

Tivoli, to a certain extent, actually tried

this approach with one of its earlier products called Tivoli User

Administration (TUA). It introduced a cross platform tool for managing OS configurations. Puppet succeeds where

Tivoli fell short because Puppet not only

performs the cross-platform management (i.e., Solaris, SuSe, RedHat,

Debian, Centos, OpenBSD, Oracle Linux, and Ubuntu) but also allows

users to define all their resources in understandable human terms. For

example, Puppet allows a user to define a resource such as a file

system as “filesystem” without having to know the gory details of all

the file system commands and configuration files on different systems.

While Puppet provides this abstraction layer for OS configurations, it also allows a user to define configurations for applications using the same abstraction layer, thereby managing

the distribution and configurations of applications such as MySQL,

Apache, and PostgreSQL. Imagine being able to define all of your

complex software configurations and relationships in simple human

terminology.

Puppet’s ability to define complex relationships

in human terms brings me to the second way in which Puppet

differentiates itself from other products in configuration management

space: One of the Puppet project’s goals is to define a CPAN-like

repository for human resource descriptions (called “recipes”) for all

software products.

Here is an example of a recipe for installing and maintaining MySQL on different machines:

class mysql-server {

$password = “insert_password_here”

package { “MySQL-client”: ensure => installed }

package { “MySQL-server”: ensure => installed }

package { “MySQL-shared”: ensure => installed }

exec { “Set MySQL server root password”:

subscribe => [ Package[”MySQL-server”], Package[”MySQL-client”], Package[”MySQL-shared”]],

refreshonly => true,

unless => “mysqladmin -uroot -p$password status”,

path => “/bin:/usr/bin”,

command => “mysqladmin -uroot password $password”,

}

Currently, the fast-growing Puppet community has

contributed about 50 recipes. Puppet supports most of the configuration

management processes through “Providers,” and it comes with around 10

default providers for managing system configurations. One package

provider supports most of the common Unix/Linux installers, including,

but not limited to, dpkg, gem, rpm, and pkgadd on Solaris. Puppet also

allows users to define other packagers by letting them create their own

packages. For example, Puppet can run on AIX, but it doesn’t have

“installp” support. This missing functionality could be fixed by

creating a new provider. Puppet can also shell out on the agent,

allowing it to install virtually any software product. In fact, I have

been working with Tivoli software distribution

customers for over 10 years, and I can tell you that over 80 percent of

all the Tivoli software packages that I have seen customers develop

have been executions of the native installs.

Architecture

The Puppet server runs as a daemon that commutates using XMLRPC of

HTTPS. Puppet uses standard SSL certificates and includes its own CA.

Here is a simple example of the Puppet architecture:

[ Reductive Labs|http://old.johnmwillis.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/puppet12.png|puppet12.png]

The Puppet agent wakes up every 30 minutes (this

time can be configured) and contacts the server to get its current

configuration. Then, the agent topologically sorts the configuration

and checks the status of all the defined resources for that server. If

nothing has changed for a configured resource, Puppet will take no

action; it acts only when the state of the resource has changed. This

feature allows Puppet to do life-cycle management for a server by doing

the initial install, on-going upgrades, and de-commission. The Puppet

architecture allows machines to be kept up to date and in sync with an

organization’s business policies.

Puppet is written in Ruby and also provides its

own language for defining resources (a language called, conveniently

enough, Puppet). The Puppet language seems extremely flexible and easy

to define because it comprises mostly configuration-type statements.

Though it comes with preset defined functions, users can create their

own Ruby-based functions as well. See the Puppet Wiki for tons of

information about getting started.

Business Model

Reductive Labs, Luke’s company, provides community support for

Puppet through its Wiki, mailing lists, and IRC. Though Puppet is open

source GPL V2, Reductuve Labs, like any good open source vendor,

provides support and services around Puppet. It currently

has 5 paying customers at an average of $15k per year. It also provides

a bootstrap service of on-site installation, training, and

implementation. A customer can typically get the one-week implementation, training, and the first-year subscription support for around $25k. I

usually try to stay way from proprietary vs. OSS price comparisons, but

this cost is very insignificant compared to some of the proprietary

vendors listed above. Currently, Reductive Labs is working with about

12 serious organizations that are now using Puppet among a whole slew

of community users.[https://webmail5.isis.unc.edu/mail/services/go.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fusers.iLike. com]

<span class="MsoHyperlink">[iLike.com|http://ilike.com/]

Uncomfortable with his recent celebrity at

conferences, Luke told me that he has difficulty measuring his

successes because he has his head so deep in the development and

services of Puppet. One of his better success stories is

with iLike.com, a website that allows users to download and share

music. When iLike created one of the first Facebook applications, it

grew from about ½ million users to over 6 million in a week. Luke,

being the entrepreneur that he is, asked how iLike planned to manage

that growth. He discovered that a services company in Seattle was managing iLike.com’s infrastructure build out using Puppet. In

fact, one of the owners of that company told Luke that he makes a

healthy living installing Puppet. Luke admitted that he felt feel

pretty good to know that other people can make a living from his

product.

My Cheesy Attempt at Being a Blog Interviewer

Near the end of the conversation, I felt that I

needed to ask some obligatory “Blogger” type questions. First, I asked,

“Why GPL?” Luke said that it’s not so much the license but what the

license has afforded him to do. For example, within the last year he

has been invited to give Puppet presentations (at not cost to himself)

in five countries. He also feels that he could never have

afforded the type of growth that he has achieved without his open

source community. He also thinks that, if he had created a proprietary

company, he would not have achieved even a small portion of what he has

accomplished in a very short period. Also, his open

source community has a lot of early adapters that thoroughly test out

new functions and features, which can then be delivered earlier in the

development cycle.

I then followed up with my personal “baptism of

fire” question. My theory is that most successful people can pinpoint

one or two “baptism of fire” moments in their career. Though at first

he didn’t recall one, he eventually pointed to his time spent compiling

Apache in 1998. Back when he started as a systems

administrator, one had to know how to compile everything, which got him

thinking about an easier way to do ESM. I also asked him about his

experiences coding, and he said that he actually majored in chemistry

and that the first program that he ever wrote was a 900-line shell

program. Some people, I guess, are born to be coders.

I also asked him what he thought might be some future opportunities. Luke

said that he saw managed services and possibly building and somehow

leveraging the recipe repository. If he really succeeds in creating a

sort of CPAN for configuration management, he should be able to make

money on that somehow.

Summary

In all honesty, even though my focus has been on

availability and event management in the OSS space, I find myself

really intrigued by what Luke is doing with Puppet. In the early days of Tivoli, all the products were bound by the Tivoli Framework. At the core of the Tivoli Framework was the configuration management infrastructure. The

Framework’s distribution manager made all the products, such as

monitoring, inventory, user administration, and event management,

viable in a large shop that had to manage many servers. Even

today, as IBM/Tivoli is putting the final nails into the Framework

coffin, thousands of Tivoli customers are scrambling to manage their

infrastructures with all the new IBM products. As I look

at all the extremely interesting OSS ESM tools out there, I struggle to

understand how they will all integrate. Maybe in an “Infrastructure

2.0″ sort of way, the framework might be created by Puppet.

Reuseable IP

botchagalupe — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:46:13 GMT

A few weeks ago I taught a class for IBM and had some interesting

discussions in the class. Actually two of my students in particular

gave me food for thought and connected some missing dots for me. The

first was a woman who was a lead architect for one of the largest

professional services organization in the world. For the sake of

simplicity I will call her the architect. The second was one an

original employees that came out of a Silicon Valley startup that was

purchased by IBM a few years ago. I will call him the entrepreneur. As

always I look for the angles, and I started to talk to the woman

architect about me possibly doing some on demand teaching to other

professionals in her organization. She liked my ideas and gave me some

contact names. However, she also offered me some advice. She said – if

you are going to try and sell them on this training you might want to

tell them how you can help them with a hot topic they were all using

called reusable IP.

Hmmm! I have built a few professional services organizations and those

two simple words kind of crystallized what I would call the holey grail

of processional services.

Later in the class I struck up a conversation with the entrepreneur.

We talked about what most ex-entrepreneurs always talk about – we made

fun of VC’s. Some where along the way I told him that when ever I spoke

to VC’s it was as if I was speaking German and they were speaking

Japanese. There was no “Love-Connection”. I told him about a visit I

had with an OSS ESM Nagios based startup I had last year out in San

Francisco. I told him that the meeting went great at first. The founder

loved my ideas, the architects loved me and the visit was going great.

However, my last meeting was with the CEO (a VC plug-in). Needless to

say it didn’t go well. When I told the entrepreneur who the company was

he said - holy cow – the CEO of that company is my best friend. At this

point he was a little confused to what could have gone wrong. He had

been sitting in my class all week and he was convinced I knew my stuff

and it didn’t make sense knowing his friend – the CEO. Then he asked me

if I minded telling him what the idea was that I proposed. So I told

him what I was selling was using their open source ESM product as a

Trojan horse as entrée into the Big4. We would go after low hanging

fruit via service offerings and integration projects and work to get

the software sales on the back-end once we were in the door. This was

all based on my long standing philosophy of the three R’s (references,

revenue, repeatable-revenue). I also told the CEO that this is a new

world. The old world of selling software is gone and the new world is

one where its not clear the difference between services and software.

—– stop right there the entrepreneur said. That’s were you lost him

because you offended the VC police. No one within 100 miles of Silicon

Valley is an allowed to use that word. If any one in that valley is

caught using the word “services” the VC’s will come and lock em up. I

tried to explain that the OSS (Nagios) ESM company I was meeting was

currently selling services at a 3 to 1 ration (i.e., 15k per software

deal with 30k add on services). Doesn’t matter they are in denial – he

said. They just can’t stand that word. Then I told the entrepreneur

that I wasn’t talking about regular services, I was talking about

repeatable services, in fact “Reusable IP”.

The entrepreneur then asked me - did you use those words during the

meeting. I said no… Then, there you go – he said – that is where you

lost the battle.

Where’s the IP

A friend of mine recently asked me what IP means to me. I use the

acronym a lot and I know it can mean a lot of different things. Instead

of regurgitate wikiepedia let me give you a few snips of what I think

of when I use the letters IP. A few years ago I was doing some Tivoli

consulting for the Navy in Hawaii. The hotel I was staying at had a

little Ukulele shop. Each afternoon when I came home from work I would

walk past the shop and peek in the window. One day I stopped in and

asked the shop keeper if he could show me a few chords on the ukulele.

He hemmed and hawed and seemed annoyed. Then he told me he is not

really a teacher and he really didn’t want to do it. Then I told him

that if he showed me just a couple of chords I might buy one.

Reluctantly he handed me a cheat sheet that had about 6 chords on it. I

fumbled for a few minutes and then broke out playing and singing a

killer rendition of “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison. The shop keeper

looked up in amazement and asked me if this was the first time I had

ever played a ukulele before. I told him that yes it was the first time

and that was a true statement. What I didn’t tell him is that I hade

been playing the ukulele’s six string ancestor, the guitar, for over 30

years. That my friends is what I am talking about when I use the term

IP.

I’ll give you another example. If you do a search on Google for

resumes of people who can install Tivoli monitoring you will find

hundreds of resumes. However, there are less than 30 who can actually

make it work. It’s the same software why can’t those hundreds of

consultants make it work. Young consultants that work for me are always

amazed when they show me some new software program that is written in

Python or Ruby I can scan it quickly and tell exactly what the program

does and why. What they don’t realize is that I spent my first 10 years

of my career coding assembler and the language is the least significant

part of the program. One of my favorite authors is the Italian

philosopher Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum). He

writes all his novels in Italian however I have read all of his books

in English and I have had no complaints. So when I look at the OSS ESM

market and hear Nagios vs. ZenOSS or Groundwork vs. Hyperic what I look

for is the IP around those products. What does the vendor’s service

internal and external organizations look like? How much IP is there

around the implementations using the vendor’s software? If it’s ZenOSS,

Hyperic, GroundWork, Nagios, or Zabbix who cares

John Willis

johnmwillis.com