John Willis's Blog

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

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