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Real-time links, thoughts and news is aggregated via @egoboss on Twitter...

Please refer to Twitter accounts @egoboss and @CirrusIQ for real-time links, thoughts and news - thank you!

GigaOM | The Consumerization of IT

In a recent presentation, Lew Cirne, CEO of application performance management vendor New Relic (it’s an anagram), revealed the company now has 5,000 customers and just one sales rep.  That’s astonishing.  Cirne points out that there’s a new class of customers for whom “there is no reason whatsoever for application performance management to be sold by a direct sales force.”  If you’re building a cloud-based application on top of a standard Ruby, .Net or Java stack, much of the complexity has been factored out already, enabling a much simpler self-service sales model.

This is a profound shift in IT. Cirne’s prior company, Wily Technology, had all the trappings of a typical enterprise software company: lots of knobs and dials, complex on-site installations, high prices and lengthy sales cycles.  Still, for customers deploying J2EE app servers, Wily’s products helped them find and fix performance issues that otherwise would have taken months to resolve. Wily did a great job back in the day; but things have changed. By moving to a cloud-based platform as a service the deployment model can now be dramatically simplified. New Relic illustrates a powerful trend: the consumerization of IT.

In the last 10 years, the web has brought us countless innovative technologies which enable consumers to get things done simply and without fuss, whether it’s finding information, buying goods and services, managing finances, sharing documents, communicating with friends, finding a job, setting up meetings, backing up a PC, or any number of other activities.  So why, when you go to work in a typical large company, are the applications so bloated and complex?  Why can’t we get the kind of simple, one-click deployment of applications and infrastructure that mirrors what’s going on in the consumer world?

More ...

http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/the-consumerization-of-it/

 

ReadWriteWeb | Gartner Hype Cycle 2010: Cloud Computing at the Peak of Inflated Expectations

Analyst firm Gartner has released its 2010 Hype Cycle Report, identifying those technologies it thinks have reached the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" as well as those languishing in the "Trough of Disillusionment."

Activity streams, cloud computing, and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays are among those at that peak. Gartner defines this as a "phrase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections." And although according to Gartner's map, it means these technologies may be on their way to mainstream, the next stop is one of disillusionment because those technologies failed to live up to expectations.

 

Gartner's report examines 1800 technologies as well as trends in 75 industry and topic areas. These reports are meant to provide a snapshot into emerging technologies. as well as estimates in the time until these technologies become mainstream. Cloud computing and e-readers, according to the report will be mainstream in less than 5 years, but we have to look beyond the five year mark for mainstream 3D printing and robots.

More...

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gartner_hype_cycle_2010_cloud_computing_at_the_pea.php

FT.com | Companies Embrace Social Networking Tools

Andy Miller, chief executive of Polycom, doesn’t normally spend time answering mundane questions from low-level employees. But when he saw that a sales engineer was looking for the company’s director of charitable giving, Mr Miller promptly replied with the right contact.

Mr Miller saw the engineer’s query on Yammer, a social business tool now used by two-thirds of Polycom’s workforce. Yammer, along with Jive and Chatter, an offering from Salesforce, are infiltrating the enterprise, bringing social networking into the workplace.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Social networking comes of age - Sep-01

Lex: Social networking - Jul-28

Disney clicks in to buy Playdom for $563m - Jul-28

Sorrell questions rush to social media - Mar-02

New breed of social sites offer less privacy - Feb-22

Analysis: Google: Antisocial networking - Feb-19

“People are already using social networking that’s the way people communicate,” says Heidi Melin, Polycom’s chief marketing officer. “We’re just expanding that to the way we communicate to inside Polycom.”

Polycom is not alone. According to Yammer, 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have Yammer networks, though not all are paying customers. And as a new generation of social-networking savvy employees enter the workforce, companies from the financial services sector to retail are taking note of “enterprise 2.0” and launching internal company-wide social networks.

“We’re trying to take social networking, which is the most important innovation in the web in the last 10 years, and bring it inside the enterprise,” says Yammer chief executive David Sacks. “We want to make employees as connected with each other as they are with their friends in the real world.”

Yammer, Jive and Chatter are all, in a sense, motivated by frustration. While consumer internet tools have grown sleeker and easier to use in the past ten years, business technologies have not kept pace.

More ...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d97ff734-c691-11df-8a9f-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss

Seth Godin | Competition...

The number one reason people give me for giving up on something great is, "someone else is already doing that."

Or, parsed another way, "my idea is not brand new." Or even, "Oh no, now we'll have competition."

Two big pieces of news for you:

1. Competition validates you. It creates a category. It permits the sale to be this or that, not yes or no. And this or that is a much easier sale to make. It also makes decisions about pricing easier, because you have someone to compare against and lean on.

2. There are six billion people in the world. Even if your market is hand-made spoke shaves for left-handed woodworkers, there are more people in your market than you can ever hope to track down.

More ...

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/08/competition.html

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Yahoo! News | Tech Customers Question Industry's Takeover Spree

The world's largest technology companies have been on a buying spree, spending billions to snap up smaller companies. And often the buyers say they're doing it for their customers — businesses, hospitals, schools and government agencies.

As tech companies get bigger and bigger, they say, they can offer a broader variety of products and make it easier for their customers to do one-stop shopping.

Yet if you ask the customers, you hear a different story. Often they get new headaches with multibillion-dollar deals by the likes of Oracle, IBM, SAP, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. When you add the challenges that come with any corporate acquisition, it's not hard to envision a reverse trend eventually building: a drive to split up tech companies that have grown too large.

In other words, the tech consolidation of the past few years could turn out to have wasted shareholders' money.

"The demand is not coming from the customers," says Gopal Khanna, who oversees a $600 million technology budget as chief information officer for the state of Minnesota. "On the contrary, I'm best served when there's a phenomenal amount of innovation happening. ... Sometimes creating behemoths slows down that innovation engine."

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100706/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_technology_consolidation

VentureBeat | Integrien (IT Analytics) Raises $8m Funding

Irvine, California-based Integrien has announced an $8 million round of funding led by Clearstone Venture Partners. Mariner Capital Ventures and the Acartha Group also participated.

Integrien, founded in the shaky days of 2001, makes a product called Alive that lets IT workers perform analytics on their systems. The company has released a new version of the product, AliveVM, designed for the increasingly popular virtual machine environments now casually referred to as part of “the cloud.”

In its announcement of the funding, Integrien claimed 140 percent year-over-year top-line growth for 2009, a year when many companies were thrilled to break even. Integrien also alluded to several seven-figure deals with Fortune 100 companies.

More ...

http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/11/integrien-fundin/

The New York Times (IDG) | Open-Source Software - Hidden Snags.

When CIO Daniel Chan was first prompted to use open-source software, cost savings weren't top of mind. He was mainly interested in how open source would enable his IT group at the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance to put ideas into action more quickly. In his government office, the procurement process lasts anywhere from 12 to 18 months. "It makes it impossible to do anything creative," Chan says.

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With open-source software, it took just a few months for Chan's team to get the tools it needed to build a new self-service benefits system -- just in time for the flurry of activity that occurred during te economic freefall. Even though the agency purchased a support contract for the technology, there were no licensing terms and conditions to negotiate, which cut way back on the involvement of the procurement and legal offices.

And the benefits kept coming. As use of the system escalated, Chan's team not only kept up with the increasing volume, but also was able to help transfer the technology to three other states in a month's time, since there was no commercial license involved. "We were able to get people to come in and help quickly because there was a large pool of developers to draw from," Chan says.

With that success, Chan is now looking at migrating from the agency's current Unix platform to Linux -- and this time, cost savings are at the fore. "We'll easily see three to five times in savings by moving to open systems," he says. "Instead of $5 million to do a technology refresh, it will be $1 million or less."

More ...

http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2010/05/10/10idg-open-source-softwares-hidden-snags-90820.html