Here in the Boston area, if you live outside of Route 495 you're considered to be, like in medieval times, "beyond the pale." I like that just fine actually. My little Massachusetts town has six horse farms, lots of open space and rolling hills, less congestion, more fresh air, and I can actually see the stars at night. The town center is quintessentially New England with the mandatory three white steepled churches and a picturesque town common ... so much so that (I'm told) it was used to depict, guess what, a quintessential New England town in a Hollywood film years ago.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/29/20081 comments
John Suit is CTO and Founder of Fortisphere, a startup that focuses on automation technologies for virtual environments. He made some predictions for the virtual space in 2009, and shared them with us recently. One I found particularly intriguing. Imagine this scenario: a business unit owner in the company goes to their IT admin and says “How come I can go to Amazon and get an EC2 cloud instance for $15/month and .15 cents an hour and I have to pay you guys $9000 a year?”
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/17/20080 comments
I'm not an economist nor do I play one on TV. Nor would I want to play one on TV nor for that matter would I want to be an economist, practitioners of what historian Thomas Carlyle called the dismal science. Frankly, I still can't quite figure out what economists actually do other than spin out fanciful theories about why things do or do not work that seem to have little relationship to whether things do or do not work. Still it must be nice to have a job like that. In any event, here are a few of my own non-expert opinions on what's going on right now with the global economy.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/15/20082 comments
VMware recently held an event in Boston called
Virtualization Forum 2008
. I would estimate attendance at 400-600, in that range. My only gripe is that the company seems to have a penchant for piping in high-decibel hard rock music just before the first morning session (the same thing happened at VMworld before the Maritz keynote, some of you may recall). While I'm a avid rock fan, I would prefer to just sit there in a quiet, coffee-sipping lump at that time of day. But hey that's just me.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/15/20080 comments
I was joking with a former IDC colleague the other day that I seem to see more folks from IDC's Enterprise Computing Group (my former business unit) now than when I was there. Of course, analysts are on the road or working from home more often than not. But I recently had an enjoyable lunch with John Humphreys and Julie Geer from Citrix at our usual business hangout, Legal Seafoods. John was up until recently covering the virtualization market for IDC but is now senior director of solutions marketing with Citrix, with responsibilities that cut across a number of different business units there.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/10/20081 comments
I kind of like IBM's clever marketing idea. An ad click parlayed off the theme of defining server virtualization takes you to a special-purpose
Web site
, sponsored by both IBM and Intel. The site is a kind of workspace to share definitions of server virtualization and even allows you to draw a diagram using a software program called Whiteboard.
So here's how it works. You create your definition. Then site visitors get to vote on each one. Each contributor's definition is shown along with the total number of votes. Right now there are 22 definitions posted (although some half-hearted efforts represented, to be sure.) In addition, you can click on links to "most recent," "most discussed" or most votes.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/08/20080 comments
Tarkan Maner, President and CEO of
Wyse,
and Jeff McNaught CMO, stopped by our offices in Framingham to chat with
Redmond
magazine editor-in-chief Doug Barney, exec. editor Lee Pender and yours truly about the company's future direction. Maner is not your typical CEO in many respects ... I could tell when he and Jeff immediately gravitated towards the
Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/08/20080 comments
Today IBM and two business partners (Virtual Bridges and Canonical)
announced general availability
for what the company described as its "first Linux-based, 'Microsoft-free' virtual PC solution," claiming that it cuts desktop costs in half compared to a Microsoft-based environment. (Note: The cost estimates weren't provided by a third party but by IBM.) A statement says that those savings will come from license costs, desk-side PC support and help and desk services among other things.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/04/20080 comments
An interesting e-mail came in the other day from
Phil Koster, a systems engineer for Data Strategy,
a consulting company that specializes in VMware
solutions. Phil had read my
blog
on the maturity of the IT market (or, more accurately,
the lack thereof) and said he was going to comment
here on the site but thought the response might
be too long. Instead, he replied in
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/03/20080 comments
Is virtualization confusing to newcomers to the
topic? You bet. Could certain aspects of it easily
be made less confusing? Absolutely. One of them
is the nomenclature surrounding VDI.
Nomenclature wars are mostly border skirmishes
that take place between vendors trying to stake
out conceptual territory in emerging markets.
Vendors hope their terminology will catch on because
if it does, presto, the best kind of viral marketing
gets jumpstarted. But you can also see it happening
elsewhere. For example, as mentioned in an earlier
blog, Forrester and Gartner both have their own
terms for VDI: hosted desktop virtualization and
server-based client virtualization, respectively.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/01/20081 comments
I ran across an interesting blog from Gordon Payne, the GM of Citrix’ Delivery Systems Division. I always like to see senior managers in a company blogging although the quality can vary. I found this one to be a bit more sales-pitch oriented in tone than some other executive blogs I’ve seen… forgivable as long as the information is in there (which in this case it is.)
First a little history. I met Gordon years ago when he was heading up a VOIP startup company called Tundo and I was an analyst covering IT and telecom convergence. Gordon also had a stint with telecom giant Nortel Networks. It’s interesting to note how many people with communications backgrounds are now working in one capacity or another in the VDI space (but not particularly surprising given how telecom-intensive the market is).
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/30/20080 comments
As you can imagine, we have a lot of discussions with virtualization management vendors of all stripes. I tend to find startups especially intriguing since many of them have a particular value proposition that they’re trying to bring to the party. In some cases, they’re trying to fill a product gap in the marketplace (something overlooked by the big systems vendors or just overlooked in general) and in others, just trying to advance the state of the art.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/23/20080 comments