Graham Chastney

Microsoft’s press team have had a busy couple of days.

The first two announcements that caught my eye were virtualisation announcements:

• Microsoft and XenSource to Develop Interoperability for Windows Server “Longhorn” Virtualization
• Microsoft Completes Acquisition of Softricity

The softricity one is old news, coming as it does on the same day as the XenSource one though it shows a definite shift in the market. While many people are focusing on virtualisation at the server as a way of reducing server footprint and cost, many people are missing the ability of virtualisation to all IT organisation to loosen control without loosing control. This loosening effect will be especially true for the softricity technologies.

Then there were a couple of hosting announcements:

• Microsoft Sees Strong Demand for Hosting Solutions as Software as a Service Increases in Popularity
• Microsoft Enhances Solution for Windows-Based Hosting

From the first one:

Intergenia, a leading Web hosting company based in Germany, has deployed a wide array of Microsoft hosting solutions to deliver applications and services to its broad customer base. With more than 2.2 million active sites hosted and more than 20,000 dedicated servers in data centers in and the U.S., the company has recently been declared the second-largest Web hosting provider in the world by the British market research firm Netcraft Ltd. More than 95 percent of Intergenia’s active sites are hosted on the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting 3.5. In 2005 Intergenia was one of the first German hosting providers to launch Hosted Exchange and has since deployed the solution to a growing number of customers.

“We are seeing a significant upswing in the software-as-a-service market in Germany, and Microsoft solutions for Windows-based Hosting and Hosted Messaging and Collaboration are helping us to capitalize on this opportunity,” said Thomas Strohe, founder, Intergenia AG. “Our customers expect a high level of security and service availability, and because of the ease of deployment and the tools and management capabilities in Microsoft’s solutions, we are able to provide both. As companies become more familiar with the software-as-a-service model, we expect to see demand grow even stronger for more sophisticated services and applications.”

I never really saw hosting and SaaS as the same thing, or perhaps I’m wrong and hosting is a form of SaaS. Michael Platt’s been trying to get his head around the different definitions too. Scoble wrote a number of times about how Microsoft should purchase Web 2.0 companies, perhaps they have a more subtle plan which we are seeing working itself out – perhaps the plan is not to own the applications, but to own the delivery of the applications.

Another interesting announcement was the purchase of wininternals. A very interesting move, particularly the thought of Microsoft trying to integrate another set of talented individuals.

Tags: SaaS, Microsoft, Hosting, Softricity

Gartner’s High-Performance Workplace Blog highlights a voice I am seeing grow around IT: IT Must Loosen Control Without Loosing Control:

When I talk with customers about how to achieve a high-performance workplace (HPW), one of the hardest things for them to deal with is the need to loosen up on some control issues, and how to do that without losing control completely. This is natural. For the past several years, CEOs and CFOs have been asking CIOs to reduce costs, reduce risk, ensure compliance and generally take tighter control of users. This has resulted in locked-down desktops, strict TCO and ROI procedures, and tight IT procedures all around. The result is that IT has collectively become “The Abominable No Man”’ in many organizations, better at refusing or blocking any initiative than facilitating it.

We cannot stay on this trajectory. The complexity of the business and IT environments is too overwhelming to pursue the myth of total control. There are too many variables and influences to permit anyone to control all inputs. Even if we could, that would be a bad thing. Real innovation is coming from unexpected and not totally understood areas, such as Web 2.0 and consumer-oriented collaboration facilities. To block access to these is counterproductive and, ultimately, futile. Increasingly, many users see access restrictions as similar to network faults: a minor irritation to route around.

I love the phrase “The Abominable No Man”.

So many IT environments are stuck between major refresh and transformation programmes. No change can occur without the large scale testing and control of a large programme, but the environment has to be in a real mess before the pain of a large programme outweighs the pain of keeping things as they are.

When the large programmes does get initiated is does a good job of delivering generic capabilities. Anything that is innovative or complicated will be squeezed out by the needs of the generic.

However hard the corporate IT environment runs it can never deliver the same breadth of capabilities as the Internet. One of the major drivers for adoption of Web 2.0 type services is not that they are better than what the corporate IT organisation could provide, it’s simply that they are available.

The problem for IT organisations is that they are stuck between reducing costs and be innovative. in my experience it never works when conflicting requirements are placed on an organisation – one will always win. In my experience it’s always cost reduction that wins. That why I think that the really smart organisations will not place the conflicting requirements into one organisation, they will run an IT organisation and an innovation organisation (that may well also deliver IT). I’ve written about this previously in the context of CIO’s delivering value rather than just reducing cost. I just don’t see it myself. Engineering organisations don’t have the operation organisation design the new product. The operational organisation are involved but they aren’t setting the agenda that’s the job of the product development organisation.

The problem with loosening control is that IT organisations are generally not good at dealing with grey, they like things to be black and white. They have to deal with grey every day, but they are never comfortable with it. Loosening control requires the addition of a whole load more grey. Perhaps that’s where the versatilists come in .

ComputerWorld has an article on the changing skill requirements for ‘IT’ people:

The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the U.S. or abroad. Instead, IT departments will be populated with “versatilists” — those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

I’m assuming that the newly invented word – “versatilists” – is trying to overcome some of the negative connotations of the more commonly used word – “generalist”. At least that’s my assumption, because the word is never really defined. To be honest I think it’s a terrible word, but I do think that they have a point.

As IT becomes more grown-up it is bound to become more business focussed and less technology focussed. As the technology starts to get out of the way, the purpose for the technology will come to the fore.

The only issue I think I do have is with the time-scales – 2010. From where I am sitting the tide has already turned and people with business understanding are the ones most sought after already. Perhaps I’ve just built a perception because my job is already a “versatilist” job, I have no statistical evidence to support my theory.

Another interesting element from the article was the pronouncement that many of this set of IT people will come from education backgrounds other than IT. In my experience this is, again, already the case. Even though I work in an IT services organisation I know very few people who have an IT educational background. The dominant group are people with old school engineering backgrounds (mechanical, civil, etc.).

I was in the USA last week with a group of colleagues. One of the issue we were talking about was service levels of collaborative and communication solutions. We had quite a good discussion on the difference on reliability and availability requirements. The interesting part of the discussions being on the difference between the actual availability requirements and the perceived availability requirements.

One of my arguments was that we all have so many different communication mechanisms available to us, does it matter if one of them is unavailable for a period of time. We perceive that we need all of them all of the time, but is that really true.

Unfortunately my sub-conscience decided that it would undertake an experiment on this thesis and caused me leave my mobile phone in the taxi that took us to the airport .

I am now one of those “mobile phone left in taxi” statistics .

Thankfully the taxi driver was an honest sole and phone my home to tell my wife of this fact. Unfortunately, know that I had no mobile phone, she was unable to contact me. As it was the early hours of the morning I didn’t contact her until I was back in the UK the next day. Hopefully one of my colleagues who is based in the USA will be able to collect it this week, and he is over in the UK next week.

I wonder how crucial to my work having a mobile phone is? I have four days to find out before the joys of holiday.

One of my flickr pictures has passed 1000 views (1128 to be precise for the moment). I noticed that it was popular near the end of last week and then it only had 990 (ish) view. That’s right, nearly 150 view since over the weekend.

This is a complete mystery to me. I have absolutely no idea why this picture get so many views. It’s not a bad picture, but it isn’t that interesting either. There are lots of pictures which I personally prefer.

Ever since I took it, it has gained lots of views. It’s sister picture has nearly 1000 (901 actually). In Flickr pictures tend to get noticed because they are members of all sorts of groups, but that’s not true for this picture either, it’s not been posted into any groups. It’s not like it has any comments associated with it either. There’s only one comment and that’s mine, asking if anyone knows why it’s popular .

The most popular Jimmy and Grandad picture has only gained 172 views by comparison .

I suppose it could be related to the blog that it’s posted on. I’d like to think that this was the reason and that lots of people where reading this particular post because I regard it as one of my best. I have done some tests, and I don’t think that these remote loads actually count, the statistics on the blog don’t add credence to this thesis either .

Boggle? Sounds fitting for such a mystery .

Tags: flickr, views, blogs