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Red Hat and Hyperic Finally Made Me Happy

Savio Rodrigues — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:55:44 +0000

I previously questioned Red Hat’s apparent lack of love for Hyperic. Today, Stacey Schneider, Senior Director of Marketing at Hyperic, tipped me off to a joint Hyperic & Red Hat announcement.

Stacey writes:

“Finally today we announced that Red Hat and Hyperic will be working together on the development of a common systems management platform.

……
As you know, back in 2005 was originally OEMed to create JON before the Red Hat acquisition. At the time, the software licensed was still closed and the software has not been upgraded since, rather JBoss and now Red Hat has been updating the software privately. The new project will update the software contributions from Hyperic to its latest software, contribute the additional code written by the JON team, and work jointly to create a roadmap of future features. And of course make it all open source! (GPL v2)

…….

This new open source project is meant to create a repository of common services to be used in future versions of Red Hat and Hyperic products. Both companies will work to maintain, govern and extend management capabilities within the new open source systems management platform project.”

Now, this is very cool news, and a great endorsement for Hyperic technology. The deal appears to position Hyperic as the de facto systems management provider for Red Hat customers. Choice is great, but it can sometimes work against OSS in the CIO’s mind.

The deal is also an endorsement of Red Hat’s community. Long-time readers may remember that I questioned the “endorsement of the JBoss community” when Exadel decided to move their development into the JBoss community. I questioned the endorsement because there had been funds exchanged, making this an acquisition rather than an endorsement of community A vs. community B.

This agreement, may lead to an acquisition in the future, but today, it’s about one independent company agreeing to join forces and communities with another independent company.

Kudos to Hyperic & Red Hat for making this happen.

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The Firing of Microsoft CIO Stuart Scott

Nathan Weinberg — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:02:09 +0000

Microsoft abruptly fired Chief Information Officer and corporate VP Stuart Scott, and everyone’s been trying to figure out why he was kicked out.

Valleywag leads the pack, as always, wondering what the company means when it says he was fired “for violation of company policies”. They also suggest that Microsoft fired him while he was traveling to his sister’s funeral, in order to further embarrass him. Most of the speculation is in the direction of him being fired for cheating, or rather having an affair with an employee of his.

Valleywag talks about another firing at the beginning of the year, that of Martin Taylor, Steve Ballmer’s right hand man. Apparently the rumor mill has been spinning on that one, with company insiders saying Taylor was given the boot for charging the company for hotel rooms he charged the company for, rooms he used for weekend getaways as part of an affair with a coworker.

Seems to be becoming a pattern, or perhaps not. People are always having office romances, and some people are always cheating on their wives (just read InsideGoogle). Microsoft is just standing up and being willing to fire these people, no matter how important they are to the company. You’ve got to respect that, applying company policies to everyone no matter their pay grade, though having to hire a fourth new CIO in four years must be getting tiring.

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Microsoft CIO Fired

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:20:00 +0000

Stuart Scott received very abrupt walking papers from Microsoft, losing his position as corporate vice-president and chief information officer.

Little information has emerged about the swift departure of Scott from Microsoft’s command structure.

Mary Jo Foley posted a compact statement from Microsoft regarding Scott’s firing: “We can confirm that Stuart Scott was terminated after an investigation for violation of company policies , and have no further information to share.”

Given the dramatically quick nature of Scott’s dismissal, certain speculation has been raised. Valleywag cited a tipster’s claim that Scott and a female VP reporting to him both took emergency family leave at the same time, suggesting an affair was taking place.

Valleywag also recalled the departure of Martin Taylor, a Microsoft executive who was out of the company a day after the debut of Windows Live Messenger, which he had a role in promoting.

Owen Wilson at Valleywag picked up on a tip about Taylor, which claimed he not only enjoyed an affair with a co-worker, but charged his weekend hotel trysts back to the company.

Yet lengthy delays in getting the Vista operating system to market, and Microsoft’s need to acquiesce to OEM demands that they be allowed to continue offering Windows XP to customers, hasn’t resulted in anyone being fired in the lofty peaks of the corporate apparatus.

Beyond the Hurdles to the Digital Natives

Neville Hobson — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:50:33 +0000

The CeBIT technology fair in Hanover, Germany, started last week and runs until March 21.

CeBIT is the world’s largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work.

I’ve not paid as much direct attention to it as I have in previous years. I have a couple of RSS watches enabled via Google and Technorati and of course I’m seeing what some of my favourite bloggers are saying.

One news item in my RSS feed did catch my attention today, an article in CIO magazine which begins:

Company leaders are being urged to embrace blogs and other “web 2.0″ technologies to improve their businesses, but some executives say it’s easier said than done. Peter Sondergaard, global head of research for Gartner, told chief executives at Cebit that blogs and online communities like MySpace may have started in the consumer realm but they’ll have a big impact on businesses in the coming years.

Many executives already use blogs to talk with customers, CIO magazine says (which is true enough), and companies like Microsoft and IBM are offering tools to let employees work on projects using blogs and wikis.

There is plenty of commentary out there about executives who blog and the pros and cons of their doing so. At the same time, there’s really little that addresses some organizational realities which CIO magazine illustrates well with quotes like this:

“He’s a consultant and I’m a CEO. He doesn’t have to worry that if you have a community network in your organisation and you disclose financial information, you go to jail,” said Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of BT Group.

And this about HSH Nordbank, a credit investment bank in Luxembourg, where Manfred Reif, a managing director, asked his IT department a few months ago to create a blog where the company’s 130 employees can discuss how the bank is run:

[…] Labour laws in Luxembourg have required him to go to the employees’ union for approval before the blogging can begin.

Mr Reif has a pragmatic view about some of the regulatory and other barriers affecting companies operating in his industry sector:

[…] Reif said he must think about ways to innovate first and consider the compliance implications second. “If you think first about regulations, you’ll never do anything,” he said.

I wish there were more with a mindset like Mr Reif’s!

Speaking of mindsets:

A top executive with a management consulting company in Germany said his clients, which include traditional manufacturing companies, are not using web 2.0 technologies today. Manufacturers don’t have the right mind-set, he said, because they are too focused on products rather than services. “It will be at least 10 years before they are ready,” said the executive, who preferred not to be identified.

And a lot will have changed in ten years, so they’ll miss a boat or two.

The article concludes with Gartner’s Sondergaard’s view that most chief executives today are “digital immigrants,” struggling to understand consumer technologies that are being popularized by the young and creeping into business:

“The digital natives are the 16-year-olds, your sons and daughters,” he said. Companies need to experiment with web 2.0 technologies internally today, he said, because in a few years they will determine which companies those digital natives want to work for and do business with.

CIO magazine | Chief execs grapple with web 2.0

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Public Affairs via Web 2.0

Dan Morrill — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:54:32 +0000

Everyone who owns a forum, a blog, a bulletin board or otherwise knows that to accept user content is to monitor what that user content. Does it makes sense for the web site, is the content that the user supplies something that fits in, makes sense, and is appropriate.

We have heard about all the spamming that happens in these systems, but a larger question posed by CIO today is:

For YouTube, and quite possibly the Web 2.0 paradigm itself, matters came to a head this week when Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against the Google-owned Web site. One question on the minds of many people watching the fallout from the Viacom suit against YouTube is whether a business can function legally if it allows unregulated user contributions. Source: CIO Today

Most sites at this point have someone who monitors what is being said on a web site that allows folks to comment. I have four web sites, and the majority of the comments that I get on them are all about selling some thing like drugs, or other materials. I delete them because I do not want to get black holed by Google or any other search engine. It takes about 30 minutes of my day, and some I am so familiar with seeing that I have inserted block words, or black listing words that I know I will not use. Like the formal name of a drug like cialis.

YouTube faces a world of unregulated user content. We want to share, the popularity of Peer-to-Peer networks, bit torrent, and others are all based on our ability to share. When people post to YouTube or otherwise, we are sharing something that we think is funny, or touched us in some way that we need to share with others.

While YouTube started off as "broadcast yourself", it is now a fundamental repository of video clips from copyrighted materials and works. There are hundreds of thousands of works on YouTube that the copyright belongs to someone else, and the owners of the copyrights are willing to enforce those copyrights.

Beyond the idea of sharing, is the idea of what is the benefit of someone posting a video to YouTube? More people watch or listen to a TV show that they might have missed otherwise. Word of mouth can make a TV show or movie more popular and possibility lead to more sales.

The flip side of this is that the secondary market is unregulated, it also has no direct monitory benefit to the maker of the work. And that is the crux issue of the whole web 2.0 phenomena, we will share regardless of what the copyright holder wants. We will repost the minute it is taken down, because we can.

The odd part about unregulated user content is that you can devote staff to remove things that you know are copyrighted. Alternatively, if you are unsure, wait to see who comes along and asks for a take down.

We already regulate user content, IT Toolbox regulates user comments, in a web site that according to alexa gets roughly 29,000 unique IP’s a day as visitors. YouTube gets roughly 8.5 million visitors a day. If we were getting that kind of traffic, we would have a way to regulate user content.

Moreover, we would have to because users are often unpredictable, and information security dictates that user input is not trustworthy.

YouTube obviously makes deals with the media companies, and sports outlets to post their stuff. Why Viacom is the hold out right now along with the billion dollar lawsuit needs to be watched by anyone with a Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 mind set. The security implications are also there in the control of intellectual property.

While information security understands unregulated user content is bad, and while many sites also have ways of regulating user content, YouTube and others like it seem to still not have gotten the idea of the same thing. That is what makes this so interesting in the longer run, what we understand we act on, what we do not understand we won’t act on. We know that unregulated user content is dangerous, Web 2.0 needs to learn the same lesson that we learned in Web 1.0.

Another Thing CIOs Should Know About Requirements

James Taylor — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:32:02 +0000

I saw this article on CIO magazine – Five Things CIOs Should Know About Software Requirements. It seems to me that there is one more thing (at least) that they need to know about requirements:

Business rules are NOT requirements

After all, business rules are about how your business takes decisions, not about how a system works. Trying to capture business rules the way you capture any other kind of requirement is not going to work – simply trying to write better requirements will not get it done, I think system requirements, use cases and business rules are great complements to each other (as noted in Use Cases: Requirements in context) and, fortunately, you can find rules the same way as you find requirements

Here are the five things CIO magazine listed, with comments

The Inconvenient Checkbox: Understand the Role of Requirements
As this section says "Many development projects are handicapped from the start. The requirements are vague and subject to interpretation, require intimate knowledge of the business to interpret correctly, and aren’t prioritized" and that’s certainly true. It is also true, however, that part of the problem is mixing of business rules with requirements.

Don’t Throw It Over The Wall: The Right People Should Define the Requirements
Indeed business users should maintain rules but there are some secrets about getting them to do so. IT departments and business people have fundamentally different perspectives and separating out business rules can really help resolve this.

Superficially Complete: Define Requirements With "Enough" Detail
While I agree with the comment "They should have information that states more of what the requirement is to do (the What) and the way it is to do it (the How)", I think this means making sure testers can see the rules as well as the requirements as otherwise you run the risk that the how of the business will get mixed in with the how of the system.

Working from Ignorance: Recognize that Requirements Change
Much of the change in "requirements" really come from changing business rules and separating them out can dramatically reduce the change in the requirements themselves. However, most systems spend most of their life changing not being specified, so you do need to build systems where the rules can keep changing over time.

Carpet Yanking: Pay Attention to the People on the Front Line
One example of this is the necessity of making sure that the policies and regulations you think you are implementing are really being used.

One last thing, rules can and should be used with agile methods. If you are interested in more on rules, Barb von Halle and others (including me) published a book recently on the Business Rules Revolution.

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Technorati

An Open Mind for Second Life

Neville Hobson — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 01:36:18 +0000

If you want to really understand all sides of the story about Second Life as a business platform – the genuine potential as well as the current drawbacks – a series of in-depth feature articles published last week by CIO Insight magazine is where you definitely should go.

Under the umbrella heading of Is Business Ready For Virtual Worlds?, technology editor David Carr has done an excellent job in presenting a broad and balanced picture of Second Life that, when you’ve read the articles, will leave you wiser as well as with better understanding of why Second Life attracts evangelists and skeptics in equal measure.

Carr’s umbrella addresses these topics:

Second Life: Is Business Ready For Virtual Worlds?
Real-world companies such as American Apparel, IBM, Starwood Hotels and Toyota are exploring whether 3D virtual communities can be adapted to serve business–and whether they are an effective place to do market research, collaborate on projects, and sell goods and services.

Second Life Insiders
Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life, is a pioneer in the development of streaming media technology.

Virtual Growing Pains
When Linden Lab outlined a growth path for Second Life, it found that getting everyone on the same virtual page wasn’t easy.

The Anatomy of Second Life
A look at how the virtual world works.

Tapping into Virtual Marketing
Starwood Hotels demonstrates a relatively low-cost market research experiment in a new Internet medium.

I make no secret that I firmly believe virtual communities like Second Life present significant opportunities for companies and other organizations in myriad ways.

Once you understand more about what’s possible and balance it with what’s not yet possible, you will be able to make sounder judgments on whether a place like Second Life is for you and your organization.

Either way, it’s a place you need to pay attention to, no better said than this text from Carr’s main feature:

[…] And if this really is the start of something big, those companies that explore the technology now may be in a better position later, much like the first companies to grasp the importance of the Web in the early 1990s back when it was an immature technology trickling out of academia. Sandy Kearney, director of the virtual worlds program at IBM, says the transition is coming, and “you may not have as much time as you had with the Web” to adjust to its impact.

[…] ”Based on the history of the Internet, we think this is a stabilizing period for the 3D Web,” Kearney says. A true 3D Web would have to be based on open technologies, with some means of passing between virtual worlds hosted by different organizations. And just as new types of businesses were born on the Web, new businesses will be created around the 3D Web, she says. “But right now it’s very early, and the technology is very, very young.”

Keep an open mind.

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CIOs, Is Your Career Over?

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 13:44:02 +0000

The long-standing joke about the acronym for chief information officers actually standing for “career is over” may have a real punchline now, one that hits those C-level executives right in their employment status.

Rather than being innovators challenging the status quo of computing and driving their companies to greater rewards through technology, company CIOs have the weight of budgets weighing them down and a hefty paycheck that could be endangered by dramatic changes that go wrong.

“The Long Tail” author and Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson paints a picture of the standard CIO as a Dilbertian lump of pointy hair in a suit, clinging to a slippery rock while a rushing river of technology threatens to sweep the CIO away and drown him, unmourned and swiftly forgotten.

Anderson’s tail of speaking to a room of what he thought would be “technology innovators” instead proved to be a meeting of the Dead Weight Club. They obstruct employees from working more effectively using resources available from a number of providers online.

The users know these types well, Anderson related how these CIOs block connections to services like Skype or Second Life. People probably are more familiar with not being able to reach web-based email services, even at companies where Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for maintaining information integrity do not apply.

Instant messaging has been another bugaboo for CIO types. They see AIM or Yahoo Messenger or Meebo and their first thought is of hundreds of employees chatting away with people and not getting their work done.

They don’t see a customer service rep with a good contact via IM at a manufacturer getting a customer’s question answered in a fraction of the time it takes to navigate a menu on a relatively expensive long-distance call.

Control and trust are the big issues CIOs have. Anyone who has had the displeasure of working with or around some of the more glacial-moving throwbacks of the CIO species understand that paranoia, rather than efficiency, rules his office.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Companies can implement usage policies that permit more freedom in using technology while safeguarding corporate information. If a worker fulfills projects on time and as expected, but spends a lot of time on the big, bad Internet while doing so, has the company suffered any actual harm?

Probably not. Yet all over the U.S., workers will try to use something new, something different, and hit the firewall like a bug into an 18-wheeler’s windshield. The truth is, CIOs who stand in the way of their more innovative employees cost the company a lot more than the numbers on their fat paychecks.

They may be costing their employers a business edge, too.

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Computer Security Still Damaged by Social Engineering

Dan Morrill — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:51:50 +0000

Interesting article out of CIO magazine about Vista, and that while it is a highly secure operating system, with some neat things it can do, it still is not invulnerable to those programs that require social engineering to get the user to do something.

For as long as there have been people, there have been people who will do crazy things. PT Barnum stated that “there is a sucker born every minute” and the social engineering aspects of cyber crime are not something that is so easily dismissed. Is there any operating system out there that is invulnerable to the person sitting behind the keyboard?

We joke about the end user, ID-10-T errors. However the reality is that social engineering works, and works really well.

People, including experienced information security folks will click on that link, fall for a phishing scam, and not look to make sure that the web site they are dealing with is really the one that they need to be dealing with.

“Remarkably, with the new operating system (Vista) just released to business, the software giant said in effect that there is nothing it can do about the threats in question — Stratio-Zip, Netsky-D and MyDoom-O — because they rely on social engineering to invade systems. The three threats together account for 39.7 percent of currently circulating malware, according to Sophos. “Based on our initial investigation, Microsoft can confirm that these variants do not take advantage of a security vulnerability, rather they rely on social engineering to infect a user’s system,” Microsoft said in a statement”. (CIO Magazine).

Acknowledging the human condition, and our ability to be fooled, we still have an up hill road to work with in the longer run. While we must love our users, the issue is that point of human frailty when someone we know clicks on something we know that they shouldn’t have.

While we develop more secure operating systems, more secure web applications, and in general learn how to develop software so that it is harder to shatter, we are still rounding on the same issue that we have had for many years.

We still need to educate our users, if not annually then quarterly on the dynamics of social engineering, and while it is ok to trust, no one should be trusted equally on the internet.

The answer is still no, you did not win the European Lottery that you didn’t enter, you do not have an unknown relative who lives in Nigeria with 10 million dollars to send you, you did not win any prize, there is no reward, no, people do not really send you random love notes, and if someone wants you to cash their payroll check for them, you should really be wary of that.

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Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.

The Ex-lawyer and Red Hat Support

Savio Rodrigues — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:19:07 +0000

When I bought my first home, I used a lawyer that a friend referred me to. The lawyer was great, thorough, responded quickly and took the time to explain things in plain English.

I used him again 2 years later for an investment and found that he was still thorough but not as quick to get back to me or willing to spend as much time going through the legal lingo. Heck, I had to call him an average of 3x just to get a response from him, and it took nearly 2 years to get my closing documents.

What changed? Well, news got out that he was good at his job. He got busy, became overworked, and as a result, his customer service suffered. Sadly, he couldn’t clone himself! Also, his early customers expected a level of customer service that he was not able to give, even with additional administrative staff.

I thought about this when I was looking at the CIO study that Red Hat is linking to which indicates Red Hat was the leading vendor to work with. NOTE: I’m not challenging the results of the study. I do however find it interesting that the top 2 vendors listed (Red Hat & Apple) have less than the average # of responses who have worked with the vendor in the past 12 months (see 3rd column from right on the 3rd page). In plain English, even though Red Hat & Apple scored highest in the study, less than 25% of the respondents had experience with these two vendors in the past 12 months. Yes, that means lots of room to grow for these vendors But does it also hint at growing pains that may lie around the corner? Said differently, I am questioning whether Red Hat’s position in the rankings will take a turn for the worse if they are able to attract additional new customers. Will they fall into the same trap that my lawyer did? Get too big for a service business to the point that customer satisfaction suffers severely?

Some of you will say, I missing the point; That the reason customers acquire RHEL is because it’s a higher quality product than its competition. Well, if that is the case and the support experience doesn’t matter, then why pay for RHEL at all? Why not use CentOS? Or for that matter, Oracle’s support for RHEL? To be fair, I’m not saying that RedHat’s success is only due to the level of support and the customer service associated with RHEL. Support, customer service and product quality are all important. (As is vendor stability & reputation, I’d bet).

I guess I’m pointing out a scaling problem that Red Hat may encounter down the road.unless Oracle buys them or Red Hat sees it coming and puts strategies in place to minimize the customer impact?

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.