Status - Consulting

I'm back!

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:20:02 -0700

And since I have been almost entirely detached from the technology world for the past month, I have absolutely nothing interesting to say!

Fortunately (at least I suppose it's fortunate), as is often the case after long vacations, there is a massive pile of problems and projects piled up in my inbox that have accumulated in the interval. I imagine after I dig through all that and starting piling into the work I will have plenty of things to say about the latest and greatest, the old and busted, and all the confusion that both engender among the business and IT community.

I hope everyone else enjoyed their summer vacations as much as I did. As nice as it is to have regular Internet access again, I have to say I could have been gone another month on top of the last month and not quite managed to be completely comfortable being back to work again.

Cloud effects on IT consulting

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:46:00 -0700

Jonathan Sapir brings up this topic in a post on his Power in the Cloud blog, using Force.com's PaaS aspects as an example case of how cloud platforms might effect IT consultancies by encouraging increasing specialization (and as a result, smaller firms).

Traditionally, most clients have looked for one-stop shopping in their development consulting engagements, and Jonathan posits that the benefits of this model, in terms of both assignment of responsibilities and internal synergies available from set teams, may be outweighed in the PaaS environment by the benefits of specialization combined with a decreased emphasis on infrastructure nuts and bolts work that previously required someone from either the client or consulting team to address.

I think he is probably correct in this assessment, for at least as far as he takes it. I think that CIOs have other motivations for trying to conduct one-stop shopping with large firms, not all of which are as beneficial as those Jonathan has outlined... it's as often done out of laziness or cachet as a cool assessment of capabilities (this has been made pretty obvious over the last year or so with so much public evidence slopping around over mismanagement and poor performance at the big-name firms). And I'm not sure that relying on synergies on consulting teams has ever been such a brilliant idea in the first place... one might assume they exist since that would be the logical way to run a consulting business, but logic is more rare than one might expect in the IT industry. Many large consulting firms have terrible churn rates and rely on hordes of inexperienced, fresh out of school consultants to handle that grunt work that is supposedly being done by a well-oiled team of experienced professionals.

So the big-tent firms probably aren't going to disappear anytime soon, but specialist firms will be on the rise, and that's a good thing. Something I preach as a consultant is to outsource the work, but maintain the control. That advice was not often heeded by firms dealing with large consultancies, which have their own inertia and interests which often over-rode client concerns and requirements. By splitting the tasks up, businesses will be force to keep an accurate internal accounting of who is doing what and how it all connects, which is more work but to their ultimate benefit, since they are the only ones in a good position to know if the final system is advantageous for their business.

Jonathan is also coming from a slightly different consulting perspective than I am, and consequently he focuses on a rather narrow aspect of consulting, the development side. That is a substantial component of IT consulting and it will surely be affected... but the other sorts of IT consulting are also bound to be affected by the upswell of cloud computing. Certainly, the traditional demands for SMB catch-all and MSP consulting firms will wane. Many of those which survive will have to take a different tack, focusing less on becoming a dependency for their clients and learning to let go of ongoing revenue and reliance in favor of project-based work transitioning clients to solutions which may not involve the consultant in an ongoing capacity. This is a bitter pill to swallow and resistance is certain, probably slowing adoption of new technologies in many cases; nonetheless, ultimately consultants are going to have to explore other revenue models to stay afloat.

Trying to stay ahead of the industry curve hasn't always worked out so well at here at IMS, but we're trying it again with this change. We abandoned the MSP model before it even really got off the ground in favor of a more strategic, less co-dependent approach to providing guidance to clients... and that remains my bet on where the industry will ultimately go. In that way, it jibes nicely with Jonathan's perspectives on software development consulting: the result will be small, more specialized firms... although probably fewer of them.

07/13/19 SW Edits: Spelling

Speaking of spring cleaning...

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Fri, 15 May 2009 08:58:37 -0700

We are doing a little bit of that around our business model as well. This week, we are rolling out a new website: AgileOperations.net

To go with it, we're introducing a new service specialty (or rather, putting a name to an older one): Agile Operations Consulting.

Agile is a concept that has existed for quite a while in the software development world, long enough that people are starting to get sick of the term and what was once seen as radical and contrarian is now simply becoming mainstream and unworthy of special appellation. But outside the occasional dalliance with the coding community, it hasn't seen much use in the world of Information Technology (IT itself being a monicker which is fading as technology becomes ubiquitous and those using it are decreasingly specialized in the function).

For some time now, we here at IMS have seen the value of many of the precepts informing the agile development movement, and have sought to incorporate those philosophies into our planning and operational consulting engagements. It's been a rough road, in no small part because the concepts are so foreign to many clients. And yet, they should not be; for Agile Development itself is little more than an adaptation of lean manufacturing to the software world, and lean is hardly an unfamiliar idea to most business people (and certainly not to any business school graduate). So while we have been implementing our projects imbued with these philosophies, we've also decided that it's time to start educating people about them. I wrote more on that subject at my other blog, here.

It's been clear for a while now that the field from which we sprang, managed services, was doomed to consolidation and obsolescence. It's too easy to provide services virtually; MSPs are a great deal for customers now, but the same thing that makes them a good deal (specialization and economies of scale) makes smaller, local shops vulnerable to larger national organizations. We're already seeing some of this with HP, Dell, and Zenith Infotech essentially absorbing local IT shops to put a familiar face on what is actually a large, impersonal, distant service. It's cheaper, of course, as the economies of scale are greatly expanded; but it's also considerably less profitable for the local services. This trend will only accelerate, and in my opinion it's not a great business to stick with.

So I've been looking, for nearly a year, for viable alternatives. The fact is that these economic conditions, coupled with industry trends, will almost certainly result in the next ten years or so with a contraction in tech jobs. No one wants to say it, but outsourcing, virtualization, and other efficiencies are going to hit the technology job market just as hard as steelworkers or auto plant workers. My goal is to position IMS to avoid that pit by finding the next important and desirable thing in the industry. And I believe that this is it. Techs and outsourcing companies and cloud platforms may be a dime a dozen in five years; experienced consultants who can tell you how to use all those things together easily to improve your business will still be valuable. And agile operations is a path to achieve that.

Regardless of the motivation, agile ops consulting is now officially in our toolbag. Follow along on the AgileOperations.net site for further examples, musings, and articulations of the concept.

The future of the managed services business

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:15:32 -0700

If you want to find out what the next big thing in any given field is going to be, find the people who are currently making money in that field, and listen very carefully to what it is that they are complaining about.

I had the opportunity to go to a demo put on by Zenith Infotech recently for their new cloud computing initiative (everybody has got one, it seems) which they are calling BoxOffice or Datacenter as a Service (DaaS) at the low end, and Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC) at the high-end. These are the things that my fellow attendees, mostly SMB-focused IT consultants and service providers, were complaining about.

The technology basically allows the virtualization of the average SMB network into pay-as-you-go cloud processing utilities or commodity on-premises hardware which functions as a blackbox of storage and re-purposable processing power. It's fully capable of deployment in a mixed environment, for clients who still need significant desktop processing (graphics-intensive and similar functions are good examples of these; network bandwidth still isn't quite there yet to support virtual desktops handling these tasks) but those needs are becoming fewer and fewer. On-premises virtualization for the SMB has been a tough nut for resellers to crack; the computing resources and administrative overhead have been hard to sell. ZI is abstracting this into the MSP level or above, so it's not a matter of deploying infrastructure at a single customer, but instead of leveraging their backend infrastructure for thousands of customers. The cost advantages are obvious.

ZI already offers some significant service outsourcing products, and they support re-branding for their partners, so you may already be using their services if you work with a Managed Services Provider (MSP). (If you don't already work with an MSP, what are you waiting for? Go find one, it's the best way to avoid getting nickled and dimed to death for PC support apart from going back to pencil and paper.) In the MSP gold rush, they have been the successful shopkeeper selling picks and shovels to the eager prospectors.

Zenith Infotech sees the MSP market contracting, and using existing small providers as resellers of cloud technology is their way of making the leap. This isn't a new strategy, or a poor one, by any means: it's a great way to expand your sales force without paying anyone to do so, and Microsoft has used it successfully in the SMB market for decades now. Microsoft, however, has proven slightly more adroit at skating around the harsh realities of the new world as it applies to their de facto sales force, however. Because what ZI was pitching seemed to scare the heck out of the MSP reps who understood it.

What they had to complain about were not the technologies themselves, which most of us geeks can agree are pretty cool. Instead, it was what the deployment thereof was going to do to their profit margins. The single most contentious Powerpoint slide the presenter put up showed the cost breakdown between a traditional on-premises server and workstation deployment (the predominant model today) billed under a flat-rate MSP contract, and the same capabilities deployed in the BoxOffice model. The slide was confusing because in some senses it presented apples and oranges, but a few of the crowd worked it out pretty quickly: while the BoxOffice model could save the customer nearly 50%, most of that 50% was going to come out of the reseller's pocket.

There was considerable discussion of this point, with some people just flat-out unhappy about it, and others claiming that the market would continue to expand so their businesses would continue to grow even at lower profit margins, but my take was that just about everyone there was clinging fearfully to their trusty shovels even as Zenith Infotech showed them the backhoe of tomorrow.

IMS pulled back from the MSP business about a year ago, in part because it was hard to see the future in it. The consolidation which is now occuring was obvious even then; large providers have economies of scale which small operations simply cannot compete with. The market will drive toward commoditization; some buyers will stick with the small mom and pop local shops for the same reason that some buyers still pay higher prices at the neighborhood deli instead of shopping at Safeway: familiarity and loyalty. But as with the grocery market, most IT shoppers will wind up at the chains because they are more cost-effective.

What will always be golden is good advice. The technology may become a commodity; how and when to apply it will continue to be a matter of judgement and perspective, and someone with the right experience and expertise can continue to be invaluable in helping decide where to spend and where to save on technology.

This is still bad news for MSPs, because advice doesn't require the time or infrastructure to deliver, and it scales differently than their existing businesses are structured to handle. It's easy to find someone who can troubleshoot Windows; it's hard to find someone who can clearly articulate virtual desktop deployment advice to customers. The market will contract, and a lot of existing MSPs will go out of business the same way that many local computer stores did when Dell and HP started selling direct to customers.

None of this should be construed as a stab at ZI or at MSPs. I was suitably impressed with the BoxOffice model; I think it's a great approach for many small businesses and I intend to seek out a reseller of the technology to refer people to as soon as it becomes available and stable. But it's a warning sign for MSPs who only have a single platform in their bag of tricks. You're going to have to fight hard to hang onto your clients in the coming years and you had better be prepared to accept lower margins in the process. As the presenter said, "It's time to make hay while the sun shines." There are clouds on the horizon.

Good times!

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:39:28 -0700

Ah, the glory days... I thought they were gone, washed away by the grim new realities of the recession. All the fun and excesses of big-time consulting seemed to be but a distant memory.

But then I happen upon this tale of consulting triumph, and I see that the old slash and burn approach is alive and well in the big iron world of SAP implementation. Anytime you can raise the blood pressure of those poor mortal client staffers, stuck in their dull, dead-end, nine-to-five worlds, you are living the consulting high life... like a minor deity, you are impervious to the cares of those who will look upon your works afterward, and can only laugh at the furious imprecations they launch at you (or more frequently, into the aether, as their fear precludes direct confrontation).

More seriously, that post, and a number of others on that blog, are great examples of how not to do things, both as consultants, and as clients. There isn't a lot of clarity on who is running the implementation process, and apparently whoever it is doesn't have good controls in place on what is happening, because like half of all IT projects, it sounds like it is dragging on over-time and over-budget.

Reading a blog post doesn't give you an objective picture of the scenario, of course, but you can tell things aren't going well. As the author mentions along the way, this isn't necessarily out of line for SAP installations. Which isn't a bad reason for avoiding such traditional complicated mega-projects in the first place. SAP itself may or may not be the right answer, but the massive, traditional implementation scheme that most SAP consultants bring in the door is like flipping a coin insofar as how your transition will go. There are as many failures as successes; there is something wrong with a process that offers such low odds and you can't necessarily pin it on either the clients or the consultants. It's a problem with the process they have both bought into.

If you don't need an expert, you're doing something right

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:49:00 -0700

This came up somewhat tangentially on my other blog earlier this week but it struck me that it has some applicability to the SMB market as well, so I mention it here.

The discussion there was over a new survey which claims that certain core Information Technology skills, such as COBOL (which is an ancient language that you will never encounter in the SMB world, but is widespread in the enterprise), are declining among job applicants, even as the systems relying on those technologies continue to be very important to the businesses running them.

The survey was sponsored by a company which specializes in modernizing COBOL-based systems so there is something of a hidden agenda visible in those findings, but my general reaction to the survey irrespective of the motives is that it misses the point. There is nothing wrong with having a core system and not having staff available to maintain it. Every company is already in that position. Most of them don't care, because those systems aren't in regular need of maintenance... they are working exactly like they are supposed to, day in and day out, and people are hardly even aware of them. Think copiers (actually, these break all the time, to great dismay, and yet few businesses have a copier tech on staff!), phones, staplers. You only have an IT guy around because IT breaks all the time... hardly a glowing recommendation for a "core system."

Unless, of course, you are one of those privileged few businesses which do not have an IT guy around. Maybe you don't use the stuff, maybe you put up with it being broken, maybe you just buy new and don't look back. Or maybe it all really just works.

If that's the case, pat yourself on the back. You're doing something right, whether you knew it or not. And as much as consultants such as myself look for clients who currently don't have IT staff, sometimes, maybe you just don't need us. And whatever the survey says, there is nothing wrong with that. If you don't need an expert around all the time, you're probably doing something right.

More on application virtualization for the SMB

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:34:00 -0700

Something I hadn't adequately explored when discussing the potential advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft's virtualization technologies, launched in grand style in September, was this tidbit in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) blog:

App-V 4.5 will also feature a new Service Providers License Agreement (SPLA), officially called Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Hosting for Desktops, which will enable service providers to use App-V 4.5 to deliver third-party ISV developed applications to customers via the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. SaaS powered by App-V is a key enabler to closing the âdigital divideâ that exists between large enterprises with robust IT capabilities, and small businesses with limited resources. By outsourcing IT functions via service providers, small businesses are able to focus less on maintaining an IT infrastructure and more on growing their core businesses, which in turn allows them to compete more effectively in the marketplace. Itâs an important opportunity for businesses to optimize their desktops, even if they lack the resources to build them out in-house.

So, could this be the Microsoft Approved answer for businesses which are otherwise disqualified from taking advantage of the new pro-virtualization licensing terms?

If so, it's not a bad option for many SMBs. You don't necessarily want to be running your own infrastructure anyway; if you can get the applications delivered from an application service provider (ASP... kicking it old skool) then why wouldn't you prefer that anyway? Microsoft has been trying to "rent" Office applications for years and I have always been against it... but that was when it was for the full price of the license, plus all the associated support costs you have from running it on desktops. If you could subscribe to Office at-will, with the applications streamed down to whatever PC you are working at on-demand, I think I would change my tune.

I haven't seen any of these popping up just yet, but will keep an eye on the horizon.

Small Business Summit Time Again

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:48:41 -0700

Microsoft's annual three-day Small Business Summit starts today, again as last year an online-only event.

I went to the last live version of this a couple of years ago and was reasonably impressed by both speakers and topics, but last year's lineup left me underwhelmed, and from what I can see of the agenda this year it is more of the same... a lot of people you never heard of speaking with questionable authority on a lot of things you probably already know about or don't care to know about. The summit is broadly divided into Sales and Marketing presentations today, Productivity and Security tomorrow, and wrapping up with Financial Management on Thursday. It might be interesting to see how many of the canned Financial Management presentations line up well with the current econonomic situation. Otherwise, I will probably be skipping most of the show.

But it's free, and if you're bored and have a fast web connection, by all means check out the agenda and listen in on whatever interests you.

Get Virtual: Keynotes

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:27:00 -0700

EDIT: Added some clarification to licensing discussion toward the end of the article.

Bob Muglia and Kevin Turner delivered the keynotes, both assisted by a variety of walk-on guest stars brought up to reinforce certain points. The key point for both of them, however, seemed to be: VMWare, hold onto your lunch, because we're coming for it. To that end, they announced that Hyper-V Server 2008, a bare-metal competitor to VMWares ESX series, will be available as a free download, inside of 30 days. Further, System Center 2008 Virtual Machine Manager, capable of managing both Hyper-V and VMWare server instances, will be released in the same timeframe (the price point on that was unclear; if it is also free, as I took it to be, it represents a significant threat to VMWare).

Muglia handled the technical side of the affair. I was surprised at the extent to which he, and particularly guest Tom Bittman of Gartner, emphasized cloud computing as a core representation of the virtualization movement. It is, of course, but few people seem to think of the two trends on the same level. But as Bittman pointed out, the virtualization of process is the underlying emphasis driving both of them.

Muglia rolled out the demos, most of which were rather unimpressive for reasons noted in earlier posts... namely, the whole point of this technology is to allow people to do what they would normally do without any fuss or disruption. A rather extended presentation of the abilities of Vista and AppV to provide a user with a seamless new operating environment after he had lost his laptop in a cab didn't differ in any significant respect from the same event backended by XP roaming profiles and standardized images, both common in enterprises today. But his unveiling of the new capability in Windows Server Hyper-V 2008 R2 to dynamically transition server instances while running was a direct stab at VMWare. "Vmotion isn't magic, it's just a feature," Muglia said.

Turner, on the other hand, kicked things up a notch, speaking energetically of Microsoft's goals and strategy. He outlined the company's new, post-gates mission statement, "Create experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of Internet services across a world of devices" and defined how they are attempting to achieve it on four fronts: the desktop, the data center, consumer devices, and internet services. Put together that way, the approach is a compelling demonstration of a strategy playing to Microsoft's strengths (or at least capabilities) and should give any observers predicting the slow demise of the company subsequent to the departure of Bill Gates pause.

Turner's emphasis in presenting the essence of the Internet case, the so-called "Software+Services" model, was choice; citing Google and Salesforce specifically as examples of SaaS providers that only offer, well, SaaS. This is true, but it's a rather disingenous approach to take, more marketing than market oriented, as it were. Microsoft is hardly a paragon of choice (just look at their licensing sometime... although, as we'll see soon, that has changed, too), they are just putting the best possible spin on being saddled with legacy corporate-server and desktop-based software.

But Microsoft is also intent on delivering real choice, as they have been demonstrating with recent, previously unheard of, accommodations in their enterprise licensing schemes which unleash the ability of customers to take full advantages of virtualized Microsoft software. Previously, relatively simple, useful operations such as moving a virtual server from one physical machine to another (to load balance, for instance) meant that you owed Microsoft money. Now, applications and operating system instances can be more easily shifted from machine to machine as required.

Unfortunately, the most significant of these changes are in the Enterprise licenses only... and Muglia says the company is not inclined to broaden them any further. Once again, Microsoft is missing the boat and preventing a significant category of customers from making full use of their software... so much for choice. As useful as virtualization might be for the SMB market, it is being placed out of reach by senseless licensing restrictions which will continue to make competitor VMWare the logical choice for many SMBs.... this despite the significant pricing differential introduced under Microsoft's new scheme. Turner showed an imposing graphic demonstrating the towering costs of implementing a VMWare-based virtualization solution next to a quite reasonable cost using Hyper-V and System Center, but putting costs together that way is only relevant if the benefits are also comparable... and in this case, they aren't. If you can gather together the 250+ desktops needed to qualify for an Enterprise Licensing Agreement, you may take a look at Microsoft and come away impressed. Otherwise, when it comes to truly flexible virtualization services, you may as well not bother.

It occurs to me that I should clarify this somewhat; running VMWare does not magically disqualify you from the terms of your Microsoft Software licensing, which is still just as draconian as ever. It does, however, allow you to get away with running it in contexts which Microsoft's own products would disallow, which I cannot recommend, but is nonetheless a time honored tradition among small and mid-sized businesses (and heck, major enterprises) everywhere. Let's face it; SMBs, despite historically being officially cut out of the game when it comes to new software and technologies, has nonetheless found ways to implement them outside a strictly legal framework. Otherwise, most would never have been able to afford the infrastructure they put in place (and which is now coming back to bite them as they are forced to become more or less compliant. Now, it's a fact that I have not yet seen all this put together on Microsoft's platform, as it all is just coming out now, and it's possible that you can circumvent your licenses with Hyper-V and System Center as well... but I wouldn't recommend it, considering the degree of snooping which the company has already demonstrated with other recent products.

Get Virtual: Keynotes first look

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:25:12 -0700

I'll post a more comprehensive look at the twin keynote addresses by Microsoft Senior VP Bob Muglia and COO Kevin Turner later in the afternoon. For now, I'll give my brief first impressions.

Microsoft is clearly aiming squarely at VMWare with most of the virtualization technologies they are pushing out today (with a sideswipe at Google for good measure). Turner's cost comparisons were oriented by VMWare (and Microsoft's pricing--although I need to fact-check this--appears to be extremely aggressive in that market) and Muglia promised that the upcoming Windows 2008 Server HyperV R2 product will include many features that currently are exclusively the domain of VMWare products. Combined with Microsoft System Center's ability to manage both HyperV and VMWare instances, the company is returning to a formula which originally allowed it to dominate Netware, WordPerfect, and a host of other past market-leaders: underprice 'em and make it easy to switch. By addressing not only the pricing but also increasing interoperability and compatibility, the company makes it extremely easy to bring in, and eventually transition to, their product.

Also announced were several changes in licensing which eliminate one of the greatest unseen limitations in choosing Microsoft as your virtualization provider: the useful technical capabilities of their products were often constrained by the legal uses. Although these changes only apply to Enterprise licensing customers, they represent a significant change of course for Microsoft, which has been making licensing more, not less, restrictive, to the detriment of customers.

Next session is starting now, more information later.

Get Virtual: Centralized Desktops

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:53:43 -0700

The first session I went to was put on by Microsoft product managers Joshua Schnoll and Fei Lu and was titled "Centralized Desktop: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Terminal Services" covering both a comparison of the adapted SoftGrid application virtualization technology which Microsoft purchased last year and the existing, but improved, Terminal Services RemoteApp and hosted desktop offering the company already provides as part of its core server package.

I was having some difficulty wrapping my head around the differences between simply providing traditional terminal services remote desktops and hosting remote virtual machines and this presentation helped considerably with outlining the differences and describing the relative advantages of the technologies.

The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) approach relies on connecting clients to complete virtual machines running on a remote server. According to Lu, one of the primary motivators behind adopting this approach is the need to provide developers (especially off-shore developers) with means of working remotely on technology which would never physically leave the corporate infrastructure but would nevertheless be a faithful and full replica of a real machine in order to provide a complete development environment. A number of other scenarios which require full access to a machine for the user also apply.

Using VDI, users can connect remotely just as they do with Terminal Services, but run in a completely isolated environment with full and dedicated system resources, and entirely sandboxed machines. As Lu pointed out, this may be the fastest way ever to start up Vista--since the VM can be kept running during any selected time period before the user actually logs in, "startup" and login are blazingly fast compared to the usual cranky Vista start times.

Lu also made a short crack at "our competitor" (an unnamed VMWare), touting Microsoft Hyper-V's stripped-down, light-weight micro-kernel approach as providing a smaller attack surface for viruses (if I heard her right). This seemed ironic, considering that we are talking about hosting Windows, the quintessential exposed attack surface for viruses, but it may explain why the company is picking Citrix as its primary partner for VDI deployments.

A full-on Virtual Machine (VM) may be provided with VDI, or simply virtualized applications, depending on the use case. Simply virtualizing the applications retains the advantages in centralized management and sandboxing without entailing the management of full-blown VM images.

Schnoll took over and demoed the Terminal Services approach, including the RemoteApp services, which performed similarly. He also outlined the pros and cons for each approach, summarized below:

VDI	Terminal Server
Full user rights	Constrained user rights
Full application compatibility	Application compatibility limited by server OS
Resource intensive and inefficient	Most efficient resources utilization
Poor for regulatory compliance	Easier to bring into compliance
Network connection required occasionally	Full network connection required

In both cases, the primary management for the services was accomplished through Microsoft System Center, and it appeared both easy and powerful. Combined with its ability to manage a host of other aspects of system management (not to mention VMWare resources, among its other virtualization management features), System Center looks like it is shaping up as a powerful default management console for the Microsoft-based enterprise.

Opening Notes, Microsoft Virtualization Summit

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:37:55 -0700

The quality of Microsoft dog and pony shows has definitely gone downhill, even in just the past few years. No free wifi here, for example (actually, no wifi at all, so even if you were willing to pony up and pay, no dice). So posts today will be limited, not because I am spending too much time at the buffet table (a spread which has also diminished in size and succulence in recent years) but because I'm accessing the net through the straw of my cellphone radio.

There are relatively few exhibitors here and I think I have gone past most of the booths twice already. Several of them are pretty peripheral to the virtualization concept... sure, you need lots of memory to run virtual machines, but Kingston as an exhibitor? And Microsoft's erstwhile Linux ally Novell had a booth set up, a fine gesture toward the potential of hosting non-Microsoft operating systems in Microsoft's Hyper-V environment, but as of this morning, at least, the booth was empty and quiet.

The opening riff from Bob Kelly, Corporate VP of Infrastructure Server Marketing, was more flash than fire, with some slick production values in a series of video vignettes from various early adopters, but nothing beyond buzzwords to prop up the pitch. A curiously lackluster video from Steve Ballmer opened ahead of the most striking performance of the opening, a guitar duet featuring the (virtual) legendary Buddy Guy and a nine-year old virtuoso from Boston named Quinn Sullivan, who mostly just looked stoked to be missing school on a weekday. Who can blame him? That seems to be the general atmosphere among other attendees as well.

I'm going to hit the Centralized Desktop presentation next and see what they have to say. Of the booths down in the commons, the Application Virtualization one was among the most crowded and interest seems to be high in the topic.

Microsoft Virtualization Summit

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:20:22 -0700

Microsoft is holding their Get Virtual Now! launch event over in Bellevue today and I will be over there most of the day taking a look... expect more posts as Internet service presents itself and interesting tools and techniques are described.

Virtualization, while a technology which seems to be taking corporate America by storm, receives short shrift in the SMB environment, at least in my experience. I am not familiar with very many SMB organizations without full-time technical staff who are using or even considering using it. Yet it holds the same advantages, and perhaps even greater ones, for them as it does for the enterprise set which is currently embracing it.

While Microsoft's event today is aimed squarely at the enterprise, we'll see what we can get out of it that may be of interest to the SMB owner, executive, or consultant, and pass it along.

Google Chrome madness

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:34:06 -0700

If you hadn't heard about Google's announcement this morning of their newly developed open-source web browser, Chrome, you must have been away from the Internet.

I haven't been able to download it yet, the site was too jammed up this morning. On the whole, I'm fairly excited about it. I imagine it will take a few versions to become stable and useful, but the real implication of the news is that for Microsoft to remain relevant in the browser market, they'll have to start delivering many of the same capabilities that Chrome promises. They just put out their beta of IE 8, which is almost exactly the opposite direction: big and bloated. They've already lost much of their market to Firefox on account of those issues, and with a powerhouse like Google behind it, Chrome could gobble up much of the rest.

More importantly, if Chrome succeeds in making web-based applications faster, easier-to-use, and more stable than they are currently, it will pull more and more people away from Microsoft's desktop applications in the direction of cheaper, faster, and more flexible web-based products (like Google Apps, which is currently encumbered by browser performance limitations).

We'll have to see if Google can deliver, however. They sometimes, and for odd reasons, seem to just abandon products on the vine; only time will tell if they follow through on this, although it seems in their best interests to do so.

For more pontification, see my other blog entry on the topic.

Microsoft releases beta of new security system

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:42:00 -0700

They're bringing back the sexy codenames at Microsoft; the beta release of their Forefront security system is splashily advertised on the homepage as "Codename: Stirling."

Well, maybe not so sexy.

Security is sexy, though, and Forefront promises to bring a more holistic approach to corporate network security management than current approaches offer (or at least affordable current approaches). One of the big problems with many security packages is that they only address a single sector of vulnerability: your network ports, for instance, or spam. Even packages which combine features to protect against multiple vulnerability categories are rarely truly integrated; they usually have a handful of sub-components which don't talk to or even necessarily work well with one another. This is a bit like the problems that police forces have with jurisdiction; cops in one city don't track what's going on in the next one over, but criminals observe no such common lines of demarkation.

Forefront promises to end those sorts of gaps and provide a single dashboard for your corporate security controls, as well as a bevy of new features to integrate security policies and respond dynamically to threats.

Pricing and licensing have not yet been announced, but the beta is free for download--first taste is free.