Ten things I learned about CA

I spent part of last week at CA’s (Computer Associates in the old days) industry analyst meeting. My overall impression is very positive. CA is a complicated company with a complicated history. Often when a company has a near death experience, it either dies or changes. I have seen many companies that [...]

Is HP ready to rock and roll with its investments in software, hardware, and services?

Every year for the past 20 years I have attended HP’s annual analyst meeting. The first one I attended was quite small with a couple dozen analysts with all the focus on hardware. Having spent so much time with HP over these years I am in a unique position to give a point [...]

When does the data center become the cloud?

This is the beginning of another season of analyst meetings. Today I am at IBM’s Linux and Open Source meeting. Next week I will be with HP at their industry analyst meeting (hardware, software, services — no printers or PCs), that will be followed by IBM’s Impact (SOA conference), CA’s analyst meeting, and finally [...]

I love the smell of acquisitions in the morning: BMC Gets BladeLogic

The great thing about acquisitions is that it provides a lot of fodder for bloggers and pundits. And there have certainly been a lot lately. For example, just yesterday BMC finally got a data center automation company. It almost had landed OpsWare when HP swooped down and landed the deal. Now [...]

Top 10 Predictions: Innovation, ROI, Cloud Computing and more…

I love the end of the year. I get to sneak out of the office for a few days and stay off of airplanes. I also have a chance to look ahead to the new year. I like making predictions. Sometimes, I am years ahead of the market; other times I am able to hit [...]

EMC’s Innovation Journey: from storage to information centric computing

Today I am at EMC’s annual analyst meeting. Just like IBM, EMC’s theme is innovation. EMC is on an interesting journey from its roots in storage managment. EMC has been on a journey for a number of years with acquisitions in information and content management (Documentum and eRoom) and security (RSA, Verid), management [...]

Five things I learned at IBM’s Software Group Industry Analyst Meeting

Every year at about this time I attend IBM Software Group IT Industry Analyst meeting. This meeting is attended by about 90 industry analysts and about three times that number of IBM software group leaders, managers, and support staff. It is quite the event! While I can’t possibly talk about everything I [...]

Can you measure and monitor your user experience?

Since the web has increasingly become the platform for interacting with customers, partners, and the like — the notion of managing the online experience has skyrocketed. The term “user experience” is confusing. I have traditionally thought about this in terms of how the user interacts with software.  But I am finding that the [...]

What’s the value of autonomic computing?

Ok, here is a test for you. What is the value of autonomic computing in the real world? Autonomic computing has always sounded a little like science fiction. The system sits there and anticipates when something is going to go wrong and rushes in, and fixes the problem – before any [...]