Back at Dell, Docker Forking, Healthcare IT, & DevOps - Coté Memo #15

With summer over, there’s a new round of conferences, and my kids are back at school. My 6-year-old, Cormac, is starting 1st grade. We looked around at lot of schools for him and settled on the Lake Travis STEM Academy. I went to public school all my life - and a state college (I mean, a not too fucking shabby one) - so I’ve been really curious to see how private schools pan out. So far, two weeks in, it’s very nice: I like all the extra attention he gets in such a small school and a class of six. Compared to public school, the flexibility of regulations, policies, and norms is amazing as well: they’re basically like, “we’re here to lurn them kids, not fill out a bunch of fucking paperwork.”

I’ll be at DevOpsDays DFW next week, speaking and staffing the Pivotal table. Come up and say “hi” if you’re there!

A big-ass summer frog, caught by the ever quick-handed Cormac.

Discounts!

I have a discount code for Operability.IO, September 19th and 20th in London. I hear good things about this conference; check out their talks from last year. It has a good list of speakers, including our very own Casey West. You can get 10% off registration if you use the code COTEMEMOOIO16.

Where my shit is

I switch around the distributed wunderkammer that is my content on the Internet a lot. It’s a bad habit that probably loses a lot of the audience each time I shift around. At the moment, here’s what I’m doing:

• Daily links and micro-commentary are blogged at cote.io. Occasionally, I collect together several “clippings” on a topic and post that as a “Notebook” entry on cote.io.
• Longer, original pieces are divided between cote.io (such as the Docker piece below) and Medium (like the stop hitting yourself and ROI pieces).
• I’m moving all my podcasts to SoundCloud.
• I cross post most everything to Facebook. While I don’t “friend” that many people (I keep my family stuff “hidden” from public view), all my public stuff is, well, public. Facebook’s model for all this is weird , but, well, there it is.
• And, of course, there’s selective self-promotion and inane chatter over in Twitter.
• And, good Lord, there’s so many more content-silos too.

I long for the days where you just had a blog and an RSS feed, but them days are long gone. Viva la Shotgun Your Content All Over the Internet paradigm!

Coté Content

The Stop Hitting Yourself Anti-pattern, or, Change is hard, but failure is worse.

While I try to write long, well-cited pieces of advice, sometimes it’s good to just be preachy. On this topic - large orginizations being all butt-hurt that they can’t change for the better because they suck - I think a good rant is in order.

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DevOps for Normals, #S1P

Here’s the DevOps talk I gave at SpringOne Platform. I was nervous about giving this talk because Nicole Forsgren spoke right before me and I reference some of her work. She does excellent work and is a great speaker. It seemed to all pan out, though I had to rush to fit into 30 minutes cause I’m, you know, a real fuckin’ professional, apparently.

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How Important is Platform and Cloud Portability? — Coté, Mueller, Gregory

As you’ll recall, we did a webinar recently on the topic of multi-cloud and, more broadly, starting your cloud strategy. We were lucky to have Brian Gregory from ExpressScripts International on. Holger and I had some great conversation with him about how large orginizations can get their cloud native strategy on.

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New Pivotal Conversations episodes

Check out the recent episodes on requirements management and microservices with SpringCloud.

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All about that Docker forking stink

Docker is like the Trump of tech news: no one can help themselves from covering it. As such, when there was talk of the community forking off, I and my podcasting buddies covered it at length:

Unbreakable Docker, or, elephants, er, like other elephants - Software Defined Talk #71

Brandon, Matt, and myself talk about Docker. And also, what’s up with outsourcing. And, don’t miss the other SDT episodes since last time.

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Deciding where the Docker ecosystem will make money

I don’t get a chance to write a lot of proper analysis anymore, but sometimes I allow myself to dip back into that pool. This is a pretty good piece on Docker’s product/business model flâneuring and how the rest of the commercial commmunity fits in…if I don’t say so myself ;) - 

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Links

Big data and the limits of social engineering

The idea of programming groups of people with small payments is interesting. “Incentives” is always fun to monkey with, at least, in theory. It always feels like “well, have you tried more money?” is pretty good fix for seemingly intractable problems.

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Is this how the Quadrant lost its Magic?

For as much as people in tech talk - and, let’s be honest, mostly complain - about the Gartner Magic Quadrant, there’s little commentary or history of it. You can catch a few snippets here. For me, it’s all about context and reading the whole thing to understand the methodology/selection critera.

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Rackspace goes private for $4.3bn

Rackspace is finally going private. Here’s my collection of links and news on the topic.

cote.io  •  Share

Back at Dell

Having worked there in corporate strategy and M&A, I stop myself from talking about Dell a lot, esp. when it comes to strategy and M&A. They really injected us with paranoia about that, and rightly so. So, I haven’t really spoken that much about the Dell/EMC merger (or “acquisition,” technically) which closed today (September 7th, 2016). 

I think it’ll work out pretty well, actually. There’s been no end of re-iterating that Pivotal (the company I work for) will be kept as is: an independent company still set on its plan of growth. When I look at the remaining “mega-companies” in tech - IBM, HP/HPE, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, etc. - I think we’ll be situated pretty well.

The problem any large company has, over time, is re-inventing itself while keeping “Wall Street” happy. Investors want high growth and big returns to match the high valuations/multipules they give tech. So when a company has to “go back to drawing board” to come up with the next 10 years of innovations, well, shit’s hard. 

Wall Street could give a fuck about “fail fast” and just wants “profit fast.” I mean, I don’t blame them: I want those index funds we keep my family’s cash in to go up as fast as possible and stay up, nevermind the risk of bringing horizon 2 and 3 shit to market and paying for all that R&D.

Microsoft and Apple have both walked through this harrowing gate. IBM is trying it’s damnedest (and, as a 100+ year old company, should have a strong grasp on what’s up). HP/HPE is, well, trying, to make a pun out of it. And Oracle: well, I have no idea with that outfit - I’ve never covered them closely (nor Cisco). 

I’m curious and eager to see how “the world’s largest technology company” sorts this out. And, of course, personally vested in seeing it work out well.