Tech & Work World

I was at Spiceworld, briefly, last week. This is Spiceworks’ big user, annual conference in Austin; they have one in London as well. I’ve followed Spiceworks for many years (from RedMonk to 451 Research) and have always liked their IT management approach: their business model is to be the Facebook of IT by giving away the systems management software for free and then selling access to the users to advertisers, vendors, and others. They also have a data practice which has some interesting, deep pools of data.

Last week they announced several new services and features, and also made some exiting ones free. They have a hosted (cloud!) offering that I’d missed seeing; that’s one of the things they made free (down from $10/month). As ever, I think their ambition is to monitor and manage as much IT as their user base wants. They don’t always provide the deepest functionality (saving that for their “real” customers who can sell more sophisticated tools into the user base), but they balance the “you get what you pay for” product management track well as their user momentum shows:

The numbers from there are not entirely consistent as they’re a mix of “users,” “monthly unique page views,” and whatever Spiceworks told me in briefings. That is, the thing counted has likely changed over time. I feel like getting a million “users” over a year is high (from 5m to 6m), but, whatever: just check out the general shape of the thing and you realize there’s something going on there.

Some other momentum figures:

• One good, recent figure is “2,000 new members a day.”
• Another one from Sep, 2014: Spiceworks being used by 1.8m organizations.
• Spiceworks currently has “over 400” employees, up from 225 in Nov 2013.

One theme this year was the expansion, up-market into “enterprise.” If I recall, Spiceworks considers “enterprise” to be 500+ employees, and the rest is “SMB.” For them, that’s fair, but be warned if you think of enterprise as something more like 10,000+ employees.

Over time, the share between “small” and enterprise has been growing:

• 2009: 13% enterprise, 87% small (from my notes)
• 201?: 20% enterprise, 80% small (“previous to 2015”)
• 2015: 40% enterprise, 60% small (from SpiceWorld 2015)

This year, they reported 71% penetration into F500 accounts.

The phrase “DevOps” was flashed up on the screen a few times and mentioned in meetings. In general, I see “DevOps” as only being applicable to organizations who are working on and deploying custom written software, their own software. (Sure, you could adopt the same principals for packaged software, SaaS, etc….but would you?). As it expands more, Spiceworks could concern itself with managing custom written software - somehow - which would be interesting and consistent with their general strategy of grabbing as much IT department land as possible.

Quick Hits

Meanwhile:

• All the taboos of working from home - in which I write-up how I handle working at home. Two items: (a.) I posted this as a post to LinkedIn and it go mad “engagement”…more for the “blogs are dead” file; (b.) the wife of one of my LinkedIn followers said, “my husband asked, ‘do you think he got permission from his wife to post that picture (cause you would have killed me if I did the same!)’”
• The most recent Software Defined Talk: Picasso didn’t have markdown, or, “Matt Ray’s DevOps World” - Software Defined Talk #44 (cote.io)
• A new podcast series Matt Curry and I started on companies who are transforming how they use IT.
• PCs, tablet shipments set to decline further - Gartner - “Worldwide shipments of these devices are expected to reach 2.4 billion units in 2015, a drop of one percent from 2014, according to the market watcher.”
• HP releases new versions of Propel and Service Anywhere - speaking of the evolving nature of ITSM.

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