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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced that it has formed a group dedicated to addressing the need for open management standards for cloud computing. The "Open Cloud Standards Incubator" will work to develop a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management.
As virtualization technology continues to be more rapidly adopted, it is emerging as a common enabling foundation for delivering software solutions into IT environments along with the potential to lower IT costs and improve operational efficiencies. While deploying virtualization technologies it is also critical to have comprehensive management capabilities associated with the implementation.
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There is now a little bidding war going on for SumTotal SystemsACCEL-KKR, a private equity firm, outbid Vista Equity Partners by offering approximately $124 Million for the company. This bid is approximately 20% higher than the $103 Million offer which Vista extended in early April. This is a very positive thing – both for SumTotal as well as for the general HR software marketplace.
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting Facebook will open up most if not all of their user-contributed data to developers at a developer event tomorrow. This has been long expected and will likely trigger a wave of third-party integration of Facebook streams with other popular feeds, most notably that of Twitter.
Should players such as Seesmic Desktop and FriendFeed roll out an integrated service, we will be a major step closer to a single stream of realtime events. This in turn will rapidly accelerate a convergence around micromessaging similar to the one around email when it achieved a critical mass following AOL’s opening up of the limited educational and government mail systems to average users.
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Business Intelligence projects are famous for low success rates, high costs and time overruns. The economics of BI are visibly broken, and have been for years. Yet BI remains the #1 technology priority according to Gartner. We could paraphrase Lee Iacocca and say: People want economical Business Intelligence solutions and they will pay ANY price to get it.
Nobody argues with the need for more Business Intelligence; BI is one of the few remaining IT initiatives that can make companies more competitive. But only the largest companies can live with the costs or the high failure rates. BI is a luxury.
I believe that the bad economics of BI are rooted in the IT department/BI vendor duopoly on BI infrastructure. This post focuses on IT’s inability to deliver efficient BI projects.