Roll For Enterprise

IBM buys Instana — what does this mean for the monitoring market

https://venturebeat.com/2020/11/18/ibm-acquires-instana-for-its-ai-powered-app-performance-monitoring/

Is this a sign of more monitoring deals to come?

451 Research's M&A KnowledgeBase has recorded more than 50 'monitoring' purchases, on average, for each year since 2015, which is two-thirds higher than the number of deals in the first half of the decade.

Salesforce may be buying Slack

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/tech/slack-stock-salesforce-acquisition-rumors/index.html

What does this mean for adoption? Did Teams steal Slack’s growth, or did they fumble execution all by themselves? And what does this mean for Zoom? With everyone working from home, we have not seen a real change in remote working compared to before; Slack & Zoom are still Slack & Zoom, just with more people.

(But also: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/11/25/slack-salesforce )

Amazon outage

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21719396/amazon-web-services-aws-outage-down-internet 

Anchor affected! 

https://twitter.com/discoposse/status/1331667061748211719

Instead of recommendations, we talked about what we are thankful for

Dominic

Slack, Zoom, and all the rest of the apps & services that have made it possible to work remotely this year

Mike

Home office space

Zack

This podcast and our chat channel

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

How do people actually use the cloud?

Is it still raw infrastructure components, lifted & shifted from on-premises data centers, or are people architecting apps differently in a cloud-native world?

Servers > VMs > Containers > Functions

The Big Three providers and what differentiates them

Who’s the customer: developers or business users

Openshift At The Center Of The Hybrid Cloud Storm https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/11/17/openshift-at-the-center-of-the-hybrid-cloud-storm/

John Chambers: Why tech companies need to reinvent themselves every three to four years https://www.vox.com/2018/10/10/17957886/john-chambers-cisco-connecting-dots-book-leadership-management-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast

How Many AWS Services Are There in 2020? https://cloudwith.me/posts/how-many-aws-services-are-there-in-2020

Killed by Google https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle

What is Backend as a Service (BaaS): https://george-51059.medium.com/backend-as-a-service-list-9104bdce845e

Recommendations

Dominic

Charles Stross, “Dead Lies Dreaming” https://amzn.to/2UxPfrx

Mike

Oura Ring https://ouraring.com/

Zack

Grammarly - AI-powered writing tool. Checks for spelling, syntax, punctuation, tone, plagiarism.Freemium model with paid tiers for additional features. https://www.grammarly.com

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

How technical should you be, as a manager or a marketer?

At what point is it okay to accept that you’re no longer hands-on? Vice versa, how do you keep up to speed enough to make intelligent decisions?

William Gibson quote, from “Johnny Mnemonic” (published as part of “Burning Chrome”): “These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.”

Skill stacking (although Dominic didn’t yet know the term when he wrote this post): https://findthethread.postach.io/post/intersections

The value of reference customers

How to avoid burning them out — user groups let you go one-to-many

Why a warts-and-all story may actually be better than a “perfect” reference

The power of internal references within a company

Should marketing departments have their own engineers?

https://firstround.com/review/The-Case-for-Why-Marketing-Should-Have-Its-Own-Engineers/

Low-code/no-code, Microsoft, and open-source

Guido Van Rossum joins Microsoft: twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1326932991566700549

Recommendations

Dominic

Reverse recommendation! Since Apple didn’t announce a monitor that costs less than several of my early cars, what 4k monitor should I get? Zack and Mike came out strongly in favour of Dell curved monitors, which are tempting, but what else should I consider?

Mike

Italians Mad About Food (see here for some context, or just enjoy the tweets)

Zack

Naps

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Cloud computing is always in the news — but the reason we are talking about it on the podcast is that this feels like a tipping point. Famously, Snowflake had a cloud-only strategy from day one, and that seems to have worked out pretty well for them. Now, others are moving in the same direction, with Atlassian planning to end sale and support of their on-premise server product and go cloud-only:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/atlassian-to-end-sale-and-support-of-on-premise-server-products-by-2024/

There is a recurring revenue trap. There is no way back. Cloud delivery does save time, but if you are a growth company, then as you add more users you pay more, and soon enough the cost has ballooned. Now what? There might not be an easy way back.

But the ratchet turns both ways: PAYG business models work for both users and providers, because they scale with utilisation (flat-fee cloud services with unlimited usage would not last very long). Marginal costs are a factor, and ideally you want to go up the stack and offer more differentiated services that command higher margins so that you can amortise your fixed costs better. Recurring revenue aligns incentives better between user and vendor:

https://findthethread.postach.io/post/incentives-drive-behaviour-security-is-no-exception

This conversation is becoming more critical as cloud becomes the default:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/13/the-good-saas-times-will-end-and-challenges-are-coming/

The calculation is about CapEx vs OpEx, efficiency vs resilience. Also as companies modernize (or try to) there is often no business case. There might be a road to a business case — if your CIO doesn’t get fired!

IT Fragmentation is another factor. We all know shadow IT is IT, but there is an issue with the power of cloud offerings: too many people with too much power and no idea what they can do. Next thing you know someone turns on or off a feature and your company is paralyzed.

Finally, what about skills? All this abstraction risks creating skill silos; will new generations of technologists need specific vocational training? Will they be trapped in one particular domain, without transferrable skills?

Recommendations

Dominic

Bicycles — bicycles are good

Mike

Smokeless Backyard Firepit - We all need to be outside this winter to survive the dark winter ahead. Be smart.

https://breeo.co/

Zack

Exercising in front of YouTube videos

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

This week we welcome back friend of the show, Lilac Schoenbeck, VP of Go-To-Market Strategy at Rocket Software. This was very timely, since it gave us a chance to discuss Rocket’s new acquisitions: https://www.rocketsoftware.com/news/rocket-software-acquires-connectiq-and-webconnect-activeops-delivering-rpa-mainframe We were especially interested to talk about the RPA side of things, including what increased automation means for the job market. RPA can be thought of as APIs for humans… Also, it turns out mainframes are still everywhere, mainly because they work, and unless and until the business process that they automate changes, it’s not worth the effort and risk to move automation of that process to a different platform.

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud: is this time different?

Cloud computing is always in the news — but the reason we are talking about it on the podcast is that this feels like a tipping point. Famously, Snowflake had a cloud-only strategy from day one, and that seems to have worked out pretty well for them. Now, others are moving in the same direction, with Atlassian planning to end sale and support of their on-premise server product and go cloud-only:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/atlassian-to-end-sale-and-support-of-on-premise-server-products-by-2024/

This cloud prioritization can lead to concerns about cloud lock-in, but because we are talking about middleware — SaaS or PaaS — that conversation plays out a bit differently than last time, when it was all about IaaS. For instance, MongoDB just launched multi-cloud clusters for the Atlas DBaaS:

https://diginomica.com/mongodb-forges-ahead-multi-cloud-agenda-announces-multi-cloud-clusters-atlas (disclosure: Dominic’s employer)

Recommendations

Dominic

“The Ministry For The Future”, Kim Stanley Robinson — especially for the talk of discounting future values

Zack

IDC FutureScape webinar series

https://www.idc.com/events/futurescape (+1 from Dominic)

Mike

Microsoft Power Automate

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Dominic, Zack and Mike discuss the long term impact working remote is having on the workforce including:

Rumors at Cisco and why hardware companies are in trouble. Why Mike thinks even if you aren’t a software companies you need to give the illusion you are like Nvidia.

Also why channel partner are shifting to managed services as a result of hardware company troubles.

Also the shift in MAC to PC. Is BYOD now benefitting PCs more than MACs? Who are these people asking for PCs? The Microsoft turn around has been strong for years now.

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Zack, Mike, and Dominic are joined this week by John Hanlon and Steven Palmese, respectively the CRO and CIO for Presidio.

As the pandemic accelerated companies' journey to the cloud, challenges have emerged, whether migrating existing applications, building new cloud-native applications, or managing both the cloud and on-premise environments. In parallel with these infrastructure questions, digital business transformations have challenged the IT workforce and created demand for new roles and skills – both in IT and across every functional area. All of these evolutions are taking place against a backdrop of falling budgets and ever-greater expectations from the business and end-users. Presidio managed and professional services have spent the last years adding automation and AI/ML to their existing toolset, helping Presidio respond faster and more efficiently to ever-changing business needs.

John and Steven share their thoughts on the high expectations placed on CIOs, the ever-changing IT workforce, the gradual acceptance of shadow IT, and the dos and don’ts of migrations to the cloud and adopting a cloud-first mindset.

You can reach Presidio online at https://www.presidio.com, on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/presidio-/, and their Twitter handle is @Presidio, https://twitter.com/Presidio.

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Zack, Mike, and Dominic are joined this week by Matt Harper. Matt is Vice President of Marketing for Nylas, where he leads global marketing efforts for the API-first developer platform that serves customers like Dialpad, Ceridian, Hubspot and Move.com. Nylas most recently closed a Series B round for $25M this past June. Matt joined Nylas from Moogsoft, where he helped lead the company from Series B through Series D rounds, raising nearly $100M and scaling the company’s revenues by over 6x. Previously, Matt led marketing departments at Glassdoor and Sony PlayStation, where he led digital marketing efforts for the PlayStation 4. 

Nylas is a developer API platform that helps you quickly launch new productivity features without having to write custom code. Through a single integration, developers can leverage rich communications data to trigger automated workflow, like scheduling meetings or syncing data to a CRM. Learn more about Nylas at nylas.com or on Twitter @nylas.

Some of the topics we discussed:

That blog post of Dominic's that he shamelessly promoted on air: Serving Two Causes

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

You’re doing cloud wrong

Lift & shift leads to high costs, missed benefits https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/03/cloud_control_costs/

Cloud economists: Corey Quinn, Owen Rogers

Embracing cloud requires org changes — decentralisation, delegation; Shadow IT comes out into the open

BUT! All of this is not free, will coexist for some time with existing models — which leads to the dreaded bimodal IT

See also https://cloudpundit.com/2020/09/18/the-multicloud-gelatinous-cube

Stupid Sh*t Vendors Do — reprise

Mike wishes that sales people would please stop selling through LinkedIn.... 

Beware of hobbyists

Certain domains (security, ML) attract a vocational approach which may not follow organisations' best interests. How to align to organisational priorities, not just personal interest?

Follow up

iOS14, App Store moderation‎

https://daringfireball.net/2020/09/widgetsmith_bunco_squad

Automation

VMware and SaltStack Important, But Not Exciting | Find the thread

Recommendations

Mike:

Elon Musk interview on Sway talking about neural ink and our human meat flaps.

Elon Musk: ‘A.I. Doesn’t Need to Hate Us to Destroy Us’ 

https://overcast.fm/+he8FSycfQ

Dominic:

Let there be light — put more lights around your working area, both for visibility on webcam and for your mood

Zack:

Vitamin D is good

You always need operations

Is DevOps an oxymoron with the no code movement? Is it time to move on? What about GitOps?

Snowflake can also be considered as shadow IT, or conversely, business empowerment through NoOps

Dominic’s NoOps blog post: https://findthethread.postach.io/post/not-noops-but-smartops

“Said no CEO ever: Things that don't matter in the cloud”: https://speakerdeck.com/caseywest/said-no-ceo-ever-things-that-dont-matter-in-the-cloud

Forrester NoOps article: https://go.forrester.com/blogs/11-02-07-i_dont_want_devops_i_want_noops/

Lehman Brothers spreadsheet error: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2533631/excel-error-leaves-barclays-with-more-lehman-assets-than-it-bargained-for.html

Lightning round

Privacy

Airlines and privacy https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram

AI/GPT-3

Microsoft teams up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3 language model

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/22/microsoft-teams-up-with-openai-to-exclusively-license-gpt-3-language-model/

Is this exclusivity an issue?

Recommendations

Dominic

Handwriting! Rotring 800 mechanical pencil https://amzn.to/2EuvEUC

Mike’s pend of choice: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001E6A9M8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Zack

A diet based on caloric restriction might make you live longer. Starve your cancer cells and renew & rejuvenate.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/20/553/prolon-starvation-diet/

Mike

Amazon Ring drone camera! https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/24/21453709/ring-always-home-cam-indoor-drone-security-camera-price-specs-features-amazon