The sum of what I know that might be useful to my sons. Maybe not.

The sum of what I know that is useful and appears to be true now that I’ve achieved 43 years of age. (in no particular order)

• Happiness, in general is not a good goal – it is a by-product of trying really hard to do something else.  Also, it doesn’t last.
• A good wife, at least based on my experience, is one that is not too terribly ambitious, and one that has not too much success early in life.  If either of the first two conditions is met, you will need to either hire help to fill in the gaps left by her pursuit of ambition or perform those duties yourself.  A nice girl that got B’s at state from a reasonably agreeable family is a good start, but no guarantee of success.
• What is required for a marriage – either party can do it, but these are the fundamentals.
  • Income in any amount.
  • Child care / Supervision of children’s intellectual, physical, and spiritual education
  • Acquisition and Preparation of food
  • Initiation and completion of sex
  • Upkeep of the interior of the dwelling
  • Upkeep of the exterior of the dwelling
  • Interface with other families outside of either birth family
  • Bills / Bookkeeping
  • Planning for family togetherness so that the children bond amongst themselves which will serve them well when the parents have died.
  • Parents are interested in silence, not justice (Bill Cosby)
  • The condition of being a man is to be essentially lonely.  The cure for this is to read books or even better (I think) write them.  Do not believe for one second that your wife is your best friend, a confidant, a soul mate, or any such thing.  This is not to say that you cannot love them deeply, because you can – but they will never ever understand the way that you think and if you’re normal, you will think many, many things that you must never, ever share with your wife.
  • Most of what you learn in school is in fact useless.  The things you learn while at school, outside of the classroom are far more important.  Therefore, go to a good school with high quality people so that you will learn the right stuff.
  • One should read “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” in high school, again in college, again after college, and after being married for 1 year, 6 years, 10 years and 15 years.
  • Define what success means to you early, or you will never be happy.  Once you define it, you can achieve it and if need be, redefine it after you achieve your first goal.
  • Don’t trust Wall Street or any investment vehicle.
  • Your home is not an investment.  It is a place to live.  Do not confuse it with an investment.
  • You make your best friends when you are young and single.  Take care of them.  You will need them later so that you can grow older with them.
  • I feel terrible even writing this, but people from two-parent households tend to have less complications in their lives and are easier to deal with.  If you come from a two-parent family, it is best to seek a wife from a two-parent household because they will have no baggage and a more realistic approach to marriage, life, and conflict.
  • There will always be someone at your job that you will perceive as doing better than you, getting ahead faster, deservedly or not.  It is best not to worry about this and to focus on something more important.  Just about anything is more important than this.
  • I believe that one area that the Europeans have over the Americans is no illusion of class mobility.  If one seeks to maintain their class status rather than improve it, ones life will be easier, better, and will not endure so much suffering as one who strives to join a club to which they were not invited.  This is just my belief.
  • If you want something, ask for it.
  • If you like a girl, ask her out.  The worst that can happen is she will say ‘no’ – and that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you would think.  Besides, you’ve got nothing to lose.  You already not enjoying her company, so you’ll just be where you started, plus the ‘no’ will help you move onto the next one.
  • Get through your first love quickly.  For whatever reason, it seems that the inevitable painful failure of first loves falls more on the male than the female.  Maybe they’re better at hiding it?
  • A girl is going to look like her mother – so if looks for the long haul are important to you, make sure the mother is at least 50% MILF.
  • It is important to have at least one good hobby that you can do in complete isolation, without talking and without the need for a helper.  You will have much more time alone when you are an adult than you can possibly imagine.
  • It is good to travel – experience new places and things – so that you can appreciate the beauty of your quotidian existence.  It is better to live abroad and learn to speak another language.  Learning another language doesn’t only teach you new words for things you already know, it teaches you another way of thinking entirely and enriches your understanding of the world, because you will have two points of view.
  • Admire, but don’t desire beautiful people.  They are wonderful to look at, but don’t project any further than that.
  • To go to jail for more than 24 hours is a failure and is to be avoided at all costs.  When trying to decide whether to do something you know is bad, ask these two questions – “If I get caught, will I go to jail for more than one day?” – the second question is “have I ever done this before”.  If the answers to both questions is yes, DON’T DO IT.  People rarely get caught the first time they break the law.
  • Only break one law at a time.  If you are speeding, don’t drink.  Trespassing is a crime – often the first law broken.
  • Read great books first.  There may not be enough time to read the less good ones.
  • A good religion is at least 10 generations old and has descendents from the first generation still practicing it.
  • It is never worth it to commit suicide.  You’re going to die anyway – why rush it?  Having good friends can help you avoid this.  If you think you want to commit suicide, write down all of the reasons you want to do it on a piece of paper.  Put the paper away for three days.  Don’t commit suicide during those three days.  After those three days have passed, open the paper up and make a decision – carry on with life as it is or choose a new life – you can plan a new life.  If neither of these things works – anti-depressants, coffee or a road trip to a hot sunny place may help.  If that doesn’t work, then maybe suicide is the answer – but I don’t think that it is.
  • Pornography, like alcohol, is unavoidable, but one should not spend more than 5 or 10 minutes a week with it.  It will lessen the quality of your real-life relationships, create unattainable desires, and generally cost you more in wasted thought and anxiety than it is worth, so don’t spend too much time with it.  Alcohol will make you fat and sick.  Both have their place, but must be managed.
  • Make sure you meet your obligations.  If a paper is due, turn it in on time.
  • Attend all classes.  You don’t have to pay attention, but nobody I know ever got below a ‘c’ in a class that they bothered turning up for.  You can graduate with ‘C’s – but of course I expect better from you.
  • Be prepared to take care of your parents.
  • We, as parents, know that you will think that we are idiots until you are fully an adult.  Then you will have a more reasoned opinion of us.  This is normal.  We will be looking forward to the day when we are all adults.  We’ve been looking forward to it since the time you were potty training.
  • Your brothers and sisters will be your best and most reliable friends – so don’t ruin those relationships unless it is absolutely unavoidable.  That situation is if a sibling is a verifiable psychopath – verified by someone outside of the family.  Simple bad behavior, borrowing your stuff, taking your money, marrying “wrong” is no excuse.  You have more in common with your siblings than anyone else on Earth – including your spouse. There are many times when this matters a lot.
  • Money isn’t everything.  In fact, it’s no more important than anything else – but you do have a responsibility to make sure that you can meet your obligations.  By the way, for the most part, you get to choose your obligations – so choose them wisely.
  • Do not allow your happiness to depend upon the happiness of another – especially your significant other.  There are so many other forces at work that affect your partners every action, mood, etc., that it is foolish to think that you can do anything to cause or change it.  What you can do, however, is to not cause the grief / anxiety – i.e.”don’t piss them off” knowingly.  You can’t cure another person’s unhappiness.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that something you can do (buy a big house, buying a new expensive gift) can make a difference.  It cannot.  The root of this foolishness comes from early in the love, when things you do, appear to make a difference.  They don’t.  You are learning nothing during the early stages of love because there is no pain.  You learn later in love, when it is at its depths.  Worry about yourself – go practice your hobby.
  • Children are wonderful.  They are wonderful 21 hours a day.  The 3 hours a day that they are not wonderful is separated into 10 minute increments spread throughout the day.  Remember, if there are 2 children, that’s 6 hours a day.
  • Children cost about 10% more money than you have.  Just be aware of this.  Doesn’t matter how much you have.

I thought that this was a good post.  I read it in a Google Group dedicated to Cloud Computing, but I think the quote applies broadly to high-tech.

“Economics follow technology, not drive it.  Private airplane, charter airplanes, business airplanes, and airline use the same technology with radically different business models and costs.  But business models have no effect on aerodynamics.”

TiVo – Why I’m going to cancel it

I have been a TiVo devotee for years, but I’m having difficulty justifying the roughly $26 per month I’m paying for the privelege of using it.  In short – it’s still a great way to watch TV.  Timeshifting is one of the best innovations in television viewing since cable itself (yes, I’m that old).  Here’s what would help me justify continuance of my TiVo subscriptions:

1.  Integration with Pandora. – We listen to Pandora constantly – it’s a great service and it’s a lot like TiVo for radio.

2. Better sound options on the boxes themselves – the audio that comes out of my TiVo stinks.

3. Record one program and watch another simulataneously and easily.  Maybe the new TiVos do this, but my 3 series 2 boxes do not and I really don’t want to have to upgrade.

4. Better program transfer between TiVo’s.  I have a wired network in my house and I still cannot transfer programs in real time between boxes.  This is a pain in the neck if something is recorded in the family room that I want to finish watching in the bedroom, for example.

5.  Cloud Storage – I would love to have my Tivo storage be unlimited in the cloud.  This would allow me to access it from anywhere, anytime, and really make the whole service a lot better.   Amazon S3 would be ideal for this.

It seems like they’re just not keeping up with the times here.

IT Marketer Tip 1: Determine the bias of your firm

How to tell if you work for a Marketing and Sales oriented firm.

You work for a Marketing and Sales focused firm if:

1. The firm is chaotic
2. Your CEO is moody, as opposed to always in a bad mood
3. The firm is opportunistic – i.e. when sales uncovers a prospect that needs something that the firm does not provide, there’s a real good chance that the sales team will “go for it”.
4. Products ship on time (although they might not actually work as designed for a little while)
5. You earn six figures and work in marketing.

 

How to tell if you work for an Engineering biased firm.

 

You work for an engineering biased firm if:

1. The firm is not chaotic.
2. You never are really quite sure whether the product is going to ship on time.
3. Your CEO has an engineering degree and has never been in sales.
4. The ratio of engineers to marketing / sales staff is 2:1

 

In small companies, the difference between being an Engineering focused company and a Sales and Marketing focused company are like the difference between being right-handed and being left-handed.  In a larger company, the differences occur at the business unit level.  It’s worth noting that the engineering focused company tends to be a better acquisition target than the sales and marketing one.

 

If you work for a Sales & Marketing Focused firm, enjoy the ride.  You will get to try new things and have big programs.  Unfortunately, your career may not last long due to your moody, possibly over-involved CEO.  If you work for an Engineering focused firm, start dating one of the Sr. Engineers, or get a low cost hobby – you’re being underpaid and underappreciated so you’ve got to do something with your time.

Top 10 Things IT Marketers Need to Know – Intro

I’ve been collecting thoughts, observations, and best practices for those of you who market IT Products to IT Buyers.  Feel free to quibble.  Enjoy

Pandora and TiVo

I wish that I could get the Pandora application on my TiVo.  I’m assuming that you know what TiVo is by now.  Pandora, www.pandora.com, allows end users to create and (more importantly) train streaming internet stations so that they only play the music that you like.  I’m listening to Pandora as I write this post.  Anyhow, TiVo allows you to rate shows with a “thumbs up, thumbs down” button on the remote.  Pandora allows you to rate songs with a “thumbs up, thumbs down” control on the user interface.  If I could stream music from pandora via my Tivo, I’d use it all day long.  I think this would be a bigger win for TiVo than it would be for Pandora.

Last thought on this – TiVo used to have a relationship with MoodLogic, which would allow for the TiVo to stream autogeneretated playlists on your .mp3 collection.   This was a pretty good application that overcame a lot of the limitations of the built in .mp3 player in the TiVo – namely, that the TiVo application craps out / becomes unusable with a list of more than about 2000 .mp3′s due to memory limitations and timeout errors.  But, alas, moodlogic is defunct and I can no longer add new songs to my library and have them categorized.

I had one more thought – TiVo should reposition themselves as an application delivery platform for home entertainment and REALLY ENCOURAGE 3rd parties and hobbyists to develop applications that can be run on the TiVo.  Imagine – Flick’r or Webshots on your TiVo – for example.

Maybe the TiVo folks are listening?  Evidence suggests not.

How the desktop virtualization market is going to shake out

The desktop virtualization marketplace is going to be fought by Microsoft, Citrix, and VMWare.  There are tons of startups in the space, so maybe one of them will break out, but here’s how I envision it’s going to shake out;

VMWare is going to have the best technology.  They will be the expensive, high quality player and will be embraced by organizations that have standardized on its infrastructure for server virtualization.  Now that they’ve got a new CEO from Microsoft, they will probably learn how to put sneaky, proprietary hooks into their server code so that their desktop software performs best when you standardize on a 100% VMWare solution.

Citrix, whose battle this is to loose although i don’t think they see it this way, will be the price competitor.  Same features as vmware and microsoft, but cheaper.  To a certain extent, I think that their position in this market place is going to be the same as Linux is to Windows today – a (big) niche player that will have its afficionados, fine technology, but an inability to really break out.

Microsoft, and its desktop virtualization suite, will win using the classic Microsoft method – distribution – the offering will be ubiquitous, come bundled into the operating system(s) and be the default choice – not unlike Internet Explorer is today.  Microsoft already is using some application virtualization in Vista for non-compliant applications.  I’ve said this before – distribution channel wins the war in the end.

I’ve been watching the startups that are out there, plus seeing what Symantec (SYMC), Parallels (aka SWSoft), Sun, Quest Software, are doing.  My sense is that these players, plus the big three in this space above will set about acquiring some of these startups to assemble portfolios of offerings.

This should be a fun one to watch!

What do you think is going to happen?  Post a comment.

Xobni

An application I’ve been digging lately is Xobni.  This tool is a free Microsoft Outlook plugin that is a local search tool and collects statistics about the people you send mail to.  The tool is cool, although the statistics are more interesting than useful.  The best thing that the tool does is to change the paradigm of email search from whatever it was to ‘conversations’.  You can use the tool to (immediately)  see all of the conversations you’ve had with a person or around a topic.  Since this is the way that your brain, or at least my brain, thinks – this is much more useful.  The best advice I can give is that you should download a copy of this FREE tool and try it out.  Quite cool.  And the guys behind this in San Francisco appear to be cool too.  www.xobni.com – check it out.

BriForum ’08 – Chicago, IL USA

BriForum 2008 – Geekfest

 

I recently attended BriForum 2008.  This, if you’re a desktop virtualization newbie, Microsoft Terminal Services pro , or Citrix Presentation Server (now renamed) devotee is THE SHOW.

 

There were about 450 attendees (it is ongoing as I write this, but I had to return home to deal with some important corporate matters) representing some major firms.  Case in point, I had lunch randomly with a gentleman from a large company in charge of desktop architecture for 90,000 people.  That is a big job.  He was there.  There were also consultants the specialize in terminal services, entrepreneurs posing as consultants, and of course Brian Madden – “the guy” when it comes to Terminal Services and now desktop virtualization.

 

The first session I attended was given by Steve Greenberg and Joe Shonk on OS Virtualization vs. Hardware virtualization.  This was a “basics” presentation, attempting to define virtualization.  Since Steve used to work at NeXT, he was giving away t-shirts from his alma mater.  I’ve got a drawer full of old t-shirts and a rack of coffee mugs that reads exactly like my resume – I was thinking of putting them on craigslist, but maybe they will be useful if someone offers me a speaking opportunity as a contest giveaway.  Steve did prove that IT guys will put a great deal of effort into something if there’s a free t-shirt involved.  (Marketers:  Take note!) Even if it’s a historical t-shirt.  I wonder what people would do for my old Netscape developer program t-shirts?  Old Tally Systems Y2K t-shirts anyone?

 

So, with the help of the audience Steve was able to come up with a definition of virtualization – encapsulating OS and emulating hardware – and then went on to discuss how OS virtualization does not equal hardware emulation, but rather how OS virtualization such as that practiced by Virtuozzo actually leverage the first loaded copy of the OS to spawn subsequent instances of the OS.

 

Steve went in depth about Virtuozzo, stating that eache virtual machine OS instance is a complete instance of Windows, but these instances share running services, kernel, etc.

 

He then compared this to code sharing in Windows Terminal Services whereby 1 copy or instance of Word.exe can be used by many users simultaneously.  The real gain here is efficiency in memory usage.

 

He went on to demonstrate this.  He showed, by loading 10 instances of Windows Server 2003, how each copy only used 45 MB of RAM and 50 Mb of disc space.  How does that compare to your physical servers that are running in 2-4 Gb of RAM and 12Gb of disk?

 

The audience was heavy into virtualization – one of the participants claimed to have an infrastructure that was 90% virtualized.  His images for each of the virtual servers were 12Gb a piece using vmware.  I have no opinion about that.  Actually, I do.  Storage is relatively cheap, and vmware, I hear, is pretty stable – so one has to make their own decision about whether the virtuozzo approach is right for them, or whether vmware is the right choice – or any of the other players that are in the space.

 

In my opinion, the discussion was biased toward Virtuozzo, and with no vmware people in the room, there was nobody to defend their solution.

 

As for comparisons made by the speaker – and you can make your own judgements here these differences were highlighted.

 

Vmware

• Need to apply 1 patch to each virtual machine.
• Has vmotion which allows for hot moving of a live machine (this is very cool)
• Use Cases
  • When you need multiple Operating Systems or Service Pack Levels for each physical machine (like supporting legacy applications
  • When you need to migrate machines without interruption
  • When your applications running under virtualization install or run kernel mode drivers.

 

Virtuozzo

• 1 patch can be applied to the main image and it will in effect apply to all of your virtual machines
• No vmotion-like functionality for Windows.  Can do this for Linux, but not Windows – currently
• Use Cases
  • When your need to run a very standardized Operating System and Service Pack infrastructure
  • When total cost needs to be minimized (i.e. – Virtuozzo is cheaper)
  • When the number of physical servers needs to be minimized
  • When application delivery and live backup are important.

 

And then for good measure, use case scenarios for when it is best not to virtualize were given.  These include:

•  
  •  
    • When maximum performance is needed for compute intensive or transactional systems that have high IO requirements
    • Specialized applications like Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), voice mail systems, time clock systems, etc.

 

I didn’t get a clear sense of why the latter group was not suitable for virtualization, but it was offered.

 

The next session I went to was Brian Madden’s “VDI Smackdown” where

Citrix XenDesktop

VMWare VDI / VDM2

Qumranet Solid ICE

Quest Provision Networks

Ericom Powerterm Webconnect

 

Were discussed.  Interestingly, fully, 20-25% of the audience were Sales Engineers from the vendor community.  Everyone behaved and the interplay between Brian and the SE’s was very, very good and informative.  Citrix must have gotten there early, because they had a lot of the front row – but then they had one of their top “Citrite’s” in from Australia specially for the occasion.

 

Brian did a quick poll about VDI usage in production:

 

10% of the audience was using VDI in one of its permutations in production.  Remember, this was a session on VDI, which I think self-selects and skews toward the enthusiasts.

 

Roughly 30% of the audience has intentions to purchase something in under 24 months.  40-50% of the audience admitted that their timeframe was somewhere above 24 months, but that they indeed had plans to purchase.

 

Briefly,

Citrix XenDesktop – offering a VDI only solution that can run XP or Vista instances.  Consisting of a bundle of ESX (to create the environment), VDM (the connection broker), and Virtual Center (for management).  For application delivery, VMWare’s Thinstall acquisition was mentioned as a solution.

 

Qumranet Solid ICE – is a new solution with a hypervisor, a connection broker, and a transfer protocol call SPICE, which is optimized for LAN connectivity.  This is cool stuff.  Even Brian Madden gave this a “thumbs up”.  This product uses “KVM” which up uintil yesterday meant keyboard, video, and mouse in the world where we all live, but is now being redefined as “Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM)”  I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this.

 

The Qumranet solution is “tuned for desktop loads” and support a higher density – more virtual machines per box in the server room – with one helpful SE in the audience claiming that on an “ordinary 8 core processer box” (think dual processor Quad Core machine), 52 simultaneous end user sessions can be supported with little to no degradation of performance.  Quick question:  How much memory in that box?  It may have been discussed, but I didn’t catch it.  Still, that’s pretty impressive.

 

Quest (Provision Networks) Virtual Access Suite.  Provision Networks has a long history with this market, and indeed their roots are in making enhancements for Terminal Services.  These guys now make tools to support VDI and Terminal Services, Application and Desktop Virtualization.   This was probably a smart buy for Quest.  They do seem to have their act together with acquisitions in a way that other companies like CA and Citrix might want to follow.  Anyhow, the use case scenario is when you want 1 interface across all platforms that can natively support ESX, Virtual Iron and soon Hyper-V, and Virtuozzo.  This is cool stuff that merits looking into as we all become more sophisticated in our deployment and management of virtualization.   I’m looking forward to getting a demo of this software at some point.

Ericom PowerTerm Connect – these guys are positioned and have been essentially a low-cost alternative to Citrix and are now offering products to enable VDI with application and desktop publishing support.  The product is hypervisor agnostic and uses the Teradici PC over IP protocol – which is hardware based – meaning that the sender and recipient of the session display needs to have the proper decoding chip.

 

Other random notes and opinions:

 

 

Madden opined,

“certain that Hyper-V will be the most popular hypervisor in a few years” .

“I don’t see anyone choosing one product over another for its management tools and user interfaces”  To me this means that this is still an early market.  I was in a room full of enthusiasts, and desktop virtualization hasn’t yet, to borrow an overused Geoffrey Moore term, “Crossed the Chasm”.

 

 

There is going to be a battle over protocols used in desktop virtualization.  There is RDP (Microsoft, others) , ICA (Citrix), Net2Display, RGS, SPICE, and others – each with its own plusses and minuses.  A session is scheduled to have a protocol smackdown.

 

 

More notes on vendors, what they were showing:

 

Appsense – user environment mgmt.  These guys had been iQurious previously.

 

Datacore – storage

 

Expand Networks – wan acceleration,  applied to exchange, notes, virtualization, consolidation.

EG innovations-application monitoring for all 7 layers of the OSI model.

 

RES software – user workspace management for xendesktop.

 

Tricerat – end user preferences management.

 

Symantec – desktop streaming.

 

RTO – discovery and monitoring.  New, virtual profile management.

 

Ericom- cool, presentation virtualization.  3rd year at the show.

 

Computer Lab International – a thin client maker that targets verticals.

 

AEP – ssl vpn provider;

 

 

TechEd for IT Pro’s – Orlando, FL

 

Bob Muglia (pronounced mug-lee-ah), as opposed to the Italian pronunciation that would sound a lot like the word for “eggplant”, was the speaker.   They organizers passed out rattles, showed commercials for Technet. 

 

An aside:  In the midst of this pomp I got an email from David Ferris’  news service (see www.ferris.com) which used to be an excellent source of information about messaging products and developments, but which has recently taken a turn towards covering the IT security market – which is bigger and undoubtedly more profitable.  One thing about messaging ISVs that make add-ons to Notes and Exchange is that they’re all pretty broke and small and hard to sell to…  This I know from experience.  Today’s Ferris post was all about some new products that CA had released.

 

Another thing I’ve noticed about TechEd this year, is that the participants look a lot thinner and healthier than they have in the past.  This could be relative, as perhaps I’ve put on a few pounds lately.

The keynote opened with some sort of native dance, a drumming call to action.  I was not “feeling it”  Perhaps I should have sourced and smoked a doobie before coming to the show.  I suddenly understand what the rattle is for.  

The drummers are pierced, blond, vaguely polynesian in approach.  It’s more like a hippie fair in Eugene, OR and the blond leader of the group reminds me a lot of my chiropractor.

There’s a big stiltwalker.  She is dressed up like a character from one of the live action disney shows (It’s about a band) that my oldest son used to watch.  Then again, we are near the “House of Mouse”, so it might actually be that character.

OK, enough already.  All in all it was not a bad way to wake up.

I may have been hallucinating, but on the big screen that was showing head shots of “heroes”, I’m almost positive that I saw Barack Obama’s face go by on the big monitors while they removed the props from the dance / drum ritual and readied for the keynote.  They did some cool things on that video – suffice it to say that there are some people at MSFT that really know how to work Powerpoint.

First Theme – The theme of Bob Muglia’s presentation was “IT Pro Heroes” – given that this entire audience was made up of IT Pro’s, it was probably a safe route to call them all heroes.  Major points were:

Microsoft is an enabler (of great things)

IT Pro’s are “unsung heroes”

They showed a video featuring Hunter Ely, a security analyst at LSU.  A story was told (against a backdrop of acoustic guitar) about Katrina and how LSU used Groove and SharePoint to track storm victims and their families with relationship to the hospital.  A picture of Hunter’s wife and baby were featured.  Oddly, they were all barefoot in the picture.  Did Annie Liebovitz take the photo?

Hunter came onstage to much applause.  He had much less hair than he had in the photograph they had on screen.  Hunter, grow it back.   You are not in the NBA.

2^nd theme – Dynamic IT.

Bob Muglia then talked about how Microsoft, some 5 years ago, introduced the concept of Dynamic IT.  technology can change your business lifecycle.  Again, I saw some of the nicest Powerpoint slides I’ve ever seen.  Kudos to the marketing services team at MSFT.

He went on to discuss that Dynamic IT is a 10 year vision and we’re half way through it.  There are 5 more years to go.  Muglia pointed out that Microsoft has Infrastructure Optimization models that are available online where you can benchmark your infrastructure.  The major point being that moving away from IT being a cost center, to a Dynamic IT that is a part of your business strategy is something that you can buy now.

Some of the subpoints were

Identity Management / Managing Identities.  Security and credentials are fundamental and adopting a model of federation is a good thing.  Somehow, and I’m not sure how, this was going to allow users to do more self service identity management.

Identity LifeCycle Management with Active Directory and Windows Server 2008 was discussed.  Bob Muglia announced that Identity LifeCycle Manager “2” was in beta 3 and available for download.  

Fred Delombaerde – program manager gave a demonstration of the new UI for security provisioning.  I would like to use that UI to manage SharePoint permissions within our organization today.  ILM manager looks like a good thing and the integration with distribution lists and self-serve password reset would be great things to have.

Sidebar:  It occurs to me that Bob Muglia sounds a lot like a smarter version of George Bush.

3^rd Theme – Interoperability

Bob Muglia talked about how open Microsoft was becoming.  An example was given that 50,000 pages of documentation about standards had been produced by the developers at Microsoft.  That’s a big number, but a Public Enemy song “Don’t believe the Hype” kept echoing through my head.  The presentation got a little vague on some of the points here, but you can’t blame him for trying.  I’ve always thought that Microsoft’s idea of standards was to standardize on Microsoft.  One concrete example was that SCOM (Systems Center Operations Manager) now works with Linux.