the stinkin' blog

In my quest for knowledge surrounding cloud computing, I have come across some interesting notables. The first of which are the basis for a cloud compute type application which is logically an appliance of sorts. There are a number of vendors in the Linux/OSS space who are creating JeOS (juice) type instances to be used as an appliance. I have looked at four, rPath, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu.

Arguably within months after VMWare’s CEO mentions JeOS in this blog, Ubuntu created a JeOS for use within VMWare’s VMDK. rPath was already doing appliances. Red Hat and SUSE are currently in a beta project with their appliances. I understand how Red Hat and SUSE make money – from subscriptions and support. rPath appears to charge for the developer kit (rBuilder) as well as charge for support and development services. rPath may even make money off of each appliance distributed since they provide a kill switch inside their kit. However, how does Ubuntu or Canonical make any money?

Mark Shuttleworth has vowed to keep Ubuntu completely free. How can one monetize free? This is the $1m question (not that US$ are worth much today!). Canonical is not large enough to have enterprise support offerings that rival Red Hat or Novell. Canonical does not have a developer kit like rPath. Can Canonical make money off of the appliance? Maybe the only way is to build a developer kit and resell it? Does Canonical have the manpower? or the time to build and manage such a beast?

I have yet to see any appliances that advertise using linux underneath – of course I may not be looking hard enough. Let me state that I have not found any mainstream appliances that fit the previously mentioned bill.

I will be diving deeper – for good reason. Stay tuned.

I realized after looking through my posts that I rarely post anything about what is going on in and around me personally. Not that anyone really wants to know, but hey tough shit.

Work has been dogging me lately. I have been pounding the streets (well the airlines) killing myself and not making any money. This begs the useless question of why? Let me see if I can provide some color. The company I work for has been going through a transformation ever since I have been working for them and I am about to start my ELEVENTH year. Yes. Eleven years. It is a great company, they just spin wheels really hard and make a lot of smoke burning the tires only to never take off the brake lock to shoot down the speedway.

I have worked with some great minds and we have put together some great projects that were way ahead of their time, but no one would ever stick with the projects. The quest for shareholder value kills the projects after a quarter of no revenue. Very frustrating because competition starts a similar project and stick with it – they make money hand over fist. AAAAARRRRRGGGH.

Case in point, we have a great ISV team that is working on certifying apps on SLES and SLED. All is good there, but one thing – that is OLD school. In today’s world we really need to think ahead. The model is very different and I cannot convince anyone (besides the fact that I am struggling to keep MY head above water) to look at anything different.

So that is leading me on my quest. My quest to find 3-5 companies that are up and coming so that I can flex my knowledge and desire to drive the future and quit dwelling in the past! It is working. I am finding all kinds of interesting things.

That brings me back to the reason for this post – I NEED TO GET TO REGULAR POSTINGS! I am so haphazard on things like this that are not in my face regularly. With that being said, I am challenging myself to write 3 posts a week on various topics. Let’s see how well I can manage that!

Coming soon – views about cloud computing. What is it? Who are players? and why do we care?