Blogs

There’s an oft-quoted phrase along the lines of, “You never get a second chance to make a [good] first impression.” Apart from its obvious semantic tautology, what’s also interesting is that (a) there’s considerable debate about the attribution of the quote itself (apparently whoever first used it didn’t make a good enough impression!?), and (b) it lacks context. FalconStor is a pretty well-known name in IT circles, but it’s been busy in recent years crafting a new—relevant, timely, and high-potential—first impression.

[In this blog I refer to 'we' - I want to acknowledge the help and guidance I received from my colleague and all-around smart person, Mike Leone, in pulling this together. I, however, take full responsibility for the puns!]  

OK, so you know how sometimes you read supposed big news from a vendor and you wonder where the “meat” is? Well, the reverse can be true too; Oracle’s subdued news this week that it has an Oracle Database API for Mongo DB is just such a thing. Without much fanfare - here’s the technical blog we saw – Oracle was in fact doing something pretty meaty (certainly for MongoDB users), definitely newsworthy, and highly strategic.

I was impressed with the demeanor of Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, as I watched him deliver the public announcement on August 10, 2021 of the availability of MySQL Autopilot, a new extension to the MySQL HeatWave service. While he had a great story to convey, he somehow managed to do it without overt hubris. Sure, there were plenty of impressive claims, incessant and exceedingly flattering competitive comparisons, and a pitch devoid of small-print caveats, but through it all, he remained resolutely matter of fact. Why did that impress me?

A newly released ESG Brief gives insights into how IT professionals are feeling about in-person conferences and other events that have been such a lynchpin of their (and their vendors') marketing, educational, and entertainment calendars for decades...and which have essentially all been replaced by online events since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read the ESG Brief here. The ambivalence of the results was perhaps predictable. While it took a while for us to all settle into the "new normal" it has also made us both long for and question the "old normal." There is value in each. It will be interesting to see how things shake out as COVID—at least as a pandemic—"passes" and we all (vendors, end-users, and commentators) have a genuine choice.

So, here’s the thing – regardless of how complex or simple IT is to manage and to run, it’s still all-too-often the aegis of just the IT department; and that’s especially true of data lakes, marts, or warehouses, call them what you will. That’s not to say regular non-IT users can’t and don’t consume the valuable outputs from these endeavors (of course they do, that’s the point), but anything new is invariably only achieved with the necessary involvement of highly trained and skilled help – DBAs, system administrators—IT personnel of some sort.

Sometimes vendors focus on the integration of their abilities, while sometimes they emphasize improvements to those abilities. Oracle’s announcements today – the free-standing, cloud-based delivery of its APEX low-code application development tool, as well as the 21c "innovation" release of its eponymous database – do both.

Let’s briefly cover what was announced before commenting on what it all means.

NetApp's annual Insight event wrapped recently. Right off the bat, I must record that I thought this was a lesson to many other vendors about how best to run a digital event. It was fast-paced, enjoyable and easy to watch. And that matters; the best content in the world is wasted if a vendor has poor and/or boring presentations...NetApp did a stellar job of embracing the new medium. Luckily, the content also did not disappoint. In the video below, Scott Sinclair and I discuss some of our key takeaways.

It bears repeating that events like Dell Technologies World cover way too much ground to ever cover everything in a brief post. So we won't try! Instead, my ESG colleagues and myself are talking the "bite-sized-chunks" approach, dipping into various topics in reports, blogs, and videos as appropriate. One of the biggest announcements at this year's digital event ("big" as in likely impact rather than elapsed time on the virtual "stage") was Apex - Dell's as-a-service umbrella commitment - and we've already chatted about that in another single-topic video. 

Like every other tech vendor, Dell's annual mega-event transitioned from a massive conference center to a massive digital extravaganza. We'll cover it in multiple manners and media over the coming days and weeks....after all Dell has heft in IT and there's a lot to comment upon. 

IBM’s announcement last week that it is to split into two companies by spinning off a big chunk of itself leads with a compellingly bold statement, saying it is “…to accelerate hybrid cloud growth strategy and execute spin-off market-leading managed infrastructure services unit.” By the way, when I say “big chunk,” I actually mean a relatively small percentage (just under 25% of current revenues)…but anything at IBM-scale is big compared to most businesses; the NewCo has a current revenue run-rate of $19BN, a backlog of $60BN and does business with 75% of the Fortune 100. Not bad, eh!?