I haven’t blogged here for awhile, and being honest there is extraordinary change happening in our industry that anything I posted here could need to be re-written. In the meanwhile, the business of enterprise software is coming under intense pressure as I imagined it would as cheaper and more robust applications and services come online. Just today, Marc Andreessen takes aim at software giant Oracle and how economic pressure along with lower cost cloud computing alternatives to enterprise software is shaking the very foundations that information systems are built upon and how they are deployed and consumed by start-ups and the SMB market.

Within the Identity Management (IdM) space, this trend could not be more profound. As companies migrate away from enterprise software deployments towards SaaS apps in droves, the justification for enterprise IdM (or WAM) solution does not fit quite as nicely as it once did. In fact, looking at the success of SalesForce.com and availability and support of modern protocols for 3rd party SSO integration (SAML/OAuth, etc…) and many other apps following suit, the options for SaaS apps continues to present viable alternatives and following this logic, more nimble IdM deployments at a fraction of the cost. Looking at Identity & Infrastructure management from VMware perspective there is a comprehensive set of technologies that can be used to build, run, deploy and secure robust business applications. Today, many of these are deployed using a Public Cloud service (somebody else’s infrastructure) but as this technology moves along on the technology adoption curve and some trust/assurance/liability questions are answered, it will gain more momentum and extend its reach into the enterprise space. In certain cases where security or high assurance is needed, an on-premise (Private Cloud) solution that can be tailored to a company’s or government’s specific requirements would be necessary.

Coming back to the Andreessen article and with all due respect to Oracle as a great and mighty successful American company, a lot more folks are taking notice to what I have been saying for some time now. From an investor perspective Oracle might be a good place to keep your assets safe, but with a growing list of compelling alternatives, if Oracle would stop charging prices like it’s 1999 (or 2007) the situation would not seem as dire as they appear they might become. Many of Oracle products are now available through their On-Demand network for more SaaS model services but will that be enough (making them available as a SaaS service) to make good with customers and keep the competition off their heels? Disclaimer: Having never used Oracle On-Demand services I can only venture to guess that even their SaaS model services are priced with premiums.

On the other hand, VMware continues to make interesting strides in virtualizing mobile platforms along with which a user’s identity and entitlements must travel. Access policies, provisioning and compliance must be monitored and controlled across mobile applications and platforms. So with VMware’s Thin App provisioning (the dev team for the latest incarnation being a great group of guys in my neighborhood right up here in Bellevue, Wa) and entitlements around who can access what, the tools available for managing identities across clouds and devices gets even more interesting!

Godspeed, dear innovation! What say you? What do you have to gain or lose with lower cost IdM implementations and more efficient computing platforms?

This week I relished in the announcement here and this Metalink article that Oracle recently made about support for running Oracle on VMware virtualized environments. Then again, for those of us who have been doing the same for awhile now, it’s not *that* big of a deal. Or is it?

Having spent a fair amount of time at the VMware booth at Oracle Open World and witnessed the intense interest in virtualizing everything Oracle, from RAC and Database servers; at the VMware Booth Dave Welch from House Of Brick Technologies attests it has had Tier 1 workloads on VMware since 2006 (and seen $ millions of capex/opex reductions), there were no shortage of folks from the audience taking note; to Middleware and as I have discussed Oracle IdM on VMware as well. Sadly, there are others from various industries who have not even begun to virtualize their Oracle infrastructures due to Oracle’s previous stance on support running their products on VMware.

VMware Snapshot Manager

Beyond the benefits of snapshots and virtualization for the Upgrade scenarios there are the extraordinary stories for consolidation itself to be told. Infrastructure consolidation invariably leads to other interesting possibilities such as cloning (which I talk more about here) for building out new environments, making your infrastructure portable to make building out cloud infrastructure more efficient, to even being the key to your cloud security, as Art Coviello talked about at the RSA conference this week.

So in all honesty, I don’t feel that the announcement from the Evil Empire in Redwood Shores is for me so much as it is for other large companies I know exist out there with sizable physical infrastructures. I have seen success and failures due in large part to the virtualized environment (or lack thereof) so to encourage those of you who have not gone down that path, that now you have an open doorway to bring your support issues and take another hard look across your IT infrastructure of prime opportunities for consolidation and to better realize benefits from this Age of Virtualization, which arguably is already giving way to the Age of Cloud Computing or Agility as VMware executives like to describe it.

With that being said, a huge thanks is due to Oracle, who is now only slightly less evil, for getting out of the way of IT innovations, economic recovery and for giving the power of choice back to the customer.

As always, feel free to leave your comments here in the blog thread. And if you are in need of assistance or want more resources on virtualizing your Oracle environment with VMware, head over to http://www.vmware.com/oracle for more information.

Happy New Year, everyone! It’s been a couple months since my last post, so I thought I’d better get with the program and keep fresh updates coming. In addition to a few other goals of mine for the new year, which I’m sure a lot of you have as well, writing more about IdM and the industry here in my blog is among them. So while I enjoyed reading IdM prognostications here and here, I will take a few moments and make an attempt at giving a few of my own from my tiny perspective on the world of IdM.

It hasn’t been too long since I last gave some predictions about the future of IdM, but since then there have been some interesting developments. First of all I should give the usual disclaimer that I am giving my own opinions in this blog post, and not speaking officially on behalf of VMware. With that said, let’s talk about IdM.

The industry has been abuzz with ideas about “Identity As a Service” or IDaaS for short (as if we needed more acronyms!), with different approaches layed out succinctly by Frank Villavicencio in a blog post back in 2010. However, without taking pain to spell out, it is a trend that can easily be marginalized as another service bus that must be deployed and managed in an enterprise without much thought about leveraging new deployment models such as public or private clouds. In fact, VMware has a lot of API and SOA based (so-called) Identity Services. While they are consumed very much like any Web Service, they are not being managed or deployed differently than any business application.

Latourell Falls, 2003

I remember the first time I heard about an appliance for managed IdM back in 2005 that was pitched by Oblix at a customer meeting. While we will see these technologies like Web Services, Identity APIs and SAML used throughout the organization, I think in 2011 we will see the appliance based IdM implementations accelerating and taking hold nicely and at a much faster pace. Well even if not so new, they will be embraced for sure. With new products from VMware like vCloud Director and the bounty that vCenter will enjoy from the Ionix acquisition in 2010, it will offer architects and IT leaders more robust tools for efficiently deploying and managing their IdM services and infrastructures. This is one of the biggest opportunities in the data center today, I feel, which IdM in a broader sense is positioned incredibly well to benefit from.

Which leads me to how I see the two major forces in play that will profoundly affect the way companies adopt and manage IdM in the coming year.

• Consolidation – (And I’m not talking about acquisitions…) Driven by the desire to reduce costs of managing large data centers,and taking advantage of opportunities to more effectively utilize a disaster recovery zone, cloud models for computing will allow us to achieve re-use and consolidation much more efficiently than previously possible. This will be an essential strategy for Directors and managers to add to their IT playbooks as most companies will begin to move alot of their apps to some form of cloud-based computing model, and we desparately don’t want to migrate server sprawl or VM sprawl practices into the cloud.
• Next Gen IdM – Back in June I keyed into the idea that Identity & Access services will be available in the “drinking water” (just look at Salesforce) and as more partnerships form, trust will be further established and companies will begin to leverage more SaaS and PaaS services where IdM is just one of the services available in that environment. With VMware’s acquisition of Tri-Cipher in 2010, imagine the possibilities of this (or what would become of any 3rd party partnership) when IdM capabilities exist in the platform that you deploy your cloud apps on (Think VMforce, vFabric, or any other vendors (which I could mention but won’t *wink*) who may be using OpenSSO, Shibboleth, Facebook Connect, etc… for their IdAM requirements.

After giving one of my talks at Open World last year, I was approached by (of all people…) a security architect from Microsoft who pressed me with the question about “What makes this any different because at the end of the day, it’s still a Web Service, right?” Well for one thing, maybe the guy attended the wrong conference because we covered a lot of ground at VMworld 2010! On a more serious note, what we are seeing is not just consuming services but the way these services are deployed and managed. Incidentally, I came across a new hash tag today, perhaps this will be the newly recognized trend in 2011 #MSHyperVfail Anybody?

All biases aside, the ways in which you will be able to deploy, manage HA and achieve distributed computing models will be fundamentally different than we have for the most part been able to achieve. But the best thing yet is that when it comes to Identity & Access management, the cost and complexity barriers will be significantly less than we know it today.

Do you want to learn how VMware manages Oracle Data and Oracle Identity Management middleware with EMC and VMware technologies? Are you curious how VMware rapidly builds new Oracle OID and Access Manager environments with it’s own products?

I will be in San Francisco at VMworld next week presenting “Automated Refresh of Oracle Data” during the Oracle Storage Guys session at VMworld. Look for Session ID: EA7061 on the topic of Creating an Internal Oracle Database Cloud Using vSphere in your handbook. I will be sharing how we shaved days off our Environment Refresh processes and significantly reduced error rates using EMC’s SRDF/TimeFinder and custom scripts managed via PPM workflows to achieve greater levels of efficiency and accuracy.

It will be presented twice, so you can catch this session on Monday or Thursday at the following times.

Monday: Moscone South Room 308 @ 12:00-1:00 PM
Tursday: Moscone West Room 2007 @ 10:30-11:30 AM

Also, if you are headed to Oracle Open World in September, look for me at the VMware booth. I will be there to talk about how VMware, in addition to the EMC/SRDF solution described at VMworld for bootstrapping Oracle DB instances, uses vSphere to clone and build out new Oracle Identity Management environment. I blogged about how awesome this is awhile back, but this will give you a chance to hear a 6-month progress update and ask any questions. Stay tuned for more details on which days and times.

See you there!

In response to a few thought provoking questions from a colleague on whether Oracle VM, VMware or IBM would be better prositioned to lead virtualization of Java, I had to form a few responses and decided to share them with everyone, and gather insights and comments from others who read my blog.  So after much rumination on hot technologies (all biases aside as best as I could) I can share what’s been stewing up in my mind for the past few months. 

So, running WebLogic on the hypervisor is compelling, but I doubt many companies will want to migrate to Oracle VM in order to obtain this advantage.  Check out the recent Gartner report that VMware is alone in the Leader Magic Quadrant for virtualization, so this is no slam dunk for Oracle, Microsoft, or any other vendor.   But challenges are ahead for Oracle in virtualization on hypervisor, as one article puts it, “Either they (Oracle) promote VMware, and abandon their own product, or they abandon their customers, but keep their product.”   I haven’t really expressed much of an opinion here, as much as I have doubts about customers reaction to the technology that’s available.  I’m not so much of a virtualization guy as I am an IdM guy, but time will tell, and with any luck Oracle may relax their position of resistance against virtualization from their Palo Alto brethren.

The Big Switch

But going beyond the datacenter, now many customers have the option to run Java apps in the cloud rather than their own infrastructure using VMForce.  My bets are that history will repeat itself, and  this trend will only continue as companies abandon in-house server farms and infrastructure, and as Nicholas Carr aptly describes in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, will opt for deployment to Cloud machines much the same way companies abandoned generating their own power and began using centralized electricity provided by the power grid in the early part of the last century. 

With that said, IdM technology is in for a roller coaster ride as the tidal waves of change come and we look at how to manage and scale IAM services across a broad spectrum from internal IT to private clouds to the public cloud for partners, customers and employees.  It is looking like the cost and complexity of extending Federated SSO across multiple protocols (not all customers will have SAML, WS-Sec) will be a hassle unless you factor in the potential of cloud services and a hub & spoke model.  It makes me wonder if IdM will go the way of the centralized power grid and Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS, et al) or maybe it’s already happening.   And as Coby Royer points out in a recent blog post, “I can install the old style IAM tools, this is missing a huge opportunity for cost savings—putting standard infrastructure for IAM into the “drinking water” is the wave of the future.”  In an economy like this, that logic is becoming much easier to buy into than say in 2008 before the recession started to hit IT budgets. 

As an old hand at Oracle IdM (going on 10 years now) it is a bit hard for me to digest, but my instinct tells me that survival means adapting to the seas of change rather than trying to run from them.  There is a bright future and a lot of pent up demand in cloud services, where new models will soon overshadow the shortcomings of client/server and internet architectures.   The old school IAM stacks are not going away anytime soon, but the IdM professional will need to learn new models and standards to keep pace with where this industry might be heading.

Anyways, time will tell.  Leave a comment if you think differently.

I can hardly belive the official release of Windows 7 is right around the corner.  Only a few of you may know that back in Decem ber 2008 (right before Win7 Beta became available) I was merely weeks away from switching entirely from PC to MAC OSX to rid myself of the evils beset inside of Windows Vista.  I have been running Windows 7 on every home PC, yes even able to sneak it on to my wife’s laptop, and have enjoyed the progressive quality, reliability and performance I have squeezed the from each new Windows 7 build.  It’s so capable that I do not even work with my “Work” pc directly but use my home PC with Remote Desktop and “remote” to my work PC on a regular basis.  Memory, Video and CPU rarely if ever pose any constrains on such a configuration.  The most common pitfall: network and broadband congestion.  Windows 7 is rocking my would be Mac OSX world, and I have nothing but praises for the latest from Redmond, Wa.

However this morning (Sunday), horror struck as my wife informed me her latest Win7 build (Release 7201) stopped working (7:40 AM).  She couldn’t login to her desktop.  Being the tech guy that I am, her hard drive is has 2 partitions, one for the OS (40GB) and the rest for “Data” ~ 120GB and every user/app setting is backed up to the Data drive.  I tried loging in to her desktop 3 times (8:40, second cup of coffee and Molly by my side) to realize it was time to boot in Safe Mode.  Logging in with Safe Mode I found 1.) Windows Media Player netowrking service consumes a lot of network and CPU bandwidth once enabled and 2.) Network share of a nearby (Win7, of course) PC in Sleep mode caused boot delays.  Still after disabling Startup programs in the boot menu, I was unable to boot up properly. (9:30 AM)

Windows 7:  Fools game or Mastermind of time management?

Today was a tricky one to have troubles with a PC. I had a flight to catch (which I missed) at 4:24, had to leave home by 2:00 in order to catch the flight, although post July 4th traffic would kill off any such aspirations.  Also I was informed of a honey-do list that included A.) Fix the back door from opening so Molly could not escape, B.) Fix the teeter swing in back yard C.) Get milk, and D.) Pick up prescriptions, and most important E.) Fix my PC, even if it requires installing “With Windows 2.0… I don’t care what version of Windows!!!” I could have hyperventilated with all that was to be accomplished by 2:00.  Windows 2.0 honey?  C’mon, I don’t have a copy of that anymore, that would require a tript to my friend Doug Dayton’s house (Microsoft’s 169th employee and Windows OEM Sales Guru) and there’s just not enough time for that (10:30).

Kicked off file system restore.  Took a shower and finished packing.   Attempted “Repair PC” option from Boot menu.  Started new Windows 7 Install (10:45) which finishes in near record time thanks to streamlined install process.  Reviewed USB ports (drivers) and installed programs post install before heading to Fred Meyer (11:30).  Installed MS Money and Office 2010 Tech Preview.  Started Windows Backup (11:45) and went to Fred Meyer.  Returned (12:15) backup complete, yay!  Next time this restore process will only take an hour or less.  Stopped for awhile and to have lunch with Molly and Cami. Chicken sandwich.

Wow!  How could this happen to me on the day like this, little would I know it would only get worse in Tacoma Narros toll traffic *sigh* and so continued restoring Cami’s Laptop with all personal files by 1:30.  Forgets to install Pidgin, so she takes upon herself to install it herself (bless her) so we can chat on IM tonight from my hotel room.  It seems as though 98% of reinstall and restore tasks are complete (still need to fine tune network share, wake on lan, install Java and Business Accounting, and a few other small items…) so a sigh of relief.

It’s beautiful outside although clouds are flying high Cami and I go outside and lay on the grass and talk about the weekend, our rental in Oregon, and how nice it would be to have our own home here (in Washington).  I take mental notes about packing cell phone battery charger, medications, and throw on a quick deodorant before heading out the door.  Sends text to Cami (to her fresh Windows 7 PC) from my phone while driving.  Whew, everything is okay!!!

Did Windows 7 just save my day and avert a disaster of the most extraordinary kind? 
Someone is lucky that Windows 7 is so amazing, or that she has an engineer as a husband! 

Happy Monday!

P.S. What went wrong with Win7 in the first place?  I’m not convinced that it was Windows fault since it’s running fine on another laptop and a home built PC, and take more issues with the hack jobs that Sony did when coming up with Drivers for Vista, and of course there are no new drivers for this Windows 7, and Sony just expects you to run Vista Home for the rest of its life.  Anyways I’m suspicious of the Sony drivers, which I had uninistalled after installing them before.  So moral of the story is, Sony laptop owners beware.  I always seem to have most issues with drivers for Sony products whenever any configuration outside of the shipped OS is used.

My favorite Windows 7 tips from Maximum PC

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/25_most_popular_windows_tips

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/21_steps_make_your_pc_betterfasterstronger

HTML is not dead.  Let’s face it.  Flash isn’t for every photographer or every budget.  But when I look at the services and products available for photographer for building their websites there is little to no help for those who simply want an HTML and CSS design.  The chasm between Flash and HTML websites should not be so huge, as if Flash is the only way to go.

1. Sell the logo+branding
2. Sell the color + additional typography studies
3. Add the CSS definitions based on the previous offering
4. Offer a few basic layouts, or a custom layout if that is preferred
5. Referral to a developer who can implement the design at an affordable price (don’t do this step yourself or risk undermining your credibility as a designer)
6. Repeat the process for the photographer blog design+branding+strategy

So for you designers, here is my business idea.  Offer a basic logo+branding service for a flat fee of say $250, or $500, or $750 (whatever you charge for this).  This is your business core, and every photography needs this more than they know.  I can point you to a few dozen photographers who need this service right now, but who don’t know how to buy this service or that it’s even within their budget.  It is your business to inform your prospective customer, and to create a preference. 

A way to upsell this basic business need is to offer a CSS file as a deliverable.  The basic CSS option uses a primary or basic color scheme using the themes that are included in the logo.  The 2nd level uses type fonts from the basic study, and has a custom design for everything from H1,H2,H3 all the way to P, I, B, and all the basic events such as Warning, Confirmation, et al. 

From there we can offer a basic service to design a layout that meets their needs, including layout graphics like rounded corders, shaded edges, etc… 

To me this is common sense.  We need wheels before we need a leather wrapped steering wheel.  We need gas before A/C does us an ounce of good.  And a moon roof without the moon?  Let’s start out photographers with the basics, and allow their business to drive where their website design takes them, and their customer demographic dictate to us whether Flash is a “no brainer” or not.

The basics get yous and your customer’s business moving in the right direction.  Partnership with the technical talent who can implement your beautiful designs will make you look like a rock star, and help your customer achieve their business goals faster than if they had to search for this on their own.

Just some brainstorming, would love to hear your thoughts.

I know there are you creatives use and enjoy Windows Vista and if you are like me with multiple PCs to network with from the home office, then Windows Vista can and probably will cause you a lot of grief at some point. 

So I hooked a switch to two of my PCs because I didn’t have long enough cables for both to go directly into my router, and because I was tired of connecting to one of them via the wireless network.  Somehow this broke my network and file sharing to and from Vista.  I spent an embarassing amount of time troubleshooting this yesterday.  It boils down to the fact that NetBios over TCP/IP had to be enabled on the network card, and it was, but the tests I ran proved that it was not enabled, hence the problem. 

So if your networking or file shares with other XP computers all of a sudden stop working here is something to keep in mind.  You can test this my seeing whether you can connect by IP address.  If you can connect by IP address but not by the machine name, then here’s one thing you can do.  Make sure that NetBios is enabled on your network card, and make the following change in your registry:

- Enter the registry
- HKEYLocalMachines/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/NetBt/Parameters
- Double Click “transportbindname”
- enter the value \Device\ (use the backslashes) hit ok.
- reboot

I spent time with Linksys tech support several times, but they refused to help beyond ensuring Internet and LAN connections to my XP machines.  And, of course, Microsoft tech support doesn’t come free.

If you want the long and painful version of this story, look here:  http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3881172&SiteID=17

Cheers!

By the way I had just created a nice post on Xanga and the editor timed out on me, prompted for my password and lost what I had written.  So this is my first post to my Xanga blog using Windows Live Writer.

I just finished watching a short webinar given by Bryan Eisenberg and Tom Leung on website and marketing optimization.  Since Tom is from Google and Bryan a Google partner, they talked a lot about a new Google product called Website Optimizer.  They walked through some best practices and features of Website Optimizer and about Bryan’s new book on the same subject.  I found it to be a very informative webinar, and you can click on the link above to see it in the archives.

Unfortunately, for photographers who use templates from one of the big template vendors, it’s going to be difficult or even impossible to get the vendor to cooperate with this level of testing on their designs.  While you can say that their designs are optimal and are already optimized, I’d ask optimized for what?  (optimized for selling more templates to unsuspecting photographers such as yourself) The templates surely cannot be pre-optimized for anyone who buys them.  And your call to action is likely not going to be perfect without testing your marketing story on your audience. 

If you have a custom designed site or somehow get the template vendors to let you make changes to their designs, you can begin to maximize the effectiveness and profitability of your marketing communications and call to action. Google’s free tools can be more than adequate to help you refine your efforts and improve the bottom lines. Now imagine the possibilities if you used Google Website Optimizer, AdWords and Google Analytics together?

My first experiment, to randomly display 3 variations on a link name to see which gets clicked on more often.  Once data is available I will post a screenshot of the results.