Peter Christy

C-Scape 2008

For the last couple of years Cisco has fooled around with the format of the Industry Analyst meeting (now called C-Scape). Three years ago it was joint Financial and Industry analysts - a format I liked but apparently few others did. The Industry-Analyst-only version became less crisp (more focused on the "dialog" which isn't always a great idea). This year's meeting was transitional. Cisco hired a new head of Analyst Relations -- Melissa Selcher - from Sun, and then Melissa promptly went on maternity leave and just got back to Cisco a few weeks before C-Scape so C-Scape 2008 was driven by Terry Anderson (Mel's boss) and returned to the crispness of earlier versions, but sadly lacked any discussion of the current business (the base). There were some great customer presentations including the head of IT for the HSBC bank (the HSBC IT organization has 100,000 employees and an outside spend of $6B/year!) and the CTO of Verizon. Randy Pond, Cisco EVP of Operations, Processes and Systems gave a really clear talk on Cisco's decade long evolution to its current, unique "matrix" form of organization (Councils and Boards). And of course an exhausting set of deeper dive presentations and 1::1 briefing opportunities. Like Microsoft, it's really hard to keep up with Cisco since so much is going on in so many dimensions, but it's always fun to try!

Video and the Network (redoux)

The overarching theme at C-Scape was Video as it has been repeatedly in the past. Video of course drives huge increases in network traffic and demands for high quality network services, so for a network equipment vendor it must be an important topic. What is different this year is: (1) Cisco products are starting to drive video loads directly (TelePresence) and (2) Cisco has introduced a family of video network products. Ultimately video end-point devices will include meta-data by which they can identify their needs to the network (bandwidth, quality of service - in the interim Cisco will let switch ports act as a surrogate for the connected device). The first notable product is a transcoder that transforms common video formats - Cisco's goals is that any media can be experienced from any endpoint (a future version will do real-time transcoding). Video is integrated with WebEx already. There is no doubt that video will play an important role in the network (anyone who has experienced Cisco TelePresence or HP Halo Room will agree). The more interesting question is "how much?" Cisco hasn't tried to answer that yet. While there are some jobs (like John Chambers') that are defined by non-stop meetings, I believe that for most people trying to get a job done the goal is fewer, more-effective meetings, not more meetings. That suggests a bound to how much video a normal organization will drive.

A Bad Month for the Good Guys

For years I've been railing about the lack of real joint industry progress on Spam control and saying we're "fiddling while Rome burns." I'm starting to wonder if that was an understatement. It's been an interesting month or so for security. First a San Jose (CA) hoster was shut down because of investigative reporting by the Washington Post and the result was a dramatic drop in Spam (more than 50%) apparently because this site hosted much of the payment system used by the bad guys (the infrastructure under renting a bot net for example). The good news was the unexpected magnitude of the impact; the bad news was the fact that a newspaper was the driver. Then a couple of weeks later John Markoff wrote a pessimistic piece in the NYT suggesting that economics of malware were now so robust that the bad guys were outspending the good guys (follow the money!). And then this week Microsoft went to heroic overtime after an attack was found in the wild that was used for "drive by" infection (just visit a bad site) that was able to do anything the unfortunate browser user could do (ANYTHING). Within just a couple of days Microsoft had patched the problem. Before you start dumping on Microsoft read the Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) blog entry Michael Howard just posted. SDL is generally accepted by experts as the state-of-the-art in trying to develop secure software; Michael's entry explains why it wasn't enough in this case. Sure feels like we're fiddling while Rome burns (we never really do much to mitigate bot attacks because that requires complex industry technical and financial cooperation). This is all very scary!

Learning to Love Microsoft

It's truly amazing to think of all the effort in the computer industry that has been driven by hatred of Microsoft, either at the company level (all the company consortia to free the world from their evil domination) or at the grass roots level (most recent CS grads know that Microsoft is both evil and incompetent). So what kind of fool would sign up to get people to like Microsoft better? The answer is Microsoft CVP Dan'l Lewin, and he may be crazy like a fox but he's no fool. Dan'l does a bunch of interesting things from his Mountain View office but a major part of his mission has always been to improve Microsoft's relations with the outside tech community, especially with the Silicon Valley infrastructure. He rolled out the latest wave in these efforts in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Conference in SF -- BizSpark.  BizSpark is Microsoft's answer to Amway in a sense, a network of partners (including IRG) that are empowered to offer relevant startups (yes there are rules) free to inexpensive access to Microsoft software for development and early market purposes. In the past, Dan'l built and still operates an organization that understands and nurtures external startups even more intimately but on a much smaller scale. I would guess that a lot of recent CS grads still think that Microsoft is evil and incompetent but from what we hear Dan'l has made real progress pivoting these companies at the management level. It's a nasty job but really valuable to Microsoft.

Google GreenTech

I had a chance to have lunch with my old friend Bill Weihl, Google's GreenTech Tzar (prior Bill was CTO at Akamai). I asked Bill what Google brought to bear in this space (compared to the likes of Chevron for example) and got a remarkably good answer. He pointed out that much of the current alternative energy work is misdirected in the sense that it does nothing to diminish the use of coal for electric power which has unfortunately climate impact unless some magic clean coal solution can be found (don't bet the rent money on that). Coal power costs roughly $4/KWH. Alternative power (e.g. Wind, solar) fetches $10/KWH (driven by governmentally mandated use by power companies) so most of today's alternative energy is optimized to make $8/KWH power and sell it profitably for $10. Google is focusing on solutions that could possibly beat coal prices (taking the long term view). Oh, and as Bill points out, minimize your expectations for companies like Chevron and BP. They advertise their alternative efforts a lot but if you read a recent 10Q they are oil companies (period).

The Data Center Market Matures

Do you remember back in the dot com boom when co-location hosting facilities (high-class warehouses with good power and cooling) were touted as a high-value business? One of the interesting and differentiated offerings at that time was Equinix. They offered neither warehouse space nor vertically integrated, locked in services. Instead their ideas were: (1) network neutral (let the user choose his network services provider separately) and (2) really high-quality facilities (when it came to things like security and uptime). We recently caught up with Equinix for the first time in a number of years. They have not only managed to survive the downturn (Exodus certainly didn't) but also have demonstrated steady growth. Their model seems pretty much spot on for the base level of cloud data center infrastructure (reliable and well-connected). It's still not easy to make money in "hosting" (Ellen Hancock was just plain wrong) but rising from those ashes Equinix's business model not only pays the rent but is even capable of providing enough free cash flow the drive expansion in these uncertain financial times.

Microsoft PDC Overload

There was an amazing amount of interesting new stuff at Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in LA last week. Microsoft had cancelled the planned 2007 version because the time wasn't right (PDC is held episodically when major technology introductions are ready) but there was more than enough this time including deep dives into the cloud infrastructure (nee "Red Dog" and now formally Windows Azure), Windows 7 and of course the infamous Oslo.

Mr. Ozzie Comes to Los Angeles

Ray Ozzie really hit his stride as the executive MC at PDC (Ray led the keynotes on both of the first two days). At Mix08 earlier this year he was a little apologetic ("I'm not Bill Gates") and tentative (nothing formal to announce -- just vision) but all that was gone at PDC. Ozzie is now not only a reasonable alternative to Gates -- in many ways he's better. It was always thrilling in a celebrity sense to attend a Gates keynote, but sort of like attending a Who concert today -- it's no longer all about the music and the performance. Sometimes Bill seemed like he was just calling it in (for lots of possible good reasons). Often he explained things in the context of the history of Microsoft. Ray definitely wasn't calling it in and he didn't worry about explaining the Windows 3.1 history. The story was Windows Azure (Windows for the Cloud) and he was very articulate and passionate. Ray Ozzie has accomplished more than enough to rest on his laurels if he wanted to (Lotus Notes, Groove) but he clearly didn't sign up as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect (Gates' final position) as an honorarium for his earlier work. If Azure and Live Mesh succeed, the impact will swamp what Ray has done in the past. He's fully engaged, excited and passionate and it shows. Bravo!

Windows Azure

Windows Azure is breathtaking in vision and ambition: The idea is simple: create a version of Windows that runs Windows applications in the cloud at unbounded scale. Pioneers of successful Cloud applications and services (e.g. Facebook) all say that scalability is the critical design issue -- if your scalability model isn't right then success will literally kill you. Windows Azure has no less an ambition than enabling scalability while bringing forward the richness and tools in Windows programming. This isn't HotMail warmed over with a new face. Ozzie views the PC, the phone and the Cloud (all running Windows of course) as the three pillars of future applications, with Live Mesh keeping data synchronized among all the participants. Windows Azure builds on the success of Windows as an applications platform. The key question going forward is whether Microsoft can herd the huge and valuable Windows developer community toward Azure. PDC was a loud and strong beginning but only time will tell.

What's Oslo?

Anyone who has come close recently with an XML'ish topic has probably heard me ask "Do you know about Microsoft's Oslo?" Well Oslo is now much more out of the closet but in many ways still as mysterious. At the root of Oslo is the contrast of imperative and declarative expression (program logic and rules). Complexity is the great issue in all forms of modern application and system design. The wise men all believe that moving more and more application and system design into a declarative form is critical (rules and their interaction are much easier to understand than code written in C# or Java). Oslo is a unique and bold tool for declarative expression. Or is it? I keep asking the Microsoft marketing people to give me the decision maker elevator pitch for Oslo (or declarative expression more broadly) and they can't (not because it doesn't exist but rather because they haven't coalesced it). Microsoft's PDC is the ultimate geek fest -- the lingua franca of PDC is on the fly construction of working code in demos. PDC certainly wasn't the venue to give the CEO elevator pitch. The pieces of Oslo that were explained at PDC are interesting to a programmer but I'm sure completely cryptic to anyone on the business side. People very much "in the know" had suggested that Oslo would be used for rule based virtual machine deployment and that didn't see the light of day (and now those in the know are less confident). I guess I'll just have to wait some more and see what transpires.