Enjoyment: 21 Aug 2015

Friday 21 August 2015

Structure News: Lightning strikes, Salesforce hikes, and Mee, too

Where The Schedule Is Set

August 21st, 2015 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll talk about the negative effects of lighting strikes on data centers, the rise of the "algorithm economy," and meet the new boss at Pivotal.

STRUCTURE NEWS

STRUCTURE 2015: CHECK OUT THE SCHEDULE

Structure 2015 is three months away, and the schedule is ready to help you make your plans. We've already announced a bunch of speakers who will be appearing at the Julia Morgan Ballroom, but new highlights include Florian Leibert, CEO of Mesosphere, Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, and Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical.

INDUSTRY NEWS

GOOGLE LOST CUSTOMER DATA BECAUSE OF REPEATED LIGHTNING STRIKES

So much for the legend that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place. Slate reports on a Google data center in Belgium that experienced some drive failures after four consecutive lightning strikes, resulting in the loss of a tiny amount of customer data. Expect AWS and Microsoft to tout "five lightning-strike reliability" in their next marketing push.

ORACLE IS 'TOO OPTIMISTIC ON PROFITABILITY OF THE CLOUD BUSINESS' ACCORDING TO THIS ANALYSIS

The shift from software licensing to software subscriptions may not allow big enterprise software vendors to enjoy the margins they once did. Business Insider looks at a study by Citi that predicted it would take Oracle eight to 10 years to make as much profit from cloud software (assuming it continues to scale that business) as it does from software licenses.

PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN ON GOOGLE'S NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

Google was one of the first big web companies to embrace a roll-your-own infrastructure strategy, largely overseen by Structure 2015 speaker Urs Hölzle. This week Google released a paper showing how the networking part of that infrastructure evolved over five generations, giving network geeks a nice look into how Google thinks about this vital cog in the machine.

IDF 2015: INTEL WOOS DEVELOPERS TO BUILD FOR THE ALGORITHM ECONOMY

It was a busy week for Intel and Structure 2015 speaker Diane Bryant, as they held their annual Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. ZDNet looks at one of the key themes Bryant discussed, which is that the growth of the internet of things is going to generate massive amounts of data that will require new types of algorithms to organize and make sense of that data.

EARNINGS REPORTS: SALESFORCE POSTS STRONG REVENUE GROWTH, HP REVENUE DOWN

Guess which company has a strong cloud computing business. HP continues to struggle as it gets ready to split itself into two pieces, reporting a drop in revenue and profits for the quarter and lowering its full-year forecast. Salesforce, meanwhile, reported a 24 percent jump in revenue, although it roughly broke even for the quarter.

BIG PICTURE

Although most of us see cloud computing as the inevitable future of enterprise computing, it's not easy for people and companies with decades of experience from a different era to make the shift. Pivotal has had a great deal of success helping companies adjust and embrace the cloud, and the key person behind that effort, CEO Paul Maritz, announced this week that he's stepping down from that position to become chairman of the company. Rob Mee (pictured above), who was executive vice president of Pivotal Labs and is a co-founder of the company along with Maritz.

Any time a company changes CEOs there's a tendency to assume something was amiss, but in this case it seems like a rather orderly transition, with Pivotal smartly choosing to announce that it expects to do $100 million in bookings for Cloud Foundry this year alongside the news of Maritz's departure. Mee's tenure at the company also suggests that Pivotal's employees are pretty familiar with his style.

But these are still interesting times for Pivotal and its "federation" partners, EMC and VMware. Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC and considered the godfather of the federation, is 67 and has vacillated on the prospect of retirement before, although earlier this year he said he's not thinking about the shuffleboard and early-bird special lifestyle just yet. Maritz, who was once CEO of VMware and an executive at EMC, had been seen as a likely successor but said this week that his "operational career is over."

And as Adam Lashinsky of Fortune noted following the news of Mee's promotion, this might be an ideal time for EMC to bring VMware and Pivotal fully into the fold, consolidating the three-headed monster into one corporation. As we noted in this newsletter a few weeks ago, according to reports EMC has at least considered a "downstream merger," in which it would be acquired by VMware.

These will certainly be tricky waters for Mee to navigate. But there's still a huge amount of potential for Pivotal's services as the world shifts to the cloud, and if he can keep the company growing at this pace, the balance of power in the federation could shift.