Publications

This is a selected list of publications, presentations, quotes, etc. primarily related to my professional activities as an industry analyst and at Red Hat. I have attempted to distill a very large (and, at this point, not fully extant) list down to items that may be of current or historical interest. Where published pieces remain on their original site, I point to them there. However, in some cases, I host documents that are no longer available elsewhere.

Books

Personal blogs with both tech and more personal content

Red Hat (mostly and related)

I have been a technology advocate at Red Hat since 2010 and have been mostly focused on hybrid cloud, DevSecOps, and emerging technology. This is a partial list of things I’ve written or otherwise created during that time. More recent content is mostly higher on the list.

CNET: The Pervasive Datacenter

Between 2007 and 2012, CNET had a blog network of external writers and I had a blog there called The Pervasive Datacenter. Much of what I published there was cross-posted on Illuminata’s blog although I also wrote some more general interest pieces relating to photography and other topics. This is where most of my blog-length writing from that period was published.

Illuminata research

Between 2001 and 2010, I wrote a large number of research notes and other publications as an industry analyst at Illuminata. In this section, you’ll find a (very) curated list of those publications that people may find interesting for historical and other reasons.

  • Open Source in the Next Computing Wave (2009) By the end of the aughts, it was becoming increasingly clear that open source had won in important respects.
  • The Cloud vs. Open Source (2008) I’d update some details but much of what’s discussed here remains relevant today.
  • The Future of the Operating System?(2008) This piece largely argues for a continuing operating system role that evolves but doesn’t radically shift. I think today’s containers bear out that argument.
  • The Server Virtualization Landscape, Circa 2007 (2007) This may be of some historical interest as it looks at the landscape post-VMware’s rise but while containers were still primarily viewed as another partitioning technique.
  • Itanium’s State of the Union (2007) This is probably the last major piece I did on Itanium. Most had made peace with the market situation by then and HP apparently even used this research much later in a lawsuit with Oracle to help demonstrate that Itanium wasn’t completely without market value.
  • Hypervisor Home (2006) I forget if it was this piece or a related one that had Diane Greene accosting me at an Intel Developers Forum for suggesting that virtualization might be built into the operating system. The more things change… This debate continues in the container space today.
  • Mew Containments for New Times (2005) Containers 1.0 as a VM alternative.
  • The End of Cobalt and the Appliance Era that Never Was (2004) Mostly I just really liked my lede and the graphic we used for the piece. But it also serves as an obituary for the Web 1.0 style of software appliances.
  • TPC-C Passes Escape Velocity (2004) I think this is historically interesting because it sort of captures peak Big Iron.
  • Open Source Incivility (2004) This note was deliberately a bit (well, maybe a lot) provocative. I include it because I think it does capture the ideological vs. pragmatic debates occurring at that time. (The debates still happen but they’re much less front-and-center.)
  • Intel’s Newest Ecosystem (2004) Intel were the ones I annoyed with this one when I pointed out that they weren’t doing a good job of building an ecosystem for their telecoms initiatives.
  • Breaking Up the Microprocessor Monolith (2003) One of many pieces I wrote about thread-level parallelism. The lots of small cores architectural approach never ended up panning out in a major way–although, of course, distributed computing more broadly is ubiquitous.
  • SCO’s Derived Case Against Linux (2003) This report would eventually lead to spending a lot of time on an (alas, unpublished) expert witness report on one of the cases related to SCO’s lawsuits.
  • Apple: From Computers to Entertainment? (2003) This is way too living room centric and way too skeptical of the early iPod but an interesting historical curiosity nonetheless.
  • Apple’s Server Biz: Building on Unix (Again) (2003) Another early on Apple piece during the period when Apple was still vaguely interested in making a direct enterprise play.
  • Novell Tries to Recapture Its Glory Days (2003) I had never followed Novell much but their SUSE and Linux play put them in my wheelhouse. It ultimately didn’t save Novell but this gives some historical perspective on how Novell got there.
  • Latency Matters! (2002) This report was written in reaction to an overemphasis on bandwidth when marketing systems. While most of the specific examples here are ancient history, the principles still apply.
  • Itanium 2 = PA-RISC 2? (2002) I followed Intel’s Itanium from early on and even wrote a long and mostly positive long-form report on it while at Aberdeen Group. This is probably the first piece I published in which I systematically questioned its broad industry impact. HP was not very happy with me.

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