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Internet Evolution - First Post!

I’ve been asked to blog at Internet Evolution, a TechWeb property. My first post just went up this morning. Going forward I intend to evaluate software for IT professionals. It doesn’t seem, to me, like their are a lot of software evaluators in the blogosphere who address the needs of IT. I expect to cover new/social, open source, or free technologies for IT and trends affecting the IT professional and manager. I think this should prove especially salient for IT during our current economic downturn.

Internet Evolution - Aaron Roe Fulkerson - How, and Why, End Users Circumvent IT T

Enterprise IT has been changing, or evolving if you like. The challenges of IT have grown more complex, spending habits are in flux, and technology adoption patterns are shifting. There are some key forces driving the changes in enterprise IT, but let’s take a quick look at the increasing complexity of enterprise IT.

A long time ago (meaning, a few years back), the IT department had only to combat rogue deployments of desktop software in business departments, such as Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, the latter of which could often have more business logic than most of today’s Web 2.0 applications. Now, however, companies have a plethora of insurgent server-based applications that are proliferating both inside the firewall and outside in the “cloud.”

Who’s deploying and feeding these guerrilla applications (often of dubious engineering quality and even more questionable security)? It’s the users in the business departments [gasps of horror] who are installing and driving adoption independent of IT sanction and governance. The business users are taking matters into their own hands in an effort to improve their productivity and remain competitive. They’re turning to easy-to-use and flexible tools like wikis, blogs, lightweight CMSes, social bookmarking tools, and others that are often grouped under the category of Enterprise 2.0.

Fail

It’s cheesy, but I still like it.

Styleo and Li Wei

I’ve recently added Styleo to my feeds to read, posts like this is why:

Styleo | Li Wei Performance Art

More of Li Wei’s work at http://www.liweiart.com/

On social networks

Via: The Squid

Open Source Success

Zenoss - Zenoss Closes Record Quarter with Over 100 Enterprise Customers, Opens New Development Center in Austin, Texas - Open Source Application, Server, and Network Management
Zenoss Inc., a leading provider of open source network and systems management software, propelled by explosive customer growth has expanded their operations to Austin, Texas through the addition of a new software development center. The Austin development team collectively comprises over fifty years of experience bringing enterprise-class systems management software to market. The Zenoss Austin office will be located in the same building where management software innovator Tivoli was started and since acquired by IBM. Austin was chosen for its wealth of talent and access to expertise in a market segment estimated by Gartner Research to grow to $18.1 billion dollars by 2012.

Great people, great company. Glad to see they’re doing well.

Quite a week

It’s been a busy week. Allow me to recap. I just started guest blogging at TechZulu. My first post about the San Diego Tech Meet Up and the SDTweetUp:

TechZulu: Let There Be Wine and Tweets

First post. Well, mine anyway. Vak introduced me previously. I’m happy to be a contributor here at TechZulu; although, TechZulu is a bit different for me being I’m usually blogging on geekier topics :-), but I’ll do my best. Now down to business. 

It’s been an eventful week in San Diego…

Then I was very pleased, and flattered, when a piece I wrote on open source in the enterprise at the MindTouch Blog was picked up by LinuxWorld. 

LinuxWorld: Open source infiltration?

Aaron Fulkerson has a thoughtful response to a recent Gartner Group study. "There can be no doubt that open source will continue to grow in usage and increasingly permeate IT infrastructures, but I agree with Radcliffe, this is going to happen much faster than Gartner predicts."

Finally, and best of all, was this very flattering mention I got (and all the fellows at MindTouch) at ReadWriteWeb.

Aaron Fulkerson and the MindTouch Team

MindTouch, the makers of the DekiWiki platform, is a social media company that eats its own dog food very publicly. Every member of the team contributes to the company blog, discussing not just product developments but also general interest industry news.

The company’s active developer forums are filled with media that users are able to repurpose for their own evangelism. The company integrates with a substantial number of other developer-level social media technologies.

They also use the sophisticated Viddler video platform so their videos can be tagged and commented on. See the down-home 4 minute example demo video below, the only thing missing is audio quality.

As a result of all this material being made available and the company’s high degree of visibility in several social media fora, the marketability of the widely appreciated wiki software is further amplified. Mindtouch says their enterprise wiki software is downloaded 3,000 times every day.

I responded to this honor at the MindTouch blog. All in all, a great week.