Dear Implementers:
What could be the KPIs by which I, being Management Representative,
can show complete picture in a compiled brief/short report? Your
response would be highly awaited.

Which I think is a great question!  Talk about no-nonsense.  None of this “high-falutin” nonsense about ISO adoption providing ‘piece of mind’ and ‘common language’ or ’strategic currency’.  No this is straight from the hip - tell me right now how I can communicate the value of an ISO implementation to non-security management.

I’m not sure I’ve got a good answer.  Do you?  You guys (loyal, cool, readers) are really bright and many of you CxSO’s in your own organizations.  Leave comments and in our next post  I’ll publish the best and brightest (as well as some of my own thoughts).

So, my dear readers, imagine how amazed I was to find myself being truly inspired by my CEO,  for the first time in my working life! Philippe’s “no-B.S.” approach definitely works for me. I listened to his speech at a company meeting last week and – I am serious! – that was the most interesting, visionary AND inspiring speech that I’ve heard in a long time. It was clear what we’ve been doing, what worked, what didn’t and what we need to be doing and why it will work.

I already learned more than a few things from him just by listening to him  speak or conduct a meeting (or by watching him beat up a job candidate…). For example,  one CAN be “positive, but not marketing-ish,” even if situation is difficult. If one has an issue, one has to face it with no sugarcoating rather than ’play’ positive and pretend the issue is not there. One can have BOTH a driving vision AND be attentive to customers. One CAN release something when it is ready, not a year before :-) Etc, etc.

Finally, while some choose to lay people off, we at Qualys  ARE HIRING!  Come join us and help build the SaaS security platform that actually works! Specifically, we are looking for TAMs (kind like an SE, but better :-)), PMs and a lot of engineers.

As of today, the only Chief Logging Evangelist in the world is no more. I have resigned from my position at LogLogic, effective October 9, 2008, which is today. Please don't contact me at the company email; use my personal email instead. My LinkedIn profile has been updated accordingly.

If you are curious, I still love logs. I really do. Logs are cute :-) You should love them too. And, it goes without saying, I will always remember that title, Chief Logging Evangelist, that I have created for myself. People did say that "Anton wakes up and thinks 'what else he can do today to make the world love logs?'" - it was pretty much like this. In fact, I think world does love logs a tiny bit more now and thus my mission of a logging evangelist has not been in vain.

I will be offline for the entire next week ("OMG, no blogging?" - "Nope, no blogging!") and you, my dear reader, will have to wait until October 20th to hear the news about ...

... where Anton is NOW!!!???

Yes, where is he? :-)

Talk to ya October 20th! The end always brings the new beginning ...

P.S. Please don't tell me that I have a penchant for dramatic. I know :-)

John talked about Microsoft’s mission, his perspectives on key industry trends and market opportunity; he touched on Cloud Computing and Virtualization and took some Q&A from the audience of Managed Service Provider executives.

One of his first proclamations - Microsoft has really embraced the heterogeneous environment. Really? How in the world is Microsoft going to help convince IT line managers, or mid level managers to believe this statement? I think they have a long way to go to achieve this vision with any credibility in the marketplace.  I do know that they are making small strides.

Microsoft has been widely credited with some very good blogs that are self critical and introspective. They have also been quite active in the standards boards within DMTF and many others such as Open WSMAN and CIMON (Open Pegasus). Microsoft in February published 30,000 pages detailed technical specifications – protocol documentation for Exchange, since that time they have published another 15,000 pages. They have had over 224,000 downloads since February 21, 2008. Thus they are trying to be more open by making some of these secret sauce protocol resources directly available on the web.

So for now, I will take a very cautious wait and see approach to this proclamation. Time will tell.

Trends

• Rapid growth continues
• Hosting Competition has a new face
  • Platform gorillas (amazooglesoft)
  • Ad supported Web 2.0 hosters (Google, Facebook,)
• Utility Cloud Computing models are expanding to non-traditional hosting companies
  • Wells Fargo vSafe - hard to believe that a big bank would start to offer a SaaS offering
  • New tools and markets digital ribbon, CohesiveIT

IDC Data shows that growth of SaaS ISV’s is the biggest layer of growth. The fastest growing services are complex, custom applications. IDC says this area will be bigger than the hosting area in the next 5 years. John said that Microsoft is spending a lot of time, money and energy on this right now.

John said:

“when Microsoft thinks about the building blocks that make-up the cloud, virtualization is a core piece of the puzzle. However you also need also identity services, Operating system with standard set of libraries to tap into… or remote storage that application developers will tap into.. Developers will consume these set of services, but you will also need a set of tools to manage your physical, virtual and geographically distributed datacenter infrastructure.” (that is where ScienceLogic comes in!!)

He went on to say,

“In some ways, virtualization enables decentralization – allows you to move from data centers, enables fast scaling out, business to move from on premise to the cloud and off again…. Automation is very important – this will help you scale your business – this is core to your future success.”

He talked about a new breed of knowledge worker: He called them Digital Natives (compared to grey haired guys like me who are left out of this category).

Definition of a Digital natives? A young adult who has grown up with cellphone, web based applications, Facebook account, as their primary mode of communications.

John commented that we are 5 years into a 10 year journey. Only 12% of all servers in the world are virtualized today… in the next 4 years it will double to 25%. This is the time to think through how this business will affect you.

‘Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place.” Thomas Bittman, Analyst Gartner

Patching and provisioning nightmare – no scalable administration – sprawl chaos.

John posed a question to the audience: How do you partner to provide the ISV support in application development with specific market needs… partner by keeping the hosting to SaaS solution providers up and running and provide the quality of service that their customers expect…. Complimentary services of storage and backup is a big win with a huge market-upside over the next 5 years..

John said that Microsoft continues to make  huge investments with Managed Service Providers.

• Investing in the windows hosting platform
• Hyper V and SQL2008 GoLive program - getting beta code out to service provides to find as many bugs as early as possible.
• Software + Services (S+S) incubation center program
• Partnering for cloud platform market offers
• Cloud platform guidance and best practices

During the Q&A, David Burns from Cincinnati Bell asked the very best question… “when are you going to make it easier for the Service Provider market to deal with the Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) quarterly statistics pull and change the SPLA pricing to be more efficient and creative for the new Virtualization and Cloud offerings you have talked about?”

John’s response: “We hear your frustrations loud and clear and are working on some new ideas for the future version of SPLA.” My interpretation – “Dear Service Providers don’t expect anything new or easier to deal with in the next 6 months!”

His closing remarks: “Cloud is evolving = very early stages, lots of hype, but think of how this evolution will effect your business and how you can plug into it.”

Now you know why I have not been travelling the world, speaking in conferences this year. Event processing is great fun, but there is more to life than processing complex events!

New rules are being proposed, but there’s some debate over them because they would still be restrictive–from Ars Technica:

The new rules, proposed in a letter by Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-MA), would allow members to use third-party sites so long as official content is not “posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information.”

This would be difficult since most third-party sites like YouTube display automatically generated advertisements and related user content next to featured video.