I just read Mitchell Ashley’s Network World blog from last Friday.  He cautions that feature limitations won’t slow Hyper-V in its march to the data center.  He also predicts that VMware will be quick to point out feature deficiencies.

 

I agree with Mitchell that Microsoft is poised to make inroads despite having a lighter feature set.  Yet I think VMware would be remiss to focus on Microsoft shortcomings.  Instead they should get more aggressive from a vision and feature standpoint; articulating what they will do even better in the near future.

 

As I blogged yesterday, the new battlefield between Microsoft and VMware is taking shape.  VMware needs to focus on accelerating its presence in the data center and not on trying to slow Microsoft down.  The machine is coming with fewer features and a much lower price, obviously initially aimed at smaller deployments.  VMware can win by making new features strategic to the data center and articulating even more for the days ahead.

 

Tackling I/O, virtualization security and other data center relevant issues will create more opportunity than a vain effort to slow Microsoft’s Server 2008 bundling and extension strategy.

Now that Hyper-V is officially shipping you can expect to see a series of new developments in the data center virtualization market.  Microsoft appears to be leveraging Hyper-V and virtualization to extend the reach of Server 2008 versus launching it as a head to head offering versus ESX.

 

Microsoft clearly wants to play to its incumbent strengths in the data center as a way to put increasing pressure on VMware.  By releasing a low cost product that bundles, Microsoft has positioned themselves as an incumbent disruptor:

 

Hyper-V is a late arrival to the party and is taking a different approach to garner recognition. First off, Hyper-V, for all intents and purposes, is a free virtualization solution; it is included with several editions of Windows Server 2008 and is deployed using WS08’s roles wizard. That bundling, ease of installation and initial “no cost” ideology will make Hyper-V a hard technology to ignore. What’s more, those looking to bring virtualization into their enterprises will be forced to take a long hard look at an upgrade path that includes Windows Server 2008.

- Frank Ohlhorst, eWeek June 26, 2008

 

 It isn’t that different than how Cisco has been treating Riverbed lately, using the gorilla factor (aggressive, competitive product pricing bundled in with a breadth of offerings and relationships) to apply pressure to a smaller foe with more specialized products within fewer categories.  It’s a commonly used marketing strategy that forces competitors -out of necessity- to innovate more and make less in order to land the same customers.

 

Now that Microsoft has played its first hand I think it’s clear that both VMware and Citrix are going to be looking to differentiate more aggressively.  That should mean less talk about the general benefits of virtualization (Microsoft will be doing that on perhaps a larger scale with Hyper-V) and more about the business case for unique features and perhaps even focusing on more specialized sub-categories.

 

You can expect both to start talking about roadmaps that will keep them ahead of Microsoft and the strategic importance of their ecosystems, capabilities and specialized data center requirements.  I think the existing virtualization-lite dynamic that has played itself out since VMsafe’s awe-inspiring launch at VMworld Cannes, now needs to mature into full-blown virtualization within the data center. 

 

That doesn’t mean complete virtualization of the data center, but rather quickly extending from the hypervisor VLAN beach head into deployments that make the business case for virtualization even stronger.  With Citrix it may mean more focus on desktops versus virtual servers.

 

For VMware that makes virtualization security, VMotion and any potential capability roadblocks now strategic to success.  Months ago features were tactical.  With Hyper-V some will now be strategic. 

 

As Microsoft uses its position to pressure VMware in the same way that large product portfolio players squeeze one category specialists, VMware will now need to accelerate execution on strategic features and move inland from the hypervisor VLAN beach head to win and defend critical data center infrastructure. 

 

VMware may become even more aggressive on the roadmap front, and articulate an even more powerful vision for its marketplace.  The coming VMworld could be the best ever from the standpoint of attendance, buzz and innovation.

 

The difference between success and failure is often a matter of momentum, focus, aggression and execution.  VMware has done very well so far; the question now is how effectively they can get their partners, prospects and customers to take the next step while Microsoft prepares its next moves.

 

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Disclosure: I’m the VP Marketing for Blue Lane Technologies, a winner of the 2007 InfoWorld Technology of the Year for security, Best of Interop 2007 in security and the AO 100 Top Private Company award for 2006 and 2007. Blue Lane is also a 2007 Best of VMworld Finalist in data protection. I’ve been a marketing executive at Juniper Networks, Redline Networks, IntruVert Networks and ShoreTel. I’ve been an Always On blogger/columnist since 2004. My recently launched personal blog is: www.archimedius.net .  My blog also appears at www.broaddev.com, John Furrier’s new 24 hour blogzine.  These are all my opinions, and do not represent the opinions of employers, spouses, kids, etc.  They also do not represent any stock recommendations of any kind.

VMware has enjoyed having the virtualization market to itself, with only peripheral competition from Citrix and others. As I’ve talked about virtualization and security it also seemed like the only story in town was VMware; Microsoft has been silent and Citrix has taken a more passive stance.

 

With Microsoft’s blog on Hyper-V posted June 25, it appears that they’re now ready to start putting the squeeze on VMware by announcing their intentions to go into areas underserved by VMware, including eventually entering the data center.  The impact of their announced intentions is a signal to VMware’s customers and prospects that Microsoft is on the way.

 

This officially puts VMware on notice that any delays in penetrating data centers with virtualization will increase the prospects of Microsoft competition, and possibly force lower margins and longer sales cycles.  Microsoft has a formidable presence.  They won’t have to have a better product.  If they deliver a more secure approach to virtualization it could also spell trouble for VMware, as that is currently a very significant barrier to the full benefit of virtualization.

 

Virtualization-lite, or the adoption of hypervisor VLANs with restricted movement and flexibility, will not be enough to hold back Microsoft.  VMware will need to get VMsafe members to step up and deliver elegant hypervisor visibility and enforcement.  If they can heighten the VMware business case by unleashing the full power of virtualization in the data center they will have a substantial head start; and that could be Microsoft’s Achilles heel.

 

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Disclosure: I’m the VP Marketing for Blue Lane Technologies, a winner of the 2007 InfoWorld Technology of the Year for security, Best of Interop 2007 in security and the AO 100 Top Private Company award for 2006 and 2007. Blue Lane is also a 2007 Best of VMworld Finalist in data protection. I’ve been a marketing executive at Juniper Networks, Redline Networks, IntruVert Networks and ShoreTel. I’ve been an Always On blogger/columnist since 2004. My recently launched personal blog is: www.archimedius.net .  My blog also appears at www.broaddev.com, John Furrier’s new 24 hour blogzine.  These are all my opinions, and do not represent the opinions of employers, spouses, kids, etc.  They also do not represent any stock recommendations of any kind.

Many of my recent blogs at Archimedius have talked about cloud computing from a macro economic perspective, with anecdotes about small towns mixed in with lessons from world economic history.  Now let’s talk about why every company with an IT operations department hasn’t yet flown into the clouds to save money and enhance agility. 

 

A farm made up of racks and stacks of hypervisors is incredibly cost efficient, and can allow servers to be brought up and down on short notice in order to scale to meet user demand.  That kind of flexibility is a powerful IT operations enabler, especially for businesses with significant user load spikes. 

 

Without virtualization (or cloud computing) organizations have to overprovision servers to support peak; they even keep unused servers running simply to ensure system availability for potential peak usage.  That consumes plenty of extra electricity and has caused crowding and data center expansion for many enterprises, which also means extra real estate expense.

 

If server farms were interconnected around the world in a massive cloud, servers could chase cheap power and only consume electricity when needed.  That would be a massive boost in server efficiency and reduction in energy consumption, as articulated in Follow the Moon (or whatever).

 

Yet despite the opportunities to go cloud there are still technical hurdles; and one of those hurdles is virtualization security.  Sharing processing power among many organizations, applications, etc would require a new level of security enforcement well beyond the systems in use today to protect physical servers.  Most were created to protect known, static servers, and deployed at an outer perimeter.  Very few are capable of looking at traffic inside a hypervisor and protecting virtual servers (VMs) from each other.  Many use older deep packet inspection engines to scan traffic for growing lists of attack signatures, which is very compute intensive, which means sizable hypervisor resources being tied up in security tasks.

 

Because these solutions are compute intensive enterprises would have to create elaborate hairpins between hypervisors, agents and multiple hardware security appliances in order to properly protect the hypervisor layer.

 

As a result, most enterprises that have virtualized portions of their production data centers have implemented what I’ve called virtualization-lite.  There is very little flexibility and cost savings with virtualization-lite relative to virtualization and cloud computing, but it’s the most common response to the protection of VMs by older network security equipment.   

 

Virtualization security is therefore one of the factors restricting the benefits of data center virtualization, and would be an even a larger impediment to cloud computing; the benefits of clouds depend on higher levels of flexibility and server motion.

 

The established network security and virtualization players need to tackle this issue in order to drive the wider adoption of virtualization and cloud computing.  They need to deliver deeper and more robust hypervisor inspection and traffic management capabilities, without having to resort to hypervisor hogging and movement restrictions driven by multiple, specialized security agents or elaborate appliance hairpins.

 

There is no question that the major players will eventually deliver on the promise of an elegant, comprehensive virtsec solution.  Technologies have come to market to address the unique requirements of VM security and hypervisor layer enforcement.  The key is their rate of adoption into mainstream virtualization projects.  According to security expert Mike Rothman that adoption will take years.  Yet the virtualization, security and cloud computing players could reap massive gains as a result of cloud computing.  They could establish leadership and considerable revenue momentum as the world’s data centers are re-architected.

 

Yet the market will have to walk before servers can fly.

 

 

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Disclosure: I’m the VP Marketing for Blue Lane Technologies, a winner of the 2007 InfoWorld Technology of the Year for security, Best of Interop 2007 in security and the AO 100 Top Private Company award for 2006 and 2007. Blue Lane is also a 2007 Best of VMworld Finalist in data protection. I’ve been a marketing executive at Juniper Networks, Redline Networks, IntruVert Networks and ShoreTel. I’ve been an Always On blogger/columnist since 2004. My recently launched personal blog is: www.archimedius.net .  My blog also appears at www.broaddev.com, John Furrier’s new 24 hour blogzine.  These are all my opinions, and do not represent the opinions of employers, spouses, kids, etc.  They also do not represent any stock recommendations of any kind.

Like The Wisdom of Clouds author James Urquhart I was floored by the cloud computing meme explosion.  What was an initial comment about Who will Ride the Clouds was picked up by tech visionary Nicholas Carr Monday, in addition to several new media outlets.

 

While I’ve been living in networking and security technology the last ten-plus years, the implications of cloud computing took me back to an econ history course I took in grad school taught by Walt Rostow.  Walt authored several economic history textbooks, including a tome from the sixties called The Stages of Economic Growth, which was subtitled “a Non-Communist Manifesto”.

 

Walt’s wonderful course was about how fluctuating terms of trade over hundreds of years between raw material and finished goods economies were a backdrop to various stages of economic growth and development experienced by nations around the world.  Cultural factors, geographical conditions and markets shifted wealth across hundreds of years and thousands of miles as demands and trade routes shifted, technologies and tastes evolved and new raw material sources were discovered or depleted.

 

For his time Walt was highly controversial in many circles, not just because of his belief in the triumph of capitalism (especially in the sixties) but also because of his unwavering support for the war in Vietnam.  Yet I found his economic history perspective refreshing, especially before the outright collapse of communism.

 

Because of Walt’s scholarship I saw cloud computing within an even larger context than its impact on network and security equipment/software.  As cloud computing decouples software, services and servers from physical hardware it poses an incredible impact on who benefits from IT.  It promises to shift IT operations careers from highly congested and expensive real estate markets to remote farming communities in areas with cheap power.

 

We’re already witnessing shifts in how technology firms operate, including the rise of teleworking and the movement of larger firms with mature technologies to lower cost (especially real estate and tax) locations.  When you add virtualized cloud IT to the mix you add an even more powerful dynamic that is already moving IT operations to remote areas like Quincy, WA which offer cheap electricity and cheap real estate, not to mention less congestion.

 

As massive server farms are built, small farming towns become the factories of tomorrow.  The Detroit-styled, urban bureaucracies and wealth transfer engines (that relied upon proximity to unprecedented wealth creation to insulate residents from the ongoing dance between productivity and resources) start crumbling at a faster pace. 

 

 

 

IT operations flight would disproportionately hit communities that have depended upon unprecedented gains in tax revenues driven by their proximity to powerhouse technology company headquarters and branch offices; and would deliver the equivalent of a route change for the information superhighway.  Remember the ghost towns created by dried up mines or shifts in railroad routes?

 

Similarly, large technology companies that fight the tide by keeping IT operations in higher cost metro areas pay disproportionately for the same services as their competitors.  The Googles, Microsofts and Amazons enjoy competitive advantages by spreading the wealth into communities that were once isolated from the industrial and computer age, where many residents don’t have an email address.

 

The age of motorized transportation drove incredible resources to the automobile and the petroleum industry, enriching towns and even deserts with manufacturing or processing plants and oil facilities.  The information technology age may similarly empower a new generation of communities, companies and electricity producers. 

 

If cloud computing and virtualization launch the age of strategic electricity, power plants could become as important to economic growth as universities and entrepreneurs.  New investments in new energy technologies could finally give us the impetus to break our dependence upon fossil fuels.

 

There are still technology barriers to the cloud computing vision, including virtualization security, application management and delivery, I/O processing and change management, to name a few.  New companies have already emerged to tackle these challenges and as their new approaches get adopted new potentials are unleashed.  I’ll be talking about them here at Archimedius in coming months.  I just had to tee them up within the larger context as a tribute to Walt Rostow, a great professor and scholar.

 

Yesterday security pundit and all around nice guy Mike Rothman unleashed a Special Incite called: “VirtSec: Don’t Hold your Breath.”

 

He mentioned a few of us security bloggers and talked about how long it will take before virtsec takes off and why.  I think our “pragmatist” has really confused vision and tech strategy with market sizing. 

 

Most of the larger netsec players argue that “size equals significance”, while startups usually correlate significance and innovation with growth potential.  The truth is probably somewhere in between, although the last few years have been rewarding incrementalism more than innovation.

 

By falling into the “size matters” camp, Mike ends up becoming a perhaps unwilling metaphor for today’s numero uno problem.  I’ll call it the netsec quicksand rationalization, which goes like this: “every move you make causes you to sink even further”.  Whether it’s the thousands of new attack permutations a day, the knowledge of an increasing population of vulnerabilities, or the no rest posture of waiting for the next attack, I think Rothman represents a common perspective shared by many in the security industry.

 

For years netsec has become a land of incremental innovations, driven mostly by past decisions, regulatory events and exploit publicity dynamics. Every new security category looks a lot like the airline industry as it starts, with more funds going out than coming in.  Under those kinds of pressures a few survivors emerge, and fewer yet find exits for their investors.

 

As IT teams evaluate new technologies they hold them against a higher standard than those already installed.  As Andy Kyte said at a recent Gartner keynote covered by Network World:

 

“We see people putting money into products and solutions that are clearly dying. Instead of investing in them, they should be investing in migrating off of them.”   - Andy Kyte quoted in Network World

 

Most large enterprises have made an attempt to protect themselves from the negative effects of bad decisions by establishing a multitude of committees to approve purchases.  They collectively evaluate new technologies, placing more emphasis on analyzing innovations than the value of what they’ve already installed.  The result: innovation faces disproportionate scrutiny versus the scrutiny placed on the negative effects of obsolete legacy decisions.

 

That environment of “selective persecution” puts a substantial burden on anything truly new, while rewarding incremental innovations which are complementary to five or ten years of past product decisions.  No wonder Mike has advised repeatedly to go to the midmarket when launching a new netsec product.

 

Last year I was chatting with my cousin the IT guy, who has spent close to 20 years working for a large IT consulting firm.  We were talking about various hot new technologies and he commented: “My frustration is that it takes us about two years to evaluate and deploy a new, innovative product; and that’s if it’s hot.”

 

That brings me back to Rothman’s hold your breath rant.  Taking any new discussion and waving the “it’s two years guys” flag just exacerbates the quick sand mentality.  Everyone knows that new markets start slow and the first 50 customers are the hardest; but virtualization is already established and spreading like gangbusters, VMware is openly declaring their intentions to permeate the data center and the cloud, and security is clearly a new challenge for platforms developed within the confines of devtest.  The strategic importance of virtsec has indeed drawn a great deal of attention as plans are made.

 

Virtualization is an opportunity to examine the possibilities of the old and the new and to make network security and IT strategic.  As enterprises deploy virtualization-lite as a first step, let’s use this opportunity to rethink what is working and what isn’t, and to plan a more proactive future.  Let’s place equal scrutiny on yesterday’s decisions as we do on tomorrow’s innovations.

 

That is why it is important for people like Hoff and Rothman and others to keep the conversation looking forward, beyond the beer already spilled.  It will take innovation on multiple levels to help us get ahead of the game, so let’s not get distracted by the bureaucracy that won’t jump until it’s too late.  We’ve seen that story play itself out many times before. 

 

There is also a considerable consensus that the requirements of virtualization security are different than those of fixed physical servers; and that most of the security players, including Cisco, Juniper and Symantec, may not be ready for the demands of elegant hypervisor layer visibility and enforcement. 

 

I think the coming collision between virtualization and security in the data center gives us plenty to talk about.  Or we could just sit still and breathe slowly while waiting for someone to hand us a vine.

Ogren Joins Amoroso (and others) on Security as a Service Bandwagon

 

A few blogs ago I talked about Ed Amoroso’s (AT&Ts CSO) recent interview in the San Jose Mercury News.  I thought it was a smart strategic move for AT&T on both an offering and message basis.  It gives enterprises the opportunity to step out of the combat medic role into which they’ve evolved as firewalls and intrusion prevention systems have been increasingly unable to keep up with increasingly sophisticated attacks.

 

Eric Ogren’s blog, posted end of day Friday, validates Ed’s comments via an announcement by Trend Micro.  I particularly liked Eric’s comment:

 

There are way too many attacks for traditional approaches relying on comparing against signature files to keep up. It is simple arithmetic - the discovery rate of new attacks (several thousand per day according to independent the AV-Test organization) far surpasses the ability for any security vendor to distribute up to date signature files to endpoints in any kind of effective timeframe. The most logical security approach is to route traffic through a security service where it can be analyzed and scrubbed before it reaches your PC.

     - Computerworld blog, June 20 2008

 

Well said Eric.  Exploit mutation is trumping static signatures and someone needs to do something about it.  The service providers have a very viable opening into the security as a service business, as long as they can deliver on the promise.

 

A blog, article and conversation about virtualization and security over the last few days helped me to get my head out of the clouds for at least a few moments.  Here is a brief recap of virtsec news and commentary from the last three days:

 

Chris Hoff talks about virtualization visualization and how a host of new virtsec solutions will help virtualization pros learn rudimentary security.  Hoff is a Chief Security Architect at Unisys, and he can be incredibly precise and insightful.  I’ll summarize his post by saying that ultimately tools shape perceptions, and new virtsec tools will help virtualization teams learn new things about virtsec.  I’ll take it a step farther and predict the emergence of virtsec managers and directors.

 

That leads me to Denise Dubie’s recent Network World piece on the importance of proper planning to successful virtualization.  She talks about an HP Universe session with Cameron Haight, a Gartner research VP, who talks about enterprises virtualizing without appropriate plans or procedures in place, and the implications:

 

“Every time I see a benefit created by virtualization, it also introduced a challenge,” Haight said. “Taking the same approach to managing virtual as we do physical … in the long run is a dangerous proposition.”

- Network World, June 23, 2008

Cameron’s warnings could certainly be applied today to the emergence of virtualization-lite, which I would label as the emergence of hypervisor VLANs in the enterprise data centers, despite the risks and watered down virtualization benefits.  The security teams like virtualization-lite because it works within the confines of their existing security infrastructure and the ops teams like it because they don’t have to become fluent with virtsec issues.  Did I mention that the VMsafe members who are not ready to deliver hypervisor layer visibility and enforcement must also love virtualization-lite?

 

 

Last night I spoke with Toon Vanagt, Founder and Publisher of Virtualization.com.  He was in town for a conference, so we had a few minutes to talk about virtualization, security and cloud computing.  You’ll be able to catch the interview on Archimedius in a few weeks.  I spoke to Virtualization.com’s Tarry Singh on camera at VMworld in Cannes a few months ago.

 

Toon was once an IT consultant in one of the world’s top consulting firms.  He established Virtualization.com a few years ago, after pitching VCs on a container-based virtualization platform and being told that no one would buy it.  So he secured the virtualization.com domain and created a fast-growing media site.

 

We both lamented how early virtualization projects weren’t strategic but rather tactical first steps that weren’t living up to the technology’s full promise.  If virtualization stays on its current enterprise course, I think it will simply accelerate service-oriented architectures, cloud computing and the minimization of classic enterprise IT.  The IT strategists will go to the service providers, where the true innovation will occur while layers of enterprise committees focus on status quo preservation.

 

Looks like I’m starting the week off where I left last week: contemplating the clouds, the players and the consequences.  In the meantime if I see anything interesting I’ll blog about it.

Just as I’m assembling a pattern of posts, dinners and newsletters about cloud computing and its impacts on networking and security hardware and innovation, along comes this June 20 blog by Rich Miller about Quincy, WA.  If you’ll remember, I just blogged about “Who will Ride the Clouds.”  In my blog I talked about the historical impact of access, resources and innovation on wealth:

 

When spice trade routes shifted to the ocean the overall Middle East economy went from optimism to despair, from science and enlightenment to xenophobia.  Factories gradually replaced artisans around the world and agriculture went through a series of cycles depending on access to trade routes and distances from markets (in addition to weather and practices, etc).  A coming shift to cloud computing could be as influential in wealth distribution as any previous shift in factors of production and access.

 

Mark Anderson has mentioned Quincy several times in his SNS Newsletter.  I used to see the Quincy mileage markers when I drove to Wenatchee from the Puget Sound region, so I didn’t pay much attention to his comments until I read Rich’s comments about the impact of data centers on this small farming town of 5300:

 

New data centers from Microsoft, Yahoo and several other high-tech firms are providing a significant boost to the economy of Quincy, Washington, local officials said this week. Quincy city administrator Tim Snead told the Wenatchee World that the building phase of the new data centers server farms had a huge impact on the city’s sales taxes. After receiving $700,000 in sales taxes in 2005, Quincy’s tax revenue grew to $1.5 million in 2006 and nearly tripled to $4.3 million last year.

Sales tax revenue is expected to recede as a number of data center projects are completed, reducing the volume of construction workers at local sites. Quincy is a small farm town that had 5,300 residents when it was selected for the Microsoft project in 2006. Yahoo, Ask.com, Intuit, Sabey Corp. and Base Partners have since announced projects in central Washington.

 

The Quincy Factor is interesting because it signals that a shift may already be underway in how technology companies are optimizing factors of production.  Washington State has a sizable hydropower industry that has kept electricity relatively cheap compared to other states.  Microsoft, Yahoo and others are placing strategic bets on cloud computing.

 

Will central Washington become a cloud computing powerhouse, or will it merely be one of many VM hops as the world’s IT innovators establish cloud-driven service fabrics in places once off the beaten path?

 

For a community considering a casino project in a rural backwater as a source of revenue and service industry jobs, the prospects of data centers, construction projects and eventually higher paying IT service jobs might not seem far fetched, especially if electrons are cheap.  For service providers often based in larger, high costs metropolitan areas, cloud computing could decouple the ability to deliver advanced services from the high cost of real estate and metropolitan congestion.

 

Service providers who understand this trend and ride the cloud could dominate a global industry, if policy makers understood the strategic importance of these projects and created favorable economic and regulatory environments.  If they don’t then enterprising rural townships in more inviting nations may be the next to experience the rainmaking abilities of cloud computing.

 

There are technology limitations to VMs hopping clouds, including security and traffic management, which I’ve already discussed.  I’ll be talking about a few other issues and startups tackling them in upcoming posts at Archimedius.

 

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Disclosure: I’m the VP Marketing for Blue Lane Technologies, a winner of the 2007 InfoWorld Technology of the Year for security, Best of Interop 2007 in security and the AO 100 Top Private Company award for 2006 and 2007. Blue Lane is also a 2007 Best of VMworld Finalist in data protection. I’ve been a marketing executive at Juniper Networks, Redline Networks, IntruVert Networks and ShoreTel. I’ve been an Always On blogger/columnist since 2004. My recently launched personal blog is: www.archimedius.net .  I recently added my blog to a growing lineup of editors at BroadDev.com.  These are all my opinions, and do not represent the opinions of employers, spouses, kids, etc.

 

 

A few weeks ago I had a cup of coffee with John Furrier.   We threw a bunch of ideas around about the blogsphere.  As a result my Archimedius column will also start to appear at www.broaddev.com, one of Furrier’s blogzines.  For more information on John and what he is up to check out Furrier.org.   FYI- I think he has a deep understanding of the upcoming transformation of the media landscape and how personalities, content and readers will interact.

 

From John’s blogzine:

 

Why blogging matters. Bloggers are natural search ‘robots’ - subject matter experts who index their territory and filter stuff out … Look at Jason Calacanis and his new venture - going down this road of human collective intelligence. The most successful bloggers are human vertical knowledge machines. - they have to be.

Furrier.org is an opinion blog in technology and business. It’s basically me - so the platform is a new kinda PR firm and search engine. I’ve traced my social graphs and the reach is significant. Great for certain sponsors. My blog is a small (but influential) node in the technology media graph (google trends had me in the top ten techmeme last night). Sponsors will benefit from working directly with me but my users will have full transparency.  

 

Years ago I told Tony Perkins and Rich Seidner that this trend we saw exploding on the scene should be called reality media.  In retrospect that will prove to be an understatement.  More on that later, perhaps at a tech marketing blog that I’ve been sketching out for months.

 

Thanks for reading Archimedius, my take on the coming collision between virtualization, security and data networking.