I really like the FAZ, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (“Frankfurt general newspaper”). As its name says, it is based in Frankfurt and has a national audience in Germany. It is quite conservative and has a strong focus on the economy, which is why I prefer it to, for instance, the Süddeutsche Zeitung (South German newspaper, based in Munich).
As I was browsing the website faz.net, I read an article about Nicolas Sarkozy called “Sarkozy’s truths” published on October 28th. The article mistakenly mentioned that the work time reduction to 35 hours a week in France had been voted when Francois Mitterand was president, although this had been done in 1997 when Jacques Chirac was the head of state.
I took the freedom to send them an email to correct that online and heard nothing from them… Until someone (thanks Cécile and Mom !) noticed that the paper had published an erratum signed under my name on November 11th in its paper version and told me. I was really surprised because I never thought it would be published. I thought they would correct the online version and move on, but I officially published something in the FAZ now
The conclusion of that is that the FAZ is accurate in its content, but should reward the attentive readers by telling them that they were published !
HP’s CEO Meg Whitman has just announced that the webOS code will be open-sourced ! This is great news for the open-source community after the Odyssey announcement. This means two things : either HP takes open-source seriously and hopes to revive webOS through that move, or it prefers to drop the development entirely to the open-source community. I would tend to the first solution for two reasons : first, HP controls the update servers for all devices and hence a majority of webOS devices will remain updated through HP channels. Second, if HP wanted to drop webOS entirely, they would have sold it to another company (such as Amazon, who is eager to sell tablets).
WebOS was already based on Linux and on open-source software stack (with, for example, a standard Linux kernel, LVM, etc.). This change will benefit the community with a great component for UI development, as well as webOS users, who will benefit from more applications and a broader ecosystem in the future.
I have spent the week in Vienna for the event “HP Discover” that took place at the Vienna Fair.
This event was the counterpart of the American HP Discover that took place back in June in Las Vegas.The setting was huge and the executives have delivered sessions about HP’s strategy. Meg Whitman, for instance, described her vision of HP centered around the hardware infrastructure as a core, the infrastructure software as an extension and the services as a wrap-up layer. This strategy sounds very much like where Mark Hurd was heading in the past. She did not use a flip chart as Hurd used to do all the time, but all in all, she delivered a solid keynote.
Things were a little different compared with the American event. First, there were less sessions. The exhibition was smaller, and we have had a private concert of Anastacia (the people in Las Vegas have enjoyed Paul MacCartney…). Also things have changed since June from the HP-UX / Business Critical Servers perspective, because of the Odyssey announcement. Many customers asked what were HP’s plans for the future, and the HP announcement sets the vision on which HP will deliver in the future, giving a clear strategic roadmap. As I presented CloudSystem Matrix, I introduced the advantage of deploying cloud services with mixes of both x86_64 and Itanium-based solutions to customers from all the EMEA region.
However, many actual new announcements came from the HP storage division, such as its new dedupe system. 3PAR and the latest SPC benchmark for 3PAR arrays were also hot topics. The storage part of the exhibition was full all the time.
Also, many customers were extremely interested in the HP Software products (especially given the latest acquisitions of Autonomy and Vertica). CloudSystem combining HP Operations Orchestration and Server Automation It was then quite easy for me to demo their capabilities and then guide customers to the corresponding HP Software booths.
I think it was a very good event, with many customers and in a wonderful city (Vienna is an amazing place). Also the important part for me was to network and meet people from the whole IT industry to share ideas and insights. And that is invaluable.
Last week end, I attended Toastmasters district 59 fall conference in Basel, Switzerland.
This bi-yearly event takes place every time in a different city among the numerous continental European countries that belong to the district (Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Germany, Danemark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, Sweden and Norway).
The main purpose of this Fall conference is to host the humorous speech contests (held in French, German and English), as well as the table topics contests (impromptu speeches) held in all three languages. These finals attract among the best speakers in continental Europe !
I arrived on Friday afternoon in Basel by train, as I took the role of chief judge for the German table topics. The conference was hosted in the Ramada Hotel in Basel: a great location for such an event !
After having briefed the judges about the rules and the ranking criteria for the contest, I attended both the German and French table topics contest, and one of the the English humorous speech contest semi-final. Finally, on Friday, the District Executive Committee Meeting (DECM) took place. This meeting gathered all Toastmasters Area, Division and District governors to present the progress made by the district towards its goals fixed at the beginning of the year.
From my perspective, the Area I supervise (F1) contributed to the general progress, as a new club was is being chartered in Stuttgart, which is excellent news for all Stuttgarters.
It was definitely an exciting experience to see how structured the success plan of the district is and also to see that it is executed in a fairly disciplined manner. All aspects of the plan were addressed : club and membership growth, educational achievements of the members, organization of the district conference and financial status. Although all people who contribute are completely benevolent, a lot of time and energy is put inside this organization.
One interesting fact is that the district has grown so big that it will be split in two in the coming years. A vote of all club president, VP education and district officers allowed the start of the procedure to check all facts and make a proposal in that sense. I personally think that the strength of this district is its diversity (especially of languages) but its size is just too big and a split would benefit the members. One of the biggest challenges of this reform is that a “border” will need to be defined to separate the two districts. As Germany provides by far most of the clubs, I fear that it may be separated, thus making a German speaking district contest less interesting. Germany also has a not-so-positive history with splitting…
On Saturday, Ted Corcoran, an Irishman, former Toastmasters International President, gave a very good keynote speech about leadership by stating ten skills leaders show (for example “take responsibility”, “be proactive”, etc.). Although these presentations may look repetitive, their core message is still important and the delivery of the one-hour speech was impeccable.
I then attended the German humorous speech contest (yes, these two things are compatible !), the English table topics contest, as well as the finals for humorous speeches. The table topic, an impromptu speech usually to answer a question, was this time very original. The table topics master gave an egg to the speaker, who had to make a one-to-two minutes speech out of it. The result was very different from speaker to speaker and it was fun to watch. The last contest was the humorous speech contest. As expected, the level of the speeches was excellent. The winner deserved her title and although some speeches were funnier than others, all participants deserved their applauds.
The organization of the conference must have been a huge work for the organizers. I contributed a bit by volunteering as a chief judge, but the task of managing this whole convention must have been a herculean task. The organization team can be proud of themselves !
For the future, from a personal perspective, I would like to contribute to the success of the district by taking over a role in the district team, for instance as Lieutenant Governor Marketing. Growth is something I am fascinated by and I would like to help extending the network of clubs all across Europe.
The next district conference will take place in Spring, in Poznan, Poland. The evaluations and International speech contest will be held there. I am confident that I will have achieved all the goals set for my Area for this Toastmasters year (June 2011-May 2012) until then. Also, I looking forward to go for the first time in Poland and to participate to the growth of Toastmasters in continental Europe !
Big announcements for HP !
As internally already rumored, the next generation of Superdome 2 servers will be able to use x86 processors, such as the Intel Xeon and run Linux x86_64 natively !
As stated in this press conference, HP has launched a project called “Odissey” that will probably be a complete game changer in the x86 industry.
So far, only HP-UX could be run on a Superdome, but now, customers will have the capability of running HP-UX as well as Linux in the same Superdome server. The lowest-level virtualization layer of the Superdome is the nPar (node partition) and is an electrically-isolated group of Superdome cells (the picture on the right shows the SD2 enclosure populated with cell blades). As nPars are electrically isolated from each other, it will be possible to have nPars equipped with Xeon CPUs and other nPars with Itanium CPUs. Just as the first generation of Superdomes could run PA-RISC and Itanium processors in different nPars in the same server. A mix of CPUs types or families will not be possible.
Of course, the HP-UX cell blade will need Itanium CPUs and the Linux cell blade will need Xeon CPUs (as Linux is not supported on the latest Itanium-based servers), however, this opens the door to bringing Linux to new levels of availability, making use, for example, of the highly available crossbar of the Superdome 2 that routes all IO signals from the IO extenders, which contain the PCI-e cards, to the cell blades. This crossbar is able to retry all possible transactions and to reroute signals to make sure that every IO is performed accurately.
HP-UX will not be ported under under x86 and it will continue to run on the Integrity blades, rx2800 i2 rack-mount servers, as well as on the Superdome cells with Itanium CPUs. Also, this integration will only be for Intel Xeon processors, not AMD Opterons. The development of HP-UX will continue, as the Itanium roadmap still has two CPUs codenamed “Poulson” and “Kittson” to be delivered in the future.
It would be possible to run Linux (with the current Xeon CPUs – the number of cores of Intel’s next platform, codenamed Sandy bridge, for servers is not clear as of now) on 32 sockets, or 320 cores, or 640 threads !! That is huge and great news for all the customers who wanted to switch smoothly from Unix to Linux, or needed scale-up servers going beyond the 8 sockets provided by most of the vendors.
Also, the Integrity blades, which were very modular (they could be extended from two sockets to four sockets and even to eight sockets by just combining blades together and linking them with a blade link pictured below), will also be made available for Xeon processors.
The new servers (Superdome 2 and scalable blades) are planned for 2013.
Finally, HP announced that the Linux HA portfolio would be similar to the HP-UX one, which means that ServiceGuard for Linux (that was stopped two years ago) will be reactivated.
I think that all these announcements are great news for Linux customers who wanted to push their Linux infrastructures to mission-critical levels. Although HP-UX still has a clear roadmap, the attractiveness of the Xeon processor with Linux on such a scalable and available platform will be very strong.
This offer could also be interesting for customers of other commercial Unix versions by offering amazing scale-up capabilities for Linux on the x86 platform, which is the most open one.
Back in August of this year, Toastmasters International introduced a complete new branding. This -much needed- initiative aimed at presenting this venerable nonprofit organization with over 13,000 clubs and more than 270,000 members in 113 countries in a new light and give it a distinctive identity.
Founded in 1924 in Santa Ana, California, this institution’s goals is to help members become better speakers and leaders. The public speaking skills are trained based on a self-paced program and the leadership skills are trained by taking over roles in the organization, either at the club, or at a higher level. I have been an enthusiastic member for four years now and already wrote on this blog an article explaining the basic principles of Toastmasters.
The organization encountered identity problems as clubs and geographical divisions were created around the world. Many clubs started to use their own logos, colors and tag lines. The District 59, for example, which comprises all western European Toastmasters clubs, invented its own motto “Connect through diversity”. Although this sentence makes sense for this particular district with so much diversity, the strength of the Toastmasters brand was diluted. Indeed, there are around 89 districts in the world, each with its own tag line !
Toastmasters International gradually lost control on its own brand and needed an energetic answer to the fragmentation of its identity across the world. Moreover, some of its communication artifacts were not representative of the current state of the organization, such as its exponential international growth.
The logo, for instance, was one of the most outmoded part of the branding. Although the globe gave a sense of the international purpose of the organization, it was centered around the American continent only.
The gavels, one is used to open the Toastmasters club meetings, were not understood from a large part of the population. Some even believed to see fists gripping the world !
Furthermore, this logo, which is an evolution of the first logo designed in the 1930′s profoundly lacked dynamics and modernity. On the other hand, it provided a sense of authority (the gavels reminding of the justice) and of tradition.
The tag line of the organization was “Become the leader and speaker you want to be“. Although it perfectly described the goals achievable through this organization, it had a major issue : its length. No one could remember exactly the sentence after having heard it for the first time.
Finally, the organization used to use a patchwork of unrelated colors, changing, at each event or in each manuals.
Toastmasters International hence decided to hire a consultancy to refresh and align the Toastmasters brand on a worldwide basis. The outcome can be seen on Toastmasters International’s website, as well as on my club’s.
A definition of a brand is an idea embodied in, among others, products, services and experiences. The brand represents the interface between us and Toastmasters. It is present on all web pages, all official documents, all flyers and promotional items. If a branding is not efficient or not focused, it loses its strength and the message of the organization weakens with it. Toastmasters hence introduced in August a new unified branding for the worldwide organization. Its goal is clear : the clubs need to align to the headquarters’s communication to give a unified and controlled member experience.
The consultancy came up with a “brand” new concept, with a distinct set of colors that are culturally neutral and are not part of any country flag in order to emphasize the international vocation of Toastmasters. Also, this color panel is distinct from any other public speaking association, thus increasing the distinction and value of TM. I think they completely succeeded in this task.
The new logo is now much less centered on the USA and looks much more modern. However, as modern as it may look, the drawback is certainly that it will be outmoded much faster than the previous, more conservative, logo. Note the use of the new color scheme.
Finally, and this is my only real complaint, the emphasis of this new branding is clearly much more important on the leadership side than on the public speaking side of Toastmasters.
For instance, the tag line was changed to “Where leaders are made“. In the elevator speech provided by Toastmasters for district leaders, I could count one “speech”, three “communication”-related words , one “tell” versus 12 derivatives of the word “lead” !
The reason for that is that the consultancy associated the needs of the target groups (one of the most important being the young professionals) with the will of becoming better leaders. Thus these people will look for opportunities to increase their leadership capabilities and will acknowledge that, in order to become better leaders, they need to become better speakers.
I fundamentally disagree with that assumption. Although I look for leadership opportunities in this organization, I came on first place to improve my public speaking skills, and so did all members I know.
I highly doubt that people will make the connection between leadership and public speaking at first. Googling on the web “public speaking” would lead them to a website where “leaders are made”… not exactly what they were looking for, and in a world where the first impression is often the last one, I think this messaging will not grab the attention of the prospective learners enough to make them stay and learn more on the website.
This brand positioning assumes people want to become leaders, putting the public speaking skills aside. However, leadership can be understood in many ways and is too fuzzy to be really effective as a tag line. Hence, instead of reinforcing the message of Toastmasters, which is dedicated to helping people improve their public speaking first and then their leadership skills, this branding centered around leadership rather undermines it.
Despite this point, I think that this branding was much needed. Unifying and changing the color codes and the logo was necessary to regain control of the Toastmasters brand and to give members a better experience wherever they are on Earth. Nonetheless, I fundamentally disagree with the emphasis set on the leadership side of the educational program. I think it weakens our message, as well as will be less effective for prospective members to connect leadership and public speaking and eventually join this fantastic organization.
This post is the last of a series of three that explain the concepts and technologies that are used in HP CloudSystem Matrix. The first one was about creating a CloudMap. The second one was about how to deploy a complete IT service automatically. This post is about the management of the resources (servers, storage, networking, software) that can be used and shared as a pool across several services.
The idea behind CloudSystem Matrix is relatively simple : the whole environment should be as easy to manage as possible.
This starts first with the firmware management. All c-Class enclosures have a defined firmware level according to their Matrix version. This means that the server firmware (HBAs, BIOS, iLO, NICs, etc.), the interconnect modules (HP Virtual Connect Flex-10, Fibre channel or FlexFabric) as well as the Onboard Administrator (the enclosure management processor) have a defined firmware level that was tested and qualified to work together in the best way. Given that HP implementation services take care of the firmware deployment, the administrators don’t have to bother about it.
What can be managed by CloudSystem Matrix ?
The physical servers to be deployed must be HP blades (ProLiant x86_64 or Integrity Itanium servers).The reason for that is that we leverage the capabilities of Virtual Connect to apply network profiles (MAC addresses and WWN) and this technology is available on our blade servers.
However, the virtual machine hosts (VMware, Hyper-V, or HP-UX Integrity Virtual Machines) can be HP blades, HP rack-mount servers (Integrity and ProLiant) and even third-party servers (Dell PowerEdge 2000 series, e300 series , IBM System x servers 6000 series, r800, r900, x300 and x3000 series and IBM blade GS and LS servers) making CloudSystem Matrix probably one of the most open cloud solutions on the market.
In order CloudSystem Matrix to work, the management server needs to discover and manage the targeted equipment. The management console of the VM hosts, the management processors and the interconnect modules must be recognized by the so-called CMS (central management server). It will recognize the presence of the Virtual Connect domain group (which manages Virtual Connect for multiple enclosures) and will put the servers not used as VM hosts as possibly usable for physical deployments.
As soon as the CMS has discovered the equipment, the administrator can use its console on the CMS to create and assign pool of resources to different users.
From this management console, the administrator can manage all the elements provided to both IT architects and business users.
What IT architects need to create their cloud maps first is network connectivity. The VLANs at disposal to the IT architects are the Virtual Connect vNetworks. The administrator provides them to the IT architects using the tab “Networking” on the management console.
There, the CMS communicates with Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager and retrieves all available networks. Each network must then be configured to provide information about the range of IP addresses usable, if the IP address is allocated via DHCP or if the CMS allocates it from its pool of fix addresses.
As soon as a server is put in the enclosure and is managed by Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, it appears in the “Unassigned” pool of resources. From here, it can be moved to a pool of resources that can be dynamically assigned to a business user. This user will only see the pool of resources that are allowed to him in his self-service portal.
In CloudSystem Matrix, the group of Administrators has all rights, hence they can see all services currently running. The business users can also FlexUp his service by adding either disks or servers to the currently running service, in case, for example, that an unexpected load occurs on the service.
From this console, the administrators can see all items that can be deployed via CloudSystem Matrix: network items, operating systems (retrieved from RDP job, Ignite depots and golden images as well as Hyper-V and VMware templates), storage pool entries, as well as servers. They can control all requests as well as currently deployed services. I will write a new post to explain exactly how the storage provisioning works.
All in all, this third post explained how administrators can, from a single point of control, manage their resources and put them at disposal to the users. The CloudSystem solution is a complete solution that can help IT departments reduce their TCO of up to 56% compared with traditional rack-mount servers. I have already deployed it for customers and must say that many of them are really impressed of the power of the overall solution.
The new high-end HP 3PAR high-end storage arrays P10000 were launched a couple of days ago. Here is a nice video that explains the biggest advantages of the product. To me, the most interesting feature is the storage peer motion feature. It creates some kind of a cluster / load balancing approach for storage devices. It can move data across arrays without application disruption and resolves one of the biggest thin provisioning problem: when the capacity overcommitment cannot be increased because there is no physical space left. This 3PAR array solves that issue and it really looks cool !
In its January-February edition, the Harvard Business Review suggests new ideas on “How to fix capitalism”. Of particular interest to me was the article “Creating shared value“, written by Michael Porter, professor at Harvard Business School, and Mark Kramer.
In a long article, Kramer and Porter assert that companies are perceived to be prospering at the expense of the communities. I came to the same conclusion when thinking about an expression of popular culture: TV series. As a child, I used to watch TV series, such as Knight Rider or Airwolf, where private companies or foundations helped fight organized crime and bring justice.
Looking at TV series of today, the contrast is striking. Prison Break or Heroes both stage corporations, which are called “The Company”, probably in order to make them even more impersonal. In their respective series, these companies are instigators of conspiracies and use treason, murder and crime to reach there presumably business objectives.
This expression of the popular culture demonstrates the current perception of companies in communities : ruthless managers will do whatever it takes to optimize short-term financial results at the expense of the rest of the world.
Companies, under customer or regulatory pressure, try to correct this image through periodic social actions. However, according to Kramer and Porter, creating shared value (for both society and corporations) should not be put at the margin of the business model, but at the core.
An interesting example to me was the quarterly earnings calls of a tech company I have invested in. The top managers spoke for one and a half hour about financial results, goals and business initiatives, until the VP of corporate responsibility had a meager fifteen minutes time slot to present all charitable actions undertaken by the company. Charitable actions are laudable. However, it really gave me the feeling that making profit while doing something good for communities was an indirect result through the product and services sold but it was not at the core of this company’s business.
I think Kramer and Porter are on the right track and I think Free Software businesses are a great example of creating shared value. Companies, such as Red Hat, Talend, or Pentaho embody the principles of shared value by making billions of US dollars of revenue and supporting communities worldwide. Distributing software under, for instance, the General Public License, these businesses charge neither companies nor consumers for the use of their products, but rather for support, consulting and services. Moreover, they provide the source-code (the instructions that make the programs work) for study or modification purposes.
The authors of the article state that shared value should be created in three ways:
- reconceiving products and markets
The products creating shared value should serve disadvantaged communities, providing products to lower-income homes. The beauty of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) is that it can be distributed at no charge. Anyone can install and use a zero-cost operating system and applications, provided by company-sponsored initiatives, such as Fedora or Ubuntu. Of course, communities still need to invest in hardware, but open-source software can be used by poor people in developed countries, as well as by users anywhere in developing countries, thus providing cutting-edge technology (such as virtualization) at no cost.
Moreover, the open-source licenses make it very easy to adapt the products to the needs of users, reusing components already developed by other projects.
- redefining productivity in the value chain
Many of Kramer and Porter’s elements that participate to the value creation, such as “energy use and logistics”, “procurement”, etc. do not apply directly to the production of software products, let alone FOSS.
However, the development of a project, such as the Linux kernel, is a collaborative approach. Anyone can participate and send patches to correct bugs in the program or launch a new module. Companies relying on such community projects and benefiting from the huge manpower provided by these communities cannot take total control of them. Though they can influence them by offering more technological support, they have to take in account the will and motivation of the community to make sure they still benefit from it. They have to balance between their agenda and the motivation of the community. This, to me, is creating shared value.
An example of a bad approach is the OpenSolaris project. After Sun Microsystems had opened and backed OpenSolaris for years as an open-source Unix operating system project, Oracle, which bought Sun, decided to close completely the development process, thus chasing any goodwill to contribute to the project. Although OpenSolaris is still open-source software, Oracle does not allow any change from non-Oracle developers. They do not open their development process and hence do not contribute to any community.
This combination of working for a company and for the community makes me think that employees working for companies selling solutions around Free Software certainly have a sense of working on something greater than just their own business. By helping produce software that can be used to the benefit of anyone around the world, they have a feeling of fulfillment, contributing to the global enhancement of societies.
- building supportive industry clusters
This point is, in my opinion, less relevant to Free Software. The reason for that is that anyone who has a decent Internet connexion can get access to all the FOSS knowledge (by downloading the source code of the programs) and also participate to the process of improving the products by sending improvement suggestions. Obviously, this can be done worldwide – the only prerequisite being a sufficient Internet infrastructure and working computer hardware. The work of NGOs, such as Linux4Afrika may help accelerate the penetration of the market in developing countries by providing support and by teaching classes. Nonetheless, Kramer and Porter name the North Carolina research triangle as an example of a successful cluster. Interestingly, it is where Red Hat’s worldwide headquarters are located.
The HBR article concluded that companies creating shared value would be the ones “unlocking the next wave of innovation and growth”.
I believe companies working in the FOSS ecosystem definitely create shared value. By giving their software for free, these companies make it accessible to all. By using processes based on the Internet, they make it possible for virtually anyone connected to the Internet to participate in their development and support communities. And finally, by publishing the source code, they allow anyone to take a look at how cutting-edge software is written and learn from it.
The current financial success of Free software companies is a proof that their business model is a sustainable success.
I used Gnome for years – roughly since Ubntu Warty Warthog went out seven years ago. I liked the way the desktop was organized and I could even use 3D effects to make it very eye-catching. When I switched to Fedora last year, I remained on the Gnome desktop, which, in the end, provided very few changes to me from a visualization perspective (besides having a blue theme rather than a brownish one).
I have never been too impressed with what Ubuntu came witch, such as the Ubuntu netbook edition, although it did the job for the HP mini I had. Granted that I never tried Ubuntu Unity, but even so, I wanted to stick with Fedora and Gnome…
But then came Gnome3, the new version of this Linux desktop.
It is not that I dislike the new Gnome shell. It is very pretty, actually. The problem to me is that, although it is pretty, unlike, for example Apple products, the Gnome developers and designers could not bring two more factors in the equation : the intuitiveness and my desktop production style -which I am sure I share with quite a few people-. I am certainly no Apple fan, quite the contrary, actually, but I really missed here something not only beautiful and user-friendly, but also productive.
I need different fixed desktops for my music, to browse the web, to work on documents and to read my emails. This was simply not possible with Gnome, since the desktops automatically close when they are empty, changing their order. There is probably a way to fix that, but this was not the sole issue…
One more thing is that the 3D effects were far too slow to be usable. After having opened the fourth application, my desktop, that works like a charm under Gnome2 and KDE, became really too slow. Not an option for me.
The last thing that finished convincing me to switch to KDE was the wireless device that worked on the LiveCD but not after being installed. That really upset me, especially given that it works well under KDE (hence not a Linux kernel problem).
For these three reasons : because it is not sufficiently intuitive, because it is too slow, and because I did not want to lose 20 hours fixing a wifi stick that would work on another desktop, I switched to KDE.
I really think that the new Gnome shell is pretty and has value for some users, but not enough for me. That is something I love about Free Software : you don’t like what you have ? Then switch to something else ! Competition is definitely good for everybody…
Technology and leadership in an international environment