I’ve been waiting for someone to say it, and because nobody has yet, I will.

Linux is Green!

It’s not Open Source propaganda – it just happens to be true. I can put it another way if you like. Bloatware is not green and, in particular, bloated OSes are not green. It may only be extra lines of code when you get down to it, but more lines of code eventually means the need for a more powerful cpu and more memory resources, and that means more carbon dioxide for the planet to chew on.

Linux is famous for being viable on old PCs and that’s simply because it isn’t resource hungry. There was no point in the developers deliberately bloating it because there was no advantage in it being a resource hog. By comparison, Microsoft regularly bloated Windows because it was good for business and for the PC vendors too. It was built in obsolescence – a win-win.

How Green is my Linux?

Surprisingly, it is even possible to run some versions of Linux on an old 486 running at 66 MHz with just 32 MB memory. (Yes indeed, Click here if you don’t believe it). The 486 PC; that came out around 1994, I think. 66 megahertz – think of that – it’s pre-Internet.

If you arranged the desktop OSes in order of greenness, I believe the order would be:

1. Linux
2. OS X
   Windows XP
3. Windows Vista

I actually think Windows XP is more resource hungry than OS X. That’s my impression from running them, but I may be wrong so I’ve listed them as equal. You can certainly make OS X chew up more resources by turning power saving settings off, turning all the animation settings on and having a slide show as wallpaper. The same is true of XP. Windows Vista is, of course, far worse than the rest.

Surprisingly, there is actually a Green Linux Initiative, organized by the Linux Foundation as a collaboration between hardware manufacturers, Linux developers, system vendors, and end users to improve Linux power management. There’s a lot that can be done and is being done; including winding the cpu down when it’s idle, building power aware applications, improving management of USB devices, providing more comprehensive power management features to users and so on.

Am I alone in finding it strange that, Linux is way ahead of its desktop competition in being concerned about Green issues and actually doing something about them?

Given the dash by hardware vendors IBM, HP, Dell, Sun et al, to jump on the green bandwagon, why not Microsoft (and Apple too)? If you’ve not yet noticed the hardware vendors greener-than-thou tendencies, just turn up to a virtualization presentation, and bring your polar bear with you – it’ll be welcome.

I googled in vain for any mention anywhere on the Internet of OS X and environmental implications – despite the fact that Al Gore is on the Apple executive board. Apple is big on environmentally friendly hardware, but hasn’t thought yet about software.

When a googled for Windows and green, I got 20 million hits, most of them relating to the correct windows to fit in buildings for the sake of energy efficiency and none of them to do with environmentally friendly OSes

So the question is: Will Linux’s green credentials lead to wider adoption?

I suspect it will, because green is now such a big issue. But I’m not sure how much of an impact it will have.

There is a regular-but-not-entirely-regular business cycle, which lasts for roughly 9 years. The cycle is characterized by a period of growth, then strong growth and then recession (or at least very slow growth). Unfortunately, the cycle isn’t exact and it isn’t dependable, or else you could make money out of it, by gambling on it.

Sometimes it lasts 7 years, sometimes 10 or 11. The recession before the current one hit us in March 2001. Before that it was 1991 in the US and the one before that bottomed out in late 1982. Officially the current recession hasn’t yet arrived, but it will probably make its presence felt in the next few quarters.

The current business cycle has been a little odd in the US. Growth in the US economy has been high but it never created many jobs. Productivity statistics from the US Government suggested that from about 1996 productivity has improved at a rate of between 2 and 3 percent per year, which is a dramatic improvement on the 1 percent average for the previous 25 years.

The point at which productivity turned up coincided with the point at which the Internet started to become visible and it has never looked back. There is another quirk in the figures. Investment by US companies since 1990 has been static in almost every area except in IT, where it has risen dramatically (with a pause for breath in 2001/2003). Much of the productivity improvement in the US economy has been within IT industry itself.

The business cycle was shorter this time, fitting in neatly between two bubbles; a stock market bubble in the tech sector, which hit the IT industry hard and a property bubble which has no direct implications for IT, but is giving the financial sector a big headache. As the banks are big IT spenders, IT will inevitably be affected indirectly.

In theory, IT should be counter-cyclical and it usually is. The benefit that IT is supposed to deliver is automation. It either cuts costs and/or improves productivity, accordingly. The figures from the US suggest that has been doing the latter since the later years of the 1990s and it also does the former during a downturn.

Economic Technology

Now that rougher economic times are (presumed to be) around the corner, cost cutting will be front and center on the agenda again. So what are the information technologies that will do well in the coming era, from this perspective?

Here’s a short list:

• Server Virtualization. This is a quick win if you’ve not already done it. Estimates suggest that only 90 percent of the server population out there has been consolidated. The triple impulses to; cut costs, stop the data center from overflowing and be green, make this appealing.
• Client Virtualization and/or Remote Computing. Pushing the desktop into the data center in some way (think Citrix, VMware, PC blades, etc.) will usually cut costs – but please note it is a more arduous project than server virtualization, which has no direct impact on the user population.
• Open Source. Corporate IT Departments stopped being leary of Open Source a few years ago. Now there are opportunities in many places to cut license costs with Open Source products used sensibly. Also a great deal of time can be saved. This is particularly the case on the web where Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress have very impressive capabilities (if you want to build a web site or a blog). Do they really cost nothing? Yes they do. Are they really good? Yes they are.
• SaaS. Software as a Service gets more mature every year. It’s inexpensive to implement and easy to trial. The portfolio of Salesforce.com, the leader in the field, is increasing and it is now surrounded by a partner ecosystem. Other SaaS startup companies, such as LucidEra (for BI), Varonis (for data governance) and Workday (for some ERP functions) seem to be making an impression.
• SaaFS. Software as a Free Service could be even more compelling than SaaS. Now is definitely the time to examine the feasibility of web “office applications”, either from Google or Zoho. They are increasing in sophistication by the month and for some users they are “good enough”. Actually there are also advantages to them because the data is held on the server. It allows them to provide an excellent versioning service. Using email as a free service also makes sense for small companies.
• Cloud Computing. The gradual drift towards cloud computing (or utility computing) will become a stronger drift in recessionary times. You can already get many services “from the cloud” like, for example, EMC’s Mozy or LiveVault for back-up.
• Mashups. The joy of mashups comes from opening up your APIs to a developer community and having them develop complementary capability that enhances your own systems/web sites. The neat thing about mashups is that they don’t cost you anything other than the effort to provide a little support to the developer community and enable them to profit in some way if their mashups get used. It’s a kind of free market in software components which can serve a company well if it knows how to manage it cheaply. (See the examples of Ribbit, Facebook, Google etc. if you need a model).

I have a sneaking suspicion that when the IT industry emerges from the downturn, in a year or so it will be a different industry than the one that went into it.

A report issued by a panel of US Government and Power Industry officials has placed the blame for the largest power outage in North American history primarily on computer and human failures. FirstEnergy of Ohio and the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, the regional agency with responsibility for overseeing FirstEnergy are roundly criticized.

According to the report, the cascade of failures were caused in part by the failure of FirstEnergy to maintain transmission lines by trimming trees near the power lines. The problem began when an active power line was shorted to earth by a tree. When power lines are heavily active, the wires heat up and sag which may be what happened. However this should not have cascaded into a wider crisis.

As the crisis unfolded, a computer program that should have set alarms off in FirstEnergy’s control room failed. Consequently the computer system itself failed and then the back-up/disaster recovery system failed. Consequently, operators in the control room had no clear idea of what was happening. According to the report, FirstEnergy’s computer maintenance staff failed to tell the control room of the failure for over an hour. FistEnergy disputes, this saying that the control room staff actually informed the computer staff of the failure. Meanwhile Midwest I.S.O. was having trouble with its “state estimator”, a computer program that reports on whether the electricity grid is in trouble. According to the report, a technician turned the program off, tried to fix it, forgot to turn it back on and then went to lunch.

There is no mention in the report of whether any of these failures were caused or contributed to by the MSBlast worm/virus which was active at the time that the blackout occurred. However it is unlikely that it would be mentioned. Computer systems within the North American energy grid are supposed to be secure and a failure of security is, after all, just another failure of a system. There has been some suggestion on the Web that MSBlast was a contributory factor or even the prime cause of the blackout. The report does say that conditions on the grid were not abnormal when the cascade of failure began.

In any event it is clear that computer system failure was the heart of the problem and given the estimated billions of dollars costs to businesses from the blackout, it seems certain that IT audit and compliance will now be strongly enforced. Quite rightly so.

Although commentators marvel that Moore’s Law has remained in force for four decades, rapidly doubling computer power every 18 months or so, few of them dwell on the fact that our ability to consume this exponential gift of computer power easily outstrips the ability of the computer industry to deliver it. And yet this is exactly what has happened in the 40 years that Moore’s Law has held sway.

The perpetual increase in computer power bestows enormous benefits. The speed of transaction processing multiplied by about 10 every six years, enabling us to move from a single mainframe computer to client/server systems, then to multi-tier server systems and then to systems deployed across the Internet. The data that we put into databases expanded even more dramatically, by about 1000 every six years. In 1991 we managed megabytes then by 1997 it was gigabytes and by 2003 it was terabytes. Soon it will be petabytes.

This is one reason why we consume the abundance of computer power so easily. Applications that were leading edge 6 years ago, because of they were power hungry, are accommodated easily and cheaply now and will be considered almost trivial in another six years. Anyone who wants them will have them. But this alone doesn’t explain the dramatic growth of corporate data centers across the world.

Before the advent of client/server data centers had very few computers, perhaps a couple of mainframes and a handful of minicomputers. The numbers started to grow with client/server deployments, accelerating quickly with the advent of the Internet, so that 10s of computers grew to 100s and then to 1000s and in some cases headed towards 10,000 and beyond.

The reason the data centers grew so swiftly is twofold. On the one hand, the number of applications we deployed expanded, so organizations that once ran maybe a few hundred applications now run several thousand. On the other hand computer hardware grew less expensive every year, so cheap servers proliferated and we made no effort to use them efficiently.

The Cobblers Children

As the data centers have grown, so have their costs, including the cost of computer room space and of electricity to run the computers and to keep them cool. And yet the biggest cost of all is the labor cost – not just the labor costs of running the data centers, but costs of the labor needed to support the data center – the help desk, the desktop administrators, the networking specialists, the DBAs, the security technicians, the storage management staff and the rest of the army of support that a data center now requires.

Nowadays labor costs make up about two thirds of the cost of running a data center (we should have the associated graphic from Al’s presentation here). While IT departments engage in server consolidation projects to reduce the number of data center servers and computer manufacturers work on reducing power consumption and cooling costs, another area of focus that is desperately needed is in better automating the management of the data center – not to reduce the number of staff involved in operations, but to try to keep the numbers from rising, because right now the number are growing by about 10 percent per annum.

SOA – The Tipping Point

It should be no surprise that the number of IT support staff is mushrooming. Most of the management software that is currently deployed was written to manage data centers with relatively small networks of computers. It was never intended to work across hundreds or thousands of computers. And at the heart of system management is software that does little more than report when a hardware or software component fails. Beyond logging events, it does very little to help diagnose what the underlying problem is and consequently it can do nothing whatsoever to fix the problem automatically.

Consequently business applications have tended to be implemented in siloes, almost as stand-alone systems – so that managing the system while in operation, backing it up and recovering it if it fails are handled on an application by application basis. When organizations run so many applications, this approach is already questionable as it leads to over-provisioning of hardware and poor standardization, which in turn necessitates greater manual activity. It can hamper the use of virtualization to consolidate servers and reduce the server population.

With the advent of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) a tipping point is reached. SOA enables the reuse of software components and encourages them to be linked in an end-to-end manner, integrating siloes one with another. This software architecture is proving both popular and successful, because it enables faster building, deployment and change to software and because it aligns business applications with business processes. It has also become an inevitable direction for corporate software because all the major software vendors are now adopting the Web Services standards that are fundamental to SOA and are in the process of delivering products that are SOA ready. But what will IT Departments use to manage the SOA business applications that are already being built and that will eventually span the corporation? Not the traditional management software of the past.

The IT Management Crisis in Summary

The number of applications that the corporate IT operation has to support has been increasing rapidly and it continues to increase. Mobile technology is now being widely deployed and soon VoIP will be added into the mix, and video, and stream processing and also RFID applications and embedded chips. The signs are that we will continue to outstrip Moore’s Law for the foreseeable. At the same time, SOA is creating business applications which simply cannot be supported by the IT management software of the past and the rise in the number of IT support staff will, at some point become unsustainable. There is an IT Management Crisis building and dealing with it demands new thinking.

If you visit Analyst Profiles on Tekrati, you will discover that there are over 3000 technology analysts serving the IT industry, working from 380+ analyst companies. The mathematics suggests an average of about 8 analysts per company. So this means that despite the Gartners, Forresters and IDCs, most analyst companies are small boutique operations consisting of a handful of analysts.

AR professionals know how the larger analysts companies work (and if they don’t they shouldn’t be working in AR). However, even if you didn’t know, you could easily work it out. If you have a large number of analysts, you have to organize them so that they specialize in specific technology areas. They can then earn revenues according to that specialization by producing research, writing white papers, doing consultancy or whatever.

So if you represent a company that has, say, a CEP product, you can find out who you need to talk to in the larger analyst companies simply by ringing them up and asking. But with the smaller companies you don’t even know whether you should be talking to the company at all and if you think you should, then you won’t necessarily know who in the company you need to talk to.

You need to find out!

Bear in mind that what you are trying to find out is; who are the influencers in our IT market?

But how do you find out?

There are one or two companies that act as consultants to advise you how to deal with the analysts. They do training courses and provide databases of information and newsletters; analyzing the analysts. I’m not sure how valuable the services are, but I sincerely doubt the value, unless you know very little or absolutely nothing about the analyst world. Whenever I run into information about myself from such companies it’s off-track and my guess is that it will be the same in respect of other analysts from boutique companies.

So, I’m hypothesizing that you are running AR for a small but promising technology start-up and you want to know which analysts you need to impress. In my opinion you cannot actually buy that information, because no-one I know of specifically stores exactly that information (with the possible exception of some of your competitors).

So how do you find out?

Here’s a novel suggestion; behave like an analyst and research it. Surf your competitors web sites and read their press releases to see which analyst or analyst companies get a mention. Google “your technology area” + “analyst” and also get a Google news feed with those two terms together. Enter your technology area as a search item on analyst web sites. Ask the journalists that cover your area which analysts they speak to about it. You might even ask some of the analysts you know who they respect (some will help, some wont, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get).

And then when you have a list, proceed to create a person-to-person relationship with each of them if you can.

And here’s the point:

Analysts arrive at their own opinions and you cannot stop that happening (unless their opinions are for sale, in which case they don’t really have opinions; just open palms). If one of them concludes that your technology is inferior or that your company is flaky, then you really need the relationship. If you don’t have a relationship with the analyst, you have no chance of limiting the damage from that. You may not be able to change his or her mind, but you may be able to get them to tone down their message.

A long long time ago – around 1989 – I published a report which slammed the Oracle database (version 6, I seem to remember). Oracle marketing staff in the UK weren’t sure how to deal with it, because it was definitely costing them business. What they decided to do was exactly right. They called me in and did their best to forge a relationship with me. They made sure I was briefed on every new Oracle development. After a year or two they even hired me to give the odd presentation.

They neither tried to bribe me, nor to silence me, they just established a relationship and gave me as much attention as they could. They gave me their point of view and I listened. They did not try to argue me into submission.

There is no sense in arguing with an analyst. You may as well try cutting water with a sword.

Note: This posting is one in a series of postings that deals with the topic of dealing with analysts. Click here for links to other postings in the series.