Software, Swainson, Forrestor analysis

Forrestor have published an interesting analysis of the new announcement that John Swainson will be joing Dell next month, I’m not sure about the protocol for passing on information such as this, by I thought it was an interesting analysis. “Suddenly Dell is a software company, and can flourish under new President John Swainson“. Kevin Kwang, over on ZDNet Asia expands on the Forrestor analysis here.

Why is complexity bad?

In an internal meeting here this morning, I had another “rant” about unnecessary complexity in a design. One of the guys in the meeting wrote down what I said, pretty much verbatim and sent it to me afterwards asking if he could use it as a quote. When I read it even I was surprised with the clarity.

“Complexity in computing systems is really a bad thing, it’s the result of too many bright people making misguided judgements about what customers want, and customers thinking that their need to control has to come from complexity. Complexity creates cost, bugs, inhibits design, makes testing overly expensive, hinders flexibility and more. Most IT companies design approach to complexity is to automate it, which in turn creates more complexity.”

Comments?

Dell Software Group

Michael Dell announced this morning that John Swainson will join Dell to head up our new software group. John was one of the key executives at IBM in the creation and drive behind IBM’s Application and Integration Middleware division.

In the new world of cloud, massive scale datacenters, and the growing importance of mixed private/public cloud demand, it will be very interesting to see where John and the Exec team want to take the software group. Here is the formal press announcement from Corporate comms.

In an indirectly related announcement from earlier in the week, Dave Johnson, our Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy, announced that we were again going to expand our Silicon Valley software and R&D development and investments following our acquisitions of Force10, Scalent and many others. Marketwatch has a useful summary of Daves’ comments.

Dell for Web Development

The web dev. focussed team here at Dell have recently widened their web page offering to add some of the software and solutions work they are doing. Barton George has also recently published a 3-part glossary on all things, web/cloud related. It’s a pretty easy read and for those entering this arena for the first time, a useful cross check when playing cloud buzzword bingo.

Dell for Web Development