software.dell.com

I’ve been slacking on blog posts for a while, my Ironman training has been the main reason, time outside work has just vanished as I approach my final ironman distance triathlon in July. Also, increasingly I’ve been internally focussed on a number of key projects as well, are busy creating the real Dell Software Group, out of some fabulous acquisitions. While Dell Software Group has existed for over a year, given the staff and products largely have come from only acquisitions with a number of us moving over from what we fondly refer to as “legacy dell”, we are really starting to see a coherent software business emerge, rather than individual businesses.

Website: One of the big steps in the maturity of the Dell Software group is the launch of our very own software website, and the re-organization of the Dell Social Media properties around software. I’m jumping the gun officially, but the new Software.dell.com is now live.

Twitter: Twitter handles will be shifting around as well. In one of those “you can’t get there from here” things, changing twitter handles isn’t so easy if you want to retain existing followers. To that end, the existing Dell Software will be repurposed for the real @dellsoftware, but since our biggest twitter following is currently on @quest, we will are renaming @dellsoftware to @dellswnews, then renaming @quest to @dellsoftware. Simple… interested in Dell Software, follow @dellsoftware from now…

I’ll post a few other updates with some news on products, awards etc. that I’ve missed in the last few months in the next few days. ++Mark.

Dell Software and Big Data

The Quest Software R&D integration is moving apace, 25-days into the acquisition and since announcement I’ve now managed to visit 14 R&D locations. I’ve been impressed by the people, many of the existing products, especially their bold move to support customers by getting a set of Office365 and Azure cloud based solutions out early to help customers migrate.

One of the more exciting products and announcements coming from the Quest(now part of Dell) team are the recent cloud data, business intelligence announcements.

CNBC has a good summary of the expansion of our big data solutions, new Hadoop-centric software capabilities for business analytics, which include application development, data replication, and data analysis features.

For me, just five more R&D location visits to go, Berlin, Dresden, Israel, then Poole and Horton in the UK. Then I can maybe catch-up on a huge backlog of blogposts I want to write, in the meantime  , go bigdata!

Quest Software Update

Friday Dell announced that we’d closed on the acquisition of Quest Software. The last 50-days or so has been a blur for me,  as I wrote back in July I’ve moved to the new Dell Software group, and was asked to lead the technical integration and R&D integration of Quest Software. We’ve been busy visiting as many of their R&D centers as we can, and this will continue through the end of October.

I’d describe it as a roller coaster, the ups have been meeting the great teams in Linden UT, Toronto, Ottowa, Halifax Canada, St Petersburg and Moscow in Russia, and spending time both networking with Quest Executives and team members at VMWorld, as well as some of the other teams like AppAssure and SonicWall that are part of the new Dell Software group.

The downs in my roller coaster have been the travel, I really don’t enjoy the day-in, day-out, overnight travel. Especially as things always seem to be more difficult than they should be. For instance, applying for a work visa for China apparently requires submitting both my passport and green card, which means if stopped by the police, or immigration officials anywhere, I can not prove I’m legally in the USA. This happened to me once already on an checkpoint on I10 near Corpus Christi and I hadn’t even left Texas, not a pleasant experience. Then there was the guy sat opposite me on the train from Moscow to St Petersburg, rather than ending up with a Contagion like pandemic infection, I just got a bad cold.

However it’s been tempered by my travel colleagues, Elaine from Quest and Craig from Dell who are the actual R&D project managers for the acquisition.  We’ve been joking about making Rock and Roll style tour t-shirts, a simple Dell Software logo on the front, on the back it would have QUEST: The final tour and a list of the dates and locations. I still may do it, especially as we have Buffallo Grove, Madison WI, Berlin, Dresden, Israel, Horton and Poole in the UK, Honk Kong and China all before the end of October.

The best thing has been meeting all the great software experts, seeing some of the great products, to mention just a few: the great new UI on the Site Administrator for Sharepoint; the Quest Books software for electronic publishing; the Open source work going on at the Linden UT labs; the really great platform work that has been done for the Foglight and Netvault XA software, and much, much more.

In addition to that, the Software Group CTO team is starting to fill out, Jay and Craig are hear from the Enterprise Solutions Group(ESG) team, and we’ve been joined by Graeme, a former colleague and fellow Distinguished Engineer from IBM and of course Don Ferguson is the CTO, and VP for our group. Jai Menon, former IBM Fellow and for short period of time, my manager at IBM, has also joined Dell ESG as CTO and so we are really getting things “better together”.