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Survey: IT spending to recover in 2010

Goldman Sachs' latest IT spending survey is out and it looks a tech-spending recovery is on the way for 2010. To a large extent, the data suggests not so much that spending is dramatically higher, but that it has normalized at pre-recessionary growth rates, rather than contracting as it has over the past several months.

Goldman is cautiously optimistic about 2010 spending, noting that much of it depends on the macro-economic environment driving more business spending. And while most areas will see growth counter to 2009's downward spiral, some areas such as off-shore development will feel significant retraction.

Regardless, the sentiments are positive and dramatically different than Goldman's report from November 2008 where IT spending was in a total death spiral. What a difference a year makes.

A few key points from the report:

With recessionary buying cycle clearly through the trough, the remaining question centers on the pace of recovery for 2010. Infrastructure, application development, and systems integration remain top spending areas, especially as CIOs start to consider newer technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing. There is pent-up demand in hardware most notable, positive for storage and server/PC refresh. The appetite for offshore services appears to be below trend at current levels. HP, NetApp, CommVault, Red Hat, Riverbed, and Salesforce.com are notable names showing positive upward momentum in our latest survey.

In software, Red Hat and Salesforce.com showed strengthened results with VMware and Citrix remaining top of mind, which Goldman believes to be a good indication of internal and external cloud deployments gaining momentum.

The 'wisdom of crowds' loses steam

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. That popular aphorism never seemed truer than today when reading The Wall Street Journal's analysis of Wikipedia's declining volunteer base. Despite countless articles extolling the virtues and seeming omnipotence of "community" over the past several years, the technology industry seems to be settling back into old habits:

Command and control.

It's not that the "wisdom of crowds" idea hasn't influenced the way technology is developed, or how news and information are gathered and distributed. It has.

It's just that the … Read more

The case for the open-source Goliath

Despite the broad and deep trend toward open-source software, it's telling that Red Hat remains the only large, pure-play open-source vendor.

Without a strong, standalone open-source leader, will commercial open source endure?

The obvious answer is yes, but there are reasons to think that the industry would benefit from a billion-dollar open-source company. Actually, several.

It might seem counterintuitive to suggest that open source, which by its very nature tends to be decentralized and bottom-up in its growth, would benefit by concentrating wealth in a few hegemons.

David is nice, but the fact is that Goliath generally wins.

Take … Read more

When open source isn't (open enough)

Some open-source software may not be open enough. While "open source" refers to software's underlying license and its adherence to the Open Source Definition, there are numerous examples of open-source projects that offer an open license but a relatively closed development process.

It's been called " fauxpen source" and worse, but we may have to get used to it. It seems to be the new normal in open-source development. Only open source foundations like Eclipse, Apache Software Foundation, and Mozilla appear to be able to escape it completely.

Java is one example people cite of &… Read more

Google shifts software value to operations, away from IP

Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues that competition is just a "click away." By opening up Google's access to personal data as well as the software that collects it, Google is adding substance to that claim.

It won't work to write better software than Google, because Google is not a software company. The only way to beat Google is through superior execution; through better operations.

The way to lose to Google? That's easy: try to sell software that Google is shoveling out the door as free (open source) software.

This thought hit me last week as … Read more

Red Hat debuts virtualization management

Correction at 7:15 a.m. PST November 4: At one time, Red Hat had planned to ship an embedded KVM hypervisor based on Fedora. But the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor uses the RHEL 5.4 kernel and thereby picks up the same hardware verification portfolio.

With Tuesday's release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) for servers, the company has completed the first phase of a server virtualization rollout that effectively now puts KVM front and center. Red Hat released KVM commercially for the first time in September as part of … Read more

Google: The open-source savior we deserve

For years, open-source advocates have been praying for someone to free us from Microsoft's proprietary grasp. We've prayed in vain as Linux, OpenOffice, and other open-source software programs have failed to dent Microsoft's dominance.

Until now.

Google, not Red Hat or Sun, appears to be the long-awaited redeemer of both personal computers and servers, and has even staked a credible claim in the mobile world, as well. Google achieves this, in part, by writing copious lines of open-source code, but pays for this "generosity" with insanely profitable proprietary services, services that have long appealed to … Read more

What Red Hat's investment in EnterpriseDB means

The European Commission may be taking its time analyzing the competitive impact of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun/MySQL, but the industry can't afford to dither. On Tuesday, MySQL competitor EnterpriseDB announced that Red Hat joined its $19 million Series C funding round, which follows IBM's own investment in EnterpriseDB.

Is the software industry, once devoted to MySQL, preparing to shift allegiances to Postgres?

Probably not, but clouds are forming. On Monday, I talked with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, a former Red Hat executive, and he suggested several reasons for Red Hat's investment of "a … Read more

Open source to reset IT expectations

It boggles the mind, but it's apparently true: nearly half of enterprises think a software purchase is successful if the software is installed/deployed, according to a new study. If ever there was reason to believe there's room for improvement in enterprise IT, and billions of dollars to go with it, this is it.

Working software should be the starting point, not an end point.

According to a study recently released by Neochange, Sandhill Group, and the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), 45.3 percent of the 353 IT professionals surveyed call a software purchase successful if "… Read more

Red Hat and Google share the CIO love

For years, Red Hat sat unopposed at the top of the CIO Insight Vendor Value study. In 2008, however, Google pushed Red Hat aside with its low-cost, easy-to-use enterprise applications. This year, Red Hat has come roaring back to share the top ranking with Google.

Could this be a sign of CIOs' restive relationships with traditional vendors and an increasingly insatiable appetite for the cost and ease-of-use advantages of open source and software as a service/cloud computing?

The answer is almost certainly "Yes." It is telling that old-school vendors like IBM (ranked 20th overall), Microsoft (25th), Novell (… Read more