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The Dawn of a New Era

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“The Dawn of a New Era”.  That was the slogan that Intel used 30 years ago when they introduced the x86 processor.  And very fitting today for me as I start out a new era in the x86 virtualization space.  Last week I started working at VMware as a Solutions Consultant on the Global Accounts team.  This means that I will be responsible for selling the VMware virtualization solutions to a hand full of very large companies.

While I was talking to VMware about this position, I was impressed with how far they have taken the virtualization technology.  I was one of the 60,000 people who downloaded Workstation 1.0 during the first two months when it was released back in the Spring of 1999.  It was amazing with regards to what it could do back then.  But the magic wore off for me eventually; for most of last year I was using it to run my “work laptop” as a VM on my personal laptop at my previous job (the reason being that my personal laptop was a hell of a lot more powerful than what my employer gave me).  The magic had turned into rock solid technology, it did what it was supposed to and did it well.

But then I started to learn about the management and automation technologies that VMware has built and aquired over the past few years.  With my recent work within software development organizations at Fortune 100 companies, I immediately knew all the benefits to application development teams.   And when I saw a demonstration of Lab Manager, I was in awe once again with the magic.  Being able to run and test a multi-computer software configuration through a web browser and then saving a state of those machines as a bug…that is amazing.  And that is just one of the management/automation tools.

I feel that virtualization currently is and will continue to be the most transforming technology for enterprise computing for the rest of this decade.  That is the reason I decided to join VMware.  So, expect to see more and more postings here in the labs on virtualization moving forward.  Of course, everything I write here will continue to be my own opinion and not that of VMware.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m giving up my focus on some of the other technology areas that I have been focusing on lately (i.e., SaaS, Web2.0, Social Computing).  I will still be keeping an eye on many things in those areas and writing about them as time permits.  There are still experiments in the works at the lab…

Crossing The Streams

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“Venkman, don’t cross the streams…”

“Why, what happens if we cross the streams?”

Let’s find out…I finally jumped on the Twitter wagon. But this created a quandary for me. Everyone has multiple interests. For me, there is my day job of technology, business interests, entrepreneurial interests, and my passion of photography. Should I create two twitter accounts and keep these two streams separate? I decided that was too much work. So, I’ll be crossing the streams with my tweets. After all, both streams come from the same source…

You can find my recent tweets on the right hand side. I’m experimenting with TwitterFeed to automatically tweet my blog posts, both technology/business as well as photography.  Technology and business blog postings will start with a latoga labs while photography blog postings will start with latoga photography.

Those who wish to follow can do so from my Twitter page or from my FriendFeed page (which includes my tweets, blog postings, and photography feeds).

Live Feed From Startup Camp SF

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For the next two days I will be at Startup Camp SF and will be sending in tweets for as along as my laptop batteries last…

Update1: Just discovered an interesting twitter platform service called HashTags. You can follow a larger group of tittering via the startupcamp hashtag.

Update2: SC is being held in same space as this coming week’s JavaOne. They have some of the presentation rooms already setup for JavaOne. I find it funny how many of the presentations are running from IBM Thinkpads running Windows. Back during the days of McNealy this would never have been allowed… 🙂

Update3, End of Day 1:  Startup Camp Day 1 was a bit of droning on by panelist stating the obvious (but repetition can be the key to ensuring your doing the right thing), with some interesting conversations and networking.  I did find it interesting how a lot of the topics that were being talked about in the Web2.0 space were at the core of things selling.  And yet, that key word was never mentioned.  Nothing happens until you sell something…even if it’s just your idea.

I did find this morning’s Key Note address by Jonathan Schwartz rather interesting.  A good friend of mine is a Director of Sales within Sun.  When He joined Sun a few years back, he talked about how the corporate culture was still hardware based.  Schwartz’s key note showed his view of the company is not just hardware centric.  He talked about how different people have different views of Sun.  But I found it interesting how all these views (including the one he gave) were all product centric.  No talk of solutions.  With all these products, when will Sun realize that they need to start providing solutions around these products?  There are pockets of this within Sun (my friend being one of them), but I find it interesting how the top of the company still views Sun in a product centric way.