Our own Dave Rosenberg recently hit the press circuit, and returned with two Q&A sessions that help to explain what Nodeable does, and why it matters.
The first involves Dave’s prediction that in 2012 IT, and particularly DevOps, will seek to measure everything.
Along with the rise of cloud-to-cloud application networks, I also expect to see a great deal of interest in the monitoring and management of cloud transactions. In fact, this may be where we start to see the rubber hit the road in the DevOps world as different user groups within an organization have vested, but different interests in ensuring that data arrives quickly and consistently.
To that end, we’ll see a growth in the analysis of communication in the cloud and solutions that address everything from the “digital exhaust” associated with every layer of the stack-from each transaction to the system management aspects of virtual machines themselves.
Given Dave’s prediction, it’s perhaps not surprising to see that Nodeable is trying to solve this problem of complex system data with a clean, unified interface, as Dave notes in a separate interview:
The short version is that we struggled to make the existing tools match the new world of cloud services, which are quite fleeting. It didn’t make sense to script and automate resources that were transient, and none of the tools were designed in a multi-tenant fashion, meaning we didn’t have a breadth of deployment options.
And, the majority of the available tools are ugly and hard to use. We wanted to simplify the management tools and take advantage of the modern compute power the cloud offers….
From the Nodeable perspective, we think we can define and provide a layer in the new cloud stack – one that takes advantage of the “digital exhaust” we get from systems and adds intelligence to data. The gathering and analysis of this data leads into a systematic approach to managing these services based both on deterministic responses and predictive analytics.
Which means that Nodeable isn’t necessarily replacing other system management solutions, but rather complements them by ingesting “exhaust” from these and other systems (be it Salesforce, AWS, or Jira), thereby giving DevOps a single pane of glass through which to see relevant system events and act upon them.
Just don’t make the Nodebelly angry.
Whether viewed in terms of migration of workloads to the cloud or enterprise adoption thereof (which the research pegs at a 50 percent penetration rate by 2014, growing at a 23 percent CAGR over the next three years), cloud adoption is real, it’s broad, and it necessitates a change in how we manage IT.
Then again, maybe not. While RightScale is very different from Morph, which is different from HP OpenView, most of the cloud management solutions offer a somewhat standard suite of status reports (on uptime, response time, etc.), plus a dashboard. I don’t even have to include a screen shot here for most system administrators to have a pretty good idea of what those reports and the dashboards will look like.
Enterprise, but not boringly so
One of the things I like most about Nodeable is that while we take systems intelligence seriously, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Punctuating the frequent conversations about the UI, which systems to monitor, etc. are comments about whether Jane’s Addiction’s new album is awesome (Yes, I say; no, says Dave), who will play bass for the company’s band, etc.
And then there’s the Nodebelly.
My kids love the Nodebelly. He’s what greets you if you hit a 404 error on the Nodeable website. He’s the guy who greets me whenever I head into the office, thanks to a whiteboard drawing of him that our wonderfully creative Mike Evans drew. He’s what reminds me that enterprise software, just like consumer software/brands, can have a personality.
Some enterprise companies get this. But very few. Atlassian, 37Signals, and…not many others manage to build grown-up software that doesn’t bore you to tears with its messaging. I suppose it’s an effort to show would-be buyers just how safe a product is, by demonstrating just how dull the company’s marketing can be.
But this seems silly.
A company’s marketing is not only a signal to prospective buyers, but it’s also one of a company’s primary recruiting tools. The sort of people who want to join Atlassian, for example, are going to differ from those that want to join CA, which will mean a very different type of salesperson is going to end up sitting in the CIO’s office. My money is on Atlassian to be the more interesting of the conversationalists.
All of which makes me glad to be part of Nodeable. We’re building cool technology to manage cloud deployments, and we won’t bore our customers and partners to tears with our marketing. After all, we wouldn’t want to make the Nodebelly even more glum than he already is.
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