By Christopher Keene  When virtualization took the data center, it offered huge cost savings for IT ops and zero migration pain for developers. Coming at a time when IT was being pressed by the business for savings, vSphere took the data center by storm.
This example is instructive when trying to conside... Sep. 25, 2015 12:45 PM EDT Reads: 2,400 |
By Christopher Keene “Note to self: don't change for anyone / Note to self: don't die / Note to self: don't change for anyone / Don't change, just lie” - Ryan Adams If Woody Allen is right that 80% of life is just showing up, then the bulk of an entrepreneur’s job is keeping the company alive ... Sep. 16, 2015 12:08 PM EDT |
By Christopher Keene One of the perennial cloud predictions has been that 200x would be the year of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud. The logic goes that if an automated data center in the sky is good, an automated development platform in the sky must be even better.
“Normal” clouds like Amazon AWS ... Aug. 29, 2015 05:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,492 |
By Christopher Keene I have been fortunate to have many good sales mentors in my career but the best hands down was Joe Roebuck. Joe headed sales at Sun Microsystems for 17 years and was on my board at Persistence Software for 5 years.Joe also gave me the most important insight about how to sell enterprise... Aug. 26, 2015 02:53 PM EDT |
By Christopher Keene Most home security systems have a panic button - if you hear something go bump in the night you can push a panic button to starts the sirens wailing, call the cops and hopefully sends the bad guys scurrying. As useful as this is for home owners, enterprises need a security panic button... Aug. 12, 2015 09:30 AM EDT Reads: 1,780 |
By Christopher Keene For the last 20 years, I have been leading teams at both small (2 partners and a turtle) to large (1,000 employee) companies. During that time I have had big successes (IPO on Nasdaq, sale to VMware) and crushing failures (remember the Y2K bubble?) Sitting on numerous boards also gave ... May. 13, 2015 04:09 PM EDT Reads: 220 |
By Christopher Keene The enterprise software market is not that different than the real estate market - where you are positioned in the market is everything.In the nerdier-than-thou Bay Area, moving from VMware to BMC is not the most obvious move, so here are some of my thoughts on my decision.At this poin... Mar. 8, 2014 12:51 PM EST Reads: 1,267 |
By Christopher Keene A friend of mine just got a well-deserved promotion from code horse to manager. Here are my quick thoughts on making that transition.The basic idea is that when you are given a little more responsibility, your words and actions carry more weight. For that reason, it is important to be ... Sep. 12, 2013 07:50 PM EDT Reads: 353 |
By Christopher Keene Transparent pricing and quality data is the foundation of the US economy, yet is entirely lacking in our Health Care industry. New players like Castlight have raised over $130 million to provide greater transparency, but only to selected customers who pay for that data.I believe ... May. 20, 2013 04:42 PM EDT Reads: 927 |
By Christopher Keene "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." - Jeff Hammerbacher ex- Facebook ArchitectIt turns out that when you have a lot of "best minds" working on the same problem, you come up with some pretty interesting technology - no matter how... Mar. 18, 2013 12:08 PM EDT Reads: 1,592 |
By Christopher Keene  I recently got some feedback on my previous musing that from the customer viewpoint, PaaS equals automation. That led me to think of ways to articulate better what this means both to customers and vendors. Feb. 6, 2013 05:00 AM EST Reads: 4,614 |
By Christopher Keene  It is amazing how many open source software companies out there are trying to get hit by the same $1B bolt of lightning that hit MySQL without realizing that the MySQL result is not repeatable.
Looking at the current batch of big data high flyers, from TenGen to Cloudera to Hortonwork... Dec. 4, 2012 07:45 AM EST Reads: 5,884 |
By Christopher Keene No, this is not a joke about three guys walking into a bar but the result of some recent musing about how the art of management is practiced in Silicon Valley.The classic Silicon Valley stories often feature what Jim Collins calls "the genius with a thousand helpers" (from his book Goo... Nov. 15, 2012 03:48 PM EST |
By Christopher Keene Cloud computing has a challenge endemic to many Silicon valley advances - a great technology triumph somewhat disconnected from a clear business benefit.The developer version of cloud computing is PaaS (Platform as a Service). Like cloud computing in general, PaaS has struggled to arti... Oct. 29, 2012 05:05 PM EDT Reads: 2,409 |
By Christopher Keene  One thing that gets lost in the general Big Data hubbub is the critical question of apps. Big Data can provide stunning business insights but unless those insights are embodied into an application that can galvanize new business behaviors they are not worth much.
VMware has been a t... Jun. 26, 2012 04:00 AM EDT Reads: 5,417 |
By Christopher Keene I attended the GigaOm Mobilize conference (where VMware was well represented by CTO Steve Herrod) and came away with a few observations that are relevant for our overall mobile strategy:The web is the new app store. I had dinner with the heads of mobile for two large retail chains. Alt... Oct. 4, 2011 12:43 PM EDT Reads: 2,144 |
By Christopher Keene RedHat conducted a survey of over 1,200 VMworld attendees on their cloud plans. Here is the question that I found most interesting:
What primary development framework are you planning to use in the cloud?
Java EE 32%.NET 29%PHP 14%Python 6%Spring 6%Ruby/Rails 5%If you take this at fac... Sep. 1, 2011 07:07 PM EDT Reads: 1,054 |
By Christopher Keene Just as the LAMP stack provided a core foundation next gen for web applications, Cloud Foundry is providing a core foundation for next gen cloud platforms.
Cloud Foundry announced today that two new startups are building their clouds based on Cloud Foundry.
Cloud Foundry is proving its... Aug. 25, 2011 03:05 PM EDT Reads: 1,280 |
By Christopher Keene DevOps, which I will arbitrarily define here as "automating SysAdmin tasks to streamline application lifecycle management," raises important questions about the cloud.
Developers may ask: "if I have a self-service portal for deploying applications (aka PaaS), do I need SysAdmins at all... Aug. 18, 2011 03:21 PM EDT Reads: 1,048 |
By Christopher Keene  We seem to be coming to the end of the definition of Platform as a Service (PaaS) blog posts and are now moving on to the more pressing question of what is PaaS good for?
In a recent Paul Maritz talk at GigaOm Structure conference, he referred to PaaS as "a cloaking layer for clouds."... Jul. 28, 2011 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 4,899 |
By Christopher Keene Over the last month, I have had lengthy discussions about developer adoption of Platform as a Service with two of my favorite cloud computing analysts - John Rymer of Forrester and Michael Cote of RedMonk.The net of these conversations that we are still early in the adoption curve for ... Jun. 2, 2011 07:57 PM EDT Reads: 920 |
By Christopher Keene Cloud Foundry is an incredibly cool way to build and deploy cloud apps to any target cloud using very simple commands.The basic api has just three commands:vmc target cloud.url //targets a cloudvmc login // login to cloudvmc push // run your app in the cloudThree commands and the (clou... Apr. 18, 2011 08:19 PM EDT Reads: 2,080 |
By Christopher Keene The mood at last week's Open Source Think Tank was surprisingly somber. Two years ago, the open source community was celebrating huge acquisitions such as Sun's purchase of MySQL (and even the VMware acquisition of WaveMaker). This year, the consensus was that the economic model which ... Apr. 13, 2011 01:41 PM EDT Reads: 1,748 |
By Christopher Keene I took the title of this post from a recent blog entry by Michael Cote. Cloud enthusiasts (often people with limited operations experience) talk in grandiose terms of moving the entire data center to a public cloud. Cloud naysayers (often people with extensive operations experience) ta... Apr. 5, 2011 01:52 PM EDT Reads: 752 |
By Christopher Keene We are announcing today that WaveMaker has been acquired by VMware. This partnership is the result of discussions that have been going on between WaveMaker and the SpringSource division of VMware for more than a year. I have always had great respect for how Rod Johnson revitalized and ... Mar. 8, 2011 12:15 PM EST Reads: 1,077 |
By Christopher Keene Nov. 30, 2010 02:22 PM EST Reads: 5,510 |
By Christopher Keene  A recent survey of WaveMaker's 15,000 developers found that over 20% had moved to WaveMaker as an alternative to Microsoft development tools like MS Access and MS .NET. "Microsoft shops" typically employ a variety of Microsoft products and have dozens to hundreds of applications that n... Jul. 14, 2010 07:45 PM EDT Reads: 4,224 |
By Christopher Keene  Citrix and WaveMaker's partnership to deliver a complete cloud development platform is gaining attention.
This week, John Abbott of the 451 Group wrote a piece on how the Citrix Cloud Center strategy is coming together, thanks to a little help from WaveMaker (registration required).
... Jul. 8, 2010 07:08 PM EDT Reads: 4,604 |
By Christopher Keene Althought the iPad is getting all the press these days, WaveMaker customers are building pretty compelling apps with plain old ruggedized PCs.This week we announced an application built using WaveMaker that meets the demanding requirements of warehouse loading docks for grocery stores... Jun. 24, 2010 05:47 PM EDT Reads: 898 |
By Christopher Keene Getting somewhat adventurous, I started a new blog and created a post on Free Alternatives to Microsoft Access. We see it as our patriotic duty ;-) to make the world safe from proprietary client/server platforms.Enterprises are increasingly moving from proprietary platforms like Micros... May. 28, 2010 07:05 PM EDT Reads: 1,322 |
By Christopher Keene WaveMaker is on a roll - having hit profitability at the end of last year, we are now targeting 300% growth for 2010. This week, we announced the latest release of WaveMaker.With our 6.1 released, WaveMaker truly delivers on our "PowerBuilder for the Cloud" vision. We are the only com... May. 13, 2010 03:37 PM EDT Reads: 1,388 |
By Christopher Keene  Gartner this week released a report entitled "Citizen Developers are Poised to Grow." The report by Gartner Analyst Eric Knipp describes how forces like more computer literate employees, cloud computing and better tools are fundamentally changing the role of IT.
Eric paints a vision... Mar. 29, 2010 05:45 PM EDT Reads: 7,664 |
By Christopher Keene  Open source companies live or die by the health of their communities. WaveMaker's proudest achievement last year was creating a passionate and rapidly growing community.Thinking back, probably our most important decision affecting community health was made early in the year, when we de... Feb. 13, 2010 02:25 PM EST Reads: 8,810 |
By Christopher Keene  WaveMaker started 2009 staring into the abyss and ended the year on top of the clouds - funny how things work out in the startup world. During the year, WaveMaker doubled annual revenues and achieved profitability while also increasing quarterly sales by over 53%. The biggest momentum ... Jan. 8, 2010 11:30 AM EST Reads: 5,917 |
By Christopher Keene  With full credit to the Geek and Poke blog, the funniest nerd cartoon I have seen all year!
Dec. 14, 2009 08:30 PM EST Reads: 6,521 |
By Christopher Keene  I have had some interesting conversations recently with partners about how cloud computing will affect the developer tools market. I don't believe developers jump on a band wagon just because they like the wagon. They jump on the wagon because they like where the wagon is going! Roughl... Dec. 10, 2009 04:00 PM EST Reads: 13,037 |
By Christopher Keene  Before I head off for my favorite holiday, I wanted to send out an update on Wavemaker.Our big news of course centers around the release of Wavemaker 6. This release was over a year in the making and represents the first open source cloud development platform on the market (hook up wav... Nov. 25, 2009 06:56 PM EST Reads: 4,609 |
By Christopher Keene  Until today, web developers creating SaaS apps have been faced with an ugly choice: use proprietary development platforms like Force.com or build an open solution from scratch. WaveMaker released the first open cloud development platform. WaveMaker 6.0 is a visual development platform ... Nov. 19, 2009 01:00 PM EST Reads: 7,132 |
By Christopher Keene Hard on the heels of the VMWare/SpringSource acquisition, VMWare entered into a grand alliance with Cisco and EMC (although technically, VMWare announcing an alliance with EMC is like Buick announcing an alliance with GM).Once the data center is fully virtualized, resilient and automat... Nov. 4, 2009 03:06 PM EST Reads: 1,841 |
By Christopher Keene  We know all about these loose ecosystems of Barney-loving, hand-holding, kumbaya-singing companies who promise a full solution to help you take advantage of the next overwhelming wave of technology...for a fee. In the past, vendor ecosystem announcements indicate a vague intention on t... Oct. 16, 2009 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 10,058 |
Christopher Keene is Chairman and CEO of WaveMaker (formerly ActiveGrid). He was the founder, in 1991, of Persistence Software, a San Mateo, CA-based company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. Persistence Software investors included Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. The company went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ exchange and was sold in 2004 to Progress software.
