Music is a very important part of my life. At home I've always got something playing on the sound system, I never go anywhere without headphones, and my music collection takes up more space in my house (not to mention on my computer) than anything else. That's why on a recent trip up to Maine – a 4.5 hour ride from Boston – the first thing I did to prepare was make sure I had my phone for music on the drive, without which I'd be stuck with the radio. Having to listen to the same 40 songs for four and a half hours is something that could easily give me nightmares but it got me thinking about how much choice matters.

Ten years ago I would have been happy enough with just the radio. Then came Napster and the iPod and my world changed. I became aware the technology existed which meant I knew there was a better alternative to the radio. What's more, I was excited about it. I wanted to use my iPod and put new music on it. The product engaged me as it had engaged everyone around me. I think that correlates with what we're seeing today in firms across all industries where employees have long been locked into aging technology – which often doesn't do everything they need it to – by lack of choice.

There has been a lot of ill-considered press coverage about the “death” of UNIX and coverage of the wholesale migration of UNIX workloads to LINUX, some of which (the latter, not the former) I have contributed to. But to set the record straight, the extinction of UNIX is not going to happen in our lifetime.

While UNIX revenues are not growing at any major clip, it appears as if they have actually had a slight uptick over the past year, probably due to a surge by IBM, and seem to be nicely stuck around the $18 - 20B level annual range. But what is important is the “why,” not the exact dollar figure.

UNIX on proprietary RISC architectures will stay around for several reasons that primarily revolve around their being the only close alternative to mainframes in regards to specific high-end operational characteristics:

• Performance – If you need the biggest single-system SMP OS image, UNIX is still the only realistic commercial alternative other than mainframes.
• Isolated bulletproof partitionability – If you want to run workload on dynamically scalable and electrically isolated partitions with the option to move workloads between them while running, then UNIX is your answer.
• Near-ultimate availability – If you are looking for the highest levels of reliability and availability ex mainframes and custom FT systems, UNIX is the answer. It still possesses slight availability advantages, especially if you factor in the more robust online maintenance capabilities of the leading UNIX OS variants.

We’ve been talking about the alignment between business and IT for some time now. Last week, I asked the question to some colleagues, “Who owns the data in an organization, the business or IT?” Several jumped into the fray and gave justifiable reasons as to why it was one or the other. After giving it much thought over a few days, I couldn’t really say either or. 

Why? Because the reality is that we ALL own the data. I wrote in my previous post about data tying many areas of the business together, and ultimately, IT is a PART OF THE BUSINESS.  It’s time to start realizing that, and stop making it a BUSINESS vs. IT issue, because that’s no longer the case. The common goal of any organization should be to make an enjoyable customer experience. Data=business intelligence=better customer offerings. It’s a simple equation and outcome that doesn’t care whether it belongs to business or IT. If the customer experience isn’t enjoyable, everyone suffers in the end. 

So how do I&O teams integrate more into the overall business? How does the business leverage more of IT?  By understanding what the end goal is and making it happen as a team. There’s a number of ways this can happen, including assembling project teams based on initiatives, bringing together the network, server, storage, apps, marketing, and sales team together. Everyone needs to learn and understand the value of data. This is not an easy feat, but one that must happen if we want to break down the wall that continues to stand as a divide between business and IT.

IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) people have long bemoaned their service desk or IT service management (ITSM) tools. It’s a fact of life, well ITSM-life anyway, and analysts will often pepper conversations with clients (and anyone else that will listen to them) with comments such as “that on average an organization will change ITSM tool every five years.” Some analysts quote longer, others quote less. In many ways, whether it is three, five, or seven years is unimportant. It is the fact that organizations are changing tools that is.

In a soon to be published joint Forrester and itSMF USA survey and report my colleague, Glenn O’Donnell, offers up an interesting service desk tool statistic: that, with the exception of SaaS tools, approximately 30% of responders are unhappy with their service desk tool.

Source: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/state_of_it_service_management_in_2011/q/id/60866/t/2

Of course, one could argue that this is a little “glass half empty” (that I’m an analyst trying to line the pockets of ITSM-tool vendors) and that the “full glass” view is one where 70% of responders are happy with their service desk tools.

Yes, I could take this view, but I would be doing the ITSM Community a disservice. The big question for me is “why is SaaS only at 4% dissatisfaction?”

I’m sure many would say things like: