ReadWriteEnterprise

Failure is a word that, understandably, carries a negative connotation. Nobody wants to fail, really. But failure, if you're doing anything worthwhile, is inevitable. What's important is to plan for failure, learn from it, try to avoid damage and do your best to recover gracefully. That was the topic of Selena Deckelmann's keynote, "Mistakes Were Made," Sunday morning at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE).

Deckelmann is founder and COO of Prime Radiant, the company behind Checkmarkable, "a product that helps organizations document, share and tweak their processes." Deckelmann is also a longtime contributor to the PostgreSQL project.

In June I participated in a Forrester webinar hosted by Glenn O'Donnell called
"DevOps: Friction-Free Collaboration for Development and Operations" DevOps (a portmanteau of development and operations) is quite the buzzword now, and the discussion yielded many attempts to define it. One thing we agreed on: Unfortunately development and operations are two organizational entities that tend not to get along very well. In this post I'll explain why DevOps represents a mental shift from "us versus them" to a more cohesive, results-oriented approach.

Jay Lyman, senior analyst for the 451 Group, spoke at LinuxCon North America 2011 on the changing Linux landscape. Sessions are short at LinuxCon – about 50 minutes in total, give or take. So there's not a lot of time to get deep into the nitty gritty and perform a detailed analysis or explanation of a market that's now nearly 20 years old. Lyman went through a brief discussion of the major players in the market, and touched on the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) for each.

In a recent interview by RedMonk's Michael Cote with Pete Marshall and Peter Spung of IBM, Coté says that DevOps is moving into the mainstream. Marshall thinks this is party due to companies looking at Google and other organizations that have tightly integrated development and operations teams.

Is this true is DevOps really going mainstream?

Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Labs, Service Now, SugarCRM, and Zendesk have agreed to support a common JSON API specification for customer service applications called NetworkedHelpDesk.org.

The idea is to make it possible for all applications related to a customer's experience to talk to each other, from help desk to bug tracking to project management. "Where things start to fall through the cracks is when customer service has to cross organization boundaries," says Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker. "Either within the organization, like customer service to engineering, or outside of the organization like to a component vendor."