I suppose it's inevitable. You play an instrument. You join a bar band. You take ownership for mixing the horrible stage sound. But that's not the end of it. Sooner or later, you're going to be drawn into recording the band for the same reason as you took ownership for... Continue reading

I get some nice "thank you" notes from people who have stumbled across the blog, and gained perhaps a bit of insight on playing music, bands and -- of course -- gear! It goes without saying that I am hugely appreciative of the great people on forums who have pointed... Continue reading

Ok, so I've shared with all of you my experiences with bands, gear, etc. Some of you have found all of this useful. Hey, I like to share what I've learned? Now we're going to get into a more personal -- and perhaps more relevant -- topic. How do you... Continue reading

For those of you who follow me, you know I've been in search for the ultimate stage sound for many years. Many killer Nord boards, many killer self-powered PAs. I could write a book with all I have learned. And, for a while, I was very much happy with my... Continue reading

I've always been drawn to Nord boards. Since I discovered them years ago, there's no going back. Red, baby. When the details of the Nord Stage 3 became available, I was right there, checking it all out. Nords have always had a lot of buzz. Sort of like Porches, but... Continue reading

I I must be getting older, wiser, or maybe a bit of both. Over the last few months, my playing style has evolved nicely. Not in terms of physical technique -- I've always had the ability to pretty much play what I want to -- but more around what I... Continue reading

I've written before about getting chill with whatever semi-satisfying gig you've found as a weekend warrior. Let me tell you how my situation is working out? The basics? I've got chops and decent talent, but not enough to play top-line gigs. I have a well-paying day gig that provides more... Continue reading

I used to blog frequently. These days, not so much. Why is that? A lot of reasons, really. First, nothing bad is happening to me. Thankfully, life is pretty darn good these days. One reason is that there just aren't that many contentious issues in the enterprise IT. Cloud offerings -- SaaS, PaaS and IaaS -- are upon us in full force. And our familiar gaggle of on-premises IT vendors continue their inevitable decline. Industry transitions can be a bitch. Another reason is that I've been asked to take on expanded responsibilities for a while. That has had a way of sucking up most of my creative juices. But I'm starting to claw my way back :) And what little writing I do these days is for our corporate Forbes platform here. So, what's on my mind these days? A few big ideas -- but nothing that should be too controversial. Recognized Need For A New Business Platform My argument here is simple. When the internet hit, every organization found themselves in need of a new business platform. New business processes, done a new way. You couldn't just weld an internet router to your existing business processes and expect new... Continue reading

These days, talking to IT leaders about cloud is eerily like talking about retirement. Even though it might not be here yet, you know it's coming soon -- and investing for the future is prudent. While individual strategies vary, common themes are thankfully starting to emerge. For back-office functionality, a clear preference to move to SaaS -- usually triggered by a refresh or similar. ERP, HCM, SCM, CX and so on. The payoff? Modern, connected business processes, delivered with a minimum of cost and effort. For most new application development, a similar clear preference to use PaaS in the cloud. Better tools, better economics and better results. And, for those applications that can leave the data center, move to either IaaS or some form of hosting model. Get them out of the data center -- if you can. But there still remains a sizable subset of database-oriented applications that won't be leaving the data center anytime soon. Maybe it's latency concerns. Or regulatory compliance. Or just a general unwillingness to let the family jewels go elsewhere. More often than not, the database behind the applications in question is an Oracle database. Which puts Oracle in a privileged position to answer... Continue reading

FMS -- Frustrated Musician Syndrome -- is endemic in the bar bands that I play in. You'll also see it in strong evidence in various music forums, like Keyboard Corner where I hang out. I used to suffer greatly from FMS, but then learned a few things, and -- no... Continue reading

We haven't talked much about musical genres here, but maybe it's time. This post was triggered by a fellow Keyboard Corner forum member who had discovered the Grateful Dead / Jerry Garcia legacy very late in his career. He was somewhat skeptical coming in, but then found that he was... Continue reading

I think everyone who reads this blog knows that I have massive GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) for amplification. Guilty as charged. My Nord keyboards produce awesome sounds, it's all about translating that to the audience in challenging circumstances: smaller venues, noisy guitar players, indifferent audiences, etc. But I have learned... Continue reading

For those of you following industry cloud adoption -- and trying to figure out how the horse race between the four big players is shaking out -- today's news is certainly worth considering. AT&T is agreeing to move a significant number of their Oracle databases to the Oracle Cloud. Plus they've agreed to start using some of our SaaS services in specific areas, like field service. It's a pretty big deal. I've long argued that moving to a cloud model is inevitable -- even for established and proficient IT organizations like AT&T. But it's once thing to predict something, and another thing entirely to see it actually happen. The Basics On paper, it's pretty straightforward: AT&T's Oracle databases are going to the Oracle Cloud. Mark Hurd said there's over an exabyte involved. For those of you that left your storage calculator at home, an exabyte is a thousand petabytes, or a thousand times bigger what we usually consider "really big" in the storage world. Put differently, that's a million terabytes. That's a whole lot of on-premises storage that won't be needed anymore. No revenue numbers were announced, nor were timelines for migration, which I would guess to be rather lengthy.... Continue reading

When it comes to keyboard amplification, especially acoustic pianos, I've found there are many schools of thought. None of them bad, just all different. No judgment here. First school; bring nothing, let the FOH sound guy take care of your needs. Great if it works. Well, in my bar band... Continue reading

If you've been in the IT industry for any time at all, you know how analysts and vendors are perpetually in search of the New Shiny Thing:a brand-new super-cool technology that will change everything. Big data. In-memory analytics. Internet of things. AI and machine learning. Blockchain. Hyperconverged. Flash. Buy the research study! Attend the conference! Download the white paper! Gartner does a good job of putting all the New Shiny Things in perspective with their infamous hype curve. Always a bit sobering to those of us who occasionally get swept away with unbridled enthusiasm. But I'm here to argue that we'll see a lot less attention paid to new shiny things than we've seen in the past. Why? These new capabilities will simply become integrated features of the IT services we will already be consuming in the cloud. It's A Connected World Enterprise IT is a connected world; no technology stands alone and can claim to be useful. Things work with other things to create value. Doing that in the data center can be hard, doing that in a modern cloud seems almost trivial by comparison. As a first, example, let's start with the internet of things: hanging sensors off... Continue reading

Well, I had a financial transaction work out better than expected, so I asked The Wife if I could get some new music toys. She agreed. I have always read great things about the RCF TT08a, especially for acoustic piano sounds. I just had to try them. So I went... Continue reading

Economic history is replete with creations that have changed our world. From steam power to the internet, human innovation moves forward in great leaps and bounds, thanks to technology. Here, I present my arguments as to why I believe we are on the threshold of a new economic era: the cloud economy. This is not about how we feel about clouds, it's about the cloud's potential to change the nature of the world we live in, perhaps faster than we thought. I think it's always useful to start with a quick historical perspective. Indulge me? Steam power was invented in 1762. For the first time, you could deliver substantial mechanical power almost anywhere. It marked the start of the Industrial Revolution, among other things. As with any innovation, there were plenty of disruptions at hand. For example, if you were in the stagecoach business, the idea of steam powered trains didn't exactly thrill you. About a hundred years later, we started to use steam power to generate electricity. For the first time, power could be consumed at a distance from where it was generated. This picture is from the 1920s. If you look carefully, you can see that the gas... Continue reading

I’ve written about this amp a few times before. It continues to impress me in that it sounds great in so many situations. It also makes me despair as I see so many other musicians struggling to make it sound great. Here’s the deal: learn how to use it properly,... Continue reading

Several years ago, my wife decided to get an advanced degree in psychology, and became a counselor. Along the way, I was duly impressed by the therapeutic power of simply talking about a problem in a constructive manner. These days, I joke that I've become a "cloud therapist" for many of the enterprise IT leaders I meet. They know they have a big challenge ahead of them, they just need to talk about it. I've been told the conversations are usually helpful, which is good. Over the years, some of my most stimulating discussions have been with Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon. Dave and I feed off of each other quite well: freely challenging each other's assumptions, and getting to the meat of the matter before too long. And we always have fun. A while back, we thought it'd be great if we could have these great dialogues in a more public forum. We agreed on a series of four interviews, each approaching the enterprise IT cloud challenge from different perspectives. In the first interview I'll want to explore some of the deeper forces behind the move to cloud-like models for enterprise IT. Understanding why a problem exists in the... Continue reading

In the working world, doing your job well means that you're a candidate for a larger role with more responsibility. The same thing is proving true in my band world. Somehow, I've gone from being the keyboard guy to being responsible for amplifying and mixing the entire band. Too bad... Continue reading

This morning, I came across this grim piece from Chris Mellor at The Register, detailing evidence of the violent restructuring in our familiar storage array market. Call it confirmation bias, but many of us have seen this coming for a while, and have acted accordingly. The numbers have been mediocre for many quarters, but recently the pace seems to be accelerating. It wasn't all that long ago that storage companies were almost semi-glamorous in the enterprise IT world: EMC, NetApp, HDS, Pure, Nimble, et. al. Great growth all around, and tons of VC flowing into the sector. What happened? And should we think of this as a temporary aberration, or a permanent structural shift? The Lure Of Storage I decided to join a small storage startup in 1994, moving from Silicon Valley to suburban Massachussets. At the time, EMC was a ~$400 million company with something like 1,600 employees. I became sold on the idea that -- in the world of computing, information mattered. Capturing, persisting and re-using data was going to be a big deal, so storage was going to be really important. And I thought standalone storage vendors would have a better strategic positioning than server vendors in... Continue reading

I have long been an armchair economist. I did a full economics sequence in school, found it to be utterly fascinating, and have continued to read intently on the topic ever since. Such is the life of a geek. However, I've always wondered why none of the typical IT analyst firms spend any serious effort studying the structure and dynamics of the IT labor market. Sure, there's all sorts of great analysis on various technologies, vendors and consumption models, but what about the people who are responsible for making the magic happen? How is their world changing? It's relevant because change is in the air. Cloud, baby. Public cloud is not only arbitrage on technology costs -- which everyone talks about -- but also labor costs. Cloud is already busily at work disrupting the IT technology market. I would argue that -- before long -- it will do the same for the IT labor market. I don't know whether to be pessimistic or optimistic about the changes to come, so I'll present my case for both -- and let you decide. But one thing is certain; change is coming. The Case For Pessimism One of the best ways to understand... Continue reading

At one time, I was updating this blog regularly. And then, not so much. Over a year has passed since I last wrote something here. Well, such is life. I thought I owed all of you an update. Things are good, but -- well -- life moves on. I've left... Continue reading

Many business leaders are now applying serious pressure towards their IT counterparts to move to a cloud model sooner than later. Their motivations are unambiguous. Business people see cloud models delivering better IT services at a lower overall cost. And no one wants to forego a significant competitive advantage. But it can be harder than it looks -- at least, given many of the familiar public cloud options in the market. Most larger enterprise IT landscapes are deeply integrated; almost woven together. Applications aren't usually isolated; they feed, and are fed by, others. Critical business processes that power any enterprise can span dozens of individual application components. And like a central nervous system, the enterprise IT control plane spans all of it, keeping a watchful eye on performance and security. Untangling the components incrementally, and attempting to move them to a public cloud model one at a time, is turning out to be far harder than it might look to be on vendor powerpoint. Unfortunately, the basic nature of popular public clouds isn't genetically compatible with what enterprise IT is doing today. And therein lies a thorny problem. What to do? It's All Connected -- Or Should Be I keep... Continue reading

Many of us have conditions that end up greatly affecting our quality of life. It often takes many years to fully understand the situation, its impact on you, and the impact on those around you. One of my personal challenges has been coping with RBS: Restless Brain Syndrome. I can't easily shut my brain down. I'd really like to be able to stop incessantly deconstructing and resynthesizing the world around me, but I can't. Quite seriously, it has affected my quality of life, and my relationships with others. Maybe you -- or someone you know -- suffers from the same malady? I'm Serious (Sort Of) You know that joke where someone asks someone else "what time is it?" and the other person responds with the history of timekeeping, current timekeeping technologies available, and finishes off with current cosmological theories of time? Uhhh, that's uncomfortably close to the truth, especially if I'm not paying attention. For whatever reason, put an idea in front of me to think about, and I go all multi-dimensional. I inspect the concept from every possible angle, break it into pieces, reassemble it in many different ways, and then find relevant associations with other ideas and concepts.... Continue reading