Episode 217: You’re eating your hamburger wrong - IBM, unlocking value at Compuware, microservices are dead

With a new CEO and president at IBM, we talk about what’s been going on good and bad at IBM in recent years. Big bets were made and that whole cloud things overshadowed things. We also talk about the mysteries of private equity, here what Thoma Bravo has done to make billions of dollars of Dynatrace and Compuware. Finally, we briefly talk about the whole microservices and serverless are silly trend - monoliths rule! (Oh, and some small Java talk.)

(Sorry there’s so much high-volume on Coté's end. Hopefully your ear-holes won’t hurt too much. Coté needs to get a new pop-filter.)

Mood board:

• Interpol can’t find me in Australia, right?
• Digital transformation is bad.
• Did they decide that the kids are all right?
• Thought leader me into happiness.
• You are so much more cynical than me.
• What does IBM do?
• Reverse halo effect.
• Surviving the trough of disillusionment.
• We’ll stick up for digital transformation - No!
• For the rest of your life, do better.
• Minor bread talk.

Relevant to your interests

• IBM
  • IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is stepping down, Arvind Krishna to take over
  • 1 big thing: Ginni Rometty out at IBM
  • IBM’s Lost Decade
  • IBM didn’t spent much CAPEX, three others did.
  • Coté: what’s there to say that’s new? Cloud wasn’t executed well (I guess?) and Watson was a poor choice for such a high priority.
• Thoma Bravo to Explore $2 Billion Sale of Compuware
  • So, did Thoma Bravo do well here?
  • “could value the mainframe software provider at around $2 billion, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.”
  • “Thoma Bravo took Compuware private in 2014 in a deal valued at $2.5 billion. It carved out Compuware’s application performance management division, renamed it Dynatrace Inc. and took it public last year.”
  • Dynatrace market cap is ~$9.1bn, was ~$6.7bn on IPO day (August 2019).
  • Brenon@451 on the IPO, August 2019: “Post-offering, the PE firm still owns about 70% of Dynatrace.”
  • And: “Dynatrace raised roughly $570m in its offering, some of which will go toward paying down its nearly $1bn in debt.”
  • 451’s note on the 2014 going private.
  • So, if Thoma Bravo still owns 70%, then have ~$6.37bn worth of equity (70% of market cap of $9.1bn)…sounds… really good for laying for laying down $2.5bn, plus you might get $2bn more from the rest of Compuware.
  • That’s crazy, right? That Compuware was sitting on that much extra value?
• This week in cloud architecture patterns
  • tl;dr: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
  • The State of Serverless
    • This is just about AWS Lambda. (That said, what else is there?)
    • “Among the companies with the largest infrastructure footprints, more than three quarters have adopted Lambda.”
    • Lots of node.js and python use, not much Java and .Net use. Java and python were added in the same year (2015), node.js since the start in 2014.
    • Coté’s summary of their analysis: Lambda used with lots of data processing, primarily with python and node, at mostly large orgs. Not used by Java devs.
  • Modular Monolithic Architecture, Microservices and Architectural Drivers
  • “Monoliths are the future,” Kelsey Hightower.
  • “Now that our industry is finally recovering from the mass delusion that microservices was going to be the future, it's surely time to for the even bigger delusion that serverless is what's going to provide the all-purpose salvation.” @dhh Also: his 2016 suggestion that monoliths work best for small teams, microservices for huge orgs.
• Related: Reframing and Retooling for Observability, James Governor - overview of observability, in serious James mode.
• JRebel Java survey:
  • Over 60% use Java 8 or older. Java 8 was released in March 2014, no more updates to Java 8.
  • Tomcat dominates app server use at 60%+. Free and works is a hell of a combination.
  • Spring and Spring Boot very dominate.
  • “It was very surprising to see how many of our survey respondents are paying for Oracle JDK. I fully expected the open source options to have a much larger market share.” - 1 big thing: Software disaster sinks Iowa caucus
• Google Numbers
  • Google parent Alphabet Q4 earnings: Revenue disappoints
  • Alphabet discloses YouTube ad revenues of $15.15 billion, Cloud revenues of $8.92 billion for 2019
  • Related: Instagram brought in an estimated $20bn in 2019.
  • That’s a lot of money.
• Security
  • Google releases open-source 2FA security key platform called OpenSK
  • Apple Engineers Propose Standardized Format for SMS One-Time Passcodes
  • HPE acquires identity management startup Scytale
• Microsoft Teams goes down after Microsoft forgot to renew a certificate
• Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances

Nonsense

• Podcast app Overcast adds automatic intro skipping and overhauled Voice Boost feature
• I Have a Costco Credit Card. I Never Use It at Costco. Here’s Why.
• Spotify is buying Bill Simmons’s The Ringer to boost its podcast business

Sponsors

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Conferences, et. al.

• KubeCon EU in Amsterdam March 30 – April 2*,* use code KCEUSDP15 for 15% off.
• DevOpsDays Austin 2020 May 4th and 5th
• QCon London, March 2nd to 6th - Coté speaking at some point.
• Agile Scotland, March 6th: sessions, tickets.
• ChefConf 2020 in Seattle June 1-4
• DevOpsDays Minneapolis, August 4 - 5, 2020 use code SDT for 10% off registration
• THAT Conference August 3 - 6 in Wisconsin Dells, WI. Call for Counselors (Speakers) open until March 1st.
• HashiTalks Virtual Conference February 20, 2020 FREE (Matt’s presenting on Terraform + Chef tech)

SDT news & hype

• Join us in Slack.
• Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you free laptop stickers!
• Follow us on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn
• Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast. Check out the back catalog.
• Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
• Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, Digital WTF, so $5 total.

Recommendations

• Brandon: NeverSSL.
• Matt: Code the Classics. Faith No More’s coming to Australia & New Zealand
• Cote: Beyond the Phoenix Project, from 2018.