John Gannon

First time entrepreneurs often ask me what they should do to maximize their chances of raising venture capital. To which I invariably answer: “Not need it.” via Continuations : Want a Good Deal? Have a Credible Alternative. Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: fundraising, Venture capital ... (more)

Mobile DevOps via VictorOps

Just noticed this in my VC Deals feed.  I had been thinking about how new mobile applications will change DevOps (and heck, Ops) … glad to see this space being explored seriously by startups like VictorOps. Until just recently, mobile devices did not provide enough functionality to enable team members to collaborate and contribute. Now, the same device can effectively be the alerting channel, the view into situational information flow and the point of interaction to allow participation via VictorOps raises $1.58M to helps ops teams get web sites back online — Tech News and Analys... (more)

Enterprise Cloud Computing: Understanding the Costs

John Gannon's Blog Although cloud computing provides financial benefits like reduction of CAPEX and the ability to pay-as-you-go, organizations will still need a reasonable amount of granularity in the reporting of cloud usage and the ability to map that usage into a financial chargeback model that makes sense. Amazon has gone live with Windows support in the EC2 cloud while at the same time announcing a private beta for some new scaling and load balancing features. These features will certainly be useful for the smaller customers of EC2, but my guess is that those features were ... (more)

Where Is Cloud Computing Dragging IT Operations?

Well, if the inevitable outcome of reduced friction is to increase demand for IT resources, someone is going to have to do the capacity planning. In a sense, the impact of cloud computing will be to shift the tasks for IT operations from tactical resource provisioning to strategic resource planning - with an emphasis on achieving the most efficient, lowest cost infrastructure possible. This is a far cry from the "your mess for less" outsourcing that has previously been the outcome of cost focus - this is about creating an automated, immediate search for the lowest cost, most avai... (more)

VMware Went Shopping and Came Home with SpringSource

As a member of the virtualization startup ecosystem, it was good to see one of our own (Springsource) get picked up by VMware for a cool $400MM+ this week.  The private market and public market (really any market) are terrible right now so it is encouraging to see one of the tech industry leaders make a strategic acquisition and pay some big dollars.  As an ex-VC I should also point out that if you assume the VCs owned about half of the company (which had raised about $35MM), this is a nice return (5X money or better, with the first money in coming out in ~5 years) considering th... (more)