Sam Charrington, colleague and friend, spent a few days at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit show last week. One of the more interesting things about Gartner shows are the analyst briefings. While there is no single place that can definitively define what's going on in markets as diverse as those in which we participate, these briefings are a good place to take a snapshot of what things look like today.

One of the often-repeated baseball truisms is "that you can never have too much pitching". Even if you don't know anything about baseball, you can tell that this is true by just searching on that phrase and see what comes up. Go ahead: I've made it easy!

Michael Krigsman has been humming the "simplicity is good / complexity is ... not so good" tune lately - check out this and this - and it sounds pretty good to me. While his focus is primarily on self-induced organizational complexity, I think the same exact points apply to architectural complexity.

In fact, this is how I tend to describe the abstraction presented by an application fabric:

Two good mentions in this week's edition of GRIDtoday.

First, from Editor Derek Harris' weekly overview article comes these great comments:

... (the) dichotomy of uses illustrates the beauty of companies like Appistry who offer everything necessary to handle Web-scale and highly transactional applications, as well as the ability to handle compute-intensive applications ...
the potential market is broad.

We certainly agree with that assessment!

Easily lost in all the commotion over VMWare's big-bang IPO this week and today's Xensource acquisition by Citrix is a big question - has traditional virtualization run its course?

It might be fair to wonder if I'm crazy or not, and well maybe I am ... but I don't think so.