May 18, 2008: Blade servers use less energy and require less floor space than rack-mounted servers, says Clay Rider, president of The Sageza Group Inc., an IT research firm in Union City, Calif. They also offer simpler component connections and easier management.

March 8, 2008: That would be the real killer app, said analyst Clay Ryder, president of The Sageza Group. "If all [the JVM port] does is let you run the apps other phones have and they don't do anything new and creative, it's a check box item plus," he said. "But since it's a lot more powerful platform, there's a potential to do a lot more with it. If folks can wrap their heads around getting more powerful apps on it, then it's a game changer. Then it might start looking like a pocket PC, which you can do more with than a telephone." With Apple declaring Adobe's Flash to be too resource-heavy for the iPhone, that puts JavaFX in a good position to be the best substitute out there for RIAs, added Ryder. "It would be a win for Sun and a loss for Adobe," he said.

February 12, 2008: "For the N3300 and N3600, the inclusion of SATA and SAS drive support should help broaden the number of potential buyers," Clay Ryder, principal analyst with The Sageza Group, told eWEEK. "SATA drives make a substantial change in the economics of storage capacity while offering decent performance. At the high end, 1,008TB of capacity is huge, and more than you or I will need anytime soon; however, for Web 2.0 services, and organizations with large amounts of multimedia data, they will easily find a way to gobble up the capacity," Ryder said.

January 29, 2008: Clay Ryder, president of analyst firm the Sageza Group, said renaming the Blackbox to S20 is a sign that "the product has moved beyond the skunkworks project" and into something "worthy of an official-sounding name." "This implies some degree of marketing and product maturity as a long-term play as opposed to an example of what some clever engineers can do," he said. Ryder added that the product's target user has begun to crystallize: data centers dealing with constraints – constraints of power, cooling, space and infrastructure. Thus the push overseas and to American markets needing extra compute capacity quickly, such as university research labs.

December 12, 2007: "The endpoint is a critical piece for Symantec because of the company's reliance on its AV product as a cash and market penetration engine," according to Lawrence Dietz, research director at The Sageza Group Inc. "They need to take steps to bolster their position. Symantec likely believes that the endpoint security buyer is key to their success and that adding Altiris' products to the Symantec sales bag makes great sense."

November 26, 2007: "For the System i, ISV support is the name of the game," says Clay Ryder, an analyst with the Sageza Group. "Without broad ISV support, the System i has limited opportunity since so much of that platform is moved through the channel. Channel partners need the apps to move the iron and offer servers, so ISVs are essential. IBM did exit the business application marketplace a number of years ago. While BI could be viewed as re-entry into this space, I would posit that IBM is viewing it more as an underpinning or framework on which other applications and greater solutions can be built."

November 7, 2007: "What's interesting," said Clay Ryder, president of analyst firm the Sageza Group Inc., "is that by quantifying and having a certification process with a third party, they're laying the mechanism by which a standard credit could be traded or sold in the market if that were to come into play." For this certificate system to work properly, Ryder said it needs to catch on nationally and extend to other IT providers. "It's going to have to be larger than IBM and Neuwing for these kinds of programs to really work," he said. "There needs to be some kind of national requirements or standards or marketplace, if you will, for the credits. In a national program, all of a sudden you've got a much larger market in which these things can trade." Ryder added that this program wouldn't preclude companies from going after local incentives from utility companies such as those Pacific Gas & Electric offers. "Why not double-dip?" he said.

November 5, 2007: "It'll be interesting to see how this all works," said Clay Ryder, an analyst with Sageza Group. "As time goes on, the value of these certificates may grow dramatically ... Eventually we may see these bought and sold on eBay, for example." "The question is: Do you stop and pick up a penny? Is it worth the 2 or 3 cents worth of energy that it has been estimated to pick it up? Probably not," Ryder said. "But if we're talking about a quarter, then it might be worth it. Same thing here; if the savings get to be higher, more people will want to get involved."

October 23, 2007: Still, Sun can't afford to slow down at all in this space, said Clay Ryder, president and chief consultant of The Sageza Group. "In the world of mobile phone and gadgets, they make the upgrade cycle for PCs look like dinosaurs by comparison," he said. "Every year you get a new phone, every year you get a new gadget and the growth of functionality is incredible. ME may not be useless but it can be left behind real easily." Ryder said Sun runs the risk of falling behind in the mobile space if it doesn't keep up a fast pace. "Right now, ME is an established technology and I don't think it's suddenly being shunned, but I just don't think it's representing the leading edge any more," he said. "They have to keep it competitive if not leading, because they run the risk of not being in the next set of handsets. And everyone knows you can't afford to have a gap between generations of handsets because you don't want to appear to lose momentum," Ryder added.

October 23, 2007: Still, Sun can't afford to slow down at all in this space, said Clay Ryder, president and chief consultant of The Sageza Group. "In the world of mobile phone and gadgets, they make the upgrade cycle for PCs look like dinosaurs by comparison," he said. "Every year you get a new phone, every year you get a new gadget and the growth of functionality is incredible. ME may not be useless but it can be left behind real easily."  Ryder said Sun runs the risk of falling behind in the mobile space if it doesn't keep up a fast pace. "Right now, ME is an established technology and I don't think it's suddenly being shunned, but I just don't think it's representing the leading edge any more," he said. "They have to keep it competitive if not leading, because they run the risk of not being in the next set of handsets. And everyone knows you can't afford to have a gap between generations of handsets because you don't want to appear to lose momentum," Ryder added.

October 18, 2007: "Given that organizations are leery of trying out unknown or unsupported software, the fact that Ubuntu has gained support from major systems providers such as Dell and Sun should help," Clay Ryder, president of Sageza Group, told LinuxInsider. "Right now, it is unlikely to unseat Red Hat or Novell from the number 1 and 2 spots, but overseas Red Hat is not the leader, and both distros are controlled by North American companies," he added. "Technocrats and developers will always be defining which solution is technically 'better,' but ease of support and purchase thereof is a greater concern," Ryder said. "Applications are the ultimate driver of deployment, not the operating system itself." 

October 15, 2007: Clay Ryder, president of The Sageza Group consultancy and present at the briefing, said he felt Sun is earning some badly needed credibility in the open source community. "They have not become the goto open source player but they are earning some credibility," he told InternetNews.com. Sun's efforts are still a work in progress, he went on to say, but progressing. "It's paying off in getting some developer credibility, and they need to re-win the developer world. It also helps them with their ISVs (Independent Software Vendors). It's important to have that mindshare. They lost a lot of it," said Ryder.

VIRTUALIZATION FOR EVERYONE  

October 4, 2007: "This company [VMware] is growing like crazy," said Clay Ryder, an analyst with the Sageza Group.

October 3, 2007: "They say they're [IBM and HP] pretty much squarely going after SMBs, but these are more midsized products, a few hundred-person company, as opposed to a 50-person organization," said Clay Ryder, president of The Sageza Group Inc., a Union City, Calif.-based research firm. "With blades in particular, the major vendors have started to see these really as a way to rejuvenate their midmarket sales. These solutions are compact, they run off standard electric power, and nothing fancy is required in the room where it's plugged in." Technologically speaking, the two products are also pretty similar. Analysts say both low-end blade products are good solutions. When asked to describe what differentiates the two, they were hard-pressed to give examples. "They're roughly comparable," Ryder said. "You look at things like switches, ports -- at that level you're talking about standard, basic stuff."

September 5, 2007: A slowdown is often viewed as a natural event in market dynamics, a maturing of a technology. "This is not a bad thing," said Clay Ryder, president of the Sageza Group. Linux uptake had been on a tear, Ryder said. The momentum continued as business buyers increasingly saw its value.

August 31, 2007: The blade needed this redesign, said Clay Ryder, president of The Sageza Group. "The old design kinda limited them," he told internetnews.com. "If you wanted to stick one blade in a chassis, you could live with it. But if you wanted to go to town and had to buy 2 chassis because they could only be half-filled, that was a problem.

August 14, 2007: Sageza Group analyst Clay Ryder says the latest announcements appears to be intended to emphasise the company's continuing support for System i. "A road map for i5/OS should help assuage any concerns there may have been that the OS was going to be relegated to secondary status with respect to the Power6 platform and the new features should be well received by those who understand the value of integrated solutions," he says. Ryder says Power6 was designed with virtualisation and consolidation as a driving consideration. "Overall, the announcements are a good indicator that IBM intends to continue investment in the venerable Systemi," he says. "The continued investment in i5/OS and the hardware is good news for all user constituencies," Ryder says.

August 10, 2007: Sun Microsystems says it has the world's fastest server microprocessor, the UltraSPARC T2. And it is the first Sun microprocessor that will be available to other companies. What does this mean for Sun? Tom Foremski talks to analysts Nathan Brookwood from Insight64 and Clay Ryder from the Sageza Group. 
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August 10, 2007: According to a study by The Sageza Group, the Power 6 is a compelling reason for the take up of the p570’s. The ability to move virtual partitions without the need for a reboot between p570’s “allows administrators to treat servers as a pooled resource as opposed to a workload specific model” said Clay Ryder, president, The Sageza Group.

August 8, 2007: Clay Ryder, president of analyst firm the Sageza Group Inc. in Union City, Calif., agreed, adding that it's another feature of System i's ability to connect and manage System x through iSCSI. "At a very basic level, it's another arrow in the quiver of System i's management functionality," he said.

August 7, 2007: Live Partition Mobility helps multiple servers operate as one fluid pool of computing resources, according to a research report by The Sageza Group Inc. that IBM cited.

August 6, 2007: Live Partition Mobility, one of the many unique capabilities of the POWER6 processor, was highlighted in a recent study by The Sageza Group, where it was described as "one of the very compelling aspects of the new p570" in a report on POWER6. "This ability to move virtual partitions seamlessly -- i.e., without suspending them followed by a reboot -- between any suitably equipped System p allows administrators to treat servers as a pooled resource as opposed to a workload specific model," said Clay Ryder, president, The Sageza Group. "In addition, partition mobility bolsters the energy efficiency discussion even further. Just as electric utilities constantly monitor generation facilities to optimize output per minimum production cost, so too will IT personnel be able to move workloads to the systems that can bear the workload at the minimal cost per computational unit. Being able to adjust workloads to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption brings a new factor into data center planning. Clever deployment and redeployment of workloads could result not only in notable energy savings, but also in averted capital expenditures to augment data center floor space, cooling, or electrical capacity."

August 1, 2007: "Cooling and power draw are considerations," said Clay Ryder, president of research firm the Sageza Group Inc. "In overall power consumption, blades should come out ahead," he said. But "if you consolidate the number of servers into a smaller amount of space, that can possibly change the heating profile of the data center."