So last night, I finished working my way through The Toyota Way Fieldbook: A Practical Guide for Implementing Toyota’s 4Ps on my Kindle. Normally I’d say I was reading on my Kindle, but this book was hard work in places, and more interesting and educational than enjoyable.

It’s an incredibly dense piece of writing, full of 1000s of useful facts, and all sorts of real world examples of “Lean Enterprise”, which is especially useful given the current popularity of The Lean Startup in software development circles.

The links between the Toyota way of manufacturing, and the work of staff development, supplier development, and ways of thinking and acting, were all very thoroughly explained, and really opened my eyes to a different way of working, plus I now feel I should buy a Toyota car just to experience the end result!

If you’re interested in the reality of being “lean” or in the technical details of how large companies can be transformed by new thinking and new leadership, I’d hugely recommend this book, but if you’re looking for some light business related reading before bed, then this isn’t the book for you.

For the last couple of yeas, one of the most popular posts on my blog was a price and feature comparison of Red Hat’s RHEV product, driven largely by people searching for “RHEV download” and similar phrases.

The simple reason for this was Red Hat’s unwillingness to let RHEV out of their hands and into the hands of people who just wanted to try the thing out, and see what it was like, without engaging in a proof of concept project with Red Hat’s sales team. You simply couldn’t get a trial RHEV without begging your local sales rep, making RHEV the most closed source product at the open source Red Hat.

Now it looks like things are changing for RHEV, with Red Hat re-launching the oVirt project, seeding it with the code from RHEV.

As described on the About oVirt page:

The project has been seeded with assets from Red Hat by open sourcing it’s virtualization management software (RHEV), and from partners, customers, and competitors to build an open virtualization community to enable the growth and adoption of open virtualization solutions.

Now that people can finally get to see what’s behind Red Hat’s sales website on RHEV, I think there’ll be a lot more people trying out the solution in small scale projects, which will hopefully (for Red Hat at least), lead to more production implementations.

This might be a silly thought, but with NetApp buying Engenio a few months ago, and now HDS buying BluArc, I’ve been wondering if IBM might get out of the storage hardware business.

They don’t really build most of their hardware (it’s all NetApp / Engenio at the low to mid end), XIV hasn’t been a huge success, SONAS doesn’t seem to be going anywhere (though I could be wrong about that), and the Storwize v7000 / SVC products are great but completely lost in amongst all their other offerings.

I doubt they’d exit storage entirely, especially as the DS8000 product range is tightly linked to mainframe sales for IBM, but I don’t know if there’s really much benefit being gained for IBM outside of the high-end profit margins.

There’s no other part of IBM I can think of that is so reliant on rebadging another top tier manufacturers products without adding any value of their own, certainly it’s something that the server teams dont’ do.

Of course, another option is that IBM could just buy NetApp, which might make me look a bit silly..