IT’S MY ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY. PARDON ME IF I GET EMOTIONAL.

August 25^th 2010. That’s the day I posted my first WorkloadIQ blog. What a crazy, frantic and exciting year it has been. So much innovation—so much change. Hopefully, you’ve found my blog to be interesting and informative—occasionally even stimulating. Far too many IT blogs these days could be repackaged as digital sleep aids. Speaking of repackaging, did you know, Viagra was originally created to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension? Don’t ask me how I know this.

Well, looking back I’ve chosen a baker’s dozen of my favorite blogs to recap from the past year. Enjoy!

• Identity, It’s the Passport to Intelligent Workload Management. Put simply, identity is what puts the intelligence in intelligent workload management (IWM). It intelligently controls access to resources and applications—whether in the data center, on the road, or in the cloud.
• Who’s On First? Beyond the Who, What I Don’t Know of Identity Management. Sorry Rain Man. This one is the winner for September, although Managing Workloads without Herding Cats was a close second.
• Trade In Your Old Technologies for a New Appliance. Where’s the love for “green” technologies like SUSE appliances?
• Migrating to IWM Takes Time. Got Ten Minutes? When it comes to simplifying, automating and securing operations, Vodacom and their customer BasisOne get it. Check out this blog and learn why.
• Presenting WorkloadIQ Man: Tights Are Just Part of the Package. Faster than a speeding compliance officer. More powerful than an angry CFO. Able to switch hypervisors on the fly. It’s WorkloadIQ! Boy, did I take some flak over this one.
• WorkloadIQ Exclusive: My 10 Predictions for 2011. In this blog, I predicted the future—without the use of tea leaves, Tarot cards or the astrology app on my iPhone.
• Remember When IT Owned The IT Budget? Discover the three main challenges that surfaced from my cloud-computing focus group in Las Vegas .
• How Smart Is Too Smart for Intelligent Workload Management? It’s man versus machine. Whose side is IWM on?
• Too Much Information? Yep, and You’d Better Protect It. Sorry, the St. Paddy’s Day disclosure of what’s under the kilt of Novell SUSE Manager was simply too controversial for consideration.
• Performance Measurement Lost and Found. After you’ve learned about Novell Operations Center, you might want to check out a few of the April 1st predictions made by celebrities.
• Two Lawyers Walk Into A Presentation. You should definitely read this (unless you’re a cloud services provider).
• NetIQ, WorkloadIQ and Natural Selection. The Novell/NetIQ acquisition explained.
• Trust But Verify Applies to Cloud Hype, Too. We go down under to share valuable insight from my colleague Patrick Eijkenboom.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already been a year. Stay tuned for the year ahead! I have insider’s knowledge of some of the remarkable things that will be going on at BrainShare this Fall. If you haven’t made plans to attend, what are you waiting for? Cheers for now.

–Richard