Part of growing up is figuring out that your time and attention are 1.) your most valuable resources, and 2.) finite. To paraphrase Gollum, they are your “preciouses”. So it helps to be thoughtful and deliberate about how you spend them. You need to figure out where to focus to get the most from your investment. As an IT person, some of that investment tends to be in studying and professional certifications.

When Satya Nadella took charge of Microsoft and said they were going “cloud first” I had a hard time believing him – given the previous CEO’s tendency for hyperbole and marketing double-speak. But they proved me wrong. Their continuous delivery of new features and services in Azure and Office365 over the last year has been impressive. It’s changed the way many IT departments approach service delivery. At last year’s VMWorld, VMWare made the same promises.

I was fascinated with animals when I was a kid. Whenever there was an animal documentary on PBS, I was glued to it. My favorites were the predator and prey hunts – big savannah cats sneaking up on gazelles, chameleons popping out of camouflage to grab insects with their tongues – that sort of thing. Mimicking the animals, my friends and I would play hide and seek in the woods – hunting each other with pellet guns (I’m really not sure how none of us ended up blind.

I have always done my best to avoid Microsoft System Center, especially Config Manager. I don’t hate the product (It’s fine, whatever.), but I loath the culture and business decisions that SCCM enables and in many ways represents – turn every knob, customize every widget, control ALL the things. SCCM is the embodiment of big, ponderous IT driven by big, nonsensical bureaucracy. It’s not the tool’s fault, it’s just how everyone ended up using it.

You did it. You rejected the status quo and took a chance with a startup instead of the established safe bet. Now you’re working with that new company to gear their product toward what your company needs. Be very careful what you ask for. Growing up Companies, like people, are always challenged by who they want to be when they grow up. You can see this in startups as well as established companies like Microsoft and Cisco.

It’s been a few weeks since Cisco Live, and I’ve had time to digest a lot of what I heard and saw there. There were some pleasant surprises: The DevNet area was awesome and highlighted some interesting things that Cisco is doing with Infrastructure as Code. There were also disappointments: Intercloud remains a confused mess, some vendors went super-cheesy with their presentations, and the follow-up sales calls are relentless (Seriously, Puppet Labs, I didn’t need another 25 voicemails.

Managing end-user devices, simply put, sucks. It requires a significant amount of infrastructure and staff. It leeches time from your IT department and end users. And the more you try to wrap your arms around all the devices in your company, the more problems you have. Trying to fully control and manage every device connected to the network results in unhappy users and broken IT staff, huddling in data closets, weeping – while the executives upstairs are piped a false sense of security.

One thing you won’t hear when a vendor is pitching their cloud solutions to you is that the biggest success factor for your move to the cloud is a willingness to embrace constraints – being OK with the box you’re putting yourself in. Constraints aren’t inherently bad – I use them all the time in photography. Knowing what my camera can and cannot do pushes me to approach shots differently, often resulting in a photo that is far better than what I would have achieved if I had attacked the problem head-on with all the camera equipment I wanted available to me.

In less than 24 hours I will be boarding a plane headed to San Diego. It’s my first year to attend Cisco Live and I’m hopeful I’ll see something different than what I’ve seen from Cisco over the past few years. That companies are migrating so quickly to op-ex, cloud services models seems to have surprised Cisco – they have been fumbling for a good while now, trying to find their way in the new world.

The Hungarian forint is not in high demand outside of Hungary, as evidenced by the 10,000 forint bills being spit out by the ATM. The 30,000 forints I receive are equal to roughly $107 US. Knowing they will be nearly impossible to exchange later, I do my best to spend them all. Even with its weak currency, Budapest is experiencing a renaissance. The old buildings in the center of Pest have been restored and there are new construction projects underway on nearly every block.