So, Did You Hear the One About the InfoWorld Columnist? - Page 2

Kennedy said the dual roles continued largely below the radar until last week's story about Windows 7 memory usage raised some eyebrows.

Said Kennedy: "I had data points about how PCs are actually performing, and applied these benchmark metrics developed back with Morgan Stanley," which he said has been a Devil Mountain client for years, with 3,000 seats under license. "And [I] found way more Windows 7 machines using amounts of memory ... that they were going to start swapping to disk."

"According to our experience and methodology, that would indicate that they were going to get slowed down by virtual memory swapping."

However, the claims in the report immediately set off a firestorm of criticism that ultimately seems to have shed some unwanted attention on the relationship between Craig Barth's Devil Mountain Software and Randall Kennedy.

"All hell broke loose. Some of those sites started poking around, asking 'Who's Devil Mountain? Who's Craig Barth, and who's this company?'" Kennedy said. "The rest is history."

I'm still awaiting word back from InfoWorld on how much they knew about Kennedy's alternate persona, and when. Eric Knorr's note indicates that InfoWorld discovered the subterfuge on Friday, though Kennedy has charged publicly that the publication's management knew far earlier -- and didn't raise any objection.

As noted above, InfoWorld and Kennedy also had a relationship beyond his serving as a blogger: In 2007, InfoWorld began offering a branded version of Devil Mountain's XPnet client -- the InfoWorld Windows Sentinel. According to Kennedy, Devil Mountain is a one-man shop. That means that if InfoWorld was really in the dark about the ruse, then Kennedy was able to shield Devil Mountain's public research efforts under an assumed name, masquerading as the sole contact for the InfoWorld Windows Sentinel deal while also serving as a key contributor to the site's editorial content.

As it turned out, Devil Mountain's deal with InfoWorld helped grow its XPnet public research work dramatically, Kennedy said. It generated PC performance data that soon found itself mentioned in several of his pieces.

"The reality is [the InfoWorld column] was distracting me tremendously from the real work out in the field that I wanted to do with the exo.performance.network," he said. "It was languishing. So I struck up a deal with InfoWorld."

And, of course, all that work culminated ultimately (and somewhat ironically) in the controversial Windows 7 report that resulted in his unmasking as Barth and the loss of that InfoWorld gig.

Now that the cat's out of the bag, he remains unrepentant about his role in the matter.

"A lot of people are pontificating that you violated this trust, or breached that ... I didn't do anything unethical in terms of misrepresenting data or trying to lie about something more than just my name."

And as for Devil Mountain Software, Kennedy admits that all the negative publicity isn't likely to help the company's relationship with customers like Morgan Stanley, which has what he described as a 3,000-seat license for its PC monitoring tool, DMS Clarity Suite, along with a maintenance contract that comes up for renewal in the months ahead.

But Kennedy said that he's similarly undeterred in that regard, as well.

Devil Mountain Software "is not going anywhere," Kennedy said. "We've got 24,000 registered users of XPnet.com... we've got our blog, and we're going to keep publishing research."

Christopher Saunders is senior managing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.