01.21.09
Special Partner of Novell Bought Out by Microsoft Partner
Novell recruits Microsoft employees to become executives and its leadership in general is cause of concern, so it’s only reasonable to at least be a little apprehensive when an ally of Microsoft buys a company that is a close partner of Novell.
PDS Acquires Provident Technologies
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Provident’s long-term clients include Sheboygan Falls-based Johnsonville Sausage, for which Provident implemented comprehensive Novell identity and systems management solutions to achieve a single point of control for thousands of employee and digital partner identities.
The resulting Novell-based solution for Johnsonville paid for itself in a matter of months, reducing user management time and costs by 80 percent, reducing the number of passwords by 85 percent and cutting IT travel time and costs by 90 percent.
There is a report following this press release, but it’s not a large acquisition, so not much more coverage could be found.
Sheboygan-based Provident Technologies is a Novell Platinum partner specializing in identity management and Linux-based solutions. Provident has engineering and sales divisions in Sheboygan, Madison and Milwaukee. The company is also an authorized sales and service repair facility for Hewlett Packard and Samsung printers, HP workstations, laptops and tablet PCs.
Here is the more interesting portion:
Provident Technologies is a Novell Platinum partner specializing in identity management and Linux-based solutions with engineering and sales divisions in Sheboygan, Madison and Milwaukee. Provident also is an authorized sales and service repair facility for Hewlett Packard and Samsung printers, HP workstations, laptops and tablet PCs.
All Provident staff will be joining PDS as part of the acquisition, including chief operating officer Angela Daniels, who will lead PDS’s provisioning and platform management software services as a director in the computing architecture group. As part of the transition, PDS will maintain an office in the Sheboygan area indefinitely.
“Provident Technologies boasts rich IT infrastructure expertise, and we are pleased to welcome them to the team,” said PDS chief technical officer Austin Park. “The skills added by the incoming group of consultants in open source, Novell Zenworks and Novell identity management solutions will complement our already strong consulting capabilities in configuration management with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and LANDesk.
“PDS continues to strengthen the Microsoft platform business, which we are well known for,” Park added. “But we can now offer our customers more choice with expertise in open source software as well.”
Provident’s long-term clients include Sheboygan Falls-based Johnsonville Sausage, for which Provident implemented comprehensive Novell identity and systems management solutions to achieve a single point of control for thousands of employee and digital partner identities.
This means that they may intend to use Novell technologies to make “Microsoft platform business” stronger. █
Ian said,
January 21, 2009 at 10:17 pm
I wouldn’t read too much into that press release. Neither Zenworks, ZCM, or IDM are open source. They can run on top of SLES but that’s the extent of the open source piece of it.
Generally speaking, Novell’s bread and butter software has always been primarily aimed at managing microsoft client environments. This hasn’t changed since the days of DOS. Only since SLED 10 came out have they made a conceited effort to manage the linux desktop.
I guess the only thing I get out of it, which makes sense to me anyway, is that not everyone wants to use microsoft technologies to manage their microsoft environment. Maybe that’s what they’re trying to leverage by eating up Provident.