01.24.09
Novell News Summary – Part III: Strategy, CMDB, Virtualisation and More
NOVELL’S TECHNICAL officer takes stock and provides an overview where he explains Novell’s strategy. The key separation that he makes is as follows:
The four areas were:
1. Leadership. Why our products lead the industry.
2. Delivery. In the “engine room”—how we build those products, what processes result in leadership, and our commitment to interoperability as a design point in every product.
3. Incubation. How we take breakout ideas and make them into businesses.
4. Strategy and Vision. Fossa, our overarching technical strategy. Novell is an industry leader in next generation technologies and standards.
Interestingly enough, this post comes from “neomadness” instead of “ibruce” (Ian Bruce, Novell’s PR Director). What happened to Ian Bruce? Is he no longer editing these for the CTO blog? Is there a bigger untold story?
Either way, “Jeff Jaffe” does have a blog account that he uses. It’s a WordPress-based blog and it’s edited by multiple accounts.
Moving on a bit, we also find the Microsoft-corrupted Burton Group writing a list that it calls the “Short List”. Under provisioning leader it includes Microsoft’s ally, Novell.
The provisioning market has undergone significant changes over the years due to mergers and acquisitions and vendors leaving the market altogether. Although the market has been volatile, it is stabilizing and clear leaders have emerged: Oracle, Sun, IBM, CA, Novell, and Courion are capturing a dominant share of customers and offering innovative solutions that will drive technologies forward.
CMDB
Novell is trying to be hip by introducing a network-based “social” solution.
Novell Inc (Nasdaq:NOVL), a software company and distributor of Linux value-added operating systems, announced on Tuesday (20 January) the general availability of myCMDB, a web-based application that leverages social networking to enhance enterprise configuration management database (CMDB) usability, accessibility and accuracy.
The press release about this happens to contain a buzzword that Novell has fancied a lot recently: agile.
Novell today announced the general availability of myCMDB™, the only Web-based application that taps into the power of social networking to significantly enhance enterprise configuration management database (CMDB) usability, accessibility and accuracy. Obtained through Novell’s recent acquisition of Managed Objects, myCMDB is the industry’s first product to utilize a community-based architecture, similar to social networking applications, to provide a single view of federated data center resources across any physical or virtual environment. myCMDB is the latest addition to Novell’s portfolio of solutions that enables customers to build an agile and interoperable next-generation data center using their existing IT investments.
SCO
Without Groklaw, there’s no telling what exactly is going on in there. Groklaw has presented some new filings that it’s dealing with, but these are visible or accessible to site members only. Here is a neat SCO cartoon from Free Software Magazine and some shreds of Psystar, whose story is becoming a little reminiscent of SCO’s.
Last week in my Open for Business blog, I bemoaned the fact that SCO Group just won’t die and is refusing to let go of its intellectual property litigation against Novell and other Linux distributors. This week, the “Give it up, already!” theme continues.
Some are suspecting that Psystar may be used by a company like Microsoft to daemonise Apple or extort money from Apple.
Brainshare
Brainshare is called off already [1, 2, 3], but IDG brings some contextual analysis and nostalgia.
And then there was Novell’s announcement last month that it was canceling its 2009 BrainShare user and partner conference. Last week, I asked John Dragoon, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Novell, how many Novell employees were laid off as a result of the cancellation.
“Zero,” Dragoon replied, noting that the event was canceled because of cuts in customer travel budgets. “Registration was tracking below 50% of normal, and we were prepared to scale the event back to an equivalent cost to Novell but decided to cancel for this year and investigate alternate methods to deliver the information and training our customers and partners are seeking,” Dragoon said. “Employees who were working on BrainShare are now working on these alternatives,” which will include online classes, virtual conferences and local tours.
With companies tightening their travel budgets, we’re expecting a slower year on the IT conference circuit. Indeed, we’ve already seen some cancellations and cutbacks. For example, Novell recently cancelled its annual BrainShare conference, scheduled for March in Salt Lake City, citing a lack of confirmed attendees. And while still busy, the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a little slower than in past years.
Netware
Still on this subject of what could be, here are new memories of Novell’s antitrust complaints against Microsoft.
Way back in 1993, Novell made a complaint to the EU that Microsoft was indulging in anti-competitive practices.
Here is a separate memo from the same year:
Novell recently announced (yet another) record quarter of revenue growth and profitability. The frosting on this cake was to lay off 4% of their 3,600 employees. Novell is serving weenies, not shrimp.
Virtualisation
PAN Communications involves Novell in its new announcement of “Strong Momentum” — whatever that means in practical (and concrete) terms.
PAN Communications, a mid-sized public relations firm specializing in technology, consumer and professional services, today announced that it has added eight clients, including two international companies, to its roster across all three of its portfolios. The news comes on the heels of its Novell win in November and several renewed client partnerships for 2009.
This was also covered by Dan at ZDNet.
Egenera is one of a number of competitors offering orchestration and auotmation software to manage physical and virtual resources. They’re competiting with products from Cassatt, Novell, Scalent Systems, Surgient, VMLogix and several others.
Novell’s virtualisation technology was also mentioned very briefly in The Register.
With the second release of VirtualIQ Pro, ToutVirtual added support for Microsoft’s Virtual Server hypervisor (type 2) as well as the Xen instance inside Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (similarly type 2).
For GroupWise, there was nothing much apart from a couple of articles that mention support from Blackberry (RIM).
The Internet portion of the phones is different. The BlackBerry Storm includes additional mobile applications such as Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise. Each phone runs on a different mobile operating system.
BlackBerry Enterprise Server tightly integrates with IBM Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise and uses advanced encryption and IT policy controls to enable secure, push-based wireless access to email and other corporate data.
GWAVA will be having its bash pretty shortly.
Identity Management
We mentioned the SharePoint + Novell news last week, but one person argues that it was a stretch and disproportionate exaggeration.
In fact, reading the press release (parroted in many of the news stories), you’d think Novell was some sort of dependency of Microsoft (which, along with IBM, created the WS-* protocols). You could almost hear the hushed tones as you read “Leveraging Novell’s groundbreaking technical collaboration with Microsoft…” grants the company a real breakthrough: “As a result, Novell Access Manager enables IT security administrators to grant non-Windows directories users, partners or organizations, single sign-on access to Microsoft Web-based products such as Microsoft Office SharePoint.”
Here is a new press release about Novell’s Identity Manager receiving further support.
iMIS (Identropy Managed Identity Service) for Novell is an offering that allows clients who host their own Novell Identity Management infrastructure to outsource the monitoring, management, reporting and remediation of their Identity Management infrastructure.
New York, NY (PRWEB) January 20, 2009 — Today, Identropy announced the expansion of its Managed Identity Services suite with iMIS for Novell Identity Manager. iMIS (Identropy Managed Identity Service) for Novell is an offering that allows clients who host their own Novell Identity Management infrastructure to outsource the monitoring, management, reporting and remediation of the infrastructure to Identropy. iMIS fills the costly void created by poorly architected Identity Management solutions by optimizing inefficient workflows and leveraging Identropy’s Identity Management experts.
Security
Apart from some few advisories, there were those reports about Symantec and Novell, as mentioned in more details last week.
Customers are provided extended client support so more endpoints can be centrally managed. Symantec Endpoint Encryption now includes support for clients not managed by Active Directory. The new version includes Novell eDirectory client support as well as full management capabilities for non-domain clients.
People
Former Novell employees were seen traveling around a bit. Here are examples that we found:
1. NetMotion Wireless Expands into Europe with Mobile Productivity Software Offering
Prior to joining Citrix, Mr. Ergün held the position of managing partner at LOGO Business Software GmbH, where he launched a German subsidiary. His previous experience also includes roles at Novell and EDS Electronic Data Systems.
2. Vacant Provo City Council seat filled
Acheson is vice president of marketing for VitalSmarts, a Provo company. He has worked for Microsoft, SCO, Certiport, Novell and WordPerfect. An attorney, Acheson earned an English degree from BYU and law degrees from Seattle University and the University of Edinburgh.
3. Microsoft Veteran Tapped as Response Point GM
Prior to joining Microsoft, Frederiksen worked for Novell as a systems engineer. He has a master’s degree in business administration from the Darden School at the University of Virginia and a bachelor’s of science degree in electrical engineering from Lehigh University.
4. Cui Bono?
I don’t know how I ended up at Career Blazers (yes, I cringe myself at the name). It was like one of those plucky, poor-but-honest people you read about in Victorian novels–everything clean, freshly painted, and nonetheless falling apart. But I was too desperate to get out of that secretary’s chair to be picky. I gave them something like $5,000, in 1995, to teach me to be a Certified Netware Engineer–an administrator of Novell’s corporate networking software.
There is even a Microsoft connection in that last one and Novell’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, gets his due.
Partners
Novell partners were made visible though various press releases. There was a very short mention here:
Key Partnerships: Lieberman Software continues to maintain strong strategic alliances in varying capacities with Microsoft, Cisco, Novell, Red Hat, BMC Software, Oracle, Intel, IBM, nCipher, and RSA. The company has recently completed several new RSA SecurID and Intel product certifications.
Another list that includes Novell (about Autonomy):
More than 350 companies OEM Autonomy technology, including BEA, Citrix, EDS, H-P, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO, and the company has over 400 VARs and Systems Integrators. The
Also see this press release from Autonomy, among other writeups:
• Software – Special prices are available for a variety of programs from major companies, including Novell, Oracle and Trend Micro.
Marketing
Last week we wrote about Novell's Yorkshire-based Web manipulators and here is another press release about them (also here):
One of the world’s largest infrastructure software companies has appointed a Yorkshire (UK)-based company to manage its Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.
These are people who are gaming the Web for profit.
Novell picked U.K.-based search marketing agency. Infrastructure software company Novell went with U.K.-based Search Laboratory. Novell’s requirements include search marketing for multilingual SEO and PPC management and localization of online advertising. Search Laboratory was up against nine other suppliers for the contract.
We also mentioned the Novell employee who puts Novell advertisements in YouTube. He is still doing it, the first new addition being this one.
He uploaded another one, which can be found here.
Novell’s marketing strategy — whether it’s official or not — is a little shallow, so curious people can see it progressing. █
