On Tuesday morning, March 23, at 10:30 in Salt Lake City, Jean Staten Healy and I will be presenting a talk called “Linux as a Catalyst for a Smarter Planet” at Novell’s BrainShare conference. The talk is coded as SPR201 and will be in room 150 G.
At the annual Novell Brainshare user's conference this week, Novell announced it was providing attendees with a Novell Pulse account and five invitations, which they can use to bring colleagues on board. Pulse is a cloud-based collaboration platform, which we first covered last year in a One on one interview with Ken Muir of Novell.
Perhaps Google Wave would've gotten more attention if the initial focus was on the enterprise rather than the consumer. Here to test that theory is Novell and their new Wave-like platform called Novell Pulse. It's social, you can chat with it and collaborate on documents with colleagues, but its focus is on the business side of things.
SAP and Microsoft develop proprietary equivalents and the following post mentions Pulse along with Microsoft.
For on premises, Microsoft promotes Office Communications Server. The next release, slated for sometime in 2010, is filled with social media capabilities. The effort reminds me a bit of Novell Pulse, a corporate social media and collaboration platform that Novell will soon promote to hosting providers.
Keith Shaw talks with Ken Muir from Novell about ways IT can help improve real-time collaboration efforts.
More audio from the same site can be found here and it's about Novell's fate (affecting the stock). This link from IDG UK lead to an article which was mentioned before.
SCO
The SCO case is long and complex. It would be easy to resolve (dismiss), but SCO gets money to carry on with the smears, which mostly repeat themselves over and over again. Groklaw is the main site that covers this case and some of the latest articles are:
The second week in the Salt Lake City jury trial between the SCO Group and Novell about the copyright to Unix has uncovered further surprising details of this never-ending story. First, SCO's former CEO Darl McBride, who was called as a witness, confirmed that SCO didn't need the debated copyrights for the development of its family of operating systems, and that the copyrights were only required for the licensing business of the vendor's SCOSource division. Then the previously unaware jury members were informed that a judge had already delivered a ruling in this matter, but that his decision had been overturned. The trial will go into its third week while, at the same time, Novell's Brainshare conference will be held in Salt Lake City.
Dogged by ongoing legal costs and courtroom setbacks, the company was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2007. Throughout the bankruptcy process, SCO has said that it would continue to appeal the cases against IBM, Novell and others.
Today at the SCO v. Novell trial, Novell called Gregory Jones, and then SCO called Jack Messman as a hostile witness. His deposition was played in part earlier, but this was Mr. Messman testifying live. Then the Michael DeFazio deposition video was played. And then Novell called Tor Braham. Only two more days, and then it goes to the jury.
Novell has filed two motions today, one for a judgment on SCO's slander of title claim -- the promised Rule 50(a) motion -- and one to strike testimony inconsistent with the unambiguous contract language.
Novell points out that the only evidence SCO presented regarding malice is testimony by Maureen O'Gara of a conversation with Chris Stone, and no one corroborates her story, first of all, and second, O'Gara admitted she can't recall exactly what was said in the conversation with Chris Stone. She merely surmised things. And that's not clear and convincing evidence. No reasonable jury could find personal malice in the picture, so Novell says as a matter of law, judgment should be granted as a matter of law on SCO's claim for punitive damages.
The contract between Novell and Santa Cruz contained ambiguous language about the sale of copyrights that is at the center of the dispute being aired before the jury.
"Novell drops NetWare support," says this report which is complemented by another that says: "Novell drops NetWare support: What do millions of users do?"
Novell has announced that general support for NetWare (on physical machines) will end this month. This includes Open Enterprise Server and Open Enterprise Server 2 on NetWare.
Novell has announced that general support for NetWare (on physical machines) will end this month. This includes Open Enterprise Server and Open Enterprise Server 2 on NetWare. Novell, however, is providing extended support for these users through March 2012. Customers continue to receive general support for NetWare 6.5 running as a virtualized operating system under Xen on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). In addition, customers that migrate their NetWare systems to Open Enterprise Server 2 on SLES continue to receive general support. NetWare services include iPrint, iFolder, directory services via eDirectory, and more.
The news caused many pundits to proclaim that Novell was taking its first steps toward abandoning Xen altogether. This would be especially odd, since it was only in February that Novell and Citrix announced that they were partnering on virtualization, an extension of a year-od partnership between the two for Xen. The news in February was that Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was certified as a "Perfect Guest" running on Citrix XenServer and both companies will provide joint technical support to customers.
With the announcement of the upcoming summer release of Service Pack 1 (SP1), Novell will officially support the KVM virtualisation solution in version 11 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine was already included as a "technology preview" in SLES 11, however, with SP1, Novell will offer official support for guest systems including SLES 9 to 11, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, XP and Vista, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 and 5.
Novell's own hype around intelligent workload management (IWM) carries on:
Novell is so confident of the market for intelligent workload management that it is restructuring its business around the technology. But what exactly does it do and why is it needed?
In December 2009, Novell announced a restructure of its business to facilitate its belief that intelligent workload management (IWM) will play a major role in its future.
IWM might be an unfamiliar term in the world of virtual enterprise management, but Novell believes it is a technology that will help to allay fears about the security of cloud
computing operations.
This is a new product without any success stories that Novell publishes.
Information access technology provider ZyLab (news, site) has just upgraded its email management software so that client companies will be able to archive directly from Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise.
Lincoln Property Company, a real estate management firm based in Dallas, Texas, has about 4,000 employees scattered throughout the U.S. CIO Jay Kinney just moved almost 1,000 of them to Google Apps, ditching Novell GroupWise in the process. Kinney said he ran the numbers and Google came out ahead. His users are already spread far and wide, so managing the system remotely was a natural fit.
Callidus Software, a provider of sales performance management solutions, has announced that Novell, a provider of infrastructure software solutions, has implemented Callidus Monaco's objective management solution to develop and manage its management by objectives or MBO programs.
Novell's PR people have published many guest posts about identity management [1, 2, 3] and later on we'll show new video commercials.
Security
Apart from a couple of SUSE items [1, 2] there was nothing to see here really.
Webroot, a leading Internet security provider for the consumer, enterprise and SMB markets, today announced it has appointed Masahiro Morimoto to the new role of vice president, Asia-Japan.
[...]
Morimoto has also established and managed subsidiary operations of several major software companies, including Digital Research (acquired by Novell in 1991), Sony Microsystems (a division of Sony America) and Xerox. In addition, as vice president of Novell, Morimoto developed the company's system technology for non-conventional Novell business environments including the retail, office-automation market and production-automation markets.
Here are some Novell partners that can be seen as worthy of a mention, at least based on Novell.
Mainline – Data Center specialized partner
Paragon Development Systems – End-User Computing specialized partner
Deloitte – Identity and Security specialized partner
Agilysys – Rising Star partner
Infosys – Rising Star partner
Infosys is an interesting one because of its very strong ties with Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15].
As a leading IBM Premier Business Partner, and the largest System z partner, Mainline has helped more than 150 System z customers install SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, creating customized virtualization and workload management solutions.
Novell gets mentioned in relation to Mercury Solutions a couple of times [1, 2]. Nothing fascinating or significant here.
Marketing
To coincide with BrainShare, Novell's own staff has released many advertisements that we put here in no particular order.
It certainly does feel like the slop hype is reaching the "late life crisis" and companies that benefited from this bubble are overdue for a day of reckoning
The Microsoft-sponsored 'FSFE', which violates the terms of use of its name, is causing confusion [...] formally-recognised institutions got tricked into thinking that the Microsoft-sponsored 'FSFE' is the FSF
