07.20.10
Gemini version available ♊︎Novell Comes to New Zealand
Summary: News from Novell in New Zealand and some general Novell news too
EARLIER on we wrote about New Zealand, which wants to resolve the software patents situation once and for all. Novell is on the side favouring software patents, in general at least. To Novell, patents on software are a big business.
Novell picks up some pieces in New Zealand and attempts to “rebuild [its] local business,” according to this report:
At the time of writing, the vendor had only one staff member locally, based in Wellington, focused on consulting services.
It wants to add a country lead based in Wellington, along with a corporate salesperson there to manage existing accounts. It also wants to recruit a pre and post-sales technical specialist in Auckland.
From the same publication on the same week:
The Novell partner had hoped to be appointed as a third party, or franchisee, to build the vendor’s local brand and sales. However, Novell has decided against this model and is reinvesting in its own business in New Zealand.
Novell does a great deal of proprietary software business. It mustn’t be assumed that SUSE is Novell’s main product. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) has defended SUSE all these years, even when he wrote for eWEEK that SLED was considered acceptable to him. He continues to defend the Microsoft-taxed SLE* and OpenSUSE, even this month. eWEEK promotes Microsoft software along with SLES, as the summary alone shows:
I kicked off my tests with Hyper-V. Owing to the infamous Linux collaboration arrangement that Novell and Microsoft began back in 2006, I expected the path to running SLES under Hyper-V to be particularly smooth. Right off the bat, I was pleased to find that the so-called enlightened drivers required to use full-speed virtual components under Hyper-V were automatically installed on my test instance.
Why can’t Novell emphasise more of VMware, Xen, and KVM? The first two are somewhat beneficial to Microsoft and Novell chooses to collaborate with these (while mostly ignoring the Red Hat-owned KVM). Novell still has PlateSpin, which was criticised last week:
Nelson used PlateSpin’s PowerConvert tool for physical-to-virtual machine migrations and workload management, and he said he received excellent service and support.
“We could order and activate our licenses without so much as a hiccup, and whenever we called for support, we always got directly to an engineer,” Nelson said. “During one support incident, the engineer conferenced in one of the actual developers because he wanted them to be aware first-hand of the issue we were dealing with.”
After Novell bought them, things changed, he said. Allocating and managing licenses now requires multiple sites, and support involves “a triad of never-ending, nonhuman phone prompts, scripted questions from a nontechnical person, and the feeling of pulling teeth to get to a real, knowledgeable engineer,” Nelson said.
“I miss the old days,” He added.
In other Novell news, it’s all Fog Computing and proprietary software, e.g.:
i. 14 BSM Service Providers to Watch (see this recent post about Novell’s BSM business)
Novell – Novell’s portfolio includes versatile role-aware dashboards, solid correlation and analytics, a CMDB, social networking capabilities, as well as more than 70 fully supported adapters designed to optimized data inputs from other monitoring tools. Novell therefore excels in enabling a unified approach to service management across many diverse investments. It earned a Value Leader position and the Best BSM SI Integration award.
ii. Arrow ECS Receives EMEA Distributor of the Year Award from Novell (press release, also covered here)
iiii. Server OSes need to evolve to stay relevant
He cited the recent announcement made by VMware to partner Novell to complement its existing virtualization software with server OS technology as example of the “growing demand” for options that incorporate both server OS and virtualization platforms.
iv. WEM: Innovation in Customer Experience
“Feature / function innovation has long been the mainstay of technology companies and the primary sort key of competition for many of us,” John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer for Novell, wrote as 2009 drew to a close. “And while many technology companies continue to innovate in this area at astounding rates, customers aren’t demanding the type of innovation they can’t consume, use or integrate into their business.
OK, so Novell says that “feature / function innovation” is its strength. Does that incorporate Novell’s obsession with software patents for example (the “innovation” part)? █
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gnufreex said,
July 20, 2010 at 10:38 pm
When we are at New Zealand, I found out why Ubuntu Forums went south. Apple zealot from New Zealand is running the show:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1535333
I was always wondering why every Ubuntu forum tread about Apple gets closed as soon someone says something bad about the company. It turns out that main Admin is Apple shareholder.
Currently FSF and GPL are actively demonized and everyone who opose to that gets infractions and his posts get removed.
No wonder why FSF/GPL/GNU/Linux bashers from Linusux.org get protected by the admin (that one in particular) when he’s Apple shareholder. I always thought he’s just a fanboy, but there you go.
gnufreex Reply:
July 20th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9614802#post9614802
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9615034&postcount=13
This is actual post when he brags about his dividends.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
July 21st, 2010 at 1:19 am
Apple still gets a free pass in some circles (where “not Microsoft” exceeds the “not proprietary” as priority).
gnufreex Reply:
July 21st, 2010 at 12:29 pm
True. I get sick when see someone on some forum links Apple’s “Open at the source” page (this one http://www.apple.com/opensource/ ) and claims that Apple is somehow open source company and that we should thank them for CUPS or some other thing they hijacked. Every time someone mention Apple, that page and ApplePraise comes up from some zealot. Anywhere on internet, every forum is full of zealots.
They are in some way even worse than Microsoft, with all zealots and shills. When FSF poked around iPhone store recently, they got demonized and Apple is holier than pope. Just look at comments here http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/05/fsf-apples-itunes-store-terms-of-service-at-odds-with-gpl.ars
I have no idea what got into those people, they all say goodbye to reason and sanity when word “Apple” gets mentioned.
As for UF, I hoped at least Linux forums should be purged from that insanity. It turned to be even worse. Ubuntu can’t succeed on desktop this way, when they have no following, no advocacy. And Admin of UF preach Apple and Microsoft regularly.
I thought writing to Mark Shuttleworth, but I don’t think he could do anything now (even if he wanted). Ubuntu is dead, from point of software freedom. It actually worse than SuSE now.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
July 21st, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Mark doesn’t run Ubuntu now. He hired Asay, the biggest Apple ‘fanboy’ known to human kind (before he joined Canonical).