“They may be very strategic in terms of capabilities or coverage they have in a particular market and we want to grow with them into a particular level of the program.” The Novell program is made up of Silver, Gold and Platinum partner tiers. The vendor has also released a deal registration system to help partners grow their business.
What's left for Novell is mostly old technology, but that too is receiving very meager attention in the press, for example this new bit.
The 6 TB product includes 10 agents that are placed on the devices to be protected. The agents support a number of OSes, including Novell NetWare, Solaris and IBM i. The standard 12 TB model includes 20 agents, and the high-capacity 12 TB model comes with 35 agents.
Storage
Novell is claimed to be abandoning some once-promising areas where it simply gave up. Someone from IDG has just taken a thorough look at Novell's Storage Manager and finally wrote about it:
Novell introduced Novell Storage Manager some years back. Formerly called File System Factory, the software allows IT managers to monitor and manage the unstructured data - Word, Excel, PDFs - residing on the file servers in their environments.
We at SSG-NOW had a demo of Novell Storage Manager last week. The product, which manages not only Novell NetWare and Open Enterprise Server file servers, also manages Windows NTFS servers. It is able to discover information, retrieve it and store it on disk, tape or archive – all locations where it can be managed during its lifecycle.
'Cloud'/Virtualisation
Last week there was a lot of chatter about a group which is centered around 'clouds' (DMTF) and this week we find more such examples in the press where Novell gets mentioned:
New appliances often raise questions about supportability, but not in this case. PlateSpin Forge is built on the Dell PowerEdge 2950 III server for the PlateSpin Forge 510 and 525 models. For protected workloads, the PlateSpin Forge 310 and 325 models are built on the PowerEdge 1950 III. PlateSpin Forge is supported by Novell, with any equipment exchanges being handled by Dell.
Microsoft has recently launched an initiative through it’s interoperability division to prove Hyper-V can compete in the Linux realm. Microsoft has partnered with Novell to provide Hyper-V support for SUSE Linux (SLES 10). Expanding on this support Novell has built a Systems Center Configuration manager Management Pack for SLES 10. This management pack is compatible with the SCOM 2007 R2 Release Candidate with hopes to be GA by the end of this year.
The following two articles about Citrix gave Novell's SUSE a mention along with Red Hat:
In an email to SearchStorage.com to answer a question about its StorageLink involvement, an EMC spokesperson wrote "we … support Xen from RedHat and Novell. If we see demand for the Citrix derivative, we'll support it in the future."
Citrix also said that Novell's recently announced SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5.3, and Debian 5.0 are now supported as guest operating systems in the XenServer 5.5 beta. (The CentOS and Oracle clones of RHEL 5.3 will also run as guests).
Mail and Collaboration
Novell's role in this area was mentioned in GCN regarding unified messaging systems. An article claiming that that the "[r]ecession [is] pushing sales of collaboration tools" has also just been published and Novell was one among the "powerhouses" listed.
While traditional powerhouses such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Novell are expected to take the lead in collaboration sales, smaller vendors could do well in the coming years by focusing on niche markets and seeking acquisition deals with some of the larger players.
GroupWise now receives support from Neverfail. The press release can be found in:
Neverfail(R), a leading global software company providing affordable continuous availability and disaster recovery solutions, today announced at WES 2009 that Neverfail for BlackBerry(R) Enterprise Server can now protect implementations that include the Novell GroupWise(R) messaging system.
The following articles too mentioned Groupwise and Novell in the context of BlackBerry (although it's pretty minor for Novell):
Movement of former Novell employees sure matters, so here is the observation that Steve Harmon, once a director at Novell, will be speaking for Cisco.
His business development experience includes work as a former member of Cisco's Strategic Alliances organization where he led the global alliance team responsible for Cisco's relationship with Hewlett Packard. Prior to joining Cisco, Harmon was director, strategic alliances for Novell and a member of Novell's Strategic Investments team. He holds a B.S. degree in Business Management (Information Systems emphasis) and a J.D. degree, both from Brigham Young University.
Warner has also served as Director of Field Sales, Operations, & Education for Novell Latin America and as Director of U.S. Sales at Novell Inc. and at WordPerfect Corporation.
Sophie Lawson, marketing manager at Novell, stated she was impressed with the new conference venue, while others commended the popular keynote speech from former home secretary David Blunkett.
Sales and marketing people are considered expendable, but the loss of a co-founder is seen as a sign of something more troubling. And so it was Taylor left in June 2008, with senior vice president of business development Lars Nordwall going after three years at SugarCRM - one year short of Taylor. Nordwall is a veteran of Cambridge Technology partners and Novell.
At this point it would be rather foolish to assume that IBM will let Red Hat just "do its own thing" or maintain its corporate culture, identity, projects etc.
