Summary: Novell's products -- just like its future -- are rather foggy

SEVERAL years ago Novell was marketing itself as an "open source" company because it was good PR. Nowadays, as we showed last week (and before that too), Novell uses the so-called 'cloud' bonanza as marketing pitch (we call it Fog Computing, which is a more suitable term emphasising the associated dangers). Here are some examples from this week's news:

Managing application licences will define limits of cloud computing

[...]

Describing the strategy during his keynote presentation at the company's Brainshare Europe conference, Javier Colado, president, Novell EMEA, said, "CIOs both need to support flexibility and regulatory compliance. Intelligent workload management provides an ability to mange [application] workloads in a secure and scalable way," which he said would allow them to meet these distinct requirements.

This was also mentioned in a new interview with Novell's CEO:

Identity Manager 4 is at the heart of Novell's latest platform push, dubbed Intelligent Workload Management (IWM), in which applications are categorised with security credentials to automate deployment. IWM allows IT departments to specify whether an application can only run on physical hardware, whether it is okay to run on virtual machines, or whether it is safe to deploy in the public cloud.

Now it's the "public cloud". The word "public" is yet another euphemism (another popular one is "private").

Novell's Identity Manager is now marketed using the same buzzwords that include "cloud". Here are some of the latest headlines (from the past few days alone):

• Novell Identity Manager extended to cloud



• Novell puts Identity Management into beta



• Novell ID Manager 4 Spans Enterprise, Cloud



• Novell Identity Manager goes up to cloud



• Novell announces introduction of Identity Manager 4 to offer secure identity and access management

This is a complete list. Notice how many headlines contain the word "cloud". ⬆