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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.