Blog Entry

Remember the BASF advertising campaign from a few years ago? Consumers had never heard of them. Company officials wanted people to know that BASF chemicals were critical ingredients in many of the products consumers purchased—even though BASF didn’t actually manufacture the products. “We don’t make the clothes you wear, we make them better… We don’t make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.” It may be the longest advertising slogan in history—and yes, it was very effective.

Novell has a lot in common with BASF. O.K., BASF is a Novell customer—but that’s not where I’m going here. Like the chemical industry giant, Novell shares a similar situation with its WorkloadIQ approach to the intelligent workload management market. Novell doesn’t offer Security as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service—or any number of pay-as-you-go computing services that are popping up daily in the cloud. However, our WorkloadIQ products and solutions seamlessly provide critical capabilities that ensure the security, efficiency and integrity of the world’s leading business computing systems.

Novell is the only vendor that currently offers a complete portfolio of products for intelligent workload management. Yet, with all of these capabilities, Novell doesn’t intend to offer on-demand services directly to customers. That’s where Novell partners come in. Novell partners comprise a who’s who of technology providers, operating system vendors, VARs, ISVs, managed service providers, telcos, hardware OEMs and systems integrators—far too many to mention in one blog.

However, since virtualization is a core component of WorkloadIQ, I’ll highlight one well-known partner today: VMware. Last year, Novell and VMware announced an OEM agreement in which VMware began distributing and supporting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware. The company also standardized its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SLES. This greatly simplifies the process of building IWM solutions that can be easily ported across clouds.

In late January of this year, more major players standardized on Novell solutions—to help make their products even better. Dell’s internal development teams adopted SUSE Linux exclusively to build, deploy and maintain its entire family of Dell-branded virtual and hardware-based appliances. For some time now, SAP has leveraged Novell's industry-leading expertise in identity and security management by integrating WorkloadIQ copabilities with SAP's GRC solutions. And now, SAP delivers the enterprise-class teamwork capabilities of its StreamWork Enterprise Edition products using SUSE Studio. In fact, it’s the only way SAP offers this product to customers

Make no mistake, WorkloadIQ solutions present countless partner opportunities. And with the help of our WorkloadIQ Partners, we make cloud computing services better.

Hmm. I guess BASF’s slogan wasn’t that long after all.