John Dragoon’s Blog

Last February 21 I blogged about Microsoft’s announcement on a new set of interoperability principles. In the announcement Microsoft declared a broad-reaching set of changes across both their business and technology practices, all of which were intended to increase the openess of their products and drive greater interoperability. As I said at the time, we were encouraged by the announcement and in favor of any technology vendor working towards the broad customer agenda of choice. Choice enabled by open standards and interoperabilty.

I also wrote at the time that while we were both supportive and encouraged, we would judge the long term impact of the announcement based on the actions taken and delivered. Well earlier today Microsoft “walked the walk” and announced what we believe is a major win for choice - specifically for those seeking to leverage open standards in office applications via the Open Document Format. And despite what you may or may not think about Microsoft’s intentions, you have to applaud the follow through and commitment they are displaying in their support for ODF and interoperability at large.

So what exactly was announced today? The two most interesting items from my perspective are:

1. Microsoft’s announcement to add support for the Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1 in the next service pack for Office - SP2 scheduled for 1st half 2009 and

2. Microsoft’s intentions to increase its participation with the community and help maintaining ODF by joining Oasis, the community focused on creating an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications

Novell has been a long time contributor and leader in promoting the Open Document Format as the preferred standard for office applications. We believe cross platform document interoperability between openoffice.org and Microsoft office is key to the long term growth and adoption of Linux and openoffice.org. We’re proud of our work in the Document Interoperability Initiative, the Interop Vendor Alliance and our direct collaboration with Microsoft in our Interoperability Lab. Having Microsoft support the format natively in their application can only be viewed as a positive step towards the choice that all commercial and public sector customers are seeking. Actively participating in the dialog and development of interoperability through participation in Oasis and the community at large is equally positive.

Helen Keller once said, “It’s a terrible thing to see and have no vision”.

We’re staking our reputation and promise on interoperability and Making IT Work as One. We know delivering on this promise will take more than Novell and we welcome all partners and vendors as active participants to this mission.

Today’s announcement only strengthens this vision.

John

Last week the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council hosted its annual spring conference. This year’s conference, of which Novell was a proud sponsor, focused on “China, India, and Russia - Our Partners in the New Global Economy. There was an impressive list of speakers led off by Dr. Lawrence Summers. In addition to being an economist by trade, Mr. Summers also has held distinguished positions including former US Secretary of the Treasury, Chief Economist of the World Bank and President of Harvard University. I found myself feeling like an underachiever as I read his bio and introduced him to the conference attendees.

Dr. Summers talked without notes or charts (a great lesson for all presenters) on “America and the New Global Economy.” While the essence of Dr. Summers’ observations were on how America could continue to compete in the face of accelerating competition from China, India, and Russia, it was his remarks on innovation and the source of innovation that struck me, and I hope you, as the most profound.

In adapting to the changing global landscape and accelerated economic growth abroad, Dr. Summers primary observation was that our strength and long term competitiveness must come from innovation and our ability to generate and sustain this innovation. I know innovation is not a new or novel concept regarding competition but it was Summers’ comments on the source for innovation that really hit home.

So the big question was “What’s the optimal source for creating and sustaining innovation (capabilities and knowledge) and therefore competitive advantage? Innovation that is difficult to replicate and therefore difficult to dislodge.” The traditional answer has been through individuals and proprietary models. The new paradigm is prosperity built on the communities capacity, a capacity which is open and fluid. Indeed it’s not hard to imagine innovation created and delivered through innovation communities is more difficult if not impossible to exploit by any one individual.

Now I’ll admit that “innovation communities” is not a new concept to those of us in open source. But it was refreshing and encouraging to hear a distinguished economist, public servant and academic leader espouse the model’s promise across a broader platform. Dr. Summers’ concluded with his keys for creating successful communities of innovation.

1. Education - It’s not surprising that Dr. Summers long time commitment to education has him leading off with the need for educational institutions to take an active role in the sponsorship, encouragement and knowledge transfer for the creation of innovation communities.

2. Science & Technology - A passionate plea for a cultural and philosophical shift in America for active support, encouragement, and respect for the noble and worthwhile pursuit of science and technology professions.

3. Engaged & Active Universities - Similar to #1 and #2 above but a specific plea for high profile Universities like Harvard and others to enable the incubation of innovation communities.

4. Open - Most encouraging perhaps was Dr. Summers’ observation that the best communities are open - that “open systems” beat “closed systems”.

So all in all an encouraging and enlightening day….with a final observation that innovation communities not only benefit the community but those proximate to the community as well. Also another good reminder that the best economic system is still founded on competition and the belief that markets are efficient.

John

Creating a powerful and compelling brand. The holy grail of many if not most marketeers - indeed I’d say of most companies. Stating the objective is simple, getting there is not. In a world of commodity phrases and empty promises it takes work and discipline to position one’s company in a distinctive, credible, relevant and enduring way.

In a blog I posted in early March I told you about some positioning research and work we were undertaking and promised to communicate the “results” shortly. This post is the first of many on our positioning and where we are headed from here.

With a clear and consistent strategy in place our next mission is to communicate a brand promise that reflects the stability and promise of our strategy. To accomplish this task we undertook a five month critical and objective review of our overall brand equity and marketplace positioning. This post summarizes our findings, our new positioning and next steps.

In November 2007, with the assistance of a leading external research and branding agency, we surveyed over 1,000 IT decision makers around the world regarding Novell’s brand equity in the marketplace with the objective to specifically understand:

• Where and why the Novell brand is strong and has traction
• How to best leverage the overall equity of the Novell name
• Which attributes drive selection and recommendation
• Ways to differentiate Novell vis-a-vis the competition

As a result of the primary research, validated with conversations with customers, partners, employees and the analyst community, a number of alternatives were developed and tested. One positioning among all the alternatives emerged as the most credible, relevant, unique, durable, aligned and actionable concept.

Novell Corporate Positioning

Novell. Making IT Work as One

Through our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships,Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one.

The above is more than a marketing tag line. It’s who we are, what we do and it embodies the core values that we provide to our customers. In this simple statement we clearly declare our category (infrastructure software), the critical importance our partners bring to our overall value proposition, the business driver that is our unique differentiator (interoperability or the support of mixed IT environments) and the declaration that interoperability is not just a technical goal but a human one as well (allowing people and technology to work as one).

Those of us in the IT industry know that our markets face substantial challenges on multiple fronts. Customer IT landscapes are increasingly more complex with proprietary and open source software, new and legacy technologies, heightened business unit requirements and an increasingly sophisticated end-user environment. Security challenges and compliance issues continue to multiply. Against this backdrop customers still demand the freedom to deploy the right technology for the job and they want it all to work together. That puts even more pressure on IT managers who are tasked with managing multiple physical and virtual platforms while maximizing the value of this mixed environment. By Making IT Work as One we will enable our customers to meet these challenges at low cost, with reduced complexity and mitigated risk.

Delivering on the promise of “Making IT Work as One”

As I said earlier, many corporate positions are empty tag lines. We believe it is critical our positioning reflect, support and enhance our strategy, technical vision and culture and values. We believe three distinct Novell leadership dimensions, working as one, deliver this promise of value, namely our: actionable strategy, workable vision, and extraordinary talent.

What: Actionable Strategy

With a unique combination of enterprise Linux and heterogeneous IT management software, Novell lowers costs, simplifies complexity and reduces vulnerability on virtually every platform. Our strategy reflects our long term commitment to interoperability and helping clients leverage and extend their IT investments - not rip and replace them.

How: Workable Vision

Novell’s technical prowess and applied technology give our customers the infinite IT flexibility and agility necessary to deploy IT resources to meet and then exceed their business objectives. Our interoperable infrastructure software helps organizations to take advantage of the best that open source has to offer while delivering the management software that allows companies to address their security and compliance challenges and automate the management of both their physical and virtual environments. We define our technology vision as one where IT is truly agile allowing people and technology work as one.

Who: Extraordinary Talent

When you partner with Novell, you partner with innovative, creative and committed people. Our internal team, extended community of open source developers, and ecosystem of high-impact partnerships are focused on supporting customers with one voice, one purpose and as one team - truly Making IT Work as One.

We have undertaken a thoughtful, objective and deliberate analysis of Novell’s brand equity and what we should do to enhance it. While Novell’s general marketplace awareness is competitive, there was not a universal understanding of what makes Novell unique. Highlighting the business drivers that emphasize our differentiated value is our priority. Novell’s focused commitment and support of interoperability and mixed IT environments and our strong partner ecosystem emerged as key positioning cornerstones for the company. In the tagline “Novell. Making IT Work as One” we have created a clear and differentiated positioning. Making IT Work as One is aspirational and perfectly aligned to our strategy, technical vision and employer brand. Making IT Work as One is our promise to our customers and it’s our rallying cry for successfully moving forward.

John

On Wednesday, April 16, Novell announced the SUSE Appliance Program and the beta availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS (for Just enough Operating System). Both of these announcements are aimed squarely at simplifying the use of Linux and in doing so expanding this already hot market. More importantly, these announcements deliver on our promise to reduce the cost, complexity and risk of IT deployments and in doing so help vendors and clients make their IT work as one. The SUSE Appliance Program will enable independent software vendors (ISVs) to create appliances combining their applications with the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform in one integrated package for end customer deployment. These bundles of applications will help ISVs simplify application support while dramatically reducing development costs and easing deployment of applications by end customers. As previously mentioned, we also announced, as part of this program, the beta availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS, a minimized version of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system that ISVs can use to build appliances.

As part of the press interviews that are typical with an announcement of this magnitude, Novell’s open source chief technology officer and strategist, Nat Friedman, suggested that “the stand alone OS is dead”. A provocative quote to say the least and it made for a good headline in a number of articles. Indeed, for those who were privileged to hear Nat’s entire comments, this statement was part of a larger trend Nat was discussing on the long term trend of independent software vendor application deployment.

Nat’s certainly right that on balance, enterprises and end users don’t begin the journey to solving a business problem with the selection of an operation system. Operating systems live and die by their ecosystem of applications and technology integration. To be sure, a well engineered, secure, reliable and well supported operating system is a must. But history is full of examples where better engineered products didn’t survive because they lacked the integration with the broader platform and problem the customer was trying to solve. Our approach to operating system development—from our early NetWare days to SUSE Linux Enterprise—is to recognize that the OS is but one piece of the overall stack and that our partners and customers are well served when we take aims to facilitate the integration and deployment of the stack.

But did Nat really mean the stand alone OS is dead? Of course not. And indeed Novell remains firmly committed to the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, the best engineered, most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing from the desktop to the data center. The SUSE Appliance Program is a complementary component to the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform. Novell recently announced our development themes for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, scheduled to ship in 2009. Those development plans have not changed.

The IT landscape today is one of mass customization and our technology strategy reflects that. Novell’s business strategy is based around customer and partner choice. We deliver our SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system in a wide variety of formats designed to address a wide variety of customer needs across the enterprise, ranging from SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for mission-critical application support like SAP to our award-winning SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop to SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time for low latency workloads. SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS is another flavor of the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, designed for ISVs who wish to deliver their application as an appliance and thus need an appliance operating system.

Novell will continue to distribute SUSE Linux Enterprise through a variety of channels, including our reseller and partner ecosystem, our IHV partners, our direct salesforce, and our ISV partners. The SUSE Appliance Program is designed to make it easier for our ISV partners in particular to deliver SUSE Linux Enterprise to their customers. It’s also clearly aimed at making it easier for customers to deploy the applications they need in an easy, reliable and low cost manner.

The SUSE Appliance Program is part of Novell’s integrated operating system strategy. This strategy is designed to deliver operating systems as stand-alone products as well as integrated solutions into our partners’ hardware and software platforms.

So while the stand alone OS is not dead, making it hard to deploy applications to the best OS platform is.

John

We are all creatures of habit to some extent. Most of us like things as we expect them. Interacting with technology in a predicable and utilitarian manner is one of those items we like just so. Changing one’s corporate website is an interesting and risky test of this principle.

A couple of weeks ago we launched the new novell.com. The relaunch was not a simple face lift but the result of months of work and hundreds of hours of research on how we could make Novell’s electronic presence more meaningful, useful and interactive for all the stakeholders we are trying to have a conversation with. That’s right…a conversation not a one way monologue on our products and services.

Perhaps predictably the early feedback was extremely varied and passionate. Ranging from the “what happened to my login?” to “the updated site is beautiful…..obviously you nailed Fitt’s Law“. Yeah….I confess I didn’t know Fitt’s law either but I was delighted we nailed it. We reacted quickly to our early feedback for improvement and have incorporated much. I’m sure we’ll make other changes going forward as well. I’m equally sure and glad that you’ll let us know what you like and what you don’t. Please do.

But what problem were we trying to address? We wanted novell.com to be more inviting. To encourage exploration and a dialog with our various customers, partners, and communities.

I believe the best way to accomplish these objectives is to simplify our presence and make it more relevant and easier to use. Our old site had a lot of content. It also had a lot of clutter. The new home page removes the majority of the clutter and presents information in a format that is not only easy to consume but more aligned to our customer’s agenda. We are talking more about the business problems that customers are dealing with and giving them an easy way to explore answers to the issues most important to them. We also want to make it easier for customers to get the service, support and products (yes make it easy to buy) that they want. We believe the new site make improvements in these areas as well.

We are by no means done and our refresh goes well beyond the home page. We will continue to integrate the great feedback we are getting from all of you. In the meantime, thank you for giving it a try.

John

Over five thousand people from 58 countries will arrive in Salt Lake City, Utah next Sunday, March 16th for the annual Novell tradition known as Brainshare. Brainshare, Novell’s annual user conference, has been going on for over 20 years and for many in the IT industry it’s their annual pilgrimage for learning new things, reconnecting with old friends, making new ones and keeping up with the pace, change and opportunities in our industry.

Above all, Brainshare is about education. Sure there are the obligatory keynotes, main tent sessions, technical showcases and evening get togethers (this years entertainment features comedian Frank Caliendo and musical group Collective Soul). But the real nitty gritty for attendees are the over 250 technical breakout sessions. It’s in these sessions where real knowledge is transferred from the engineers and experts who develop, support and help implement Novell and partner solutions. I can tell you first hand the Novell employees and partners who put on these sessions take great pride in their subject matter and its delivery.

Brainshare isn’t just about the class room. We pride ourselves in delivering hands on experiences and information you can use your first day back in the office - if not before. In our Novell Technology Lab there’s the ever popular installation and migration depot where you can install, migrate or upgrade to the latest Novell technologies.

This is my fifth Brainshare and I look forward to it every year. There’s still time to see what it’s all about and join us in Salt Lake.

We’d love to see you there.

John

“If French fries were fat free, would you still like them?”

I’ve got to admit country music has some of the best lines. I heard this one on the way home last night and it got me thinking about marketing. Truth is I was probably thinking about marketing well before this line but that’s another story. I’m quite sure the segue to marketing thought was well beyond the writer’s initial intent but that’s the beauty of country music. You can find something in it for you no matter your perspective or starting point.

So the relationship to French Fries and marketing? In the end, the appeal to French Fries has little to do with their fat content. French fries are appealing because they are an easy and tasteful way to enjoy potatoes. Period. Some potato farmer long ago figured out that the way to sell more potatoes was to make their consumption easy and tasty. And so it is with marketing. The way to make your company, product, or service more compelling is to simplify what you stand for and to make it relevant, credible, distinctive, unique and “tasty”. I can imagine The French fry tag line: French Fries: “The easy way to enjoy potatoes” – or, French Fries: “Potatoes on the Go”. Pretty simple: category and benefit.

The technology industry at large and the software industry in particular have a hard time articulating what we stand for in language that is easy to understand and compelling. Our team has spent a lot of time over the last 6 months surveying thousands of customers, talking to our partners, the analysts and each other on the best way to represent and position Novell.

Some common themes that emerged in our research inclcuded:

• Stay the course on your strategy
• Be straight forward about what you do
• Clearly articulate the benefits
• Reflect your positioning in your various customer touchpoints in a clear, consistent and compelling way
• Be true to your companies’ heritage but aspiring in your future vision

We’re very proud of our technology and like many companies have led with a description of that technology vs what it allows for from a customer perspective. An audit of our own language and outward facing communication suggests we have room for improvement in simpler and more direct language. We are aiming to change that and in the coming weeks we will address the feedback we’ve heard with messaging and positioning that continues to refine what Novell stands for and why you should care.

I’m very passionate about Novell’s positioning and I’ll communicate directly on the specifics of our changes in the weeks and months ahead. Like all things marketing, I know we will get a lot of opinions on the good, bad and indifferent and I look forward to the feedback. At the end of the day, we are all trying to make Novell like our beloved french fry - simple and tasty (yeah, we’re not fat free yet either).

John

Earlier today, Novell announced its intention to acquire data center management leader PlateSpin. PlateSpin is a Toronto based technology company who is singularly focused on providing the most advanced software designed to optimize the use of server resources across the enterprise, both in the physical and virtual environment. This is an extremely important and exciting announcement for Novell and our customers on many levels. In this blog I’d like to offer my perspective on how will it impact both Novell’s strategy and our customer’s ability to respond to their every changing business conditions.

As always, the most important perspective is that of the customer so let’s start there.

We’ve talked for quite some time about our customer’s challenges and their constant need to lower cost, complexity and risk. One of the most talked about technologies in recent memory to accomplish this is virtualization. Historically, every time the business user needed a new service the solution was to provision a new physical server with a single application or purpose which is an inherently expensive, rigid and inefficient approach. Virtualization has emerged to offer new efficiencies and represents another powerful tool in the CIO’s arsenal.

But if virtualization has such tremendous promise, why hasn’t it yet reached its full potential. In a word, complexity. Virtual infrastructures must co-exist with new and legacy physical infrastructures, creating a new set of management challenges including cross infrastructure management, security, provisioning and IT chargeback. From the customer’s perspective, solving these challenges requires answers to the following questions:

• How do you find existing physical workloads that would be better served running in a virtualized environment?
• How do you find virtualized workloads that are consuming a disproportionate amount of shared resources and should be moved to a physical server?
• How can you easily assemble and move workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures?
• How can you manage the entire lifecycle of workloads and ensure sufficient resource capacity to accommodate current and future business needs?
• How do you deliver the right business services and align IT to the business?
• How do you allocate IT costs in the shared resource environment that virtualization enables?
• How do you control and manage growth of the data center when the ease of provisioning virtual machines with no need to purchase new hardware often leads to virtual infrastructure sprawl and management headaches?
• How do you change process and policies founded on principles of the static, physical-only data center to accommodate the new flexibility of virtualization and the realities of a data center that includes both physical and virtual infrastructure?

Great questions and answering these on behalf of customers is one of the keys to creating a more agile, responsive, flexible and of course cost effective IT infrastructure. Providing these answers in an integrated and enterprise class manner was the catalyst behind our impending PlateSpin acquisition. Together, Novell and PlateSpin will provide the industry’s first solution to help customers manage workloads (data, applications and operating systems) across both physical and virtual infrastructures.

So what exactly is the combined Novell and PlateSpin solution for managing the next generation data center? Fair question. In a nutshell it’s a full solution stack with a powerful virtualization platform and a best-in-class heterogeneous management portfolio. But perhaps a bit more detail is in order.

Prior to this planned acquisition, Novell had a leading open source virtualization platform (SUSE Linux Enterprise with the Xen hypervisor)—a platform from which to run virtualized work. We also have an outstanding management platform to manage physical and virtual resources in heterogeneous IT environments, Novell ZENworks Orchestrator. But we could not complete the full management lifecycle. We had no good way to assess and monitor which workloads were candidates for virtualization nor did we have a solution for the seamless streaming of virtual and physical workloads. Finally, we didn’t have an elegant and affordable solution for disaster recover or protecting workloads in the data center from unplanned outages. Enter PlateSpin. PlateSpin’s PowerRecon, PowerConvert, and Forge products are designed from the ground up to handle those important tasks respectively.

Together we now provide customers a solution for the above and more importantly answers to four fundamental workload lifecycle management categories—relocation, protection, provisioning and optimization.

So what’s the business benefit to all this? What’s in it for the customer?

• Lower costs: Data centers can lower costs by reducing their reliance on physical infrastructure as well as the costs required to provision, protect, relocate and optimize workloads throughout their life. Because virtual machines are easy to deploy and re-deploy, customers can provision applications and systems dynamically—moving virtual machines from one server to another as needed.
• Increased flexibility and agility: With heterogeneous virtualization and workload lifecycle management from Novell and PlateSpin, data centers can provision virtual or physical workloads dynamically and automatically on existing hardware to account for changing resource requirements at peak demand times as well as in test lab scenarios.
• Increase server utilization: In many data centers, server hardware utilization is between 5 and 50 percent. Virtualization can improve hardware utilization and significantly reduce server sprawl in data centers. By allowing multiple applications to coexist on one physical server, virtualization enables more efficient use of resources and increases server utilization.
• Reduce power consumption: Data center growth typically increases power consumption, floor/rack space requirements and cooling needs. And because energy costs are increasing, computer energy consumption has become a major concern for data centers. With virtualization and consolidation, you can reduce cooling requirements, lower power bills, decrease management demands and lessen the overall carbon footprint and environment impact of your IT operations. A true “green” solution.

So that’s a small view into the customer perspective. What about the impact and relevance to Novell’s strategy? In a word—it’s an excellent fit for a number of reasons.

Our planned PlateSpin acquisition is a key cornerstone of our stated two-pronged strategy of desktop to data center Linux and IT management software. With this acquisition and the addition of the PlateSpin portfolio, we will be uniquely qualified to deliver the next generation infrastructure software needed to power tomorrow’s data center. Indeed, PlateSpin is a key compenent of Novell’s management blueprint that was announced in 2007.

PlateSpin is also an excellent fit because they share our passion and commitment to two important principles—to be Open and Interoperable. PlateSpin’s value proposition is, at its core, to provide solutions that work across multiple operating systems and virtualization platforms. While we are indeed proud of our open source based virtualization platform in SUSE Linux Enterprise, the fact is that there are many other virtual platforms in use today. PlateSpin’s products work well in all these environments. Indeed, with PlateSpin, we’ll continue to promote our leadership in interoperability and in making IT work together.

You’ll here a lot more about this landmark acquisition in the weeks and months ahead. For now we are delighted to welcome PlateSpin’s 200 plus enthusiastic and passionate employees and thousands of customers to the Novell family. We invite all of you to discover what Novell and PlateSpin, working together, can do for your company.

Earlier today Microsoft made an announcement on a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices intended to increase the openness of its products and driver greater interoperability, opportunity and choice across the IT community of developers, partners, customers, and yes competitors. I’ve no doubt much will be written about Microsoft’s “true” intentions and agenda and I’m quite confident some commentary will fall into the category of “no good deed goes unpunished”. Like any announcement, actions will speak louder than words and only time will tell the true value that will accrue to the various stakeholders.

Perhaps not surprisingly, at face value, I’m encouraged and in support of Microsoft’s expanded interoperability as it hits upon two core values that Novell believes in and acts upon: To be Open and Interoperable.

Open and Interoperable aren’t just empty platitudes from Novell. The proof points are numerous and I’ll detail many of them in future blogs. We believe the best way to advance the “Open” agenda is through transparent and factual interoperability. One size doesn’t fit all. Never did. Never will. Accordingly, Novell’s belief is that the open source model in particular and interoperability in general serve the customer’s agenda the best when issues of cost, complexity and risk are top of mind. Today’s announcement by Microsoft on expanded interoperability is a positive step for developers, customers and partners because it expands choice. Could it be bolder and broader? Of course. If the market demands it to be so, it will likely happen. In the meantime, I’m proud that Novell took a bold first step in accelerating the conversation around openess and interoperability with our Microsoft partnership over 15 months ago.

One blogger (an ex Novell employee) in particular used Microsoft’s announcement to play out his tired and often inaccurate “anti-Novell” agenda with a blog titled “Red Hat was right, Novell was wrong” (be sure to check the comments too). In fact, if Mr. Asay didn’t have an anti-Novell agenda, he would have congratulated Novell for its early pioneering of openness and interoperability and for bringing Microsoft to the table on these important issues long before today’s announcement. He claims today’s announcement removes any advantage granted Novell in our partnership agreement. A clear indication he’s not following the substance of what is being delivered on behalf of our mutual customers. For Mr. Asay’s benefit our technical collaboration with Microsoft covers the following six critical areas….none of which the competitors he referenced are delivering (and all of which are consistent with Microsoft’s expanded interoperability announcement today).

• Virtualization: Support optimized bi-directional virtualization between SUSE Linux Enterprise and Windows Server 2008
• Standards-based systems management: A common framework for solutions to enable management of mixed environments based on the WS-Management standard
• Directory and identity intoperability: Directory and identity federation between Microsoft and Novell products
• Document format compatibility: Enhancing interoperability for Open XML format and ODF documents between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org Novell edition.
• Moonlight: Interoperability between Microsoft’s Silverlight rich-media player and Linux desktops
• Accessibility: Interoperability between Microsoft and Linux accessibility projects.

As we have said before, Microsoft has been a good partner and has kept their commitments. We still compete aggressively on many fronts and will continue to do so. To the extent Microsoft pursues an agenda of open and interoperable, we are in full support. It’s an agenda we’ve long held and will remain the foundation of our value delivery going forward.

John

Today we furthered our commitment to secure, reliable and OPEN enterprise collaboration solutions by acquiring SiteScape, a leading provider of team workspace, enterprise social networking and real-time collaboration technology. You may recall that in early 2007, Novell announced an agreement with SiteScape to license their technology for Novell Teaming + Conferencing. As a result of that agreement, SiteScape open sourced its technology, resulting in the ICEcore open source project. This project, to which SiteScape and Novell have been contributors, underpins Novell Teaming + Conferencing and its SiteScape corollary: SiteScape ICEcore Enterprise.

This acquisition is really the next logical step in a partnership that has already yielded significant market interest and the successful launch of Novell Teaming + Conferencing. Additionally, this acquisition delivers further proof of our commitment to delivering innovative and open collaboration solutions. It also increases our ability to offer truly open alternatives for team productivity and real-time conferencing that customers can count on for the long-term. Finally, this acquisition bolsters the foundation on which we will build a strategy for unified communications and collaboration.

While this acquisition is exciting on many levels, I believe it is an outstanding example of two fundamental beliefs and commitments of Novell – namely to be Open and Interoperable.

The SiteScape technology and the Novell Teaming + Conferencing product is based on, and has as its foundation, ICEcore – the open source project (Novell will now assume sponsorship of this important initiative). The solution is “open” in other important ways as well with its ability to support multiple platforms (Linux and Windows) and applications (Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange). No other teaming and real time collaboration solution offers these customer benefits and flexibility.

We’re excited to formally welcome the SiteScape family to Novell and we invite you to check out what a truly open and interoperable collaboration solution is all about.

John