John Dragoon’s Blog

A recurring request from many people in the technical community is for Novell to open up more channels about our technological direction. The people asking this say that they want more detail about the various technologies that underpin our strategy statements and other announcements. Although we have excellent channels such as the Cool Solutions site and the Novell Support Forums, these venues typically don’t cover background on technological direction of Novell.

To be sure, providing credible technical information has become increasingly more difficult. Years of under achieving marketing messages coming from the technology industry—arguably from all industries in general—have conditioned technologists to be deeply skeptical about the majority of communication efforts by large companies. Given this, how can a technology company credibly communicate its rapidly-advancing technology and for that matter, what it allows for from a customer perspective, in a way that is reliable and trusted?

About a year ago, one of our resident technology enthusiasts proposed launching an audio podcast for IT professionals and enthusiasts. At the time, there was a lot of hype about podcasting. Various start-up companies were regularly trying to pitch us on their expertise in effective podcasting, and more than a few big corporations were mistakenly using audio-on-demand as just another vehicle for delivering the same old marketing stuff. In that climate, it seemed that perhaps someone with technical background from our own ranks might be the right way to go, and further, might be a good way to provide the kind of information that so many technologists were requesting of us – in a format and tone that matched their evolving desire to consume information in new and interesting ways.

Of course, there was some risk in the proposal. In the corporate world, new initiatives often become over elaborate and end up failing as they are over managed, over thought and over executed. So I’m pleased with what Novell management did next on the project, which was: very little at all. That is, Novell upper management allowed the project to develop on its own, giving its owners as much autonomy as possible. I’d like to claim that this benign neglect was calculated, but really it was more the serendipitous result of circumstances. Sometimes it’s best to just get out of the way.

A few months later, Novell somewhat quietly debuted the first edition of Novell Open Audio. Since that time some six months ago, the program’s following has been steadily growing as it continues to adapt and evolve. I’m happy to say that now, some forty episodes later, Novell management still gives the shows hosts—now two of them—the same autonomy and self-regulation that helped get it off the ground and establish credibility with its listeners.

The result is a technical podcast that features the views and insights of Novell’s best and brightest engineers and technical product managers. While keeping a fun and enthusiastic spirit that avoids the stuffiness that troubles so many corporate podcasts, the hosts Ted Haeger and Erin Quill take one thing with extreme seriousness: these guys work to make sure that Novell Open Audio interacts with their listening audience as much as possible. This has helped make the show a participatory dialog rather than just another outbound channel. That aligns well with the culture that we want to further develop at Novell.

Overall, Novell Open Audio now provides something that may be a bit unexpected from Novell—a different kind of conversation from the usual marketing shtick. Rather than having our first attempt at a podcast project become another top down driven initiative, Novell Open Audio provides something that is inclusive for its listening audience, and manages to provide a credible voice to the people who are driving the technical direction of Novell – you and us.

One last thing. I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ted and Erin and my first appearance on Novell Open Audio will be on Monday, October 9. As always, I welcome your feedback and thank you for giving Novell Open Audio a try.

Happy listening.

John

Greetings from San Francisco where I am at LinuxWorld Expo – a premier event for the Linux community to discuss open source strategies and technologies. It’s been a great conference for Novell and the ideal platform to formally launch SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. We’ve had a lot of great coverage and the buzz and activity around our booth has been outstanding. Lot’s of interest in both the server and desktop. In fact, minutes ago Novell was just received three significant awards at the show.

Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop just was elected “Best of Show” and “Best Desktop Solution” and Novell’s AppArmor implementation in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was just named “Best Security Solution”.

….and the buzz just isn’t in San Francisco….we just kicked off a 26 road tour in Asia Pacific with our first stop in Beijing, China and had 3,478 customers in attendance (with our partners from Intel and IBM) at the beautiful Beijing Aquarium.

I promised in my last blog that I’d give you an update about our advertising and marketing plan behind SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.

As you may recall, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 successfully debuted in mid-July. As I have unabashedly chronicled, the press and analyst reception has been outstanding, and we’re already hearing extremely positive feedback from customers (who, by the way, have downloaded over 325,000 copies of SUSE Linux Enterprise in less than a month!).
Now it’s time to drive this exciting transformational technology into the marketplace.

Yesterday at LinuxWorld in San Francisco we announced one of the most ambitious marketing launches in Novell’s history: “Your Linux is Ready.” Linux and Open Source are not traditional technologies. No news there. We believe that they deserve unique marketing as well. Accordingly, our recently unveiled campaign focuses on the innovation delivered by the open source development community and how Novell brings that innovation to the enterprise. This is a campaign that explicitly acknowledges the contributions to our Linux platform that came from outside Novell…a true joint partnership in delivering affordable innovation and choice to those seeking enterprise class operating system infrastructures based on Linux and open source.

To bring this campaign to life, we’ve introduced new advertising, a “Your Linux is Ready” video, collateral, field marketing campaigns and a PR blitz.
If you connect to our online portfolio, you’ll see both print and online advertising, videos (take a look at “Are You Ready”, “Novell and Intel” and “Your Linux is Ready”), collateral, a media schedule, details around a worldwide SUSE Linux customer road show and much more. While the marketing materials are solid and well produced, it’s really the idea behind the campaign that makes it work so well. The whole concept of “Your Linux is Ready” is based on the fact that a global community of engineers, inside and outside Novell, has built an open source platform that is truly ready for the enterprise.

Novell has leveraged this “Platform for the Open Enterprise” and made it suitable for bet your business applications in the data center, and a potentially ubiquitous presence on the desktop. The term “big idea” gets overused in the marketing world. In this case though, Your Linux is Ready is just that. It would be convenient for marketing to get the credit, but frankly with technology like SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, coming up with a big idea was a natural progression.

This is an transformational time to be in this industry, and an even more exciting time to be here at Novell. Many of you have shared your views on Novell marketing and how we need to be more aggressive, more focused, more passionate. I agree and believe this campaign is all of the above and more. We’re looking for this to be the biggest and most successful marketing launch we’ve ever had, positioning Novell as the leader in enterprise wide Linux while providing the ideal platform to deliver Novell’s systems, security and identity management solutions as well.

Thanks.

John

It seems there’s a fair bit of passion about what makes for good marketing at Novell. As many of you know who read my blog or are students of Novell, I get some pretty direct feedback about our marketing performance. Not all of it good to be sure. But I return or comment on almost every post or email, and as many of you know, I call you directly to have you share your views on how we can improve.

Heck, I even got a call from my big brother last week who is in a totally different industry (and therefore uniquely qualified to comment) asking me “…if I was alright.”

“You bet”, I replied, “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Well”, he continued, “I just read your blog and it appears not everyone is as excited as you are about marketing at Novell.”

I didn’t know my brother was watching, but I’m glad he is. When we we’re younger he bailed me out more than a few times. On the Novell marketing thing, I’ll take all the help I can get, even if my brother doesn’t know the difference between Linux and Kleenex. As I told my brother, the enemy of being in favor of something isn’t being against, it’s indifference. Say what you will about Novell followers but they are not indifferent. They care about Novell’s future and feel an obligation to share their views on the good, the bad and the ugly. If they we’re indifferent, they would have moved on and when that happens it’s the beginning of the end.

On the marketing front, my view is that Novell’s current marketing efforts are suffering from the halo effect of 23 years of uneven marketing. Doesn’t much matter though. In my profession perception is reality. The trick is to find out just how pervasive that perception is in the marketplace. To do that you have to test the before and after. When you are dealing with subjective areas of creativity and impact (like advertising – a favorite subject of many who comment on Novell marketing) it pays to get a larger sample size.

Well, we launched a major advertising initiative last October 2005 equating Novell with “Software for the Open Enterprise”. While we couldn’t afford television advertising, we advertised in a number of print and online properties in industry, trade, and business press. Before we began the “Software for the Open Enterprise” campaign we hired a 3^rd party researcher to establish an objective baseline for Novell’s perception and awareness in the marketplace in the markets we compete in. We recently completed the “post-wave” research to assess the impact of our campaign. For those of you with strong subjective opinions about Novell marketing, here’s some facts.

Marketplace Awareness

It’s been fairly common to assert that Novell is “no where” on the Linux radar screen and that SUSE Linux in particular is a distant afterthought to our largest Linux competitor. On the topic of overall Linux awareness, Chadwick Martin Bailey recently completed a study of 500 senior IT executives asking them to name the dominant players in this Linux space. You’d expect a single product company like Red Hat to be mentioned and they were followed shortly by IBM at 87% and Novell at 84%. Not nearly as large as the current market share delta. Want more proof, check out who leads who in Linux downloads via distrowatch.com. SUSE Linux over Fedora by a lot. Have you checked out Google trends? The site that graphs what the world is searching for. Type in SUSE and Red Hat and see the results from the last three years. Red Hat’s early lead has been surpassed by SUSE and it’s been that way for quite a while. And yes I know that mind share is not the same as market share. It’s our job to convert it and we will.

Purchase Consideration

Speaking of intent. We also asked via Yarnell Inc (in a study of 400 senior IT executives) in the pre and post wave research the following question: “Would you consider purchasing software / services from Novell over next 12 months?”

Novell was up 15 points on our post wave research. A move of 5 points is considered dramatic and we were up 3 times that.

What about our competition in Linux. Well they were surveyed too and their pre and post waves results were flat.

Is there work to do in the marketplace awareness for Novell? You bet and in my next blog I’ll share the specifics of our upcoming advertising campaign around our very successful SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform.

John

The press has picked up on a nice recent step forward for Novell in building out our ecosystem around Linux. Dell has elevated SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to a Tier 1 operating system, the same level as Microsoft and Red Hat. Although Dell has made SUSE Linux Enterprise Server available to its customers as an option on their PowerEdge server hardware for over a year and a half, the move to Tier 1 status does add several benefits, including deeper EMC certification, integration with Dell’s OpenManage software, and pre-install of SUSE Linux Enterprise on Dell servers. This makes it much easier for the Dell sales force to sell and recommend SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a truly robust solution. More importantly, in my mind, this move by Dell reflects growing customer interest in SUSE Linux. Any move by a partner to embrace a platform has to be customer driven. As Linux is moving more firmly into the data center, customers are seeing the benefits of SUSE Linux. We’re pleased by Dell’s move, and think it’ll be positive for our customers, as well.

John

Peter Yared offered a muse last week on big company open source behavior patterns (http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2006/05/big-company-open-source-behavior.html). In Peter’s view, as open source challenges the existing business models of many large infrastructure software firms, different companies have reacted in unique ways. In his words, the behavior patterns range from “Join the Party” to “Run Like Hell” to “Screw with it” to “Open Source Trashcan”. Novell is the example he cites for “Buy Your Way In”.

As in most things, he’s only partly right.

I’ll not comment on the other companies mentioned but a more appropriate behavior pattern classification for Novell would read, “Bought their way in and expanded the party”. It’s certainly true that our acquisitions of Ximian and SUSE accelerated our participation in the Linux and Open Source world beyond what we could have done in a short amount of time on our own. But that was only the beginning of the story. Our acquisitions in this space brought some of the most talented open source engineers on the planet. These engineers don’t just work on Novell’s agenda. Their making serious and significant contributions to key open source projects including the Linux kernel, Bandit, BetterDesktop, GNOME, YaST, Mono, Evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Xen…..you get the picture. Not only are we giving back to the open source community through these projects, but we are actively involved in the standard bodies driving and defining open source including OASIS, the W3C and the Java Community Process among others. To find out more about Open Source and Novell vist: http://developer.novell.com/opensource/index.html

In addition to our talented engineers working on these important initiatives, we also put our money where our mouth is. After our acquisition of AppArmor, an application security tool for Linux, we decided it would be in the best interest of the open source industry at large if we open sourced the code. We did and now others are using it as well (as are we in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10). Similarly, we open sourced hundreds of thousands of lines of NetMail to jumpstart Hula, an open source calendar and email project.

And unlike many of the companies mentioned in Peter Yared’s blog, we actually use open source technologies to run significant parts of Novell’s business from the desktop to the data center. Not only did we save a lot of money in the process but we became experts at using and deploying open source in a mixed source environment. It’s a first hand experience we are now sharing with our clients as they seek the best ways to integrate the innovation that is Linux and Open Source into their environments.

So yes, we bought our way into the open source party but like any good party goer, we’re not only bringing our own food,drink and music, we’re making the party better for all. And this is one party where there’s no limit to the guests.

Why not see what all the fun is about?

It’s raining here in Boston and it seems we’re on track for this kind of weather at least through July 4^th. The Red Sox have been rained out for the 2^nd straight day and the result is some free time to catch up and reflect on our industry.

This morning’s Boston Globe had an article by Robert Weisman on the growing trend of firms looking outside their four walls for innovation. Mr. Weisman chronicles famed consumer package good company, Procter & Gamble, and their declaration that “…over the next five years, fully half of the products it introduces are expected to come from partners, suppliers, universities, contract labs, and other sources outside the company.”  Weisman goes on to state that “such moves signal a radical change in concepts of innovation, once regarded as the secret sauce of successful businesses and the one thing they should do in house.”

Well, this outside in model may be new in the business to consumer world but it’s old hat in our industry. In the open source world, it’s precisely the paradigm being followed to deliver market place innovation on an unheard of cycle time. I’m very proud of Novell’s 23 year history of technology innovation. But for all our technical prowess, we are under no illusion that our hundreds of dedicated and skilled engineers can deliver all the functionality being demanded by our customers. We leverage a federation of talented individuals both within and outside our company to help deliver quality open source solutions to our customers on a time frame that keeps pace with their evolving requirements.

When you think about it, there’s really no way one single company can imagine, engineer, market, sell and support all that is needed to run a 21^st century software infrastructure. We don’t try to do it all and nor do our clients demand that all the pieces of a software infrastructure stack come from us. We do try and acknowledge this growing voice for greater choice and flexibility. In doing so we aim to provide the best blend of commercial technologies based on open standards and enterprise class open source software that represents the best Novell and our collection of partners around the world have to offer. The goal is to use this “outside in” approach to help our clients leverage and extend their current technology investments.

Our most recent release from the openSUSE project, SUSE Linux 10.1 (released Thursday, May 11), is a tremendous example of this “outside in” approach at work. The openSUSE project, with over 25,000 members, invites the global community to work together towards one common goal, to create and distribute the world’s most usable Linux and in doing so promote the use of Linux everywhere. Not only does the openSUSE project invite outside innovation as part of its model, it depends on it. SUSE Linux 10.0, the prior scout release to 10.1, had over 1.6 million verified installations and thousands of suggestions and innovations from the global community. We’re already receiving feedback and suggestions from the 10.1 release and many of these will make there way into the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform for both our server and desktop commercial releases (slated for this summer 2006).

While there are many winners with this type of approach, including Novell, it’s you, the customer, who gains the most. You receive the benefits of diversity of thought and innovation that can only come when you are provided a solution based not on one company’s view of the world, but by thousands working towards one common goal.

In future blogs we’ll explore the ecosystem required to support this innovation approach. In the meantime, can anyone help with getting the sun to shine here in Boston?

Thanks for joining me.

John

Hello and welcome! I’m John Dragoon, Novell’s Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer and I’m delighted you’ve made it this far. With over 35.3 million blogs in the world (according to Technorati), it’s hard to get anyone to notice these days and I, for one, take your time and the choices you make quite seriously. I guess you could say it’s an occupational hazard. With all these blogs in existence and one new one popping up every second of the day, one could easily conclude the world doesn’t need yet another set of musings from some IT worker seeking to flex his or her literary muscle. It’s a fair point but my 22 years of high technology experience suggests that those who live, work and play in high technology care as much, if not more, about the conversations occurring in the marketplace, how they are sold, marketed and serviced then the underlying technology itself.

Peter Drucker, the well-regarded management consultant and popular writer, concluded long ago that the business enterprise had two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Frankly, there are a lot of blogs focusing on the technical aspects of our industry and they are far more qualified then I to do so. My colleague and Novell’s Chief Technology Officer, Jeff Jaffe, has already been writing about the marketplace implications of various technologies and I encourage you to give his blog a read if you haven’t already. I intend to complement Jeff’s views with a dialog about how technologies enter the market place and how we want to be informed about our choices. Your comments and views are critical to this conversation. Let’s get started.

Many of you who visit our website are in the IT industry or are in some way connected to its vast ecosystem. You could be a software developer, IT architect, consultant or be in marketing or sales. You could also be a part of the sizable group of thought leaders and pundits; analysts, press, professional “guru”. The $1 trillion plus technology industry is, in fact, so big we’re not even sure how big “it” is. A well respected industry pundit guessed back in 2000 that by 2002 all global information technology spending would surpass $2.4 trillion by 2002. Well, 2002 has come and gone and the industry actually shrank a little by 2002 and (again depending on who you listen to) is now well north of $1 trillion once again and growing.

Interesting, but what does this have to do with marketing? Well, in an industry where a well-respected pundit can be off in his projection on industry size by a mere trillion $, is it no wonder marketing is a somewhat inexact science? Today the industry sits at between $1 and $1.5 trillion. Depends on whether you include telecom, and a few other adjacent sectors, but it’s big no doubt. That much we can agree on. Assume the average IT player spends about 5% of sales on marketing (trade shows, events, product marketing, advertising, PR, etc.). That’s annual marketing spend of between $50- $75 billion per year, maybe more.

So the paradox is this. How can an industry that spends so much money on marketing be arguably so bad at it? Well, part of the answer is in the nature of our business. In the consumer world, for example, change comes slowly and products, styles and tastes can weather the test of time rather well. Take the ubiquitous Campbell Soup “red and white” Tomato Soup can. A while back, Campbell Soup company updated its famous package—so famous artist Andy Warhol once made it the subject of one of his most notable paintings. The package was updated in a significant way for the first time in about 100 years. That’s not a knock on Campbell Soup, but more of a testimony to the staying power of strong brands and associated identities with supermarket products.

Turn to the IT field, anybody have any 100 year old examples? Of course not—the industry didn’t exist 100 years ago. My company, Novell, is about 23 years old and has seen hundreds of players come and go even in that relatively short time. And therein lies the paradox and the challenge. Things change so fast in our space that you need to keep pace with change to survive and thrive. At the same time you need to keep pace but also you need to change at the RIGHT pace. Change too fast and you can outrun a trend before it even catches on. Keep pace too slow and you can miss a transformational technology completely and suffer the consequences.

As an example, take Linux and open source. Many were infatuated with Linux and other open source technologies in the early years. Here the “early” years are between 1996 and 2000. Then the bandwagon started to fill-up but there was some disappointment with the technology and progress being made. Why? Remember the 2.2 Linux kernel. The technologists reading this know better than I the early versions of Linux weren’t workload ready, scalable and manageable enough. As the technology got better; and partners, developers and vendors all started to make it a priority – customers started to embrace it. Not too many companies worth their salt consider Linux and open source a “skunkworks” project any more. Several of our customers here at Novell are, in fact, standardizing on it. In fact it has become so powerful that many of these same customers have asked us to keep quiet about exactly how powerful a tool is has become for them in their respective business. This is a blog not an advertisement for Novell so I’ll refrain from rambling on about how our solutions can help harness the power of open source technologies – but we can and do.

So back to the paradox. This $1 trillion + industry that spends tens of billions on marketing. And yet, most agree, marketing is rarely a strong suit among players in this space. Heck, in my travels as Novell’s head marketing guy I get plenty of feedback and advice on our own marketing and not all of it is good. So, how do we see it getting better. Mostly it’s about placing bets, taking risks – intelligent ones – and then having the tenacity to ride out the inevitable waves of euphoria followed by some stretches of despair and disappointment. It’s also about treating your audience, your customers and prospects, with the respect they deserve. The market’s brutally efficient when it comes to sniffing out the bull factor. I frankly believe our industry does a poor job at the “respect” thing.

No, unlike the classic Campbell Tomato Soup can,we don’t have 100 years to decide how the technology infrastructure race will end. We have placed our bets. We call that bet – OK- one sales pitch here- “Software for the Open Enterprise”. It’s a world where, imagine this, the customer decides which combination of open standards based commercial software and/or open source software they will use to build their software infrastructure. Why not save money. Why not create a more simple, secure, stable and integrated environment. So far it seems to be working. Not because I say so but because our customers do. But remember the IT industry marketing paradox- lot’s of money spent, it’s a huge industry with a giant ecosystem of pundits, researchers, and “gurus”. And yet, many bets taken and marketing campaigns launched end up being short lived.

We are not going to let that happen with our Software for the Open Enterprise approach. While the returns are early, we’re seeing it work. We don’t own the trend nor did we start it. But we’re a player in it, and we’re in it for keeps.

If you have made it this far, my sincere thanks. Above all I want to hear from you. What do you like or dislike about IT marketing? What are your pet peeves? Where do you see the industry going? I promise not all future blogs will be this long…but every journey has to start with a single step. Take a step with me.

John