John Dragoon’s Blog

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