John Dragoon’s Blog

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