John Dragoon’s Blog

Earlier today we announced that we had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Managed Objects, a market leader in Business Service Management (BSM) solutions.

This acquisition, like our acquisition of PlateSpin earlier this year, is yet another piece in our commitment to provide the best and most interoperable data center management solutions. We already had a very strong position in the data center with our cross platfrom management, virtualization and workload products. The Managed Objects products will complement and extend our data center value with a portfolio of flexible modeling, analytic and visualization technologies. The net result will be better visibility, for both IT and business managers, into how information systems deliver business services allowing users to understand and respond to issues in a business context in real time.

I believe Managed Objects is a natural fit for Novell for other reasons as well. For one, we share a number of customers in common and our lack of product overlap creates immediate benefit for those customers seeking a common data center management strategy. Second, we share a common value proposition. Our solutions are focused on helping clients reduce cost, complexity and risk. Managed Objects customer’s realize similar benefits through their unified approach to business service management. Finally, we share a mutual commitment to interoperability. Managed Objects extends our vision of “Making IT Work as One” by integrating customer’s existing IT management investments into a real-time model of the IT enterprise.

So we look forward to welcoming the employees and customers of Managed Objects into the Novell family….and in extending our commitment to providing the best cross-platform solution for the next generation data center.

John

Last week’s global economic news was historic from a number of perspectives and predictably there were a number of articles and postings on the impact to the technology industry at large and software companies in particular. One post by Information Week’s Serdar Yegulalp viewed the “grim financial times” as a test for commercial vendors of open source to show what they are made of.

I’ll certainly agree with Mr. Yegulalp that the current environment will test the value and business model of many firms. Having a diverse portfolio of solutions and customers and the financial vitality to weather this storm will serve all companies well. Against this backdrop I feel very positive about Novell. And I certainly agree with him that the open source model makes economic sense in good times and in bad. But I believe there’s more to the story. A lot more.

From the customer perspective, it’s not about open source vs proprietary software. It’s about value. Period. Frankly very few if any of the commercial customers I talk to care about our development and delivery model. They do care about our ability to help them lower the cost, complexity and risk of their IT environment and help them solve their critical business issues. Customers want the best solution at the best price and whether you deliver that through open source or proprietary models is a distant secondary issue. Make no mistake, Novell believes very strongly in the power, flexibility and innovation that results from the open source model. Our primary focus, however, is on delivering software that integrates well with a customer’s existing environment and lets them leverage and extend their IT investments. If we can deliver powerful, interoperable software that addresses customer pain points at a price that fits well with our customer’s tightening budgets, then it really doesn’t matter whether a solution is proprietary, open source or a combination of both.

I enjoyed Serdar’s Japanese proverbs at the end of his post so I return the favor here:

“Even a sheet of paper has two sides”

John