When you begin your day, look in the mirror and ask yourself,”what am I going to do today that will positively change other people’s perception of Novell?”  There are so many things that we can share.  We don’t have to be pedantic, we don’t have to be defensive, but we do have to be positive and open.  When you look at Novell as an infrastructure software company there is an incredible compendium of solutions available that are capable of adding great value to reduce costs, to manage complexity and to mitigate risk.  Yes there are competitors out there, good competitors and those that don’t walk their talk.  We can each make assessments of the opportunity, challenge or problem and respond with a Novell solution that creates value but doesn’t require a forklift upgrade.  This is I believe a unique differentiator but it requires all of us to step up, be professional and be positive.

The second challenge I extended to that team, because it is critical and because I already know that they will succeed in this is to ask ourselves this question as we get caught in the daily grind.  Ask yourself, “is what I am doing making a difference to our customers and partners.”  You may find that this is true more than you may have initially thought.  But, if you find it isn’t, consider the prioritization of that activity in the context.

One area that everyone can make a difference in right now is in our online communities.  We’re very fortunate that participants tell us what they think.  At the prompting of one of the people I have enormous respect for and with the assistance of our communities leader, I found that folks were taking time to provide thoughts, sometimes negative, and those comments were not being responded to.  As Novell people, we all can make a community difference by investing time each week to review and participate in the communities and to respond, to educate and to help where you can.  It’s not just to Product Management to handle, we all have experience, we have expertise, we have perspective so I am asking you again in this context, what can I do today to positively enhance the perception of Novell.  Don’t wait for someone else to do this, we all must do it.  Hit it hard and hit it often.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

In that time I spent many hours with our customers, partners and sales professionals on calls and I kept hearing this comment that frankly really disappointed me.

We aren’t moving to OES 2 from NetWare because it’s a) too hard or b) so hard we really think we should look at alternatives.

What?

Let’s step back a minute.  When I hear the term NetWare, I always think of NetWare 1.X my first exposure and the amazing for its time NetWare 2.05 that helped me make this industry into a career.  When NetWare 3 came out I started to think differently about NetWare and by the time NetWare 4 was released my perspective had changed completely.  By this time I saw NetWare as a set of services that created value for end users and for corporate IT.  The underlying OS while interesting was not the most important part and the reality even then was that the services were where the real value was.  Organizations used NetWare not because of that screaming fast 32 bit engine but because of the services, like file, print, Novell Directory Services and all the other value in the box.

A lot of time has passed since then, with NetWare evolving the set of services through the remainder of its life.  But like happens everywhere, an evolutionary spurt had to take place.  We wanted 64 bit CPU support.  We wanted the ability to run lots of commercial and open source applications.  We wanted more scale.  We wanted the file systems, the print services, the directory, the network tools like DNS and DHCP.  We didn’t want to be tied to closed kernel.  Open Enterprise Server has delivered on those requirements and in the current release delivers a much richer experience than has ever happened.  Today we can do the things we could not do on the old NetWare stack.  We have client independence.  We have massively scalable 64 bit computing.  We have the ability to run virtualization without spending one thin dime on additional software.  We have the ability for every OES Linux server to run applications, over 3,000 are certified.  We have a rich development framework from the open source community.  Stop and think about that.  Is there any other server environment that has demonstrated this level of evolutionary enhancement in so short a time?  No.

And with the release of SP2 we raise the bar even higher by delivering file system audit controls for NSS on Linux, by gaining support from Citrix for the incredible Domain Services for Windows, a new FTP gateway and other enhancements.

Our customers have mixed environments.  Open Enterprise Server 2 is designed to function in mixed environments and does so more effectively than any other alternative out there.  As we enter our 2010 fiscal year I offer the following challenge.  When a customer or partner suggests a decommit or a concern about OES 2, don’t say ok I understand.  Ask why.  Ask for an appointment to have a conversation on the subject.  Invite Juan Carlos Cerrutti (there I did it, I volunteered him with asking) or myself.  We will help you.  We may not win every case, but we will win.

Be confident, be strong, be Novell.  Novell team members should leverage the Employee Enablement page (built with Novell Teaming) at https://teaming.innerweb.novell.com/ssf/a/do?p_name=ss_forum&p_action=1&action=view_ws_listing&binderId=68144 for consolidated materials.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

No matter what route is being addressed or considered there are some very consistent outcomes that can in fact be addressed today through Application Virtualization, specifically ZENworks Application Virtualization.  And, no this is not coincidental timing because as I write this we’ve just released V7.1 of this fabulous tool.

We still see challenges every day related to software version incompatibility, “DLL hell”, time consumed with cross testing and application rollouts, and calls to the Help Desk on application issues.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could really do lockdown at an application level so the app didn’t create conflicts, or modify the registry or be able to run alongside a different version of itself or run on an OS version that won’t natively run the application?

Well it is great because you can.  What we all have to do is make sure that folks know about this capability, that it exists and that it is extremely cost effective.

A virtualized application is isolated from the underlying operating system where it runs.  It makes no changes to the registry or to the hosting OS.  The virtual apps is not actually installed on the host, it’s installed in a secured runtime environment.  Building a virtualized application is simple and can result in an executable file that can be distributed to the workstations, run from a central repository or even deployed on a USB stick.  Gartner says that the cost of application deployment, packaging and support can be reduced by 60% and that TCO savings of up to 7% are easily achievable.

The really cool parts of the solution means that the builder decides how much integration with local resources on the workstation takes place.  Maybe it’s just screens and keyboards, maybe it includes ports or disk storage.  The packaged application delivers what is necessary without what is not.  Best of all, the end user doesn’t see a difference between a virtualized application and one that is locally installed.  Performance looks the same, no admin rights are needed on the local OS, so the user gets on with his or her work and doesn’t need to learn and adopt new processes.

With ZENworks Application Virtualization there are some new functions added that we have already heard are in demand, including support for Windows 7, improvements in the support of IE6 and coexistence with local installs of IE7 or IE8 and the ability to make the virtualized application “expire”.  Other new functions are improvements to leveraging .Net 3.5 and the addition of the ability to support SQL  Server  2005 Express.  We’ve also made the process to publish the virtualized application to a USB drive even simpler.

Customers can expect higher productivity for users and simplified rollouts, coupled with lower operational costs and improved security.  There’s also promotional pricing through October 31, 2009 with user or instance licensing available.

So please, while we think about desktop virtualization in depth, let’s not forget that many problems can be solved right now.

Product Information is at : http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/applicationvirtualization/

Licensing Information is at : http://www.novell.com/licensing

What I also hear are stories of strong point solutions that solve an immediate problem but don’t truly create strategic advantage for the customer.  Again these can be seen as small one trick ponies but the stories also pertain to alleged multi-platform management infrastructures.  These stories, by their limiting nature provide to highlight Novell’s incredible differentiation.

Certainly like our peers, we build great software, and some people, like myself, believe it is truly incredible.  But what makes us special, and in my mind unique, is the tight binding of identity to everything else.  When you step back, Identity is the root of everything.  Who we are ultimately needs to define the data we use, the paths to access, the applications we leverage and the services we consume.  Novell’s Identity framework truly walks the talk of Making IT Work As One.

Open Enterprise Server, GroupWise and Teaming all create a measureable set of value propositions both by the services delivered and the fact that those service authorizations and authentications are managed by Identity.  Our ZENworks offerings in End User Computing create enormous business value on their own , but the real power is achieved when we bind those services to the Identity of those entitled to use them.  In our Data Center solutions we deliver the frameworks to maximize efficiency and lower costs from physical to virtual and this gets optimized when we can attach the who to the usage patterns for these diverse workloads.  Novell delivers best in class solutions in the Identity space, just look at the Magic Quadrants, but the real value comes when we leverage our Identity tools to enhance the other elements of business driven IT.

I’m not kidding myself in believing that no other company does Identity, but when you look at this as a business person and not as a technology advocate you see one shining difference between the Novell story and everyone else.  Other companies do Identity to integrate their own tools and to actively try to create vendor lock in making it hard for customers to maintain agility as they increase the interweave of Identity with their systems.  While we absolutely create more value by integrating Identity with our own offerings we don’t create lock in and more importantly aggressively embrace interweaving with products from other vendors, including those that compete with our own offerings.

I challenge you to ask your customers, prospects and partners to name another enterprise class vendor that goes out of its way to foster interoperability.  One only need look at examples such as our ability to work with and extend AD, to provide the authentication and authorization front end to Sharepoint and our incredible CMP extensions to SAP to see that Novell’s approach is both unique and in the best interest of the customer by instead of locking in, using Identity to break the chains of lock in, to create interoperability and to provide the best possible framework for agility in the face of the unknown.

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace.

Ross

In experience working alongside Novell’s tremendous support professionals I constantly hear stories about customer concerns about how their messaging system operates from a speed and effectiveness perspective.  Only in very rare cases are these product related and most of the time the concerns are related to mailbox bloat.  It shouldn’t surprise any of us that users don’t use the delete key in the mailbox.

There are lots of reasons for this, fear of loss, ease of finding old messages, internal rules, legislation, compliance, all rear their heads.  Most messaging systems have a “local archive” capability but really this is not an optimal solution.  That’s why we at Novell are benefitted by having partners that build complete archival systems that work with GroupWise that are already aligned with legal and commercial requirements, that provide high ease of use clients and fast, reliable searching.  Whether this is implemented through stubs into the GroupWise client or delivered through a browser is a lot less relevant than having an archive solution in the first place.  Customers have choice and can pick the solution that best fits their needs.

This is great, but it’s not enough.

The real challenge is that no enterprise can be without email.  It is possible, and good practice to leverage clustering technologies, SANs and other components to make the messaging system as fault tolerant as possible, but all too often it doesn’t go far enough.

Up until the advent of archiving solutions, doing a disaster preparedness plan for messaging was really tough because of how messages are stored in different systems and the sheer volume involved.  With PlateSpin Protect, it gets a lot simpler.

Note that I said Disaster Preparedness.  I encourage readers to use this wording rather than Disaster Recovery.  Prior to joining Novell one of the services my company offered was enterprise recovery services.  Despite great customer commitment, most recovery tests in those days failed badly and the time to restore could put companies in serious danger of financial failure because of the time deltas.  Being Prepared is always preferable to having to do Recovery.

GroupWise uses a multiple folder storage model that is well adapted to a PlateSpin Protect model.  By leveraging our partner archival tools, our customers can keep their GroupWise systems light and fast, and by leveraging PlateSpin protect in addition to our own cluster capability, they can be assured that the most demanded application is available even in the case where the primary storage or facility itself is compromised.  As we look forward, data storage consumption will only increase, so backup restoration becomes less and less useful and palatable in the real world.

GroupWise + Partner Archival Tool + PlateSpin Protect = Disaster Prepared Messaging

A conversation worth having with our customers and partners I think.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

The study is important today for a number of reasons.  First, the number one message we hear from customers and prospects is that the reduction of costs, both capital and operating, is a key initiative in the economic downturn.  Second it calls out what we all “knew”, email is not a commodity nor is it irrelevant in our transitional consumption of social media.  For many people, email is where the day starts and where the day ends.  And that will not change anytime soon.

Some key data points are that the average user spends 152 minutes of their workday in email, nearly 30% of working time, and that those users in mid to large organizations are dealing with approximately 150 messages per day, and that assumes a good anti-spam architecture.  Email has replaced telephony as the number one means of outbound communication, with email comprising 74% of those communications.  93% of users rated email as at least important or critical to the day to day.  There is no other end user facing service with this much impact.

So if email truly is this important, why is there a perception that changing email systems or doing an implementation is trivial?  Frighteningly it comes down to assumption.  As the study finds, many organizations have NO IDEA of the real cost of operating email, and many think it’s all about the cost of the software.  They’re wrong.  The data tells us that 84% of respondents were at best somewhat confident that they had the ability to assess messaging costs.  84% aren’t even sure they know the real data.  I sure am glad these numbers aren’t acceptable guesses when launching rockets, or building nuclear power facilities.

The cost of labour is the highest expense line when an organization properly looks at email, although the amount of nickel and diming that occurs with some software models is frightening.  Cost of ownership and cost of operation are not linearly linked.  In the mean, a single GroupWise admin handles 20,800 FTE users, whereas the average Exchange shop needs a full time administrator doing nothing other than Exchange for every 1650 FTE users.  That means you need more than twelve times the number of staff with Exchange just to provide equitable service to a GroupWise installation.  And as the user count passes 5,000 the gap widens!

In a comparison of 1,000 user installations, Osterman found that GroupWise on Windows had a three year TCO of $419,024 and GroupWise on Linux had a three year TCO of $381,775.  Microsoft Exchange had a three year TCO of $1,068,212  and Lotus Domino had a three year TCO of $957,063

That means that GroupWise on Windows has a TCO over three years of just 39% of the TCO of a similar Exchange installation.  Now I, probably like you, will hear from time to time that costs are “about the same, based on licenses” or “we’re choosing to use Outlook/Exchange because of executive direction.”

I make no assertions that I know what goes through the heads of CEOs, but I’ve listened to Ron on all the quarter end calls with the analysts, and he has never said, “we’ve chosen to spend more than twice what’s necessary for similar services, shareholders be darned.”  In fact I’ll go out on the limb to suggest that it’s fiscally irresponsible to install Exchange instead of GroupWise given this data.  Are there other factors to be considered beyond those identified in the study?  A profound “maybe”.  One thing that’s for sure though.  No company in its right mind says “I want to spend more than twice what’s necessary because some executive likes Outlook better than an alternative.”  Let’s be completely fair, both Microsoft and Lotus do a good job in building their email offerings.  Let’s also be accurate and leverage the data in the findings.  You need more people to keep Exchange or Domino up and running compared to GroupWise.

And those more people?  They’re busier.  Osterman found that GroupWise customers averaged 5 minutes per month of unplanned downtime, compared to 45 minutes of unplanned downtime for Microsoft Exchange and 30 minutes of unplanned downtime for Lotus Domino.  More admin staff and more outages.  Sounds like a real good business decision doesn’t it?

I appreciate that decisions will get made, some with solid business reasons and some because “he said so”  We build an excellent email service offering.  It has the lowest total cost of ownership or if you prefer, lowest lifecycle cost, of the big three.  So when someone says “we’re going to select Exchange or Domino instead of GroupWise” I challenge you to ask the WHY question and to share the report data.  I make no guarantees that you’ll turn the deal around, but I will say that a battle unfought is a battle lost.  You’re smart people, make up your own minds.

The study is posted online at http://www.novell.com/rc/docrepository/public/1/basedocument.2009-05-08.9907690608/Comparing%20the%20Cost%20of%20Email%20Systems_en.pdf

Until next time, peace.

Ross

In addition to the usual and still consistent responses around controlling costs, reducing risk and working hard to make things simpler to use and operate the primary objective I keep hearing is that they want IT to be a Service Provider to the business.  When I ask why this is so important, I’ve learned very interesting perspectives.  One perception shared first by a CIO that I have since received considerable support for is the feeling of being less important to the business than other areas.  The phrase I heard that I appreciated most keenly was feeling like “I have to sit at the kid’s table.”  The implication is of low relevance and lower respect.  I found this disturbing because a great many senior IT execs have multiple degrees and have been leaders in other business units including finance, operations and business leadership.  Yet the IT brush paints these talented folks unfairly.

One CIO was particularly disturbed by this and has taken an alternative and very successful approach.  He shutdown all IT defined projects and banked his budget allocations.  In these times this was a very out of band decision.  He then went to his peers and asked them their business requirements to be delivered and operated by IT.  Those who were clear and specific received a business plan with service deliverables for their requirements.  Those who had no specific requirements received nothing.

In pretty darn short order, an executive meeting was called to find out what was going on.  The CIO explained his goal to be a service provider to the business and his intent to development service plans with each business unit needing the IT organization’s services.  He then offered to take little direct funding, instead proposing that the business units solicit the funding to “purchase” services from IT.  He was challenged immediately being asked if that meant that services could be purchased from externals.  To the surprise of his peers he said yes.  When his boss asked him if he was feeling well, he replied saying that if his organization could not deliver the required services, the business was best served by going outside.

Three months on a number of unique outcomes had occurred.  First, each “customer” had a documented service level agreement in place with IT with specific requirements, deliverables, bonuses and penalties.  Second, one of the challengers had arranged with IT to act as the reviewer of third party proposals to deliver some unique and specific services for which IT received funding to do the work.  Lastly, the CIO no longer felt ignored or respected less and neither did his team.  It goes to a simple concept.  His team really delivered when clear measurement and accountability was adopted, and because the service agreements were documented there was no “spec creep” because all parties had agreed on the deliverables.

Business outcomes included a reduction in third party consultants and contractors on seemingly endless projects, the ability to provide training to the IT and non-IT staff and a much tighter relationship between IT and its internal customers.

Is it all perfect?  No.  I still hear the need to provide a dashboard that coalesces the service level agreement deliverables that can be accessed by the internal customer without having to ask IT to provide it.  This of course provided the opportunity for an entry discussion on Novell’s Business Services Management offerings.  We aren’t close yet, but I wanted to share this approach with you.  The concepts have raised the level of awareness of the contribution of IT and in some cases have actually pulled more funding into projects to be delivered by IT than in the past would never have seen the light of day if only IT had been driving them.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

One of the most frustrating things that support customers go through, is that first level of questions you go through.  The support professional needs to do this to perform some very basic validation and to skip it creates a lot of risk down the line by “missing” some key point.  We’re very fortunate that our customers are usually pretty diligent about doing pre-call checking but there’s always going to be the element of the support pro needing to gather a lot of configuration information and service validation.

For our SUSE Linux Enterprise and OES customers, we’ve turned that bumpy road into a highway.  Any customer can download a copy of the Novell Support Advisor from our site and install it on their Linux or Windows client.  The application uses Adobe’s Flex and Air systems to make the installation super simple and provides an elegant and snappy user interface to what you can of course do through terminal.

The tool once launched allows the user to probe the system for a variety of selectable service and functional options based on categories including connectivity, eDirectory, OES, Print, SLE, Update and Security.  Each category contains multiple service “patterns” that the intelligent diagnostic looks at to make conclusions about the state of the service pattern.  When the data is being gathered some load occurs over a Secure Shell connection to the queried device, but once the data is collected the connection is terminated so network and device load is minimized.  The gathered data is consolidated into an easy to use view that lets the viewer and the support professional see quickly the state of the system.  The tool can also be used to build history to see if things change over time and store that in the Analysis Archive.  Because all the reports are archived, it’s easy to see changes over time and the simple red = critical, green = good dashboard makes information readily accessible

The client also talks to our own update servers to load pattern updates and new patterns, so value increases over time without a lot of admin time required.  The user can select reporting on entire categories or select specific patterns from multiple categories providing enormous flexibility as well as the capability to cut to the chase when doing a problem diagnosis.  If a problem is discovered where help is needed, a service request connection to the NCC can be opened.

Customers can download the tool at http://support.novell.com/advisor/  The tool was released on March 20th, so folks may not yet know about it.

It’s an excellent tool and I want to thank very much the developers for taking me through a quick demo recently.  I encourage all readers to share with customers and prospects that Novell Support has raised the bar in the delivery of more rapid data gathering and diagnosis for Linux systems.  The Novell Support Advisor is a real differentiator sure to benefit anyone who supports a Novell SUSE Linux or OES environment.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

All too often adminstrators, DBAs, users and other people end up with root level access to UNIX and Linux production systems.  So why is this a problem?  Root is, to all intents and purposes, the supreme deity of the system.  A person with root level access can do literally ANYTHING to the system.  Start it.  Stop it.  Kill processes.  Disable services.  Open ports.  Copy data.  You get the picture.

In the old world it was always simple to just give someone root access or make that person root equivalent rather than doing things the right, but sometimes difficult, way of assessing and setting the right level of privilege at the file, directory, process etc. level.  Managing changes over time became problematic because of the power and complexity of the base security system.  So while it’s “wrong” lots of folks became root equivalent over time because it was fast and they were “ok”.

Now we face the unbiased measurement of compliance initiatives and our systems are found to have more holes than a chunk of swiss cheese or a road sign in some unnamed state.  The draconian fix is to remove the root access but while this works in the very short term, it’s not productive for the real world.

What we really need to do is to be able to simply document who needs root style access to what, without making that person root equivalent.  This is where our new acquistion of Fortefi and Privileged User Management really creates value.

The idea is very simple.  Make a database with a nice GUI front end so we can easily assign the right access to the right user to the right resource so that person can be granted root like privilege for the specific task or role without becoming root equivalent.  The power of using this repository model is that it can provide real time validation of the user’s right to use the command or service without immediate administrator intervention.  Moreover, all actions are logged, so when reporting is needed, the data is in place and easily delivers the report in a usable format.  This is driven because the audit data is reposited in a secure manner that can deliver answers with great speed.  In an infraction investigation, delay is expensive.

While remedial reporting is interesting the real power comes from due diligence.  This daily or other interval check validates that accesses are reasonable and necessary and doesn’t require that an event occur before the risk is found.  It allows managers to sign off on activity samples that creates a robust platform to satisfy auditors and security inspectors.

Novell’s Privileged User Management delivers on these requirements in the following ways:

• 100% keylogging of privileged access
• Automatic grading of risk level
• Super user privilege management
• Realtime logging and monitoring
• Proactive compliance management
• Audit the auditor

Novell’s solution not only mitigates risk and simplifies security it also saves on operational expense.  For example to manage the common SUDO function across 1500 servers could take as much as 80 hours.  With the Novell solution, the time required is less than six hours for the same number of servers.

So who can benefit from Novell Privileged User Management?  Literally any organization that uses UNIX or Linux will benefit because root equivalence creep is not only widespread, it’s been a tacitly acceptable practice for years.

My request of you is to think of all your customers or prospects who use UNIX or Linux and make a call to share with them the real risk of root equivalence creep and ask for the opportunity to speak with them about Privileged User Management.  It solves this problem quickly and efficiently and can also be an extremely proactive risk management initiative.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

It was really clear after an excellent week that we can all choose to think about how we help businesses in turmoil today and how that will pay us back in the future.  When the economy is booming, convincing a large customer to try out a “free” office suite or a Linux desktop might be a bit of a challenge.  What I heard from customers and prospects last week is that in a down economy, this is the time to help take expense out of the business.

I have never heard such frustration with Microsoft and their license and maintenance practices as I have been hearing since the start of our fiscal year.  I understand that Microsoft has a business to run, just like we do.  Nonetheless, Office upgrades are off the table at many customers and I’d suggest that they are much more open to going to OpenOffice than I’ve ever seen.  Our edition for Windows is a great start for people because when we get down to brass tacks, the vast majority of Office users aren’t using the high end functionality at all.  Moreover the perception that OOO cannot do things like pivot tables is just plain wrong.  I look at the stuff being delivered by Tom Palomaki and his team in Sales Ops.  These people are rocket scientists when it comes to spreadsheets and they do it all with OOO.  Our customers and prospects could very likely hit 95% of their end users with OOO 3.X without negatively impacting effectiveness, and actually deliver improvement in service and function.  The app can be packaged using ZCM or even delivered as a virtual application using ZENworks Application Virtualization that you’ll recall we just updated.

Taking the next step, I don’t hear from people that they are rushing to Vista.  Windows 7 isn’t here yet and there are a lot of machines still on unsupported Windows.  I don’t hear about massive evergreen hardware refreshes either.  Every customer or prospect who found that portion of their user community who would be well served by SLED would also likely be able to get another year out of the existing hardware.  I heard customer company representatives say that they used to work on a three year rotation and now they are looking to get seven years out of their hardware.  There is absolutely a place for Linux on the desk in these customers and prospects.  As one Architecture Director said, “we’re not in a position where this is optional.  Linux must be our desktop, it’s how we go forward, and it won’t be open for discussion.”

My request of you is simple.  If you haven’t brought up SLED and OpenOffice with your customers, greenfield accounts and renewals since last fall, do so again.  You might be surprised.  And for those who are struggling now, maybe we can help them survive and then thrive.  People buy from people, and just as you remember those who provided great service to you, so will they when things turn around.

Until next time, peace.

Ross