Views from Around the World

I recently had the opportunity to be a speaker at a customer conference sponsored by Novell partner, The Messaging Architects.  In his opening session, CEO Pierre Chamberlain said that email was broken.  I think he’s right, and that’s awesome news for us at Novell.

If we look at the data, and good data was shared by analysts from Forrester and IDC, pertaining to message volume and message size, the old models for email clearly don’t work anymore.  We’ve seen a shift in raw or text email away from the asynchronous world of the past to have that kind of communication moving to the synchronous modality of live texting, Instant Messaging and the like.  We’ve also seen the incredible push to always on connectivity where Blackberrys have ruled the mobility store for years, and with new challengers such as the iPhone and the Android powered G1 coming into the marketplace.

So what of what we call email?  It’s changed dramatically.  High capacity bandwidth has changed how we think about attachments, HTML is the default message construction model replacing plain text and rich media content are the norm.

Think about this for a minute.  If email space consumption has been doubling every year, will this continue?  My premise for you is that it won’t.  Doubling is the minimum.  Rich content is more than just HTML, it’s the embedding of rich image files, audio and if you aren’t seeing it yet, autorun video in email messages.  Whether this will be Flash, or some other method, I promise you it’s coming.  Initial views are short loops, interestingly enough quite similar to the “moving newspaper photos” seen in the Harry Potter movies, to video that has minute measured runtimes.  The integration of rich media solves the I want the rich experience delivered but I cannot connect to you in real time problem.  Doubling?  More like an escalating multiplier each year.

So why do I say that this breakage is good for Novell?  My contention is that we are well positioned to deliver these services with commercial grade capability.  From GroupWise Bonsai’s rich Web 2.0 and mashup experience through integration with our Teaming and our Conferencing solution, Novell bridges the line from asynchronous to synchronous, from plain text to rich media content that is more than just a set of attachments.  This isn’t speculation, it’s already happened in the consumer space.  I’ve written before about the impact of consumer on commercial, and I’ve even coined a word to describe it ; consmercial.  This new view of email won’t require user retraining, the users are doing it now.  

In fact when customers ask me how much end user retraining will be required to roll out Bonsai, I suggest that they ask their users and will likely be surprised at how ready those people are today.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

John Dragoon and team have done their usual stellar job in the new corporate positioning.  As you’ve hopefully seen, our approach to the market is fine tuned to identify three focus areas, Data Center, End User Computing and Identity & Security.  The rationale for this tuning is solid and very much in keeping with how people buy.

It brings on a question about who the user is in End User Computing.  I’ve been thinking on this and doing a lot of research on this subject.  In the late eighties we used this term when I worked at American Express.  We couldn’t “release” an internal change without the support of the EUC Committee.  While such committees may still exist, my premise is that in 2009 we are talking about someone very different.

If we look at what is becoming popular in “commercial” IT we see an interesting parallel to what is popular in “consumer” or “prosumer” IT.  The influencers on tomorrow’s commercial purchases and selections are the buyers in the consumer space today.  In the compression that is occurring around the availability of skilled IT professionals, more influence and more power is being leveraged by the end user computing community.  

Please don’t allow me to confuse you by concluding that our focus area is the same as the user, it’s not.  My premise is that the people who use the technology will continue to have increasing influence on the selection of that technology.  Folks have reacted differently to the Microsoft Mojave experiment.  At the root is an interesting idea though.  Vista uptake in corporate has been slower than hoped.  By convincing real people who are buying personal computers that Vista is not evil, Microsoft is creating an influence base in commercial software.  These influence bases will not completely override all the business imperatives that go into the selection of a desktop OS, but be very sure that they will have an impact.  Microsoft sees Mojave as having been a very powerful exercise.

Which leads back to us.  If you read the data I shared in my recent post about the challenges of bringing new people into IT, the extended data supports a similar contention into the hiring of knowledge workers.  The Knowledge Worker pool doesn’t want stagnation or limited function.  When I’ve presented our Teaming solution to Gen Y knowledge workers I’ve seen the excitement in their eyes.  When I’ve talked about the ability in Bonsai to build your own custom interface to email and calendar, sort of your own business mashup, I’ve seen some of the skepticism about all commercial collaboration solutions be supplanted by what looks a lot like hope.  Application virtualization is a really simple answer to what has been an ugly and expensive problem.  The file management in Teaming looks a lot like Apple’s Time Machine, but oriented to teams instead of individuals.  Commercial gains by leveraging consumer accepted solutions.

If you choose to see what is really happening in the overall technology marketplace, you also get to see why our Making IT Work As One message and our commitment to interoperability makes a lot of sense.  It’s not about replacing Windows with Linux, it’s about making it dead simple for the two to work together.  I commend the GroupWise Bonsai Mac team hugely.  I’ve worked as one of their primary testers nearly all year and they have built a beautiful product.  So as corporations increase the presence of Macintosh computers into their environments, Novell solutions provide integration that makes it easier for the disparate solutions work together.  I propose that we are not about Either-Or, we are about AND.

In closing, those end users will have increasing influence on what knowledge workers use day to day.  It’s in our own best interest to communicate the forward thinking, the innovation and the AND that Novell uniquely brings to the marketplace.  No other software company our size is as about interoperability as we are.

Until next time, peace

Ross