Views from Around the World

If you believe a thing you can make it so, albeit not always in the way you think.  I’m not the first to say this and will not be the last.  I am however already really tired of the whole “economy is bad and will get worse” song.  Certainly things are different than in recent years, and certainly there is work ahead, but if you believe that the economy will make your year bad, I guarantee you it will.  At the same time, history shows us that those who innovate and lead in soft economic times, often explode when the economic state improves.  Choose to innovate and lead, it’s better than the alternative.

So in looking at trends and awareness in the marketplace, I wanted to share some learnings with you.

In our Identity and Security Solution Focus Area, we bring to market four pillars if you will.  Identity Management, Access Management, Access Governance and Compliance Management.  Which ones do you think will see strong growth and implementation this year? 

If you selected Compliance Management and Access Governance, you would be aligned with the analysts.  Compliance requirements are not going away and with a change in the influential US government and the fallout from the financial perversities of last year, we should expect an increasing focus on compliance management.  The beauty of this is that it’s not practical to be non-compliant for many good reasons.  Jail and fines are often cited as the top dogs but they are not.  Shareholder confidence and reputation play enormously in this space.  We have an amazing compliance management platform that not only works as a suite but that can be used as modules to leverage existing investments in other technologies.

As companies go through the three main phases of becoming compliant, they come to the point where they must have assurance that current and future configurations do not break compliance.  It’s always easier to build governance going in, rather than bolting it on after the fact and Novell’s Access Governance Suite can help customers and prospects do both as required.

President Obama has already stated that his administration will be making cybersecurity a top priority.  Initiatives like this will drive growth in Identity and Security very quickly.

So my ask, is to be proactive in reviewing compliance initiatives and to leverage the comprehensive materials our I&S teams produce to create opportunities early and of course often.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

Hey everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, and yes, I am writing this on the first day of 2009.

Over the holidays, I’ve been reading a lot of different material and as you might imagine, the perspectives on the coming year and other outlooks vary greatly.  I choose to look to the future rather than the past and this has encouraged me to look at what other folks see coming or more particularly to summarize what they see as means to impact what’s coming.

I have to give credit to some of the published authors I have been looking at, Malcolm Gladwell for The Outliers, Don Tapscott for Grown Up Digital and Guy Kawasaki for Reality Check.  While I won’t quote them specifically, all left me feeling empowered and positive but in different ways.

So my first thought for the new year, not as resolution but as proposal is to choose to “live” in the state you want to be in.  If you believe that 2009 will be really tough, it probably will be, but if you choose to think a bit differently and to think in terms of “changing the world” instead of “getting by”, even if you miss your vision by a couple of steps you still end up well ahead.  

I could look at things and see that the days ahead are outnumbered by the days behind, but like many of you, I’m still looking at how I can change the world and make a difference.  You decide what works for you.

How does this relate to us at Novell?  As Kawasaki and Jobs and Schmidt and Hovsepian have said, to change the world you need a launch point.  We at Novell have wonderful launch points to leverage.  We’re fiscally solid, we’ve come off a strong 08 and we have amazingly capable people.  If we all choose to leverage our launch points as the first step into changing the world, I think we can amaze ourselves at what we can do, individually and together.

Novell is much more than the sum of the parts that people equate us with.  We’re more than NetWare, more than Linux, more than Identity, more than ZENworks.  I have the most fun and get the most resonance from senior customer executives when I can pull all the parts together to create a vision that works for the customer’s business.  As my friends and associates Phil Richards and Fred Arrington said on a call before Christmas, customers want to hear our vision for them, it’s a differentiator.  I count myself fortunate to work with folks like these, they get it.  

So let’s choose to go create vision for our customers and prospects and try to change the world.  There is no universal law that says only small startups with no funding and only energy and desire can change the world.  We can too.  Please consider joining me in this mode.  It’s up to you of course, but I believe that we can do it.

Until next time,

Peace.

Ross