Views from Around the World

Last week I had the good fortune to visit customers in the Detroit area with Phil Richards and Lynus Parker from Fred Arrington’s team.  Meeting customers across the Americas shows the unique challenges different folks face.  As you likely know, the American auto sector is struggling and good people are doing their best to move the ball forward.

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

In their 2009 study, IDC predicts a growth rate of 62.2% in unstructured storage. Nice to know, but what does this mean? The storage industry and its reviewers spend a lot of time talking about block storage and that’s all well and good for databases and the like. What about files? You know, files. The things that file servers exist to, well, serve. That’s the unstructured data part of the storage conversation and contrary to some reports and some opinions, its growth is explosive. Explosive is not a word often associated with control.

When we think about files, we are also thinking about people. In past postings, I’ve written about another misunderstood offering called Dynamic Storage Technology, but in this post, I want to focus on the merits of NSM – Novell Storage Manager.

If in their everyday roles, people are creating files and working together as part of collaborative units, is there value to an organization to be able to treat the files as objects managed by policy that is linked to the user, group or directory container? The answer, plainly, is yes.

I called this post The Undiscovered Country on purpose. The future is unknown so its discovery and making is both powerful and exciting. In this case I am proposing we step up and create a component of the future. And, yes I am aware of both the Shakespeare and Star Trek connotations.

Novell Storage Manager leverages identity and policy to manage storage automatically. Automation is core to much of what we do at Novell, be it systems management, governance, provisioning and virtual machine management. We created the Intel based server platform, and with it powerful, effective and usable unstructured storage.  The time to recapture that space is right now.

Every customer is challenged by costs, complexity and risk. By using NSM to automate storage allocation and management, we can have a direct impact on customer costs. When customers add in heterogeneous storage models and the challenges around data duplication, both complexity and risk appear, truly a Hydra to face.  The IDC study discovered a cost of $5 to set up a new user’s storage and $2 every time a change was made. After implementing NSM the customer dropped that to under $1 per event. That’s over a 70% reduction in a fairly uncomplicated environment.  Imagine the impact if we remove risk and complexity as well as reduce expense.

IDC elucidates storage issues for the enterprise as follows:

- Be able to identify pertinent information quickly and retrieve if necessary

- Store information in the most appropriate location and manage it based on predefined policies that reflect the value this information represents to the organization

- Be certain that information is properly protected and is available in case of a disaster, deletion or corruption

- Manage the infrastructure without impact the end-user experience or having to retrain users

Sounds to me like a prescription for Novell Storage Manager, ours heterogeneous Storage Management Product that provides support for Linux and Windows systems.

New tools in the recent NSM 2.5 product release include enhancements to collaborative storage management, a new management UI, support for auxiliary storage and path analysis. The new release is capable of being configured as a soft appliance as well as offering a Custodian feature that keeps neat and tidy a history of file movements in the catalog so archived files can be easily located and restored with full rights preservation.

Storage Management isn’t about an OS, it’s about process, policy and control across multiple platforms, a hallmark of Making IT Work As One.

No matter your role, if you speak to a customer or prospect ask if any of the IDC documented issues has resonance? If so, Novell has the solution.  To help qualify a prospect, they have to have…  file servers and files.

Until next time, peace.