Views from Around the World

As I invest time in customers and prospects I hear the same story over and over again.  The net net is that there are lots of vendors building good solutions that address business needs.  Some are better known or have a more aggressive market presence.  Others are much smaller companies building good stuff but highly dependent upon good word of mouth.  Certainly good public relations and success stories matter to all.

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

Ask any knowledge worker what application he or she starts and ends the day with and you have a very high probability of hearing email, or one of its many synonyms.  Today’s IT professionals face a huge challenge in this space that will not get any easier in the future, and that challenge is ongoing availability.

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