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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 8:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.