Views from Around the World

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.

I had a great conversation with Jason Dea of Platespin recently. Jason is a self-described (darn accurately I think) evangelist for all things from this important part of Novell. We were talking about the directionality of the whole virtualization space and came up with a metaphor I want to share with you.

Jason has a nice chart that ties together three gears, Transformation, Optimization and Protection around a larger central gear that contains three business values. They are Cost, Risk and Performance. In our conversation we concluded that what is meant here is Cost Management and Reduction, Risk Mitigation and Reducing Complexity thereby improving Performance. So his thoughts on workload management bind exactly to the value proposition we elocute around Making IT Work As One.

The metaphor is one of a train going from city to city, where each city brings new challenges and opportunities. So sit back and let me tell you a story.

We boarded a train that has departed Transformationville. There was a giant billboard in Transformationville that proclaimed the values of Partitioning, Isolation, Encapsulation and Hardware Independence. It had wonderful resonance and virtualization became commonplace and accepted, the process of transformation became highly commoditized with market leaders such as VMWare offering basic transformation service at no cost to the client. Customers in Transformationville soon discovered that virtualization itself didn’t solve business problems. They now had both physical and virtual workloads in place, and while they had saved some money on physical architecture, management costs were the same and both risk and complexity had increased. Transformationville was an interesting place to visit, but it was only the first stop on the line to value.

Our train has entered the eastern suburbs of Optimizationburg. There’s plenty of awareness of the need to optimize our Data Center environments and numerous solutions are leaping out in front of us. At our first stop in Optimizationburg we enter a crowded marketplace where lots of vendors are hawking their wares, but most of them lack dimensionality and many are one trick ponys. As we shop the market we find only a couple of answers that really focus on the business issues. One of the vendors has a storefront called Novell, and inside we see some very innovative and cost effective solutions with the label Platespin on them that help customers who’ve already bought big pieces from the VMWare store just up the block. There are other smaller stores as well that we remember from Transformationville. They include KVMeverywhere, the XENshoppe and VirtualBoxStore. They carry interesting wares but don’t seem yet to have the hooks to really make it in Optimizationburg, although the XENshoppe is carrying many products from a variety of providers that deliver similar services and seems to be getting some real world traction. There’s another storefront under renovation marked with an old MS Virtual Server sign, but no one seems to be going in although many are looking at it.

We re-board the train and as we travel through to the western boundary of Optimizationburg we stop at another marketplace that is only just being completed. There are fewer stores in this market. Many of the small point sellers are nowhere to be found but VMWare continues to have a big store, the Novell store is larger carrying more inventory with more scope and scale and also now sells appliances to make disaster recovery simpler. There’s a new store on the block as well with a sign that says Microsoft. Mostly it contains the kind of things that have been successful in Transformationville, but there is a great deal of promise of new solutions to come that will be very valuable to the citizens of Optimizationburg as well as those environs that don’t have local data centers, instead needing to transform to and optimize in a growing town called Cloud. One older fellow with white hair and small round glasses keeps referring to this new town as Bespin, but no one seems to understand.

We’re here now, but we also know that our train will depart soon on a journey of some length to Protection City. We’ve never been there but the news we read tells us that there will be another mall to shop in there with a large VMWare store, a very large Microsoft store and a number of smaller stores selling wares that improve the experience of the products in the other store. The people at the Novell store show us items that would sell very well today in the giant mall of Protection City, and encourage us to think about them well in advance of arriving there, because by then, the risk of insufficient protection will have become very great, and the impact of the growing Regional Municipality of Cloud will be enormous. They also encourage us to think about the power of Orchestration, the ability to provide automation and policy orientation to the ideas that will grow Protection City.

I hope you enjoyed the story, and like many stories there is a moral to it. When we look at the Data Centers our customer’s are building, they will be even more heterogeneous than what we see today. VMWare, Microsoft, XEN, Citrix and Novell will all have a place there. More importantly, it will be evident that the Novell Platespin brand will have enormous credibility because it will bridge the physical and virtual needs of VMWare, Hyper-V and XEN with comprehensive tools to deliver real business value. Some folks think that Virtualization is as disruptive a force as the Internet. What I do know is that it has enormous momentum and that by getting on the wave generated we can move faster and with more impact.

Some people choose to think that the future is already made. I invite you to choose to make the future by engaging in the present.

Until next time, peace.

Last post, I wrote that this is the year for Compliance and Governance.  No surprises in the premise and no arguments from readers.  Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to represent Novell in a series of roundtables around Compliance.  We promised attendees confidentiality so I won’t name names, but in each of the sessions there was consistency that I would like to share with you.

Compliance is viewed mostly still in the form of a threat.  This is not surprising.  In fact, Kevin Coppins our VP of Identity and Security Sales for the Americas has shared in chats and messages that this is normal.  In the book SAP GRC for Dummies (good primer despite the title), the authors refer to three phases for compliance implementation.

In phase one, it’s comply at any cost.  Historically this has been done manually with people figuring things out as they go along and really making best efforts.  It’s the sense of threat that drives the organization.

In phase two, the organizations start to rationalize the approach from a cost and control perspective.  This is where most organizations are beginning today.  The clear message is that “we no longer have the people capacity we used to have, and the rules and regulations change”.  The new US administration has already announced that they will be creating new compliance regulations that have “teeth”.  The challenge facing these organizations is that if they lose the people, they haven’t created an intellectual respository of what they do, how they respond, and made it easy for someone to come in green and be up to speed very quickly.

In phase three, the burdens on the organization are reduced through automation.  We are ideally positioned to deliver at this level.

Our opportunity is to understand that the sample audiences we talk to are likely indicative of where the market we attach with is living.  If this is true, and I believe it is, our ability to step in at the beginning of phase two and accelerate the passage through it to phase three has tangible value.  The rationale for this is what I see when talking to customers and prospects, which is another three phase process that maps to the process documented in the GRC book I have referenced.  When we get down to brass tacks, the phases are manual threat response, documentation and policy creation and acceptance and third, and most powerful, using compliance as a value to the business, effectively leveraging the ability to take compliance and make it a business value proposition both internally and externally.

I don’t see messaging of this type from the other vendors, yet it’s what customers and prospects want to hear, that someone can get them to value faster, with less cost and less pain.

Novell can do this.  So let’s do so.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

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

I’ve been thinking, which isn’t quite as dangerous as you might think.  I’ve been thinking about cloud computing.  Or more specifically what goes into cloud computing, the various definitions and what it could mean to us here at Novell.

There are a bunch of really smart people working with Dr. Jaffe on cloud computing.  I’m confident that they’ll do an awesome job.  We have customers and prospects asking now so let’s think about how might answer.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others all talk about their cloud deliverables.  I think that when we look at their offerings, we can talk about potential fits today.  Think about this.  All cloud deliverables focus on some element of file storage.  This is something we do rather well I think.  Consider the new version of iFolder, our high performance file systems and the best file security in the business.  We’ve delivered web access to store for a long time, so there’s one mechanism, iFolder is a different model, and provides sync services similar to Live Mesh or EC2 but with richer security and encryption.  

The other providers look to deliver messaging.  GMail is a really nice email model, but the calendar and task integration is limited and requires the user to manage multiple pages.  Hosted Exchange has been debuted by Microsoft.  GroupWise Web Access does everything in a clean, easy to use interface.  In the social networking space, Google and Microsoft both offer blog pages, as does Teaming, only Teaming does a whole lot more.  Yes you could consider Sharepoint Online Services, but it requires Exchange Online Services and Office Live Online Services.  We don’t create this level of artificial constraint.

The most important element of any web based service is secure access and authentication for each user, while at the back end, the service needs massive scalability and reliability.  Novell’s Identity Framework is the most scalable and unassailable out there.  What better toolset to manage the access for cloud services?

How do you host this level of service?  How about on a fast, reliable, secure and massively scalable infrastructure that can operate in a continuity model, with support for both physical and virtualized hosts.  How fortunate that by combining Platespin and SLES we can deliver this.

Even as Google begins to deploy the Beta of its Native Client, we’re already poised for simple agent deployment and centralized management with our ZEN family of tools.  Many ISPs deploy antivirus services to their customers but the level of protection is often inadequate.  Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to offer centrally delivered security services on an opt in basis?  We could even use our tools to push out applications directly to users in either a direct license or virtualized basis.

I don’t think I’m being overly optimistic.  Combined with the right pricing model and the right hosting service, Novell solutions address all the deliverables currently offered in the cloud, with superior service and security.  It’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.  But I really don’t think so.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

Remember when we all stored our stuff on servers, on our F: drive or Home drive?  Availability was never a problem.  Those servers were reliable, backed up and very secure.  Encrypted in connection and protected by the best file system on the planet.  Life was good.

It’s different today.  We live the web life, we use many devices, and very often we are working in a state of disconnect.  Several years ago Novell delivered a technology called iFolder that worked well but had some limitations.  It could be a bit slow, and it used less “open” connections.  We also were not so dependent on our disconnected selves, or as likely to use more than just one computer as is the norm today.

Today’s marketplace has created an opportunity.  We aren’t the only player in it, but we are absolutely capable of being the leader in the enterprise space.  Let me share why I think this is so.

Disconnected is great, but backup is typically an action we initiate.  That creates risk of data loss.  Cloud storage is a great idea, but where specifically are the servers?  Who has access to them?  What kind of protection of data privacy is ensured?  When you read the EULAs, it’s frightening.  Sounds complicated in addition to being risky.  Amazon does EC2, Google has a storage capability in addition to GMAIL.  Microsoft has its Live Mesh service out in beta.  EMC acquired Mozy.  Some of these technologies include user agents to automate the synchronization.  Novell is certainly capable of playing in this cloud model if needs be, we build to open standards.

Yet there’s a gap.  The gap exists in control of the storage location, the service level agreements, the protections and the redundancy.  The things that enterprise customers absolutely must have.  Fortunately Novell can solve this problem.

In the coming SP for OES 2 everyone is aware of the awesome Domain Services for Windows, but there is an element equally important, the next generation of iFolder.

What makes this iFolder ideal for the enterprise?  Here’s what I see.  The new iFolder does have a user agent to automate the synchronization.  It uses http as its communication protocol and that means security doesn’t get compromised by extra open ports.  The new iFolder does encryption in the stream and offers encryption on the server store.  And unlike the original iFolder, it also allows you to share iFolders with other users.  It’s the best of the original iFolder, with the best of the open source version, merged together in a fast, secure tool.

Live Mesh, EC2, the Google tools and all the rest focus on being the storage location.  They are doing what they are designed to do.  But in most cases, enterprise customers don’t want or can not trust the storage to an outside party without a lot of controls in place, and for the most part, these controls are not fully implemented yet.  They want to manage their own central store, to control access to data and to provide data integrity for their users who operate both connected and disconnected from the corporate environment.  Only Novell provides the customer the rich capability to control and manage all elements of the folder and data management, with agents that run on Windows, Linux and Macintosh and that can leverage the best server side file systems for reliability and scale.  The other beautiful thing is that the customer also gets to choose the medium for storage be it server attached, network attached or a full storage area network.  This is yet another differentiator we bring to bear, that being no dependency on a specific physical or logical platform.

Some people think we were early to market with the original iFolder.  I submit for your consideration that we today have a “folder of opportunity”  Take some time, if you will, to learn about the new iFolder and then discuss it with partners, customers and prospects.  It’s our time, let’s grab it.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

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

I serve as a Board member for the Information Technology Association of Canada.  At last week’s quarterly board meeting we heard from three sectors on what’s happening in IT in their markets.  Senior executives from Oil and Gas, Healthcare and Education shared their perspectives and the realities they are facing.  To say that the presentations were a bit saddening is understatement but they all highlight opportunities for Novell.  I was also in Ottawa early in the week with the Federal team to speak with senior leaders in our intelligence community about improving how people work together.  I kept hearing the same messages.

To an industry, the speakers made three consistent points:

1.  They are finding it very difficult to attract younger people into IT

2.  Budgets are not being used because there are not enough talented IT people to make the projects happen in a reasonable amount of time.

3.  Innovation is stalled or stalling because their current communications and collaboration models are at a point where they hurt as much as they help.

So how does knowing this help Novell?

When we drill down into the issues we learn something we should have been listening for.  The Gen Y folks who will make up IT in the future are not getting engaged.  It’s not hard to find out why not.  Fundamentally they are not interested in what they see as boring or stagnant careers.  They are not interested in a generic Windows desktop with generic apps, death by email and being required to be in a particular place to do work.  They aren’t enrolling in traditional post-secondary programs because these programs are focused on past requirements and look tedious and boring, particularly if all the work is done in a classroom.  In a traditional class based school, enrollment in the IT program dropped from over 350 full time students to 32.  Yet at Athabaska University where the classes are online, enrollment is increasing.  

The speaker from Health Care echoed the hiring problems and further stated that Health environments were becoming more and more heterogeneous, despite significant advances by the healthcare software providers to do “everything”  He said the costs of homogeneity were very high, limited flexibility and created vendor lock-in.  Unfortunately they have difficulty hiring people who can work in mixed environments and specifically so when the mix includes open source.  The speaker made some pointed remarks about being able to understand all the OSS licensing models as well.  These all combine to stall their ability to innovate, and in public health care where there is less money, stalled projects often vanish entirely.

Oil and Gas is booming, just look at the profits being reported, yet as the industry looks to leveraging new finds such as those in Canada’s north and the recently discovered heavy deposits in Utah, Wyoming and neighbouring states, finding people is a real problem and so projects run late or don’t get done and not because of lack of budget.  The challenges in getting projects for using catalysts in Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage or the establishment of the “greener” Toe to Heel Air Injection oil recovery models off the ground are that they consume enormous amounts of processing power and need the people capable of operating and supporting these systems to be in place.

In the intelligence space, these leaders are all to aware of what happens when information bottlenecks occur and are very concerned about artificial information filtration.  As Richard A. Clarke, former Special Advisor to the US National Security Council has stated in many talks, overly structured communications finds things that aren’t there and misses key information.

Each speaker also cited the challenges in letting people work together and to share knowledge.  I grew frustrated hearing this, because in individual conversations with the speakers I had already learned that they had tried “social” software but found it cumbersome and management intense.  Obviously they had implemented something other than what we do.  Every speaker understood that traditional hierarchical communications models are impediments not assets and in private conversations each said that email was killing them.

Novell brings to bear the right pieces to alleviate these business challenges.  Our software allows work to be an activity not a place.  We don’t force a particular desktop or a desktop at all in some scenarios.  Our identity frameworks easily ensure that users have access to the right services in the right way.  Our Linux frameworks provide the high performance and highly secure backends for line of business applications and easily integrate into proprietary virtual and physical environments.  Our management tools enable both the data center and the end user computing spaces to alleviate the need for every user to be an IT expert and to make working from where you are a reality.  Lastly, but most important to the next generation of IT professionals, our business social networking fabric provides the file management, new media and real time collaboration tools that new hires look for prior to accepting a job.

More than any other software provider, Novell brings the right mix of tools to help the businesses represented by the conference speakers and most all others to achieve their goals.  Our real challenge is that the partners of those organizations don’t know us that well and we still have work to do with those businesses to establish who Novell is, and that we are not what we were.  That’s not a secret to anyone I hope, but the path to change starts with a conversation.  With all the other major software providers present, I did not hear a more compelling story from any of them, than the story we can tell ourselves.

Let’s go talk to people about how we make a difference.  I’m happy to help.

Until next time, peace.