BrainShare 2008: The Strategic Takeaways

Renaissance and Momentum

When asked what he's most proud of at Novell, Ron points to the company's recent 25th anniversary, a milestone few technology companies survive to celebrate. And Novell is celebrating not just survival, but renaissance. In the past year alone the company has added 8,700 new customers, bringing its total customer base to more than 50,000. More important, those newest clients include some of the world's largest and most dominant organizations—Wal-Mart, AIG, HSBC, Peugot, Casio and Lufthansa. Novell's momentum is continuing to build.

Companies making major IT decisions should consider Novell because its strategy is clearly defined: to make IT work as one. "We know who we are and where we're going," Ron says flatly, "and I pledge not to deviate. We are uniquely positioned to drive innovation that is aligned to [customer] needs, and we are dedicated to the customer relationship—to reducing their costs, managing their complexity and lowering their costs."

Jeff Jaffe: The FOSSA Project

To present the long-term technical vision that is coalescing around Novell's core strategy of making IT work as one, Chief Technology Officer Jeff Jaffe took the BrainShare stage to introduce a cat-like mammalian carnivore native to Madagascar—the fossa. Being well known for agility (where it is known at all), and perhaps because its name approximates an acronym for Free and Open Source Software for Agility, the fossa has been drafted into service as mascot and namesake for Novell's vision of a vastly more agile IT infrastructure, and for the strategy for achieving it.

In the Fossa vision, IT infrastructure is delivered as a set of services that can be instantiated, scaled, connected, integrated, reconfigured and deactivated at will, giving the CIO infinite flexibility to deploy IT resources against business objectives. Jeff described an intelligent infrastructure that will accept user tasks, autonomously identify the best place to execute them, and automatically provision real and virtual resources through policy-aware orchestration. All resources will be identified and continuously monitored, allowing seamless quality assurance and auditable compliance reporting.

The Fossa Project is a long-term vision that will require the full support and active participation of the open source community to realize. Significant advances will be necessary in each of Novell's core technical competencies.

• Linux—based virtualization—New Linux distributions will be required: a very thin physical (P-distro) distribution to run the hardware, and identity-enabled virtual machines (V-distros) that can be dynamically allocated and managed.
• Orchestration—Workloads will need to be provisioned and orchestrated across physical and virtual boundaries and lifecycles based on policy and identity.
• Policy—Fossa will require unform policy management across services, applications and platforms. Policies will expand to include SLAs, even for real-time management of virtualized workloads.
• Identity—Fossa will require a rich language to characterize identity attributes of any type of device—physical or logical—which will be routinely distributed across different administrative domains.