BrainShare 2008: The Strategic Takeaways

Momentum is ours! Novell has a consistent core strategy, a long-term vision and a global ecosystem of enterprise-class partners.

I could name nearly as many reasons to attend BrainShare each year as there are attendees—who numbered 5,500 this year, from 58 countries! We come for the training, for the demos, the tech sessions and the labs. We come to kick tires at the Partner Expo, and to personally deliver our pleas, pet peeves and "attaboys" directly to the keepers of the code. We come—let's be honest—for a really good time. This year it was a belly laugh at Frank Caliendo's impressions, and a purge by perspiration on the dance floor, courtesy of Collective Soul.

But these days we also come for a strategic reality check, to parse the latest business plan, unfold the roadmap, peer into the future and listen for the sound of clear direction. We want to know that real customer needs are driving today's strategy, that there is a clear plan for where we're going tomorrow, and that customers, partners and community developers are lining up at the ticket window. These are serious questions; after all—if you're at BrainShare, you're a stakeholder.

Ron Hovsepian: The Keynote FAQ

Any questions about strategic consistency or customer alignment evaporated when Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian took the stage. Having spent much of the past year explaining Novell's vision and strategy, Ron served up a sample of his most frequently answered questions, and showed that he's been listening too. His talk provided a C-level view of how Novell sees itself and the enterprise software industry, what the company and community have accomplished in the past year, and how innovation, interoperability and open source development are winning hearts, minds and major purchase orders.

Ron quickly reaffirmed Novell's self-definition as an infrastructure software company with one foot in desktop-to-data center Linux and the other in enterprise IT management. He summarized the company's mission simply: to make IT work as one by building interoperable bridges between the open source and proprietary software worlds, and across the J2EE ? .NET software technology divide. He ticked off the technology trends that are setting enterprise IT agendas today: transformation in the data center, social networking in the workplace, too much complexity, too much cost and too little security everywhere else.

Let Your Computer Do the Work

Queries enable you to filter, extrapolate and calculate data quickly and efficiently. For example, you can use a query to list the laptops being used by the accounting department, to calculate the dollar amount spent on those same laptops over an 18-month period, or to list the employees who have had the same laptop for more than two years and may be in need of an upgrade. Once a query is designed, the click of a button runs the query and displays the results in a table you can save for future reference.

Four Vectors of Innovation

In responding to those trends, Ron pointed out that Novell is driving focused innovation into enterprise IT environments through four key vectors.