Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

In my last posting I described initiatives to ensure excellence in our internal processes. I described Integrated Product Development (IPD) which we use to gain information about customer needs, market trends, and technology trends and translate into high quality products that meet these needs and wants.

While IPD is used to decide what products we build, the processes which assure that they are built appropriately – on time, with quality and efficiently - are our Engineering Excellence processes. Since Novell business units came from Novell and acquired companies, we have a collection of engineering processes to choose from.

Waterfall and Scrum

There are different approaches to building software. Traditional waterfall techniques go through structured phases: architecture, design, development, unit test, system test, integration test, and regression are all typical phases. In agile techniques there is continuous build of what has already been developed, and all code is continually integrated and tested to create a potentially releasable product. With our focus on open source, we are involved in community approaches; participants are involved inside and outside our company; and we maintain both a community and enterprise version of the product. There are other variations: spiral, scrum, and extreme programming are popular.

In looking at these choices, we determined that we would get good coverage if we focused our energies on two typical approaches: traditional (waterfall, modified waterfall, the V-Model) and scrum. By standardizing on these two, we largely cover all of the choices – including open source development.

What are some key engineering processes?

There are many Engineering processes. Included in them are:

• Interlock with product management on feature selection
• Project/release planning
• Project management
• Estimating effort
• Putting in the proper buffers to deal with expected but unforeseen delays (e.g. requirements churn)
• Globalization (e.g. double-byte)
• Localization (of content and interfaces)
• ISV support
• User-centered design
• Backlog management (especially for scrum)
• Criteria to exit from one phase to another of development
• Product ship criteria
• Quality metrics and targets
• Testing strategy
• Beta criteria
• Design documentation
• Patch and update
• Multi-site development
• Defect management
• Coding and code inspection
• Documentation
• Tools (e.g. configuration management, bug detection)
• Vendor management
• Re-use
• Incorporation of open source assets
• Security
• Export
• Architecture reviews
• Install
• Common technologies (e.g. user interfaces, databases, directories)

A phased approach

Novell has an excellent reputation for its engineering prowess. For this reason we only recently have selected Standard Engineering Practices (SEPs) in our Engineering Excellence initiative.

We did not rigorously formalize all of the above processes at once. While standardization has benefits, we are careful not to overindulge in process, since that can slow down development in a way that is counterproductive. This year, we have chosen a small number of SEPs to get started. These include the ones that are most critical to developing products in a timely fashion and with high quality. These SEPs relate to: interlock with product management, backlog management, project/release planning, estimation, buffering, acceptance/exit criteria, ship criteria, and design documentation. Even these are not brand new – the standardized processes rely on tried and true processes that parts of Novell have been using for years. And it is our intention to add new SEPs every year -as part of a continuous improvement program.

Usually I write about our business and product strategies. Powering our strategies is an execution engine that ensures we build the right products with the right features for our customers - on a timely basis and with high quality. The execution engine is Novell’s people: programmers, engineers, product managers, project managers, marketing specialists, and our sales force and channel partners.

>The engine is driven by our internal processes – the methods with which we gain information about customer needs, market trends, and technological innovations and synthesis this into high quality products that meet customers requirements.

Novell has four business units. Some originated in Novell, while others, such as our Open Platform Solutions (Linux) unit, came principally through acquisitions. Others are a combination of organic and acquired elements. As a result, through the years we developed different processes.

Last year we commited ourselves to process consistency and process excellence. Consistency is important externally because it enhances the unity of our products in the marketplace. It is important internally because our engineers work together and, over time, move from one team to another.

We are always focused on excellence. Novell has always been great at understanding market needs and translating them into high quality products – but there is always room for improvement. So, as we examine and standardize core processes, we also ensure that we are performing them in an excellent fashion.

Integrated Product Development

The first area we addressed was excellent process for Product Management. Product Management focuses on the lifecycle of a product; understanding market and customer needs and translating them into products. We now have a standard approach for Integrated Product Development (IPD). Indeed, we have gone beyond product management and provided a standard approach to business management. Key features in our approach to IPD include:

• A cross-functional team for each business unit (BU), called the Business Management Team (BMT). The BMT is led by the BU General Manager, and involves BU personnel as well as leaders from sales, marketing, services, finance, and other advisory functions. The BMT makes cross-functional decisions on product content, product readiness, marketing programs, channel readiness, selected markets, and R&D investments.

• A set of readiness that each product must pass through so that appropriate decisions are made at the right times. This ensures alignment in the company and readiness for the entire product lifecycle: development, marketing, sales, and service.

• A set of artifacts or documents that must be completed to ensure that each step of the process has considered everything that is necessary to be considered. These start with the Market Requirements Document to ensure a market focus. These are reviewed at the aforementioned readiness gates.

• A complete management system for products; detailed dashboards which show schedule, quality, resource consumption, resource planning, etc.

• Operational business planning: focus on sales, channels, marketing.

• A cadence of reviews so that BMT members are well prepared for gate reviews (with the artifacts, inputs from their colleagues) and BMT decisions are promptly disseminated.

Summary and next steps

We have developed a staged roll-out for IPD: Too often, heavy processes introduced all at once can do more harm than good. So our approach is lightweight and staged. We are in the middle of a several year maturation and key elements are already in place.

Aside from product management excellence, we also need excellence for our core engineering processes. This post is getting long, so I will discuss that at my next posting.

Over the last several months, we have made key announcements about the roadmap for our flagship Linux product – SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). In March, we announced our schedule for SLE 11 and invited participation from the community. More recently, we announced the general availability of SLE 10 SP2. Both represent steps in our commitment to provide a differentiated Enterprise Linux distribution. Herein I provide some analysis.

Enterprise Linux

We have clearly, consistently, and repeatedly communicated a corporate strategy of providing enterprise-level customers with a Linux distribution worthy of mission-critical applications. Key characteristics of this include:

• Quality, service, and support.

• Functionality that supports desktop-to-data center capability with a single code base.

• Taking desktop Linux to new places: a corporate desktop, a thin client, document exchange with Microsoft Office.

• Taking server Linux to new places: virtualization built into the distribution, hardware support, support of guests including Microsoft Server.

• Partnerships with key ISVs, such as SAP.

We have been proud of the work to date, but there is more to do. After all, Windows still dominates the corporate desktop and there are more Windows and UNIX servers available to convert to Linux. This is the major focus for SLE 10 SP2 and the continuing focus for SLE 11.

SLE 10 SP2

So how does SP2, our most recently announced service pack, fit into this picture?

First, an enterprise distribution involves more than the support of the code. Customers need tools to manage their subscriptions; fully understand what they are entitled to; and keep track of fixes, patches, and upgrade opportunities. With SLE 10 SP2, we include a Subscription Management Tool so an enterprise can manage its subscriptions.

At the desktop level, we improved interoperability with Microsoft Office and Active Directory. Also for the desktop – new, exciting functionality has been added. We added multimedia support for OpenOffice.org and addressed plug-and-play for networking (wired and 3rd generation wide area wireless).

At the server level, we continue to bring Linux to new places. Over the last year, we enhanced Linux real-time support, and SP2 extends that with our SLERT (SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time) support for OFED (OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution). Applications that are both mission-critical and time-sensitive - in finance, process control, and government - should be migrating to Linux.

For server virtualization, we are delivering the fruits of our collaboration with Microsoft by shipping translators to support Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as guests. This provides near-native performance with support from Microsoft. Also, we are shipping the ability to migrate Windows server guests between virtual machines, which we demonstrated at BrainShare 2008. Our preference is to migrate workloads to Linux – but if a customer wants to stay on Windows, they can host that application on a Linux host and have Linux be the fundamental platform for the enterprise.

SLE 11

SLE 11 will ship in 2009. As a community-based product, we openly communicate what we are doing so that our partners can provide feedback and input, and help us with priorities and development.

• Software delivery models. As mentioned, the industry is experimenting with different models to deliver software. SLE 11 will support this in numerous ways. SLE 11 will be delivered in a conventional way or as an appliance. For partners that want to ship their own appliances, it will be easy to embed SLE 11 in their product – as we have already begun to do with SAP.

• UNIX server migration. Linux has been migrating UNIX workloads for a long time. This was accelerated in SLE 10 with a higher level of reliability and support. Still, there is more work to do. UNIX applications have been tuned to their operating system for years, so we need to improve performance of the system and have better tools to assess performance and quality. My objective for SLE 11 is to remove all reasons to delay migration from UNIX to Linux.

• Virtualization. Changes in software delivery models are also driven by the growing popularity of virtual appliances. At BrainShare 2008, we demonstrated a prototype virtualization platform, which could be the base for an embedded virtual appliance.

• Desktop. Across Novell’s products, we have increased our focus on user productivity. We recently acquired SiteScape to grow our commitment to the user. Within the SLE 11 desktop itself, we will continue the focus on enterprise quality, interoperability, and multimedia.

• Everything else. Any SLE distribution gets attention in every aspect of the operating system based on improvements in kernel.org – as well as specific Novell focus. Look for improvements in power management (for green computing), interoperability, and advanced support for low-latency and high-performance computing.

Summary

With SLE 10 SP2, and our roadmap for SLE 11, we demonstrate our deep commitment to (and reliance on) the open source community and an ecosystem of partners. In this day and age, an operating system needs to be a community project so we all agree on what is needed and work together to implement it. Novell will also add our value on top of community efforts – by teaming with proprietary partners to achieve interoperability, configuring the system to better address different software delivery models, and providing management tools and unprecedented quality and support.

SAP is a key player in the software industry and a key partner of Novell. Last year, we introduced a tight partnership and joint support model for SAP on SLES. In my last posting, I described how Novell is getting closer to SAP on identity management.

SAP is important to Novell not only because SAP is a large company, but also because they have been creatively exploring different software delivery models. For a software infrastructure company like Novell it is important for us to participate in all software delivery models. We make great software – and the delivery model should not be an obstacle.

What is a software delivery model?

Customers have numerous ways to get software on their machines. The PC buyer gets software pre-loaded. That same PC buyer might purchase additional shrink-wrapped software off the shelf. An enterprise customer might purchase software directly from the vendor and install it on machines. This can be installed for one computer, or tools can image it onto a large number of computers. Software can be downloaded off of the web and installed on a machine.

There is increased popularity of new software delivery models. In some Software as a Service (SaaS) models, a user downloads a small applet – exactly the software they need. In appliance models, a vendor tightly integrates a simplified version of a product, to provide a turnkey solution to midrange or smaller customers, with a reduced feature set. In cloud computing, the software might never be delivered to a user; the compute cloud holds the software and handles the function on behalf of the user.

As ISVs devise new ways to deliver their applications, the relationship between this delivery and the infrastructure software provider needs to change. Novell has different approaches to deal with these new models. We work with key ISVs on these models – both to satisfy customer needs, as well as to learn more about these models in general.

SAP

At BrainShare, we announced several offerings with SAP. They represent leading-edge collaboration between an application company and a software infrastructure company related to these new software delivery models.

• Software appliances are a key method to get software to customers. SAP and Novell announced that SLES is a platform for the SAP Netweaver Business Intelligence appliance.
• In general, integrated solutions are a great method to address Small and Medium Enterprises. SAP, Intel and Novell announced that the SAP/Intel pre-installed business solution for small and medium enterprise (SAP Business All-in-One) is built on SLES.
• Hosted solutions provided by SAP allow customers to get more granular access to SAP’s rich application capability. SAP Business ByDesign chose SLES as their platform.

A broad partnership

New software delivery models are transformational. Existing models are still important. In addition, we extended our partnership with SAP by:

• Optimizing SLES for SAP, for conventional deployments.
• Tying together our management systems (ZENworks and SAP Adaptive Computer Controller) for virtualization.
• Identity for risk management and compliance.

Generalization

The work with SAP is significant because of SAP’s role in the industry. Equally significant for us is the learning. We are now well positioned to team up with the rest of the industry as they explore different software delivery models.

I have spent the last several entries outlining our exciting Fossa project – and I have not kept up with my practice of outlining the strategy behind our recent announcements. At BrainShare we had several significant announcements which I’d like to explain further.

A growing ecosystem for Novell Identity Manager

Novell has long been a leader in technology for Identity Management – founding the entire discipline in the 1990s. That puts us in a position where we are the first to recognize new trends in this area.

With the growing importance of Identity Management, the range of new technologies that need to be added and applied are growing. It is best if these are added not by one company, but by an ecosystem of partners working closely together. Accordingly:

• Two years ago we created the Bandit Open Source Identity project to create better industry collaboration for advanced identity technologies.
• We have broadened Identity Management beyond access control to Open Identity Services that consume identities for a variety of uses.
• We have implemented a design for roles-based access control (RBAC) which tightly integrates a basic RBAC capability and provides interfaces which allows partners to add advanced functions such as role mining.

BrainShare 2008

At BrainShare, we added partnerships in three different dimensions: with technology partners, with systems integrators who help customers deploy identity technologies, and with applications that consume identity.

Technology partners

Some new partners follow the RBAC interfaces mentioned above. Aveksa enhances governance for managing roles. Eurekify provides enhancements for basic roles management capabilities.

Other partners provide companion products that fill out our solution in other ways.

Blackbird Group has companion products for backup and restore. LogLogic’s log management capability provides log management for Identity Manager. This can be used for user histories and analysis. Quest enhances interoperability with Active Directory. SailPoint Technologies improves certification and policy enforcement. And Layer 7 Technologies improves our Novell Access Manager solution for Web services.

Atos Origin

Novell is an infrastructure software company that requires partnerships with IT services companies to deliver solutions to customers. This is important to solve problems that are new for customers – where there is a large services component.

In May 2006, I argued that the identity market was branching out to new areas, specifically to compliance and governance. With compliance and governance being the frontier of identity, and with a need for partnerships, it was great to announce with Atos Origin that we would jointly deliver compliance and governance solutions. Exactly the right partnership for what the market needs today, and the next logical step in our strategy.

SAP

Novell works closely with many ISVs to provide integrated solutions for our customers. We are particularly pleased to work closely with SAP due to their endorsement of SUSE Linux Enterprise and our integrated support offer for SAP and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and due to their importance in the marketplace.

At BrainShare, we announced taking this to the next level, via a tight integration between SAP and Novell’s Identity Manager. Specifically, we announced our collaboration with SAP’s Enterprise Services Community program to focus on governance, risk and compliance. SAP’s deputy CEO, Léo Apotheker, made clear that our joint work is now going beyond Linux and is addressing key regulatory requirements.

Today, at SAPPHIRE 2008, we took the next step. We announced six offerings which make it seamless for customers to leverage Novell Identity services with SAP applications. This covers a large range: Identity Management, Event Monitoring, Federation, Single Sign-on, and both physical and logical security.

Summary

Novell has provided a constant drumbeat of Identity-related capabilities in the last couple of months. Each is exciting and important by themselves. More significant is the way the ensemble illustrates Novell’s commitment to serve customers by delivering Identity seamlessly with a range of partners: technology, systems integration and applications.

In my last two postings, I introduced Novell’s future vision for an agile infrastructure to support computing and collaboration. I described the CIO motivation, eight use cases which make agility compelling, technology megatrends which make this possible, and the seven key technology areas which will allow the realization of this vision. These seven areas are: policy, identity, virtualization, Linux, orchestration, compliance and collaboration. In this posting, I will describe our roadmap for these seven areas.

Roadmap

Our roadmap is divided into three parts: what we’ve already done in the past, what we have done in the last month or two, and our 2012 targets.

Virtualization

• In 2006, Novell shipped Xen as an integrated part of our SUSE Linux Enterprise platform. In 2007, we collaborated with Microsoft to deliver the first cross-platform solution for running Windows on Linux.
• At BrainShare, for the first time anywhere in the world, we demonstrated live migration of Windows Server 2008. We had it running as a Xen virtual machine on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
• Our vision for virtualization is that the p-Distro becomes the core operating system for the physical machine and hosts the v-Distros. To get here, we have work to do: performance tuning, ISV certification, systems management, security improvements and device drivers.

Linux

• In 2006, Novell shipped the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform, the best-engineered platform for mission-critical computing from the desktop to the data center. Since then, we’ve become key for Microsoft, SAP, Capgemini and thousands of customers like Wal-Mart, HSBC and Casio. And we’ve shipped desktop Linux pre-loads with both Lenovo and Dell.
• At BrainShare we announced an expansion of our partnership with SAP to deliver optimized versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP, and also to bundle SUSE Linux Enterprise in SAP’s All-in-One bundles targeted at the small and medium-size business market.
• The Linux revolution will have even more traction by 2012. Linux will be everywhere. It will be on handhelds and more prevalent for mission-critical computing. Key investments for Linux are: Green IT, UNIX migration, interoperability, data center readiness, virtualization and desktop integration.

Orchestration

• In 2007, Novell introduced ZENworks Orchestrator, a solution to manage the workloads on physical and virtual machines in a dynamic way according to business policies.
• Last month we announced the acquisition of PlateSpin, whose products make it easy to cross physical and virtual boundaries and provide the agility you need in the data center, for tasks such as server consolidation, workload portability and disaster recovery. At BrainShare we demonstrated joint PlateSpin-Orchestrator solutions.
• In the Fossa vision, PlateSpin and ZENworks Orchestrator manage workloads comprehensively across physical and virtual boundaries. Identifying workloads and combining them into business-critical services is the future of management and the heart of the agile enterprise. Fossa ensures that services can run on physical or virtual machines; they are discovered, created, analyzed, instantiated, provisioned, de-provisioned and optimized automatically using policy and identity.

Policy

• Policy has been key to both Novell’s identity management and systems management product suites. Today, within the enterprise, there are many levels of policy dealing with different areas.
• At BrainShare we took another step forward. We unveiled our Integrated Identity Platform that provides the automation and validation of business processes that ensure good corporate governance and adherence to corporate compliance standards.
• Our vision is that the Fossa Project will provide uniform management of policies across services, applications and platforms. Policies will expand to include Service Level Agreements – even at the level of real-time performance. Policies will have more flexibility and automation.

Identity

• Digital User Identity has been the foundation of authentication and authorization.
• With our Integrated Identity Platform we provide an agile infrastructure that governs the lifecycle of users and their changing access needs. By combining our Integrated Identity Platform with ZENworks Orchestrator, we are extending identity lifecycle management to all elements of the data center including storage, virtual machines and workloads.
• Our Fossa vision provides a rich language to characterize identity attributes of devices. Resources will be routinely distributed across different systems, even between different administrative domains. The development of Identity Services will expand the ability for applications to leverage identity infrastructures.

Compliance

• There are multiple regulatory forces in the most basic business processes: government regulations, best-practice certifications, contract restrictions, laws and internal codes of conduct.
• Last month, Novell took a huge step forward in automating how companies address this by demonstrating how Sentinel addresses both monitoring and enforcing-for-compliance to the PCI – or Payment Card Industry – standard. In addition, the Identity Platform we are demonstrating this week includes provable compliance.
• Our Fossa vision will provide standard taxonomies for events, compliance data, policies and roles. This completes the journey from manual reporting to automated remediation to inherent compliance.

Collaboration

• With OES 2 and GroupWise, Novell has a strong record in secure collaboration. Last year, Novell launched Teaming + Conferencing to enable enterprise social networking. We did this through a partnership with SiteScape.
• Two months ago, we purchased SiteScape! Why? Our customers told us how much they liked Teaming + Conferencing so it just made sense! SiteScape is the founder of the ICEcore open source project, and Novell has pledged additional resources to foster a vibrant community. To make your business agile, your users must be agile – which means they need easy-to-use, secure collaboration tools that provide enterprise social networking.
• By 2012, we will offer the most productive user experience of a flexible unified communications infrastructure and a software collaboration suite built by the community, on open standards, and that spans enterprise boundaries. Policy and identity will keep the collaboration techniques safe to use.

Novell and the open source community

Quite a roadmap. For Novell to complete this roadmap requires the full participation and involvement of the open source community. Parts of the open source community are quite cohesive, the Linux kernel being a great example of that. We are making further strides to improve the cohesiveness of Linux. The Linux Foundation through its LSB project has increased investment to create a standard Linux.

Other domains need better coordination. As I look at the areas of opportunity for Fossa, I see four generic areas: core or operating systems, systems management, identity management and collaboration. Each area already has substantial open source investment and various projects. Part of Fossa’s focus will be for Novell to more actively engage in these areas, prevent fragmentation and describe a roadmap.

Continuation of our existing strategy

While Fossa moves the ball forward, it is also consistent with the strategy that the company has around Enterprise Linux and I/T Management software that I described.

How do they fit together? The Fossa Project is the next-generation infrastructure that will manage I/T with agility and help people and technology work as one. Where does one manage resources? Well, resources in a single system are managed by the operating system. That’s the Enterprise Linux piece. Resources across systems are managed by the I/T Management software. That’s the I/T Management piece. The Fossa Project is aligned with Novell’s corporate strategy. An agile infrastructure requires both types of resource management – the operating system and the management system. Novell is the only company in the world that single-mindedly focuses on resource management of all shapes and sizes, from the operating system to the hardware. We are exactly in the right place for this mission.

In my last posting, I introduced Novell’s future vision for an agile infrastructure to support computing and collaboration. I described the CIO motivation, technology megatrends which make this possible, and the seven key technology areas which will allow the realization of this vision. These seven areas are: policy, identity, virtualization, Linux, orchestration, compliance and collaboration.

Before describing our roadmap for these areas, I wanted to provide some further motivation by describing a bit more how we arrived at agility as the central need.

We started by looking at customer needs. We looked at some of the difficult problems customers are addressing today: virtual teams, the flat enterprise, M&A, extranets, resource optimization. We then wrote out eight scenarios in prose. What do customers want to achieve in each of these problem areas? What is possible today? What is lacking?

Sitting around the table – it hit us! Much of what customers want to do can be done today. As long as they go through arcane complex processes, handle much of the work manually, and have plenty of time to plan the transitions. Function was there! Agility was lacking. Hence the focus of the project.

I am reproducing capsules of three of these scenarios here, but a more complete description of all eight can be found here (see Presentations).

Scenarios or use cases

1. Pursuing New Business Opportunities. Every business experiences variable demands on its digital infrastructure. The traditional approach to this fluid demand has been to purchase resources to meet the peak requirements and then watch these resources lie dormant during those times when the demand is modest – an expensive waste of resource.

Fossa erases separate hardware silos for various services, so each service is able to receive ample resources and those resources are reused for other applications throughout the day. This leverages our work in virtualization, orchestration and automation. Through new system reporting software, companies view the usage rates for resources and the improved productivity of the hardware. Senior management gets a better idea of where the company spends its time and IT budget.

2. The Life and Times of the New Virtual Team. Companies are dynamic. Projects come and go quickly. The economic landscape changes, core competencies shift, and employees find themselves learning new skills, working with different groups, and creating different products. The once stable “work group” has now become a virtual work group. Members come from many departments, and the work relationships may be quick or long lasting. Information needs to be created, exchanged and subjected to team edits. Access to digital resources needs to be granted and withdrawn. Layers of company confidentiality must be maintained.

In the Fossa Project architecture, virtual teams are defined by the teams themselves without IT involvement. Access to data, collaboration tools and other team members is initiated by the team leader without any additional assistance or guidance. These collaboration tools are full of capability – new techniques to collaborate with. Virtualized teams spread across corporate boundaries through advances such as SAML and tokenized identity. Where possible, software is presented as a Web service to foster participation and preserve access to legacy applications. A full audit record ensures there was accountability for the privilege and compliance to the policies.

3. Merger, Acquisition and Reorganization. Companies are born, merge with other companies, acquire other companies, and constantly reorganize to reflect the changing economic and business landscape. The agile company is able to continually reorganize its digital resources to reflect this dynamic environment. Differences from company to company do not slow down a merger from being incorporated into a highly interoperable environment with productivity.

The Fossa Project brings together identity, security and policy to facilitate sharing of information within compliance requirements both inside and beyond your enterprise. It enhances the ability of the business to engage in mergers and acquisitions or outsource activities and more quickly complete the separation or integration activities. Perhaps most important, the Fossa Project provides interoperability between architectures to ensure that any device at any location can access system resources.

More to come

Again, I really want to get to the roadmap, but this is getting long for a blog. Stay posted for next time.

My next several posts will relate to BrainShare. I want to summarize my keynote address and discuss several of our significant announcements.

My keynote address started by discussing Ron Hovsepian’s business vision for Novell – Novell harmoniously integrates mixed-I/T environments to allow people and technology to work as one. I asked: what does this mean for our products? Novell is a technology company – we deliver technology that helps our customers solve their business challenges. So when Ron says Novell’s corporate positioning is Making I/T Work as One, how do we achieve that technically and how does the technical vision transform our customers’ I/T environments?

To address this, about three months ago, we assembled a team of Novell visionaries: our Fellows, Distinguished Engineers, and market-focused thinkers. We asked them: what technical foundation provides the next revolution in our industry? By looking at several use cases (see below), we settled on the notion of agility.

Agility

If you talk to any CIO today, I/T infrastructure is anything but agile. Yet that is what the CIO wants. The CIO wants infinite flexibility to deploy I/T resources against business objectives. In a word, that is Novell’s vision for the future – the agile infrastructure. Sounds like an oxymoron – the word infrastructure sounds inflexible. Our vision is to fix it. Fix it for both the data center and the user’s desktop.

We have given our vision a code name – The Fossa Project. Why “Fossa”? If you “Google” for an agile animal you come up with the Fossa. This most agile creature – living quietly in the jungles of Madagascar with no natural predator – is our model of agility. We like the name – it sounds like Free and Open Source Software, with agility. But not every technology immediately attracts a community, so we invest in proprietary technology to fill the gap.

Maturity

I mentioned above that we have been developing these themes for three months. The project is both very mature and very early at the same time!

• It is very mature. As I will discuss when I go through the technology section, this work is built on an incredible amount of work already done by Novell, by standards organizations, and by the open source community.

• It is very early. As I will discuss when I go through the technology section, there is a substantial amount of work to be done before this is substantially complete.

Why would we unveil a project that arguably is very early? This is not exclusively a Novell project – it needs to be an industry project. We need to work with our key hardware, software and distribution partners. Most important, we need to leverage the participation, innovation, quality, speed and drive of the open source community. Key pieces are essential to be done in open source, although we see a role for proprietary development where we cannot attract a community. So we want to establish a dialog with our partners and stakeholders and develop this in the open.

Megatrends enable an agile infrastructure

Technology trends have evolved to a point that agility is possible. So there is a match between the needs of an agile infrastructure and what is available in the technology storehouse. The key megatrends that are enabling this are:

• High Capacity Computing. To execute with agility, high-bandwidth communications, powerful multicore computers and open source virtualization technologies allow workloads to be executed anywhere.

• To express the needs of agility, policy engines provide techniques to express preferences for how workloads get executed, corporate resources remain protected, and regulatory compliance is ensured.

• Orchestration. To automate agility, algorithms allow the optimization and provisioning of these workloads.

• Convergence of telcommunications and I/T – or Unified Communications (UC) – is setting the IT agenda – and an explosion in collaboration paradigms is enriching the business potential of collaboration software. We see evidence of this in voice, video, email, vmail, web, blogs, wikis, twitters, team workspaces, real-time conferencing and visual voice mail, and in popular sites and products that bring them together, such as Facebook,YouTube, MySpace and iPhone.

• Mobility. Users with powerful mobile devices are driving the use of the compute infrastructure as a collaboration infrastructure.

The Fossa Project vision

How do all these megatrends enable agile I/T? To a CIO, agile I/T is a simple concept. Whenever a compute task needs to be executed, the I/T infrastructure should find the “best” place to execute that task. And it should be easy to do so. Defining the word “best,” however, is where all of the magic lies. The compute infrastructure needs to accept different notions of what it means to be best – so a customer can use I/T assets to provide value to the business. The value will differ in time: it could be to improve ease of use, scaling, innovation or other purposes.

This is where Fossa comes into play. To be sure, we are early in the development so we don’t yet have the full architecture. However, I want to introduce the core constructs here.

It all starts when a user has a workload that he or she needs to run. He or she makes a request of the I/T infrastructure – “the cloud.” What happens when that request goes into the cloud?

• The user needs a policy language to describe how and where the workload should get executed.

• We need to be able to talk about the items we are manipulating, so you need identity enablement of the users, the applications, the storage, the processor, even the virtual machines!

• The host systems must be able to run the workload. That’s where virtualization comes into the picture.

• Linux is at the core of our virtualization vision. A p-Distro or thin Linux is just enough operating system to get the hardware running and to host virtual machines. Then we put the identity-enabled virtual machines, or v-Distros, on top of the p-Distros. The result? Workloads can be dynamically moved to run on any policy controlled hardware.

• It might be nice if we could automate this process. That’s where automation and provisioning of the workload – also known as orchestration – come in. This is done with algorithmic automation and policy, together with continuous monitoring and load balancing.

• After the workload is executed, we need to know how it was done. The infrastructure must certify back to the user or I/T organization that the workload was executed appropriately. That’s compliance.

• These can be standalone workloads or workloads that also involve working with another human. In other words, collaboration.

Our vision provides two key attributes: interoperability and usability. Interoperable heterogeneity is needed because the customer might require specific applications running on specific operating systems. The usability is via user interfaces such as visualization and a simple policy language where the customer expresses requests and the sophisticated infrastructure handles it. So we provide a sophisticated infrastructure – capable of a great deal. However, we don’t surface the complexity. We surface the right knobs for the customer, the policy expression, to enable the customer to have agility with simplicity.

More to come

I want to provide a deep dive on our roadmap for these seven areas, but this post is getting long. So we will need to wait for the next post.

My December 31st blog was about Novell’s strategy for 2008. The major themes were Linux and open source, and products that manage a mixed source environment. Interoperability is key. On January 14th I followed this with a deep dive elaborating on our virtualization strategy.

Aligned with this strategy we announced last month that we entered definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin, Ltd. PlateSpin builds products that manage virtualization in the enterprise: both proprietary and open source virtualization approaches. Clearly, PlateSpin sits at the center of all aspects of Novell’s publicly articulated strategy. Here, I’ll explore some of the key aspects, further.

Function

In Novell’s technical strategy for 2008, I emphasized that customers are demanding products that manage virtual machines. Customers want flexibility and ease-of-use to configure their workloads. They need tools to morph physical machines workloads into virtual machines – and vice versa; as well as tools that move virtual machines to different systems. PlateSpin, with its rich collection of P2V (physical to virtual), P2P, V2P, and V2V tools satisfy that customer need, along with capabilities to capture and deploy system images in an infrastructure independent way (e.g. P2I and I2V).

But PlateSpin’s capabilities go beyond the creation of physical and virtual machines workloads. There is automation built into the process. Automation is required if virtualization is to scale to be ubiquitous for production workloads. With the automation comes optimization – to get the most of the I/T organization’s resources.

Beyond the basic creation and automation is the deeper analysis. PowerRecon has powerful facilities to monitor and profile workloads which ultimately can be used to help provide for a more stable data center. It also establishes cost models, and then monitors the costs based on these models (typically utilization of system resources).

More recently developed are PlateSpin’s innovative disaster recovery products. By maintaining frequently snapshotted images of physical or virtual machine workloads, I/T managers have a clear recovery point for their workloads – should a disaster take place.

Agnosticism

Novell is a passionate believer in open source methodologies and sees a primary role for our company to bridge the gap between open source and proprietary software. But we don’t achieve this by keeping our head in the sand and working only on open source. We solve the customer’s problem – and that problem is to get all of the solutions working together. That requires a full commitment to a multiplicity of technologies.

In virtualization, there are many technology choices: proprietary, pure open source, and solutions that are based on open source in some fashion. The management problem is to treat all of these as relevant and drive for interoperability. Not to make choices. PlateSpin has done a terrific job – they are a companion product of choice for solutions based on VMWare, Microsoft, Citrix, Virtual Iron and others. We intend to keep that role.

Ecosystem

Another point I made in Novell’s technical strategy for 2008 is Novell’s focus on ecosystem. When customers are looking for I/T vendors to solve problems in interoperability, they are looking for more than agreement on standards specifications. They are looking for deep commitments among vendors that by working together and providing joint support solutions that we remove interoperability burdens from the customer.

PlateSpin’s agnosticism translates directly into a rich set of relationships with vendors: virtualization vendors, ISVs and hardware vendors – to ensure that customers have the best virtualization experience. We intend to keep that role. It fits PlateSpin and it fits Novell.

Synergy

While Novell endorses PlateSpin’s current direction and will keep that engine going, we also see opportunities to work together to take virtualization to the next level.

Several times in the past year or so (see here, here and here) I have articulated the importance of virtualization as a technology for Novell, and our participation in bringing an open source virtualization technology – Xen – to the market. Novell was the first to bring Xen to market as part of a Linux offering and more recently are bringing substantial workloads to Xen via our OES 2 product.

The full lifecycle experience for customers using virtualization needs to be outstanding. Customers require a well-integrated set of offerings: hypervisor, workload tools, provisioning tools, automation, optimization, etc. With tools from PlateSpin, our Open Platform Solutions (Linux) team and our Systems and Resource Management (ZENworks) team, Novell now has an opportunity and strategic intent to optimize the virtual data center and make it desirable to move workloads to our operating systems offerings that contain Xen.

Earlier this month, Novell announced the acquisition of SiteScape, a provider of team workspace and real-time conferencing solutions. Let’s view this acquisition through the lens of key industry megatrends: telco convergence, social networking, and open source.

Telco convergence

For most of the last several decades, the telecommunications industry and the computer industry were separate trillion dollar industries that relied on a common technology base but on different underlying infrastructures. In my years at IBM and then at Bell Labs, I was a witness to a massive and continuous convergence of these two industries.

Convergence is well underway and in many quarters it has happened. It has been accelerated by the Internet and IP, a common infrastructure and protocol to support all forms of communication. This convergence, together with new collaboration techniques available with the new infrastructure is now called Unified Communications and Collaboration or UCC. UCC has been enhanced by increased compute power at the edge. Since traditional “in-network” activity is handled by edge computers, a much simpler infrastructure results in the middle.

Today’s companies want to have a single cohesive infrastructure to support both computing and communications.

Social networking

Once collaborating among individuals moved from simple phones and powerful networks to simple networks with powerful endpoints, humans have found an untold number of new mechanisms with which to communicate. These are more powerful than traditional telephony. We started with email, but now have voice mail, chat, web, blogs, twitters, MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, teaming, conferencing, and newer tools exploding on the scene every day. This is the phenomenon known as social networking.

Today’s companies want an integrated solution that allows customers to easily choose the collaboration tool that best matches their style or the particular needs of the moment. Companies want a rich set of tools available to maximize creativity, productivity, and innovation.

Open source

Open source is our industry’s method to innovate and (equally importantly) to standardize. Novell participates in developing numerous open source technologies. With the rapid explosion of social networking mechanisms, this is the next fertile area for open source to arrive at common innovative approaches.

Novell and SiteScape

Novell is a software infrastructure company. We provide software products that allow enterprises to build robust I/T environments. Novell is also a mixed-source company which is passionate about open source. We are constantly looking for new areas to participate where open source should have a growing role.

As we have looked at industry megatrends we made several observations:

• Due to convergence, an infrastructure company must provide more than traditional operating systems. We must provide collaboration and social networking solutions to meet customer’s expectations for an infrastructure that supports convergence and UCC.

• With the explosion of social networking, it is critical that we provide additional capabilities to our GroupWise customer base – as well as new customers who are interesting in introducing social networking into their enterprises. We started that last year with the introduction of Novell Teaming + Conferencing.

• As a passionate player in open source, it is vital that we work with other industry players to have the correct open source primitives for these new paradigms.

Acquiring SiteScape is a critical element in addressing all of this. First, we bolster our efforts to provide a more complete infrastructure that supports convergence since SiteScape is a leader in UCC. Sitescape’s acquisition extends the capabilities of the GroupWise customer base – as well as new customers who want team workspace and real-time conferencing based on open source. SiteScape, themselves, created the ICECore open source project. Post-acquisition Novell will continue what SiteScape started and add additional resources to accelerate the creation of this community. We see that SiteScape sits at the intersection of three industry megatrends – using open source to provide social networking and convergence.