Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

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.

Recently, I described Novell’s support for openSUSE’s efforts to open and socialize their governance process. Novell wants openSUSE to continue to be pre-eminent. We want the story to be told. So last week we took our next step – appointing Joe Brockmeier to be openSUSE community manager.

What is a Community Manager?

Frankly, I’m not sure that the term community manager is descriptive, but let me tell you what I am looking for.

First and foremost, Novell needs to make sure we are listening. The size of the openSUSE community is huge and the viewpoints of our stakeholders are important to us. Joe will be a point person for this.

Second, we need to facilitate communication between Novell and the community. Novell has taken several well intentioned actions to foster the growth of Linux and open source. Usually we have communicated them well, but on occasion we could have done better. Joe will be a voice from the community and a communicator to our colleagues.

Third, we need to improve communication of Novell’s contributions to open source. openSUSE itself represents a huge contribution, but so do our contributions to a vast array of open source projects. Recently, I previewed Novell’s 2008 corporate strategy and pointed out how much we rely on open source. Someone posted to my blog that perhaps Novell took too much from the community but did not give enough back. A common perception. I was proud when Novell’s Josh Dorfman responded with a substantial listing of our contributions.

Fourth, we want to grow participation in openSUSE: quantity and quality.

My final point relates to the first point. We need to change. We – Novell and openSUSE - need to become even more community oriented. Joe will not only listen to others, he will communicate back to Novell and openSUSE so we may continue to evolve. In this way we will maintain a strong position.

Who is Joe?

For the position of openSUSE community manager, we wanted someone who was a broad participant in the Linux scene, came to Novell with a high level of objectivity and credibility, and was a known communicator.

Joe has been participating in the Linux community, and providing Linux content, for close to a decade – back to his days at Linux-Mall.com. Most recently, as a freelancer and finally as Editor-in-Chief of Linux Magazine, he has been a key commentator on Linux and open source. He’s also had experience troubleshooting Red Hat Linux servers and is broadly knowledgeable about other aspects of the software industry. The type of background we need.

Why do we need this position?

One might ask why we need a full-time position. It is helpful to review some of the openSUSE factoids to appreciate how large this community is. Working with a community this size is at least a full time-position for a senior industry observer. Specifically:

• openSUSE 10.3 alone has well over 600,000 installations

• openSUSE 10.3 has been averaging well over 100, 000 installations per month

• over 30,000 packages in openSUSE Build service

• over 30,000 people on openSUSE mailing lists

• over 20,000 registered users at openSUSE.org

• over 100 million page views in the last 12 months

Now that is a sizable community! Certainly a great opportunity for Joe to contribute to open source.

Novell, like most technology companies, has a dual career ladder. There is a management career ladder for those employees whose aspirations take them towards business and people leadership. As individuals grow in experience, they become managers, take more senior positions, and eventually may join the executive ranks. There is a technical career ladder for those employees whose aspirations take them towards technical leadership and innovation. Technology is critical to us. So the dual ladder assures that technical leaders stay focused on technology and still see growth in their careers.

With few exceptions, the top of the technical ladder has been the Novell Distinguished Engineer. These are incredible innovators who are role models and mentors for the engineering population. I meet with them monthly and we focus on innovation and best practices.

At my two previous companies – IBM and Bell Labs – there was also a “Fellow” designation. In late 2007, we introduced the Novell Fellow designation. Herein I explain the motivation and introduce the first two Novell Fellows.

Industry luminary

The Novell Fellow designation bolsters the technical career ladder in Novell and also signals an emerging role for our company. Novell Fellows are industry luminaries. They have made their mark both in Novell and in the industry at large.

Here is why this is the right time for such a move. When you examine Novell’s technical strategy, you see a company whose influence extends beyond its size. After all, it is Novell that is linking the rapidly growing open source world with the existing world of proprietary software. This relevance requires a notable technical role – the Fellow – who represents this influence.

Where do we see this influence? We are heavy participants in the open source community; notably with our SUSE Linux team, but also in many other projects: Mono, ICECore, Bandit, and many more.

Second, with our desktop to data center Linux strategy, we are ensuring that enterprise Linux has an increasingly significant role in the enterprise. Linux participates everywhere.

Third, with our enterprise management and interoperability strategies, we are providing surrounding products – management products – that ensure that Linux and open source products are interoperable and manageable within an enterprise that also uses proprietary software.

Fourth, we have taken several steps to achieve patent reform. These include our funding of patent busting activities, our participation in the Open Invention Network, and our usage of a substantial patent portfolio for defensive purposes.

Novell’s role expands beyond our products. We are active in the free and open source software community, we have an expanding role in enterprise computing, and we actively influence patent reform. This is why we have tapped industry luminaries as Novell Fellows.

Greg KH

Greg Kroah-Hartman is an industry luminary based on his influence in the Open Source community, specifically the Linux kernel. He has written books such as Linux Device Drivers 3rd Edition, and Linux Kernel in a Nutshell. He also is a previous contributing editor for Linux Journal. As mentioned in this post, he is the innovator behind the “Linux drivers for free” project, gathering volunteers from all over the world to develop Linux drivers for the official Linux kernel releases. This project has been joined by more than 320 programmers. Beyond this, he is a key contributor to Novell - leading teams and serving as manager for kernels in several of the SUSE Linux releases.

Greg clearly demonstrates external impact for Novell’s focus on enterprise Linux.

Steve Carter

Steve Carter is an industry luminary in the area of identity management. He has demonstrated that with a variety of methods. Whether it is by describing his vision for identity on his blog, contributions to standards efforts, or his long-term contributions to the IETF, W3C and Oasis, Steve is quite well known in the technology area. This is not his first substantial recognition for external activity. In 2004, Steve received the Utah Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology. Steve stands out for his patents, being the most prolific inventor in Novell history and a mentor who teaches colleagues what is patentable. And, Novell utilized his patent expertise when the Open Invention Network was established.

Steve clearly demonstrates external impact for Novell’s focus on enterprise management.

What’s next?

Novell’s technical leaders provide an impressive pipeline of Fellow candidates. While we have initiated the program in 2007 with two Fellows – expect more in years to come.

In my last posting, I outlined Novell’s technical strategy and illustrated proof points from 2007 that we were on track. In looking forward to 2008, I want to illustrate the methods – rather than details - we will use to increase velocity on this strategy. Here are some of the key points.

Innovation and industry leadership

2007 was a great year for executing our strategy and gaining share in some critical areas, such as enterprise Linux. To ensure that we maintain the momentum, it is critical that our stakeholders - customers, partners, employees, analysts, and the community - recognize that we are an innovative company and that we are staking out a position of industry leadership. In a word – mindshare!

So, what about mindshare? Do you know who is unifying the Linux ecosystem – preventing fragmentation? It is Novell, led by Ron Hovsepian’s clarion call at LinuxWorld that we must create a standard Linux – a common platform for all ISVs. Another example. Last spring we donated money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to bust bad patents. A scourge in our industry. Yet another example. Our own Greg Kroah-Hartman is leading the grass roots Linux driver project – to create many free drivers for Linux. Last summer, the entire Open Platform Solutions team took a week to do nothing but innovate on their favorite projects! Hack week. The community response was fantastic. We have mindshare as leaders.

Innovation and industry leadership go well beyond our Linux business. In identity management, I mentioned our recognition by Gartner in my last posting. In workgroup computing, we are the co-founders of an innovative open source project for teaming solutions – ICECore. And in systems and resource management last year, we published our architectural blueprint for systems management.

For 2008, we will continue to focus beyond products to topics of industry leadership. Standardization, innovation, and community participation will continue to be our hallmark. There will be even greater participation in open source projects. We will continue to publish blueprints and build an industry consensus so that Novell helps set the right vision for the industry.

Ecosystem

Our partnership with Microsoft made us the recognized industry leader to bring Open Source and proprietary software together. This unique capability brought Cap Gemini, SAP, Dell, Lotus, Lenovo, and many others to publicly partner and announce with us. This is just the beginning. We will intensify all of those partnerships and we are working to create more. It was really hard to land so many fundamentally new partnerships. We now have more partners than ever before because partners want a piece of the pie called industry leadership. And we are creating an economic win-win with partners.

Our pipeline of partner activity is growing. One data point: the number of partners that came to Novell’s 2008 kickoff meeting set a record for our company.

Internal processes and listening to the customer

Ordinarily on these pages I describe our external strategies, rather than how we are executing on them internally. However, it is also important to take a look at what is happening under the covers, inside our company. Our processes and methods are critical to our strategy. They are critical for two reasons. First, hearing the voice of the customer deep inside our company is critical to our success. Second, being able to respond quickly to market and customer needs is a differentiator against competition.

With that in mind, let’s ask: how do we respond to the market? How do we make sure that we meet customer needs in a timely fashion?

Recently, Novell business units have streamlined how we bring products to market. We created a framework – Integrated Product Development – where team decisions are made together with direct input from sales and marketing. We are listening to the customer. All the time. Sales, marketing, services, channels, everyone is at the table when we make decisions. Additionally, we have introduced agile development methodologies. In agile development we continuously rebuild a product release, which allows us to add unanticipated requirements late in the cycle. Not like traditional waterfall where it is almost impossible to add things late without schedule slips. These two methods are significant in helping us respond to the voice of the customer – and do it quickly.

We are not done with fundamental process redesign. Our focus for 2008 is to continue to mature last year’s new processes. Beyond that, we are introducing an additional focus: Engineering Excellence. This program bolsters Novell’s traditional strength in engineering with tight discipline that guarantees schedule integrity and quality of released products.

A detailed example and our focus on virtualization

I have shared with you how we are industry leaders who respond quickly. We’ve built processes that ensure that we listen to the customer. But how do I convince you it is real? Let’s take an extended example. And in so doing, highlight an additional point of our strategy – the central role of virtualization.

We see agility and customer focus as key in our progress on virtualization – one of the hottest areas in the industry. In SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, we introduced open source virtualization into a commercial Linux distribution before anyone else did. Once we introduced this, we spoke to customers. We spoke to partners. We spoke to analysts. We spoke to everyone! By listening, we discovered that we had not yet nailed it. In 2007 we listened, and in a very short time we became a leader in virtualization.

Our Open Enterprise Server customers told us that they wanted NetWare virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server – to take advantage of all of the drivers provided by Linux. And it needed to perform. After all, file and storage performance for NetWare is critical. A unique partnership between our Workgroup team and our Open Platform Solutions team has resulted in virtualization capability in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 that is higher performance and more manageable than any other open source solution. This is the basis for OES 2.

We talked to other customers. They did not want virtualization as a bare technology. They wanted it to be managed. Novell quickly turned around and built technology to manage workloads and provision virtual machines. ZENworks Orchestrator. The best managed open source virtualization solution.

And we listened to customers and partners some more. They said get a tight partnership with Microsoft to optimize Windows on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Build a joint lab for testing – so customers have the confidence that our solution works best with Microsoft. We did all of that!

Here is the totality. From a barebones hypervisor in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we now have an industrial strength hypervisor, supporting the demanding NetWare workload, optimized for Microsoft, SAP and others, with a joint lab for testing. It is manageable with ZENworks and will address low latencies.

How did we do this? We listened!

Virtualization clearly is a key topic for the industry, and with the 2007 results we have both staked a claim and demonstrated our agile processes. Look for this to continue to be an area of significant investment in 2008.

On to 2009

What will our strategy be in 2009? We have found our hedgehog concept. It is enterprise Linux and enterprise management as the two key areas required to bring together the open source world and the world of proprietary software. It is not changing. Expect it in 2009 as well.

As we have seen with 2007 and will in 2008, this high level strategy leaves considerable room for flexibility and adaptability. The way that we execute and adapt establishes how we will turn the flywheel to accelerate our business. Some of the elements of this are: execution, process, innovation, ecosystem, and listening to the customer. This comes together powerfully when we examine a detailed example such as virtualization. Nuances will continue to change, but we will stay within our fundamental hedgehog concept.

In 2007, my first blog of the year was an articulation of Novell’s technical strategy. It is appropriate to start 2008 with an update.

Last year’s strategy reprise

You can read the full post from the beginning of 2007 here. Here is the quick summary.

Our strategy starts with Linux and Open Source. Open Source is transforming the computing landscape. It is changing economic models and creating new winners and losers. And we are on the ground level with SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Our strategy is a mixed source strategy. We are focused on managing the introduction of Open Source into the existing enterprise proprietary world. We are focused on important customer problems related to interoperability. So enterprise management plays a major role.

The strategy fulfills a significant area of customer need that is durable; so we solve customer needs and establish a franchise for Novell that will succeed in 2007 and beyond. And it is a good “fit” - a customer need that Novell can fulfill, given our competencies and the value promised by our brand.

Novell’s technical strategy – 2008 edition

As I said last year, our strategy will stick with Novell for years, because it addresses a need that customers have that no one else in the industry is ready, willing, or able to address. That is the co-existence and integration of the innovative, rapidly emerging Open Source world with the trillions of dollars of proprietary software in the market. Accordingly, at the top level, our 2008 strategy is the same as our 2007 strategy.

That does not mean that we are done. Last year, I introduced one concept from Jim Collins’ book – Good to Great. Great companies create their enduring strategy – their hedgehog concept. They stay with it for years – and Novell has one! In this posting I will discuss a second Jim Collins concept – the flywheel. Once you have your hedgehog concept, you iterate on it, tune, adapt, add substance – and each year it gets better. Indeed, our strategy is working, it is developing teeth, and we are taking it to the next level.

Here is the structure of the rest of this posting. Recall that under the umbrella of bringing together Open Source and proprietary, the two components of our strategy are enterprise Linux and enterprise management. These are both punctuated and given meaning by this philosophy of interoperability. So I will first describe the 2007 proof points that the strategy is working. Then, I will describe how we take it – in 2008 – to the next turn of the flywheel.

2007 strategy proof points – Enterprise Linux

We started 2007 with the momentum of the Microsoft agreement. With that single agreement we clearly positioned our company at the heart of this interoperability problem.

So what happened? Bookings went through the roof as customers saw the value in this partnership. We brought new marquee customers to Linux. Revenue took off. We grew share.

But bookings are just the beginning. The partnership with Microsoft became the lever to build a broader Linux ecosystem. CSIs like Cap Gemini announced partnerships with us; we continued strong relationships with hardware OEMs such as IBM and HP; brought Dell into the Microsoft certificate program; and we strengthened ties with enterprise application vendors such as SAP. We used this credibility and our great technology to land desktop agreements with Lenovo, Dell, and Lotus.

Further, we extended the breadth of Enterprise Linux. SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time drove latency to zero. The new ZENworks Orchestrator product assured that Open Source virtualization has depth.

Enterprise Linux with interoperability

When we announced with Microsoft, we committed to create technical interoperability. In 2007, our two companies came through! Here’s the substance. We published our joint interoperability roadmap – which received analyst acclaim. We’ve been executing against it since February. And four months ago, we took the partnership to the next level. After Microsoft saw Miguel de Icaza create the Moonlight technology in record time, Microsoft asked us to bring their multimedia Silverlight framework to the Linux desktop. Can you imagine that Microsoft is a Linux desktop ISV? We are turning the flywheel on interoperability!

Last month, we also announced that we are bringing Microsoft’s accessibility framework to Linux. This points to our core values of being a Linux leader, an interoperability leader, a company that is bringing Microsoft into open source, and a socially concerned citizen improving access for the handicapped.

Enterprise Management

2007 proof points for enterprise management abound. Three times in the last several months, Gartner placed Novell in its coveted leaders quadrant on management technologies – once for Novell Secure Login, once for Novell Identity Manager, and once for Novell Access Manager. We totally refreshed ZENworks. ZENworks Configuration Manager now integrates with multiple directories and is a great product to manage Vista deployments. ZENworks Orchestrator brings Novell into the world of data center and virtualization management. Last year we acquired Senforce to give us a security solution for desktops. For our NetWare customer base, in file and storage management we released Open Enterprise Server 2, virtualized on SLES with dynamic storage management. In collaboration management we released Novell Teaming + Conferencing. Most recently, we announced the industry’s most integrated roles and provisioning module as part of our Identity Management framework.

Let’s reflect on just one of these innovations, Novell Teaming + Conferencing. The way work gets done in a world of the web, wikis, blogs, and social networking is changing. Empowered teams form virally and need new tools to share information. Novell is now the open source leader in providing such teaming solutions.

Enterprise management is enriched by our focus on interoperability. We manage the mixed source environment. We manage both Windows and Linux. Open collaboration runs on numerous platforms. ZENworks plays in all environments.

Perspective

Our strategy is working, but we need to remind ourselves why. What customer pain points are we addressing? Why will customers keep buying this? At the highest level, it is because the strategic interoperability between open source and proprietary software is a twenty year problem which needs a strategic vendor. Underneath are more pragmatic concerns. Open source solutions are lowering cost for customers. And Novell’s approach to interoperability removes the complexity and risk. We provide management solutions: identity, secure desktop, event management – that directly address key CIO issues of risk and compliance.

What will be new in 2008?

So far, I have demonstrated fidelity to the corporate strategy articulated here 12 months ago. And I have stated that we are staying true to this strategy in 2008. What will happen in 2008? What new products, new partnerships, new initiatives? Rather than speculate on every product release of 2008, it is more important to describe the process we will use to turn the flywheel on our strategy. However, this post is getting long. So the 2008 discussion will be in the next posting.