Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

I’m in the middle of a blog series on Product Quality—of critical importance to all our stakeholders. I need to interrupt this series to comment on an exciting development.

Last week we announced one of our most innovative and impactful projects—Novell Pulse. My interruption is to explain why we are exhilirated with this. Be assured, we will get back to Product Quality promptly.

Novell Pulse—Description and Background

Novell Pulse is the product name for our project Cockpit. As I mentioned at the time, it was funded earlier in 2009 as part of our breakout move initiative. I’m excited not only because it is great technology, not only because it solves a big customer problem—but also because it shows Novell’s innovation, and demonstrates the entrepeneurial spirit of our team to get new projects brought quickly to market.

Since I outlined the project a few months ago, I will not repeat the description.

Google Wave

As we developed Pulse, Google announced their Wave project. We were stimulated by the possibilities. In the emerging real-time collaboration market there is a need for multiple providers and they need to federate. Google announced their Wave Federation Protocol (WFP) as an open approach to addressing this need. We asked—why not federate? Open is key to Novell’s value proposition! So we approached the Google team and they agreed! From this began a rapid embrace and technology collaboration to show two companies interoperating with different but related visions.

Mixing the “New” with Enterprise Needs

There are many exciting features in Pulse; focused on real-time communications and social networking. That is where we find the greatest amount of pure technical excitement.

The function will appeal to many stakeholders. Service providers will provide Pulse’s real-time communications to their customers. Enterprises will leverage this as their new communications paradigm.

Additionally, Novell has a unique platform to introduce this. This is the existing platform of enterprise communications. We have a large group of customers with our GroupWise and OES products. Pulse adds value to this customer base—bringing them into new paradigms of collaboration. In fact, we learn a great deal from our customer base in terms of enterprise requirements for cloud-based real-time communications.

This is what is truly unique about Pulse. It is secure. It is managed. Identity management. Provisioning. It is not only cool. And social. Real-time. Chat speed. Easy-to-use. But it will be a product that appeals to the enterprise.

Federation

Google got it right by developing an open federation protocol. After all, there is such an explosion of collaboration paradigms—no single company will handle them all. And different users will want to experience them differently. We’ve already discussed the explosion of communications paradigms. We all need to work together. All companies that participate in WFP will carve out their specialty. For Novell, we are focused on getting the emerging real-time communications paradigm to fit enterprise needs.

Fifth in a series about Novell’s comprehensive approach to cloud computing.

Reprise

In “The Cloud”, we identified five cloud infrastructure priorities:

• Connect
• Secure
• Manage
• Develop
• Collaborate

We’ve elaborated about Connect, Develop, and Secure and here we will talk about Collaborating in the Cloud.

Modern Collaboration

I’ve previously discussed the revolutionary changes in collaboration that have arisen from social networking. There are two simultaneous changes in support of each other.

• The nature of collaboration. Modes of interaction between people and modes of broadcasting information are changing. This is impactful in personal, business, and political dimensions. A glance at the impact of Twitter—to true-up reporting of events in Iran confirms this.
• The technology to support collaboration is changing. In “Acquisitioin of SiteScape” we discussed the mechanisms to support the change in the nature of collaboration.

Collaboration in the Cloud

As the twin changes—nature of collaboration and technology to support it—bootstrap each other, we move to the next breakthrough technology of cloud computing. A cloud computing collaboration infrastructure increases the facilities for ad hoc teams of people to work together in an informal, opportunistic fashion. These people are distributed across enterprises and may fuse enterprise needs with personal needs. Key new properties of an infrastructure to collaborate in the cloud include:

• Collaboration at “chat speed”. Teams can instantly form or break-up. It is easy for individuals to join or depart team collaborations and be apprised of the history of communications of this team. Many are calling this the real-time web.
• Unification. A difficulty with today’s collaboration techniques is that there are too many of them. Cloud based collaboration can make this worse by adding more modes. Cloud communication infrastructure must create a unified dashboard for the multiple approaches to collaboration.
• Real-time awareness. Cloud computing’s instant-on nature will raise the awareness of what others are doing to a new level. Instead of a static view of whether individuals are on-line we create a dynamic view of the “properties” of what groups are doing.
• Security. We must find a way to secure the collaboration—when it is used for business needs, without sacrificing the ease-of-use required for personal or consumer needs.

Novell Teaming

Novell has been investing in collaboration technology. Our strategy is to provide the infrastructure for computing and collaboration for our customers. With that in mind, we were gratified last week when Forrester recognized Novell as having a “solid position as a collaborative platform vendor” as a consequence of our Novell Teaming product.

The Next Step—the Integrated Cockpit

Building on our success in Teaming, we will take collaboration to the next level for the cloud. In “Innovation Culture” I mentioned our breakout move initiative that identifies revolutions in our industry and innovative solutions to address these revolutions. One project that we funded was the Cockpit project. This provides an integrated “cockpit” for users to view all of their collaboration paradigms. It has the cloud computing support mentioned above: collaboration at chat speed and real-time awareness with security. In this way, it supports ad hoc collaboration as never before. It has other outstanding capabilities such as social message flow and co-editing; which we will elaborate on as the project reaches greater degrees of maturity.

Fourth in a series about Novell’s comprehensive approach to cloud computing.

Recent Events

The summer has seen numerous announcements with the proof points of our cloud infrastructure contributions. These announcements are transformative. They are not merely new products. They address issues that the industry has not totally addressed, with innovative solutions.

Last week was especially exciting. As foreshadowed in Software Appliances and Cloud Computing we launched SUSE Studio a key tool in our overall appliance program and in developing for the cloud. The press reaction was breathtaking with some saying that this was Novell’s most important announcement in decades.

Also last week we provided our cloud security demo at the Burton conference. More about that below.

The previous week saw Microsoft releasing 20,000 lines of GPL code to the Linux kernel. Interesting times.

Reprise

In mid-June, we identified five cloud infrastructure priorities:

• Connect
• Secure
• Manage
• Develop
• Collaborate

We’ve elaborated about Connect and Develop and here we will talk about Securing the Cloud.

Cloud Security

Many studies have documented that enterprises are concerned about cloud computing security.

This is not surprising. Many events have heightened concerns about security. Information leakage, viruses, and lost laptops are examples of security lapses. Cloud computing exacerbates concerns. Data and applications are placed outside of the enterprise, outside the firewall, and outside the adminstrative domain of the IT organization.

The security fears are dramatic enough. Sometimes, the fix is worse than the fear. A cloud computing vendor might propose a new security model to assure wary users that their data is safe. However, even if this new model is theoretically secure—it does not immediately address the practical problem. The IT organization must incorporate the model deeply enough to be secure. They must be able to explain it to survive a corporate audit about data protection. After the IT organization appreciates the security of the new model there is complexity to introduce the new model and security holes that arise from lack of training or misuse

Annexation

With so many barriers the best way to secure the cloud is to use existing security models. The IT organization should use the same security and access control technology for the cloud as they use in the enterprise. The interfaces must be the same. The user model must be the same. If passwords are used the actual password must be the same.

We call this idea annexation of the cloud. In this model we provide transparency in usage and security model so that the IT organization does not use a new access control paradigm. Rather, they feel that the cloud has become an extended part of their enterprise.

Novell Cloud Security Service

This is the essence of the Novell cloud security service that we demonstrated together with PivotLink at the Burton conference last week. By federating a SaaS vendor’s access control mechanism with existing enterprise mechanisms we provide cloud security within the existing model of an enterprise.

Another key piece of the cloud infrastructure provided by Novell!

Log Management

Also last week, we announced our Sentinel Log Management product. This has immediate value to today’s enterprises as they struggle with masses of data that need to be processed to assure compliance. With respect to cloud computing, we can only imagine that these compliance needs will become more demanding, data sources more disparate, and organization of this data more critical. Sentinel Log Management is focused on today’s compliance needs but this asset will also provide value to secure the cloud.

Much has been written about computing in the “cloud”. Within these pages references include “Software delivery models and SAP” and “Service-Driven Data Center“. Today is the first of several blogs where I give a comprehensive view of Novell’s approach.

The Significance of the Cloud for IT

Every so often there are sufficient changes in technology and customer buying patterns that the entire industry turns on its end.

In the 1960s, mainframes dominated and provided the first broad platform for computing.

In the 1970s, minicomputers proliferated. Computing became available for small businesses and departments. New companies rose to take advantage; new languages were popularized; and there was an explosion in professionals in the industry.

After the introduction of personal computing in the 1970s the 1980s saw mass adoption of PCs. New applications such as personal productivity and consumer related applications resulted from this shift. The paradigm of client/server and sharing within departments became prominent. Novell’s NetWare played a key role (which continues with Open Enterprise Server).

As we rolled into the 1990s the Internet and World Wide Web became the model for public access to data, and related intranet technologies were used inside of companies. Wide access to information became commonplace and programming technologies adapted to feeding information into people’s browsers.

Cloud computing is next. It will be equally transformational. The web provided clicking for “information” and cloud computing will provide clicking for “information resources”. Over time this will revolutionize every part of IT.

Within the rubric of cloud computing, IT organizations have different attitudes about how to optimize information technology. To address this, there are variations on cloud computing, including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Each has their own value and solves its own problem. A user that needs instant access to a capability may employ SaaS, a developer looking for a platform may employ PaaS, and someone in search of capacity may employ IaaS.

Novell and the Compute Cloud

With Novell’s position in core infrastructure, Novell intends to play a major role in cloud computing. Several technology choices for the cloud are favorable to Novell— Linux is the favored operating system used by cloud providers; XEN—which we have discussed often— is the favored virtualization technique. Moreover, Novell’s strength in technology areas such as management and security is relevant.

Novell has key technologies but also has the right attitude. The compute cloud will democratize computing by utilizing open interfaces and avoiding platform lock-in. This is harmonious with our brand promise of “Making IT Work as One”. It is also characteristic of Novell as a company who is passionate about Open Source, yet willing to work on interoperability with vendors who are committed to proprietary platforms. No surprise that Novell is a supporter of the Open Cloud Manifesto.

The potential of cloud computing is great, but it won’t happen overnight—just as the other paradigm changes did not happen overnight. There will be many participants in this all playing different roles. For example there will be companies that provide cloud computing, and others -like Novell—that provide infrastructure software that are used by cloud providers or enterprises. Many layers of the compute stack will change to support the move to the cloud. Novell will not invest in all of them—no one vendor can have that impact. However, in the cloud infrastructure Novell will play a key role.

Novell’s Cloud Architecture

There are numerous components that are required for the cloud. Some of the key components were mentioned above—the Linux operating system and virtualization. Many of the other key components intersect areas of Novell focus.

We have been investing in these areas leveraging the ideas of our technical leaders and looking at market input. Many of the most outstanding ideas came from our breakout move initiative, while others came from activities in and across our business units; listening to customers and partners. Here are some of the key areas. With space running out I will only itemize the areas here—look to future postings for elaboration:

• Connect. The first part of our architecture is to connect to the cloud. The nature of client devices and their appropriate operating environment will change as we move to the cloud. Our work in operating systems, including our work in Moblin will be critical here.
• Secure. This access must be done with security. We will leverage the technologies of our Identity and Security Management business unit.
• Manage. Clouds have a different paradigm for resource utilization so they need a different paradigm of managing these resources. Each previous revolution in computing also revolutionized how resources are managed. We will leverage our Service Driven Data Center approach.
• Develop. Applications needs to be developed for the cloud. The key technology stacks will continue to be based on Java and .Net. We will leverage our unique combination of skills—the LAMP stack available with Suse Linux and Mono for .Net to play an enabling role here.
• Collaborate. Novell has a strong portfolio of collaboration technologies. This will enable us to play a role here as well.

In 2008, I introduced our Fossa project (Fossa, Fossa, continued and Fossa, further continued). The purpose was to create and articulate Novell’s technical vision. Specific use cases highlighted that IT organizations need a greater degree of agility than previously available. Several blog entries highlighted changes that are needed in identity management, Linux, virtualization, policy, orchestration, compliance, and collaboration to achieve this agility.

Fossa Document

Over the past year, Novell Fellows, Distinguished Engineers, and other thought leaders contributed to the development of this architecture. We are making the work available in several ways:

• We have published a 60 page paper which describes the architectural principles. It is available at http://www.novell.com/company/architecturalfoundations/. This is the most comprehensive description of a future architecture for software infrastructure that yields agility.
• We want the individual ideas to be accessible. Many of the inventions are available in the public domain. One of the key methods is through patents—we have submitted more than 30 patent applications related to this architecture.

The Need for Agility is Increasing

With Fossa we have a vision, architecture, and strategy to achieve agility. The continued evolution of the industry over the last year has re-inforce this need for agility. With virtualization deployments continuing apace, and with cloud computing and SaaS growing in popularity the need for agility is evident. Appliance computing, Web 2.0, are related trends. These more flexible modes of delivering software and service come in numerous varieties—so the bet we made on achieving agility in a heterogeneous, platform-agnostic fashion has proved to be critical.

Next Steps

In the last year we have seen issues in financial markets and resultant concerns about risk management and compliance. Will this reverse the drive towards agility and cause focus on control?

I think not. Agility is unstoppable. After all, this is not the first time that security concerns and risk have risen to the surface. Did security stop the Internet? Did risk stop e-business? Did hackers cause harm that is worse than 9/11? Every time that these issues have arisen—the answer has been no! Progress, agility, and capability is vital.

On the other hand, while security concerns do not stop progress—the concerns are real. The result is that we need to manage the concerns—at the same time that we achieve the agility. Some of this is built in to the current Fossa document. Recent Novell acquisitions (Managed Objects and Fortefi) have further positioned us to address these management issues.

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.

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.

Earlier this year, I provided a preview of the goodies that were coming in Open Enterprise Server 2 – with a focus on virtualization, interoperability, NetWare migration, and training. With today’s announcement of the General Availability of OES2, I won’t repeat these themes, but rather I will drill down on how events of the last several months have intensified the value provided by OES2.

Growth of the Linux ecosystem

The basis of our strategy to move NetWare services, capabilities, and customers to OES has always been the recognition that the Linux ecosystem is huge. Our customers immediately get a shot-in-the-arm in terms of device drivers for new disks and printers, processor enhancements, multiprocessor capabilities, etc.

This advantage has been propelled to new heights through the efforts of one of Novell’s Linux gurus – Greg Kroah-Hartman. Greg is the inspired and inspiring grass-roots leader of the Linux driver project since he started it earlier this year. This project aims to substantially grow the number of free device drivers for Linux. It was widely reported earlier this week (see here, here and here) that only a few months later this project has gained over 100 developers across the industry.

I’ll have more to say about the broad implications of this important project for Linux in a future post. The simple point here is another proof point of our strategy of moving NetWare to a Linux base. With the growth of Linux hardware support, NetWare users using OES can be sure their systems will continue to run successfully on new hardware in the future.

Quality

We have been conscious that in moving NetWare workloads to Linux, we must ensure that existing workloads – many of which have been running for years – work perfectly in the new environment. As a result, we developed a beta program which would not relax until we achieved total satisfaction from our beta customers. On announce date, we are prepared with 100 beta test sites sufficiently satisfied that they are ready to move to the product version in production. We have run over one million test cases, and performance has increased 15 percent over prior releases.

Our desktop to data center strategy continually brings Linux to new environments. We have talked much about our innovative desktop and mission critical server and virtualization support. Now Linux supports the world’s most complete file, print, and storage management infrastructure – with quality.

Virtualization performance stress testing

One important aspect of the quality and performance testing was performance testing of NetWare virtualized over SUSE Linux Enteprise Server using Xen.Recall that Xen is the open source virtualization technology that Novell first brought as a capability within Linux. Novell is also the leader who stress-tests this technology so that it competes with existing proprietary technologies such as VMWare.

OES 2 took this testing to new levels. High intensity file performance required for a classic file server system like NetWare is not trivial to support in a virtualized environment. We spent a tremendous effort to tune, refine, and optimize our solution. This required infrastructure in the base operating system (which was added to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP 1 a few months ago), as well as exploitation in OES 2.

The result: for existing NetWare customers – an ability to migrate to OES and get good function, performance, and devices; and for the Xen community – a maturing of Xen virtualization technology.

Focus on cost for the I/T manager

The major focus for OES 2 has been to move to Linux and enjoy the Linux ecosystem. I worry that it might be overlooked that OES 2 has added function – focused on reducing the cost of computing for existing and new NetWare (workgroup) customers.

This is done by allowing customers to reduce their spend on the two most expensive hardware elements: processor and storage.

Processor cost reduction is achieved via consolidation. With 64 bit support, customers move their servers to more cost effective, higher performance systems. Further, they can consolidate multiple servers and multiple applications on a single server through virtualization. Virtualization in turn goes further with 64 bit processors!

Virtualization also helps storage efficiencies. But the greater storage efficiencies come with Novell’s innovative Dynamic Storage Technology which automatically “ages” rarely used storage and migrates it to lower cost devices. Consider the fact that about 80 percent of the data being backed up to expensive storage devices is stale. Think about costs of expensive storage at one-fifth of current capacity.

Summary

OES 2 is the culmination of a several year vision that Novell has had to move NetWare workloads to Linux. The confluence of several factors of the past few months – the Linux driver project, a focused beta program, virtualization stress testing, and Dynamic Storage Technology – has brought this promise to new levels.

Install and enjoy!

Recently Novell organized its product engineering teams into separate business units. This allows product organizations to deeply understand customer needs and market demands, and to nimbly target products to emerging needs. Given the diverse set of market segments addressed by Novell’s products, each team can finely tune its own products.

While these products are tuned to individual customer needs, they all relate to Novell’s core strategy of Enterprise Linux and Enterprise Management (see this post from January). The combination of a corporate strategy and a business unit focus provides the right balance to address immediate customer needs and opportunities, while still having a cohesive long-term value proposition for the integrated set of products.

Over the last several weeks, each of Novell’s four business units made announcements which illustrate this nimbleness.

Novell’s Open Source strategy helps us to be nimble. Several of these announcements illustrate the way that Novell participates in the community and leverages the power of the community.

Novell Open Workgroup Suite for Small Businesses

Novell’s Workgroup Business Unit, managed by Kent Erickson, consists of Novell’s stellar workgroup products such as Open Enterprise Server and GroupWise. In performing its market research, the Workgroup team discovered a pent-up demand for a small business suite which leverages these capabilities and provides a platform for other popular industry packages.

The Workgroup team looked inside and outside of the business unit for the right set of assets. From within the Workgroup products, Novell provides calendaring and e-mail with GroupWise and storage management with Open Enterprise Server. From outside of Workgroup, we brought in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and OpenOffice.org to provide clients, servers, and office productivity suites.

The result: re-use of valuable assets to provide a cost-effective solution to a large and growing set of customers. A result that comes from a business unit focus.

ZENworks Endpoint Security Management

ZENworks is a very popular platform for management which Novell has often extended with new functions. Over the last several years, Novell has added patch management, asset management, and Linux management as three examples. Earlier this year, Novell announced the availability of ZENworks CM – an outstanding manager for desktops that integrates with multiple directories. (These examples are aside from the new ZENworks products for data center and virtualization management.)

ZENworks is the flagship product of the Systems and Resource Management business unit, managed by Joe Wagner. The SRM unit, by focusing on new customer needs and market requirements, determined an immediate need for policy-based management for device security. As a result, last week, at Burton’s Catalyst Conference, Novell unveiled its latest addition to the ZENworks suite – ZENworks Endpoint Security Management. In addressing this growing need for device security, Novell leveraged the policy-based management capability already available in ZENworks to provide unprecedented flexibility for device security.

Bandit

Novell’s Identity and Security Management (ISM) business unit, headed by Jim Ebzery, launched the Bandit project over a year ago to provide open source assets for identity management. This has been expanded more recently to provide a basis for Open Identity Services. As we looked at the market, we saw a need for user control of their own identity, especially against a backdrop of disparate identity management systems by providers.

As a result, the Bandit Project recently announced an enhancement to Bandit to give more control to users. It is an open source implementation of an information card selector – called DigitalMe – that allows a user to control how identity information is presented. The user manages multiple identity cards and can select which one to use for each transaction. To address emerging needs such as the support of Windows Cardspace, it was beneficial for Novell to do the work in an open source context.

Real time Linux

Novell’s Open Platform Solutions unit, led by Roger Levy, recently had a series of announcements. A major announcement was SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 1 which I will talk about in a subsequent post. Significant for the theme of today’s post (business focus, market segmentation) is our recent announcement around real time Linux. This epitomizes market focus. SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time is not for everyone, but there are many time-sensitive loads that require real-time performance. There are several vertical markets such as the finance industry where this is particularly true.

Novell’s market promise is Desktop to Data Center Linux. By carefully understanding segmented needs, we more completely meet this promise. We addressed one segment (at the desktop level) with our thin client solution in March. And now we have further extended our data center segment with SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time.

Summary

Novell has undergone several transformations in recent years. Among the most impactful is the stronger customer and market based perspective, illustrated by the way that Novell’s business units have been addressing customer needs. Open Source as an innovation methodology is critical to this nimbleness.