Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

Next week is the one year anniversary of the Novell CTO blog. Thanks to all who have participated through the year, by posting your provocative thoughts, and those who have spoken to me off-line. A special thanks to my colleagues in Novell who have often provided detailed answers to your requests.

This anniversary coincides with last week’s BrainShare conference. Those of you who attended felt the passion. Novell’s strategy is getting traction with customers, partners, employees, and other stakeholders. We’ve been communicating this with customer proof-point press releases, new product releases, and blog postings. However, putting it together for the conference created a visceral resonance which was appreciated by all.

In this posting I will provide a quick summary of the conference’s major points. Apologies if repetitive for attendees. While many of these points have been made in past blogs or will be the subject of future discussions, I want to demonstrate how it all comes together.

Conference tone

This year’s conference was a strong celebration of Novell and its forward looking strategy. Most of the presentations linked to our growth strategy. While I can’t speak for everyone, the feedback that I received from customers, partners, attendees, and Novell employees was overwhelmingly positive.

Unfortunately, I can’t capture this “spirit” in words. You had to be there. So, next year…

I also can’t capture the full breadth of BrainShare. Between the technical sessions, press events, analyst tracks, training, partner sessions, lab showcase, partner showcase, keynotes, and conference receptions and parties – a great deal going on. You are all welcome to experience it next year.

Conference keynotes

There were three types of conference keynotes (view them here). Ron Hovsepian led off by reiterating Novell’s strategy: focused on enterprise-wide Linux (desktop to data center) and enterprise systems management for mixed source environments. He then informed BrainShare of a huge number of new product announcements. I will have a separate piece on them in my next blog posting.

I certainly enjoyed my keynote—hope it was shared by all! Instead of a presentation, Novell’s Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon moderated a fireside chat with me and Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie. Microsoft with a keynote at BrainShare. A BrainShare first! And BrainShare—appreciative of Microsoft’s sponsorship of the event—provided a warm welcome to Craig.

We discussed four items of interest:

• We reflected on the tension between openness and the excellent integration that comes from the tight creation of a platform from one company. I used this as an opportunity to point out that:
• Novell sees openness as the most immediate driver
• Openness is best achieved with open source; community development; and many vendors able to distribute the same operating system
• Open source can also duplicate the excellent integration from a single company. This happens when a software firm adds testing, tuning, security, manageability, etc. (such as Novell provides with SUSE Linux Enterprise)
• We had strong agreement on the criticality of interoperability as a major customer concern
• We discussed data center themes. This focused on virtualization, and the emergence of SLES as a universal host (hosting SLES, RHEL, NetWare (via OES 2), and Windows (via our partnership with Microsoft))
• We discussed the objectives of our unique partnership. Craig focused on interoperability and building bridges between the Microsoft world and open source. My focus was on interoperability and virtualization.

In addition, I reminded BrainShare about the details of our technical collaboration agreement.

Other than the CEO keynote and the fireside chat, we had a large number of the third type of keynote: Novell technical and executive leaders outlining our strategy, showing off new products features, and showcasing future technologies.

There is no space here to go through it all but let me make a few major points.

Kent Erickson, in introducing Open Enterprise Server 2 and Novell Teaming + Conferencing, demonstrated Novell’s incredible commitment to the Workgroup computing space. I’ll give details in my next blog posting, but the innovation and investment that went into these capabilities was one of the most exciting advances in years.

Joe Wagner showed how to link the steps that systems administrators use when managing a network. He showed a compelling demonstration of the synergy among different Novell products: particularly the ZENworks family and the Identity and Security products. This cohesion is natural as we bring our management oriented products into the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework.

Commitment to open source

It was palpable throughout BrainShare how Novell is strongly committed to open source. Needless to say, Ron emphasized it strongly in his keynote.

The subtext of my conversation with Craig Mundie was that Novell’s objective is to use interoperability to foster the growth and adoption of open source. Our partnership has already generated several impressive proof points.

Open source was strongly emphasized in all the keynote demonstrations, projects in Novell’s technology showcase, and many of the announcements at BrainShare.

When Nat Friedman and Guy Lunardi demonstrated the latest innovations going into the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Novell’s commitment to open source was evident. And when we discussed SLES 10 SP1, Novell’s commitment to open source was evident. That was expected.

But Novell’s commitment is much broader.

Consider Novell’s workgroup portfolio. With NetWare fully virtualized on Linux (in OES 2), we now are guesting the rich set of NetWare applications and services on Linux. Additionally, there is increased capability on the Linux side of OES 2 for workgroup services natively available on Linux. And when Novell and Sitescape introduced Teaming + Conferencing from Novell, this was accompanied by the launch of the ICECorps open source project. A clear commitment to open source.

In the area of Identity and Security Management, the Novell technology showcase carried the Bandit project.

Systems and Resource management evidenced a strong open source contribution. First, the ZENworks virtualization management products strengthen the effectiveness of SUSE’s virtualization using the open source Xen project. This is part of a broader mixed source virtualization management approach taken by the ZENworks virtualization products.

Additionally, there is the creation of new open source management assets via our technology collaboration with Microsoft in Web Services Management (WS-Man). The Microsoft partnership is also creating new open source assets for document management and virtualization.

A significant part of BrainShare is Novell’s new product announcements. This posting is long enough, so I will get to that in my next major posting.

In my last posting, I outlined the scope of the Novell / Microsoft Technical Collaboration Agreement. I outlined that, although it was not practical to address all possible problems in interoperability in a short period of time, we had developed a nice decomposition to address the most challenging problems. We would completely solve the bottom-top interoperability problem by addressing virtualization. We selected two impactful problems in side-by-side interoperability: documents and directories/identity management. These were vital for user-to-user sharing and for building heterogeneous networks. And we addressed management of mixed environments.

Based on priority to customers and based on complexity of task, we have developed our roadmaps at different paces. Of enormous priority, and eminently solvable, is virtualization. So we focus on this first.

Virtualization roadmap

Virtualization has emerged as a critical problem recently (see my earlier posts on this). It is urgent that we get this solution to customers instantly. This was the most important driver of our entire partnership.

With full virtualization, the “full”, unmodified guest operating system runs on the host operating system. Since it is not modified, the performance is degraded. This might be fine for test environments but it is not practical for production. We don’t need a tight technical collaboration to achieve full virtualization.

So our focus is on optimization. In Linux terminology, paravirtualization. In Windows terminology, enlightened virtualization. This requires a special layer of software that mediates access to hardware resources. This software layer requires modification of the guest OS, but in return offers performance near that of an unvirtualized system.

Ordinarily a change to an operating system, with all of the requisite testing, would take a very long time. Since this is the primary focus, we are applying the resources to bring this out as quickly as possible. In particular, the committed roadmap is:

• SLES 10 will run on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 as a guest in first calendar half of 2007.

• SLES 10 will run immediately as a enlightened (i.e. optimized) guest on Longhorn, when Longhorn virtualization ships. This is scheduled to be within 6 months of the initial ship date of Longhorn – targeted for the second half of 2007.

• When Longhorn comes out in the second half of 2007, it will be supported as a paravirtualized guest on SLES.

Documents roadmap

The second area that we identified last time was to achieve “side-by-side” interoperability at the documents level. This is an area which has consumed a great deal of effort by Novell in the past several years. When I described some of the great aspects of our SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, one of the points that I made was that we focused on interoperability between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office more than previous Linux efforts. This is part of our promise of creating a Linux for the enterprise. Microsoft Office is a reality, both within every company and across companies. The need to exchange documents is paramount.

As a result, this was the first aspect of our partnership to bear fruit. Only one month after our initial agreement was signed we announced our plans to build a translator between the Open Document Format (ODF) used by OpenOffice.org and the Open XML framework used by Microsoft Office.

In our technical collaboration announcement, we took the roadmap to a further level of detail. Specifically, we announced that:

• We will provide add-ins for Microsoft Office 2007 that allows them to open and save ODF files for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel in Calendar year 2007.

• We will also provide add-ins that allow the opening and saving of Open XML format files in OpenOffice.org.

• For OpenOffice.org, we will create native converters, as well as leveraging existing OpenOffice.org code, to provide mature Open XML import / export capabilities in 2008.

Directories / Identity management roadmap

Last posting, I outlined how the area of directory interoperability and identity management was critical to being able to manage all resources in a network. The difficulty in creating a roadmap, however, related to the vast set of directory scenarios. Basic LDAP directories have been around for a long time. With eDirectory, Novell has taken the capabilities of directories to new levels with very tight administrative control of resources. Our identity management projects take it to the next step with metadirectory capabilities and federation. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Active Directory is extremely popular in the enterprise.

On top of that, there are several Open Source directory projects that need consideration. There is the Samba project: looking at interoperability with Active Directory. Novell, Microsoft, and other collaborators began an open source identity framework, the Bandit project, several months ago to create open source assets for advanced directory and identity functions.

Not only are there numerous directory architectures, but there are numerous scenarios that must be considered. There can be different configurations between directory servers. These range from being able to authenticate a wider range of clients, to federate between the servers, or to create a single virtual directory server.

Beyond that, there is yet an additional complexity. There are numerous authentication techniques that work with each directory server. Which of these plethora of techniques should be supported – and with what priority?

So we decided to walk before we ran. Rather than trying to solve all problems at once, we decided to choose some important configurations and get started. Get some code working together. Show some demonstrations. But get it done fast!

So at this stage we are focused on demonstrations – with more details of the roadmap to come out later. The demonstrations are:

• Linux application access to Microsoft’s SharePoint server. Interoperable identities based on Active Directory or eDirectory will all be able to access SharePoint server.

• Create interoperable methods to provide auditable identities that satisfy credential requirements for Web applications.

• Identity interoperability in a mixed Novell / Microsoft environment.

Web services management

In the case of Web services management, we have a very clear standards-based approach to drive interoperability. For some time, the Distributed Management Task Force has been driving towards a model agnostic approach. WS-Management is an existing specification which implements this model via a set of Web services protocols. Microsoft and Novell have both already participated in this.

Given that Novell’s primary focus is open source, we have been working with the open source community towards an open source implementation of WS-Man. The key deliverable will be interoperability tests between our two implementations.