Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

LinuxWorld San Francisco is fast approaching. Every year it is an opportunity for the community to reflect on recent achievements and challenges for the future. Last year, Novell used LinuxWorld as our launch vehicle for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and our campaign emphasizing “Your Linux is Ready.” All of Novell’s recent success in terms of market growth and ecosystem growth is anchored on the great distribution that we announced last year.

With LinuxWorld only one week away, I wanted to reflect on our most recent Linux announcement – SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 1 (SP1) – released last month.

Rolling thunder for virtualization

A continuing focus for Novell has been the importance of an open source solution for virtualization. With SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, Novell was first to market with Xen based virtualization packaged with Linux. As noted on numerous occasions (see here and here), Novell has been adding partners, guests, performance optimizations, and management with regularity.

With SP1 we continue this leadership with the release of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack. This provides paravirtualized network, bus, and block device drivers that enable unmodified Windows and Linux guests to run with near native performance. In doing this we are leveraging advanced virtualization assists coming from Intel and AMD.

Why is this so important? As mentioned previously, our aspiration is to be the open source universal host. SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as Microsoft Windows, can run as guests on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Optimizing them on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server demonstrates a value as a host that no one else can match.

And in parallel, we are nearing the ship date for Open Enterprise Server 2. We are in the middle of our beta program in which we are running mission critical NetWare workloads virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This assures us an unprecedented experience level with mission critical workloads on Xen. Indeed, in SUSE Linux Enterprise SP1 we have added many functions (e.g. in storage management) to allow optimized performance of NetWare on SUSE LInux Enterprise Server.

The Server

Providing a quality and leading-edge Linux distribution requires more than virtualization. SP1 is a significant upgrade. By providing support for Quad-Core Intel Xeon and Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, we continue the march to higher level workloads that Linux must support for Linux to be “Desktop to Data Center”. This datacenter promise requires the higher level of performance so that customers can move more workloads to Linux.

Data center Linux is not limited to processor support. We continue to invest in the “ilities”: high availability, manageability, and security.

The Desktop

The other key piece of our “Desktop to Data Center” strategy is obviously the desktop! We have long prided ourselves on our leading and innovative Linux desktop. More recently, we have addressed the critical problem of interoperability with the Microsoft desktop, and the expansion to the thin client.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop SP1 is the next significant contribution: with additional capabilities in Open Office. Also, to expand on our larger virtualization theme, we are providing a preview of desktop virtualization.

LinuxWorld

Please stop by our booth. Novell continues to use LinuxWorld as a major event to focus on our strategy of growing the usage and reach of Linux.

During the last week of June, our Open Platform Solutions team celebrated Hack Week – a week dedicated to innovation. What is it, why did we do it, what was the reason for the timing, and what did we learn?

What is it?

During this week, we encouraged the SUSE team to dedicate themselves to innovation. A pet project that they have long wanted to get around to. A curious new area to explore. An idea suggested by a mentor. A launch of what could become a major new initiative.

I have written often about how the open source community is an innovation community. We are continuously innovating. So what does it mean that we dedicated a week (and only one week) to innovation.

This was not a one time event. Hack Week was a launch of a future of continuous innovation. Every employee now sets aside a portion of their time to work on a project of their choice. So Hack Week was more than a week of innovation. By placing a huge spotlight on innovation – and launching a future of continuous innovation – Hack Week re-dedicated our team to a core Novell and SUSE value. Internal surveys about the value of Hack Week told us – we must do it again – SOON.

Why did we do it?

Nat Friedman, our Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Platform Solutions, recognized a problem. We had over-rotated towards the business needs, and moved somewhat from our core value of innovation. Not surprising. With the rapid growth of SUSE Linux Enterprise, with the movement of Linux to new places – with a rapidly expanding desktop and mission critical applications at the server, with an expanding technology agenda including interoperability, with customer demands for support, features, bug fix – it is not surprising that we were focused on business needs.

These business drivers themselves contribute innovation. The world’s most innovative desktop. First to market with Xen virtualization in Linux. Mono. Open Source kernel drivers. AppArmor security. The list goes on and on.

But even the most innovative must stop from time to time to recharge the batteries. That was what Hack Week was all about. Never be reluctant to take out a clean sheet of paper.

And this is appropriate, given the culture of the open source community that we live in. It is all about bottom-up development, decentralized development – with the goal of contributing. We have great developers of code and our aim is to contribute it – ultimately to get it upstream. Hack Week was intended in part to refocus ourselves on that high purpose.

I remember being in Nuremberg when Nat announced it to the team. The excitement was palpable. A return to our core values. To say nothing of having some fun. And I’ve read the survey results after hack week. Near universal praise.

Mechanics

At one level there were no mechanics. Everyone had the right and encouragement to work on their own ideas.

But we also wanted to make it easy for teams to form. And we wanted to provide a menu for those who had not had time to plan prior to Hack Week. And we wanted to provide some context: a set of starter ideas. So we developed an ideas website (idea.opensuse.org). Several weeks before Hack Week, people started to post their ideas, puzzles, challenges, and aspirations. Those that wanted to search for an idea could simply choose one. Those who wanted to work with colleagues that had similar interests – well, it was easy to do.

Timing

This part was easy. We scheduled Hack Week to coincide with the completion of SUSE Linux Enterprise SP 1. We wanted a week that was clear of schedule commitments so that everyone was clear to contribute. And after the completion of a major service pack – on the heels of a major product a year earlier – people needed a break!

Awards

We gave out prizes. Best project. People’s choice. Cross-pollination. QA. Performance improvement. Power management. Best failure. Unix attack. Desktop. openSUSE community building. L3 support. Funniest project. Just looking at the titles of the awards gives a flavor for the diversity, innovation, and focus.

What did we learn?

At the macro level, we reminded ourselves of our core values of innovation, the excitement of what we do, the joy of discovery, and teamwork.

At the micro level, we learned lots of new technologies. People said that in general they got a great deal done; often more than expected. But even those that didn’t felt that the learning was worthwhile.

What should we do differently next time?

For the first time that I can recall, the leading answer was of the form “nothing – it was perfect”. But there were also other helpful thoughts such as earlier notification for better planning and more community involvement.

On behalf of all of the SUSE team: thanks, Nat!

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.