Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

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.

Last month, openSUSE announced its guiding principles, including its means for governance, and we appointed the initial board for openSUSE. It is instructive to look at Novell’s motivation in supporting these principles.

Guiding principles

First, what are those principles? Best is not to read my paraphrase, but to read the official statement. More colloquially (and shorter than the short version of the principles), openSUSE intends to create a great Linux distribution, drive innovation and technical excellence, and participate in the growth of a strong free software community. Further, we want to ensure transparency in how decisions are made.

The transparency is facilitated through a board of maintainers. The board contains members that are not Novell employees, and the board is entrusted to make decisions for the benefit of the openSUSE community. Novell does not require that decisions be made for the benefit of Novell. But Novell’s interests are intimately intertwined with those of openSUSE and we have enormous confidence in the decisions that will come from the board.

Why a set of guiding principles? Why a board? Why now?

In the relationship between Novell and the openSUSE community, there are several statements that need to be clear:

• Novell is thankful to openSUSE. We believe that SUSE Linux Enterprise is the most reliable and innovative Linux distribution on the planet, due in large measure to openSUSE.

• Novell is dependent on openSUSE. To maintain this leadership, we require a vibrant community.

• Novell is aligned with openSUSE’s guiding principles. Key principles such as innovation, making users happy, even having fun – are necessary aspects of this success.

• Novell supports the free and open software movement. The FOSS movement has led to the growth and development of Linux. It needs to be continued and it needs to be strengthened.

• The best way to move openSUSE to the next level is to socialize the management of openSUSE via this separate board.

An open process

In establishing the governance structure for openSUSE, the design point was to be somewhat open-ended so that the structure could evolve over time. In fact, one of the responsibilities of the board is to develop its by-laws, and to create a process to select the next board. Think of the current governance structure to be a first step with further steps down the road.

And what better people to guide us than those who are active in the community? Look at the founding set of board members: Pascal Bleser, an architect who builds packages for openSUSE and an organizer for FOSDEM; Francis Giannaros active in the openSUSE Community through openSUSE-Community.org, wiki handling, and openSUSE News editing; Andreas Jaeger, Novell’s director of openSUSE and now chair of the initial openSUSE board; Stephan Kulow, Novell’s project manager of the openSUSE distribution and former lead of the KDE and Usability teams; and Frederico Mena-Quintero, one of the founders of the GNOME Project, who also works for Novell.

Ultimately, the best judgment as to the effectiveness of openSUSE governance is in its success in enabling the community to achieve its most aspirational goals. Novell remains involved since we want to contribute to the community’s reaching these goals and because of the importance of openSUSE to SUSE Linux Enterprise. We are committed to working flexibly with the board to ensure that we evolve the governance to achieve the community’s goals.

And what are those aspirational goals? Again, to achieve the guiding principles, innovation, fun, excellence. But at a higher level, our goal is to foster the excitement of openSUSE, ensure its growth, and attract others by opening up the process. We believe that this first step is an important step. We remain open to further modification over time.

Several months ago, I discussed Novell’s continued leadership in the burgeoning identity management area as indicated by Novell’s recent entry to the leaders quadrant in several Gartner reports. Last month, Novell continued with additional technology and additional recognition.

The technology is in the area of roles definition for identity management. Provisioning user access based on the role they play in the organization simplifies identity management and user provisioning. The new news is that Novell announced its Roles Based Provisioning product. Our approach to the integration of roles into user provisioning was carefully designed. Some aspects of role definition are straightforward. These are tied tightly to identity management so that customers maximize ease-of-use and achieve access control and privacy compliance. Other aspects of roles are in the early adoption phase. Here, flexibility is more important than tight integration. This delicate balance guided us in how we brought this new capability to market.

Basic Role related functions

The first category of functions are the basic role functions. These are the functions that (a) are most commonly used by an I/T organization, (b) have the technology most mature, and (c ) are relevant when an I/T organization directly provisions users. These functions include:

• Role definition and membership. To define what are the key roles in an organization.

• Role based provisioning. The use of role definition to provision which roles in an organization get access to which resources or applications.

• Segregation of duties based on roles. Increasingly, for reasons of compliance, customers demonstrate compliance by enforcing segregation of duties based on roles.

• Basic reporting capabilities for roles.

These functions are relevant for every customer. As a result, our approach was to integrate these roles capabilities deeply into Novell Identity Manager. While other vendors are treating roles as add-on modules – even acquiring separate companies that focus on roles – we felt that this would result in considerable complexity for customers.

To achieve this tight integrations, we modified every aspect of Novell Identity Manager to take advantage of role function. Roles functions are designed when a customer develops their overall approach to user provisioning: they are analyzed, they are represented in a metadirectory, and they are an element in provisioning. Each of these functions represent a different module in Novell Identity Manager. Thus, in our Roles Based Provisioning product announcement, we actually (under the covers) are touching every aspect of our system.

Advanced Role related functions

We characterize an advanced function to be a function that is (a) less commonly used, (b) where the technology is still maturing, or (c ) an off-line function that does not need to be well integrated into the daily role provisioning activity. Examples of this are:

• Role mining. To better understand how roles are being used in an organization.

• Role modeling and analysis. To explore different approaches to using roles, with an overall goal of improving usage of role-based access control.

• Role change. To simulate the effects of roles being changed in an organization.

• Deeper role reporting. Some organizations want a more complete set of role related reports.

• Risk management. Risk management is not a primary identity management function, yet risk management tools simplify their analyses by leveraging the roles capability provided by identity management.

Our approach for these advanced functions is not to integrate them too deeply into the system. Since they are emerging areas, different customers will want to explore different approaches. Some customers might not want these advanced capabilities at all. The lack of integration does not create any issues for customers since these functions are utilized off-line.

There is a huge advantage to not tightly integrating these advanced functions. While Novell is providing capabilities in these areas, Novell also wants to create an ecosystem of partners that can provide their own novel approaches to these functions. We have provided a clean application programming interface (API) to partners and are encouraging them to provide these additional functions and sell with Novell. These could be:

• Technology partners who provide their own solutions to these advanced role capabilities.

• System integrators who build unique solutions for customers with advanced needs.

• Providers of adjacent products such as risk management products or compliance products.

Industry leadership

Novell has long been a leader in identity management. Novell’s thought leadership in the 1990s in metadirectories and synchronization created the identity management category. More recently, Novell has been extending this lead with its approaches to Open Identity Services and with its recognition through Gartner leader quadrants I mentioned above.

Our unique approach to roles based access – tight integration where it is needed, and loose integration where we want an ecosystem of partners – should prove to be another area of industry leadership.

In an unrelated event, we are also pleased that last month Novell achieved its third Gartner leader quadrant in just three months. This time we were recognized in the category of Web Access Management for our Novell Access Manager product.