Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

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

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

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

Industry luminary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greg KH

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

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

Steve Carter

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

Innovation and industry leadership

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

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

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

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

Ecosystem

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

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

Internal processes and listening to the customer

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

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

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

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

A detailed example and our focus on virtualization

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did we do this? We listened!

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

On to 2009

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

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