Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

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.

Recently, I described Novell’s support for openSUSE’s efforts to open and socialize their governance process. Novell wants openSUSE to continue to be pre-eminent. We want the story to be told. So last week we took our next step – appointing Joe Brockmeier to be openSUSE community manager.

What is a Community Manager?

Frankly, I’m not sure that the term community manager is descriptive, but let me tell you what I am looking for.

First and foremost, Novell needs to make sure we are listening. The size of the openSUSE community is huge and the viewpoints of our stakeholders are important to us. Joe will be a point person for this.

Second, we need to facilitate communication between Novell and the community. Novell has taken several well intentioned actions to foster the growth of Linux and open source. Usually we have communicated them well, but on occasion we could have done better. Joe will be a voice from the community and a communicator to our colleagues.

Third, we need to improve communication of Novell’s contributions to open source. openSUSE itself represents a huge contribution, but so do our contributions to a vast array of open source projects. Recently, I previewed Novell’s 2008 corporate strategy and pointed out how much we rely on open source. Someone posted to my blog that perhaps Novell took too much from the community but did not give enough back. A common perception. I was proud when Novell’s Josh Dorfman responded with a substantial listing of our contributions.

Fourth, we want to grow participation in openSUSE: quantity and quality.

My final point relates to the first point. We need to change. We – Novell and openSUSE – need to become even more community oriented. Joe will not only listen to others, he will communicate back to Novell and openSUSE so we may continue to evolve. In this way we will maintain a strong position.

Who is Joe?

For the position of openSUSE community manager, we wanted someone who was a broad participant in the Linux scene, came to Novell with a high level of objectivity and credibility, and was a known communicator.

Joe has been participating in the Linux community, and providing Linux content, for close to a decade – back to his days at Linux-Mall.com. Most recently, as a freelancer and finally as Editor-in-Chief of Linux Magazine, he has been a key commentator on Linux and open source. He’s also had experience troubleshooting Red Hat Linux servers and is broadly knowledgeable about other aspects of the software industry. The type of background we need.

Why do we need this position?

One might ask why we need a full-time position. It is helpful to review some of the openSUSE factoids to appreciate how large this community is. Working with a community this size is at least a full time-position for a senior industry observer. Specifically:

• openSUSE 10.3 alone has well over 600,000 installations

• openSUSE 10.3 has been averaging well over 100, 000 installations per month

• over 30,000 packages in openSUSE Build service

• over 30,000 people on openSUSE mailing lists

• over 20,000 registered users at openSUSE.org

• over 100 million page views in the last 12 months

Now that is a sizable community! Certainly a great opportunity for Joe to contribute to open source.