Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

SAP is a key player in the software industry and a key partner of Novell. Last year, we introduced a tight partnership and joint support model for SAP on SLES. In my last posting, I described how Novell is getting closer to SAP on identity management.

SAP is important to Novell not only because SAP is a large company, but also because they have been creatively exploring different software delivery models. For a software infrastructure company like Novell it is important for us to participate in all software delivery models. We make great software – and the delivery model should not be an obstacle.

What is a software delivery model?

Customers have numerous ways to get software on their machines. The PC buyer gets software pre-loaded. That same PC buyer might purchase additional shrink-wrapped software off the shelf. An enterprise customer might purchase software directly from the vendor and install it on machines. This can be installed for one computer, or tools can image it onto a large number of computers. Software can be downloaded off of the web and installed on a machine.

There is increased popularity of new software delivery models. In some Software as a Service (SaaS) models, a user downloads a small applet – exactly the software they need. In appliance models, a vendor tightly integrates a simplified version of a product, to provide a turnkey solution to midrange or smaller customers, with a reduced feature set. In cloud computing, the software might never be delivered to a user; the compute cloud holds the software and handles the function on behalf of the user.

As ISVs devise new ways to deliver their applications, the relationship between this delivery and the infrastructure software provider needs to change. Novell has different approaches to deal with these new models. We work with key ISVs on these models – both to satisfy customer needs, as well as to learn more about these models in general.

SAP

At BrainShare, we announced several offerings with SAP. They represent leading-edge collaboration between an application company and a software infrastructure company related to these new software delivery models.

• Software appliances are a key method to get software to customers. SAP and Novell announced that SLES is a platform for the SAP Netweaver Business Intelligence appliance.
• In general, integrated solutions are a great method to address Small and Medium Enterprises. SAP, Intel and Novell announced that the SAP/Intel pre-installed business solution for small and medium enterprise (SAP Business All-in-One) is built on SLES.
• Hosted solutions provided by SAP allow customers to get more granular access to SAP’s rich application capability. SAP Business ByDesign chose SLES as their platform.

A broad partnership

New software delivery models are transformational. Existing models are still important. In addition, we extended our partnership with SAP by:

• Optimizing SLES for SAP, for conventional deployments.
• Tying together our management systems (ZENworks and SAP Adaptive Computer Controller) for virtualization.
• Identity for risk management and compliance.

Generalization

The work with SAP is significant because of SAP’s role in the industry. Equally significant for us is the learning. We are now well positioned to team up with the rest of the industry as they explore different software delivery models.

I have spent the last several entries outlining our exciting Fossa project – and I have not kept up with my practice of outlining the strategy behind our recent announcements. At BrainShare we had several significant announcements which I’d like to explain further.

A growing ecosystem for Novell Identity Manager

Novell has long been a leader in technology for Identity Management – founding the entire discipline in the 1990s. That puts us in a position where we are the first to recognize new trends in this area.

With the growing importance of Identity Management, the range of new technologies that need to be added and applied are growing. It is best if these are added not by one company, but by an ecosystem of partners working closely together. Accordingly:

• Two years ago we created the Bandit Open Source Identity project to create better industry collaboration for advanced identity technologies.
• We have broadened Identity Management beyond access control to Open Identity Services that consume identities for a variety of uses.
• We have implemented a design for roles-based access control (RBAC) which tightly integrates a basic RBAC capability and provides interfaces which allows partners to add advanced functions such as role mining.

BrainShare 2008

At BrainShare, we added partnerships in three different dimensions: with technology partners, with systems integrators who help customers deploy identity technologies, and with applications that consume identity.

Technology partners

Some new partners follow the RBAC interfaces mentioned above. Aveksa enhances governance for managing roles. Eurekify provides enhancements for basic roles management capabilities.

Other partners provide companion products that fill out our solution in other ways.

Blackbird Group has companion products for backup and restore. LogLogic’s log management capability provides log management for Identity Manager. This can be used for user histories and analysis. Quest enhances interoperability with Active Directory. SailPoint Technologies improves certification and policy enforcement. And Layer 7 Technologies improves our Novell Access Manager solution for Web services.

Atos Origin

Novell is an infrastructure software company that requires partnerships with IT services companies to deliver solutions to customers. This is important to solve problems that are new for customers – where there is a large services component.

In May 2006, I argued that the identity market was branching out to new areas, specifically to compliance and governance. With compliance and governance being the frontier of identity, and with a need for partnerships, it was great to announce with Atos Origin that we would jointly deliver compliance and governance solutions. Exactly the right partnership for what the market needs today, and the next logical step in our strategy.

SAP

Novell works closely with many ISVs to provide integrated solutions for our customers. We are particularly pleased to work closely with SAP due to their endorsement of SUSE Linux Enterprise and our integrated support offer for SAP and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and due to their importance in the marketplace.

At BrainShare, we announced taking this to the next level, via a tight integration between SAP and Novell’s Identity Manager. Specifically, we announced our collaboration with SAP’s Enterprise Services Community program to focus on governance, risk and compliance. SAP’s deputy CEO, Léo Apotheker, made clear that our joint work is now going beyond Linux and is addressing key regulatory requirements.

Today, at SAPPHIRE 2008, we took the next step. We announced six offerings which make it seamless for customers to leverage Novell Identity services with SAP applications. This covers a large range: Identity Management, Event Monitoring, Federation, Single Sign-on, and both physical and logical security.

Summary

Novell has provided a constant drumbeat of Identity-related capabilities in the last couple of months. Each is exciting and important by themselves. More significant is the way the ensemble illustrates Novell’s commitment to serve customers by delivering Identity seamlessly with a range of partners: technology, systems integration and applications.