Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

In Novell, we have a two-pronged strategy focused on Enterprise Linux and IT Management Software. IT Management Software is a logical complement of Enterprise Linux – Linux manages the resources of a system while IT Management Software manages the resources across heterogeneous systems.

Management software is of huge importance to customers: Analyst firms estimate that customers spend over $20B annually in managing their IT assets. Yet, there is fragmentation of the market among vendors, inadequate standardization, and interoperability problems abound. Novell relies on its deep participation in the Linux community and outstanding partnership with Microsoft to address these issues, providing leading solutions for interoperable management.

Interoperable Desktop Management

Desktop management is critical to customers. The value of desktop assets are enormous, but the challenge of administration is equally large. No organization can roll out data, applications, and patches in a haphazard fashion. It would be costly, there would be many errors that lead to security and compliance risks, and ongoing maintenance would be next to impossible. For this reason, many years ago Novell introduced the ZENworks family of products.

With Novell’s growing focus on interoperability, we now integrate natively with competitors such as Microsoft. We introduced ZENworks Configuration Management (ZCM) a year ago, the first version of the ZENworks product family to leverage both Novell’s highly acclaimed eDirectory, and also Microsoft’s popular Active Directory.

ZCM SP 1

With ZCM’s success came customer demands for more: A highlight of the just announced ZCM Service Pack 1 is that it is tested to support up to 30,000 devices per zone. The dynamic range covered is huge.

Keeping ahead of desktop migration trends, ZCM was one of the first management products to support Microsoft Vista. For desktop users making the transition to Vista, ZCM is a robust tool to assist with this migration. While we maintain our passion for the Linux desktop, we place a primary focus on managing Windows/Vista desktops – given the realities of customer needs and marketplace demands.

Security

In recent years, security and compliance have become headline-grabbing issues. For example, many companies are wrestling with:

• Carefully tracking assets

• Patching mechanisms to install fixes as soon as they are ready

• Security for laptops accessing data through wireless networks

Certainly, these are not the only security threats. Security threats range from physical threats, insider threats, malware, inappropriate log-ons, and threats that arise from poor programming practices (e.g. buffer overflows). Customers need and deploy many products to address these problems – together with processes and training to behave in a security conscious fashion.

Customers address this directly by establishing best practices internally and relying on a variety of vendors. We package with ZCM those security tools that most closely relate to Configuration Management. We have had capabilities for some time to deal with patch and asset management in an integrated fashion. Last year we also added a wireless security management piece to ZENworks.

Efficiency

ZCM SP1 also deals with practical deployment issues. In ZCM SP 1 we introduced a ZENworks satellite capability. This allows image information to be sent to a remote location once, with the satellite server handling the deployment locally. This is of great value where bandwidth is limited to the remote location.

Summary

ZENworks, particularly with ZCM SP 1, is a leading desktop management suite. Novell has a strong focus on building the capability in interoperability, scale, efficiency, and security.