Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

Last week Novell announced a definitive agreement to acquire Managed Objects, a leader in Business Services Management, and developers of incredible technology in the area of Configuration Management Data Bases. With this we continue to build a strong portfolio of open management solutions for the interoperable data center. We are staying true to our two-pronged strategy of excelling in Enterprise Linux and IT Asset Management with a strong focus on interoperability. As my colleague John Dragoon commented last week this further strengthens Novell’s brand promise of Making IT Work as One.

What should our joint (Novell and Managed Objects) customers expect both today and over a longer period of time?

Job #1 – Continue the strong focus on BSM

As I mentioned with our Platespin acquisition, we acquire a company because we endorse their strategy! In the case of Managed Objects, Business Service Management (BSM) has become the primary method that customers use when they relate management of their IT resources to business processes. It has been included in every Systems Management presentation from Novell for years. Managed Objects has already brought BSM to a sizable number of customers, and was a pioneer in this market. We will now use the Novell sales ecosystem to make Managed Object’s solutions more widespread.

When I visited the Managed Object team in Virginia several months ago, I was so impressed I nearly fell out of my chair! I had long known that the company had an outstanding Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) technology, and that this was the basis for their disciplined approach to management. But I learned that this was surrounded by deep analytics, well designed graphical user interfaces, and technology that scales to large environments. That is why our immediate focus is to bring this to a larger set of customers.

Job #2 – Leverage the technologies for our traditional ZENworks platform

We have been continuing investing in the ZENworks platform to refresh the capability for customers. ZENworks Configuration Management Service Pack 1 was a substantial release. Managed Objects brings new capabilities to Novell: connectors to other systems, reporting capability, analysis, and rich visualization interfaces. Expect us to integrate these capabilities into our existing platforms.

Job #3 – Optimize the next generation data center

In talking about our acquisition of Platespin I mentioned that “Novell now has an opportunity and strategic intent to optimize the virtual data center” based on the Platespin technologies. My point was simple: if you combine Novell data center capabilities (such as ZENworks Orchestrator) with Platespin you have unique capability: rich function and support for interoperability.

The technologies from Managed Objects have the clear potential to round out this data center solution. With a Configuration Management Data Base we can more easily link the management of all resources. With the analytics and reporting tools, we can further enrich the functional capability. And with the visualization technologies, the complex task for an adminstrator becomes quite easy and natural.

For the immediate term, we will focus on further popularizing BSM, and enhancing ZENworks. But, look for data center optimization to provide a decisive lead for Novell over time.

Earlier this month Novell announced a breakthrough in the Identity Management area: We created an advanced compliance management platform. I will briefly review its breakthrough properties, but then I will add comments that we did not announce with the product. I will relate this to our longer-term goal of creating an agile IT infrastructure – project Fossa.

Compliance management platform

Platform announcements typically focus on integration because markets typically emerge with point products that address relatively narrow requirements. Customers use these point products together to build solutions. Meanwhile, each product evolves to address requirements of its customer set. Thus, silos result which make the solution more difficult to construct, more costly to run, and more difficult to evolve.

Markets fix this with a platform: Vendor takes a step back, worrying less about new individual product features and instead ensuring that the variety of individual products work well together, creating new business value through access to new source of information.

Identity management has evolved over the last decade with rich function. Today, we address user provisioning, access control, Web access, role management, single sign-on, policy management, and compliance monitoring. Increased focus on securing an enterprise and validating compliance to external regulations has created a need for integration. So we took a step back. Now, with an advanced compliance platform, customers can address security and compliance with ease and low-cost.

The path to an agile infrastructure

Above, I mentioned the Fossa project, Novell’s vision of an agile infrastructure. Our internal project has progressed nicely and we will soon release an architectural description.

The same functions that in 2008 provide an integrated compliance management platform form the basis for a future agile infrastructure. Here’s why!

The future environment is characterized by an increasing variety of software delivery models and software execution models. Important examples include: Web 2.0, SaaS, cloud computing, mashups, appliances (physical, software, and virtual), virtualization, and download. The future agile infrastructure is flexible in allowing workloads to migrate to the place and execution model where they will be serviced optimally.

Our Fossa project asks: how do we define optimal? The answer – we need a rich policy language. How do we refer to resources and reason about all of the choices? The answer – we need to identity enable everything. How do we inform users that the infrastructure was faithful in implementing the specified policy? The answer – compliance.

Although the compliance platform today is focused on security compliance, it is providing powerful primitives that help agility. The optimal workload management enjoyed by the Fossa user does not necessarily ask for a secure solution. Yet the primitives – identity management, policy, and compliance – are exactly the function that we will reuse in Fossa for the purpose of optimization, flexibility, and agility.