Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

In my last blog, I began to outline four aspects of how we achieve our strategy and long-term roadmap. The four areas were:

1. Leadership. Why our products lead the industry.
2. Delivery. In the “engine room”—how we build those products, what processes result in leadership, and our commitment to interoperability as a design point in every product.
3. Incubation. How we take breakout ideas and make them into businesses.
4. Strategy and Vision. Fossa, our overarching technical strategy. Novell is an industry leader in next generation technologies and standards.

We got through the first two in the last posting, and in this posting we will finish the job.

3. Incubation—Breakout moves

A tough challenge that any company has is how to nurture great people and great ideas and convert them into businesses? We don’t lack great people or great ideas and we continue to grow the set of talented people inside of Novell. In December 2008 we added James Bottomley to our staff, a noted Linux leader, director of the Linux Foundation, and lead maintainer of the SCSI system for Linux.

On the business side, how do we create new businesses? For 2009, we created a program and set aside investment money to take a couple of great ideas and seize the industry. To be sure, we are satisfied with our existing products and strategies. They are providing growth and profitability. But we will invest beyond: breakout moves that will capture the imagination of the industry.

Our focus on breakouts drives internal enthusiasm. A total of 265 ideas were contributed to this program by Novell’s employees. Nat Friedman went on a whirlwind tour: 5 locations in 5 countries and three continents in two weeks to drive enthusiasm and stimulate brainstorming. Many of these ideas were incremental improvements, natural adjacencies of existing products. For those ideas, we asked that the features be assessed via our usual IPD process. However, we expect to select a couple of these ideas and fund them into new products for Novell, for customers, and partners.

You won’t see the products come out in 2009, but we will be public about our efforts to commercialize them.

4. Strategy and Vision—Fossa

One way to test new product ideas is to see whether they fit within our overall technology vision. Novell’s products are interdependent; together they server a higher purpose. There is a raison d’etre for Novell—a common purpose for the company. This is important for customers and partners as they assess our value to them.

Last year, at Brainshare we introduced our Fossa project. Let me tell you about the goals of this project, how it relates to Novell’s overarching vision, and progress to date.

If you talk to CIOs today, they’ll tell you that their IT infrastructure is anything but agile. CIOs want nothing more than infinite flexibility to deploy their IT resources in support of their business objectives. Delivering on this promise—infinite IT flexibility and agility—is at the core of the Fossa Project, a technical vision for computing and collaborating with agility.

Fossa provides agile resource management. It manages resources in a changing environment which affects how IT organizations deploy resources—with virtualization, cloud computing, appliances, Web 2.0, and mash-ups. Linux is our open source approach to managing resources in a single system and Novell has a premium place as a future leader in operating systems as open source commoditizes the operating systems layer.

Similarly, Fossa is our open source approach to managing resources in this new dynamic environment across multiple systems. Novell will be a leader in Systems Management as open source commoditizes this layer.

What progress have we made? Since articulating this vision at Brainshare, we have published scenarios or use cases that characterize how Fossa transforms resource management. We will soon publish a vision document which gives a technical roadmap for IT agility. We know exactly which standards and open source projects are needed. We have blanketed this space with patents to ensure an open playing field. With our enterprise credibility and open source credibility—we are the unique company who can be trusted to lead this.

Summary

Let me summarize with the main takeaways:

1. We have great products.
2. We have seven focus areas to make them great: IPD, market focus, engineering excellence, technology leadership, quality, interoperability, and channel readiness.
3. We will invest to take new ideas to market.
4. All of these ideas fit within a simple compelling value proposition for Novell. We will provide the agile, enterprise quality, open IT infrastructure.

For the last two years (2007 and 2008), I have used the first blog of the year to review Novell’s overall technical strategy. Familiar themes such as open source, mixed source, interoperability with Microsoft, management, and virtualization appeared. We continue to enhance each of these aspects as I’ve noted numerous times. This year I will start with a different broad and fundamental topic.

Specifically, I’ll focus on four aspects of our work—the methods we use to achieve our strategy and our long-term roadmap. The four topics:

1. Leadership. Why our products lead the industry.
2. Delivery. In the “engine room”—how we build those products, what processes result in leadership, and our commitment to interoperability as a design point in every product.
3. Incubation. I will explain how we take breakout ideas and make them into businesses.
4. Strategy and Vision. I will review Fossa, our overarching technical strategy. Novell is an industry leader in next generation technologies and standards.

Taken together—a superb technology story.

1. Leadership—Novell’s great products

We have refreshed the entire portfolio in the last twelve months.

Open Platform Solutions. The heart of our OPS business is SUSE Linux Enterprise. SUSE Linux Enterprise is the best engineered and most interoperable Linux from the desktop to the data center. Our continued business success is illustrated by Microsoft extending their commitments to Novell with another $100M in SLES certificates. We have more then 2,500 certified ISV applications on SLE 9 and 10, and strengthened our ecosystem relationships with SAP, IBM, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and others.

Systems and Resource Management. In 2008, our Platespin acquisition catapulted us to leadership in managing the data center—both physical and virtual. We’re the only company that does that from one set of tools. Our Managed Objects acquisition further enhances data center management, as well as placing us in the middle of exciting developments for Business Service Management. Our endpoint management solutions—whether you are managing desktops or mobile devices, are among the most powerful and flexible tools in the industry. For desktop management, ZENworks Configuration Management SP 1 was released in August which works with Active Directory configurations—with quality. This makes our product accessible to a broader set of customers.

Identity and Security Management. In 2008, we grew share in Identity by delivering such innovations as the Compliance Management Platform—an integrated solution for customer compliance needs. And we continue to integrate best-of-breed industry technology into our identity product suites. No wonder we are in the Gartner “Leaders quadrant” again and again.

Workgroup. Years of falling revenue caused analysts to write us off in workgroup. In 2008, we proved the critics wrong. Armed with Open Enterprise Server 2, we stopped the rapid decline of revenue. For 2009, we have Bonsai—a totally refurbished GroupWise 8—and OES2 SP 1 to provide extended value to Novell’s base. With our SiteScape acquisition and Teaming + Conferencing—we are leaders in the emerging area of open collaboration.

2. Delivery—In the engine room, how do we make the product great?

I want to step back and discuss the processes we use to define and deliver products. They focus on customer, partner, market needs and disciplined execution. Seven key points.

1. Product Management. Our product management process—IPD—chooses the right markets, product segments, and features. We have used this successfully for two years. No product feature is approved without input from the field, marketing, and customers. Despite great engineering, Novell is no longer an engineering driven company.

2. Market-driven focus. With the marketing and sales organizations at the IPD table when we do feature selection, we specify capabilities that address customer challenges, differentiate us from the competition, and drive sales.

3. Engineering Excellence. In 2008 we introduced an engineering excellence program. These processes ensure that we are agile in product delivery, and that we deliver on-time and with quality. We are as crisp on the engineering side as we are on the feature selection side.

4. Technology. We have great technology. In 2008 we received over 100 patents—a huge number for a company our size.

5. Quality. Quality levels are guaranteed via an interlock with the field. Customers and our services organization tell us how quickly defects need to be fixed; and what defect rate is tolerable—and engineering is accountable to that.

6. Interoperability. Novell’s market positioning is “Making IT Work as One.” But without engineering, that’s just a tagline. We’ve made interoperability a core design point of every product. Our products work well with each other and interoperate with the industry. Within Novell, we have monthly calls to lock product dependencies. This helps us optimize our products on Linux and creates cross-Novell offers such as the Novell Open Workgroup Suite. Outside of Novell, we have the best Linux interoperability with Microsoft, a vendor agnostic solution with Platespin and integrated offers with IBM, SAP, and others.

7. Ecosystem. We have turned R&D upside down to be partner friendly. We build channel ready products for solution providers and have deep integration with Global Solution Providers.

More to come

This blog is getting a little long, so I will finish this discussion in my next posting.