Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

My February postings catch up on progress from last fall. Today, I’ll comment on our recent certification announcement, and link it to last week’s Moonlight announcement.

The Linux Ecosystem

As a mixed-source company, Novell is conscious of the relative role of Linux and open source with respect to proprietary software; today and in the future. While we drive for the expansion of open source, we recognize that most software installed today is not open source and we interoperate with it. We partner with non-open source vendors including Microsoft. Even most software that runs on Linux is proprietary. So we work with ISVs to ensure their products are certified on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

To make it easier for ISVs, “Bringing more applications to Linux” and “Bringing more applications to Linux, again!” discussed the imperative for Linux vendors to work on standard certification. Novell has partly funded the Linux Foundation’s Linux Standards Base (LSB) to simplify certification. Late last year we made an announcement which cemented commitment to ISVs.

Number 1 in Certifications

Last fall we passed the 2500 mark in terms of the number of ISVs that are “current” in their certification to SLES. We define current to be those that are certified to our most recent releases—SLES 9 and SLES 10. We continue to increase this number apace, and we believe that this is the largest number of certifications available for any commercial Linux distribution.

How did we achieve this? A simple matter of focus. Starting with Ron Hovsepian’s keynote in LinuxWorld 2007, we made it a priority to address all aspects of ISV partnerships in three time frames:

• Immediate term: We have encouraged certifications and are now at a record number.
• Intermediate term: We are working with key ISVs such as SAP to build appliances based on SLES—so the popular appliance model is optimized with Linux.
• Long term: We aspire to the complete success of LSB and a day when the principle of “write once, run everywhere” is a reality.

Moonlight

While Linux and Windows are in competition for some customer placements, customer usually prefer one or the other; but they demand interoperability.

Last week we took a further step. The Mono Project announced the release of Moonlight 1.0; the port of Microsoft’s Silverlight product (rich internet applications and media experiences) to the Linux desktop. We began the collaboration over one year ago and this release is a significant milestone in our partnership, because:

• It brings rich internet content to the Linux desktop.
• Interoperability between Windows and Linux; the same content can be viewed equally from the two platforms
• Interoperability within Linux! Mono works on Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu!
• Endorsement of the Linux desktop platform by Microsoft. Microsoft provides considerable funding for this effort and technical help such as test suites. This is critical to customers—they can’t trust the interoperability without tight vendor relationships.

Summary

Linux’s ultimate success as a platform lies in getting the right number of exciting applications to Linux. Novell invests to make SLES the prefered landing point for Linux applications. Throughout Mono framework, we also make SLE the perfect landing point for .Net based applications. The payoff is evident with Moonlight—our relationship with Microsoft brings this application to Linux.

My last two postings comprised my annual review of Novell’s strategy (part 1 and part 2). I am now behind my usual cadence of comment on Novell’s progress. We made progress in data center management late last year which I wanted to review.

Workloads

The focus of data center management changes from year-to-year. Some aspects of data center management include: physical server management, application management, storage management, workload management, high availability, security, data management, file systems, and clustering. All of these are important, yet depending on the latest disruption in the industry one aspect may require greater attention in a given year.

At Novell we believe 2009 will be the year of the workload. Several technology disruptions are driving this:

• Virtualization—an increased focus on performance sensitive production workloads
• Customer choice for virtualization: continued offerings from VMWare, new offerings from Microsoft and open source offerings such as Xen.
• Availability: continuous operation of virtualized production workloads.
• Cloud computing. Workloads can migrate outside the enterprise with a variety of models: Web services, hosted, and SaaS as examples.
• Appliances. Aside from physical servers, virtual servers, and the cloud—IT Managers have the option to deploy workloads as custom built appliances.
• Business Service Management (BSM). While BSM is already growing, we believe the growth will accelerate in 2009. A weak economy drives focus on business value and greater attention to BSM and measuring and maintaining specific SLAs (service level agreements) for workload performance.

Our December workload announcement

Novell has been ramping up attention on workload management for several years, first with our ZENworks Orchestrator solution and then our acquisition of PlateSpin. Late last year we pulled it all together by clarifying our product roadmap and integrating our assets into a comprehensive workload solution. Some of the key features of this announcement:

• We integrated the Novell and PlateSpin product lines to create a comprehensive workload solution under the PlateSpin brand.
• We culled out these capabilities to create four specific products within this solution:
  • PlateSpin Migrate—to allow migration of workloads throughout a network
  • PlateSpin Protect—to provide a recovery capability
  • PlateSpin Recon—for workload profiling
  • PlateSpin Orchestrate—to manage physical and virtual resources throughout the lifecycle of a deployment.
• We strengthened our interoperability story. We continue to provide strong support to VMWare environments; but have added others including full support for our SLES platform using the Xen hypervisor

More to come

As I mentioned in “Novell Acquires Managed Objects“, part of our rationale for the acquisition of Managed Objects is the growing importance of BSM. BSM is important for several service disciplines and workload management is a key area. There is an increased role for BSM in ensuring that the flexibility of workload deployment is translated into business value in this tough economy. Novell will continue to further add to our customers’ data center management and workload management capabilities to address all of the disruptions listed above.