Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

In 2007, my first blog of the year was an articulation of Novell’s technical strategy. It is appropriate to start 2008 with an update.

Last year’s strategy reprise

You can read the full post from the beginning of 2007 here. Here is the quick summary.

Our strategy starts with Linux and Open Source. Open Source is transforming the computing landscape. It is changing economic models and creating new winners and losers. And we are on the ground level with SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Our strategy is a mixed source strategy. We are focused on managing the introduction of Open Source into the existing enterprise proprietary world. We are focused on important customer problems related to interoperability. So enterprise management plays a major role.

The strategy fulfills a significant area of customer need that is durable; so we solve customer needs and establish a franchise for Novell that will succeed in 2007 and beyond. And it is a good “fit” – a customer need that Novell can fulfill, given our competencies and the value promised by our brand.

Novell’s technical strategy – 2008 edition

As I said last year, our strategy will stick with Novell for years, because it addresses a need that customers have that no one else in the industry is ready, willing, or able to address. That is the co-existence and integration of the innovative, rapidly emerging Open Source world with the trillions of dollars of proprietary software in the market. Accordingly, at the top level, our 2008 strategy is the same as our 2007 strategy.

That does not mean that we are done. Last year, I introduced one concept from Jim Collins’ book – Good to Great. Great companies create their enduring strategy – their hedgehog concept. They stay with it for years – and Novell has one! In this posting I will discuss a second Jim Collins concept – the flywheel. Once you have your hedgehog concept, you iterate on it, tune, adapt, add substance – and each year it gets better. Indeed, our strategy is working, it is developing teeth, and we are taking it to the next level.

Here is the structure of the rest of this posting. Recall that under the umbrella of bringing together Open Source and proprietary, the two components of our strategy are enterprise Linux and enterprise management. These are both punctuated and given meaning by this philosophy of interoperability. So I will first describe the 2007 proof points that the strategy is working. Then, I will describe how we take it – in 2008 – to the next turn of the flywheel.

2007 strategy proof points – Enterprise Linux

We started 2007 with the momentum of the Microsoft agreement. With that single agreement we clearly positioned our company at the heart of this interoperability problem.

So what happened? Bookings went through the roof as customers saw the value in this partnership. We brought new marquee customers to Linux. Revenue took off. We grew share.

But bookings are just the beginning. The partnership with Microsoft became the lever to build a broader Linux ecosystem. CSIs like Cap Gemini announced partnerships with us; we continued strong relationships with hardware OEMs such as IBM and HP; brought Dell into the Microsoft certificate program; and we strengthened ties with enterprise application vendors such as SAP. We used this credibility and our great technology to land desktop agreements with Lenovo, Dell, and Lotus.

Further, we extended the breadth of Enterprise Linux. SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time drove latency to zero. The new ZENworks Orchestrator product assured that Open Source virtualization has depth.

Enterprise Linux with interoperability

When we announced with Microsoft, we committed to create technical interoperability. In 2007, our two companies came through! Here’s the substance. We published our joint interoperability roadmap – which received analyst acclaim. We’ve been executing against it since February. And four months ago, we took the partnership to the next level. After Microsoft saw Miguel de Icaza create the Moonlight technology in record time, Microsoft asked us to bring their multimedia Silverlight framework to the Linux desktop. Can you imagine that Microsoft is a Linux desktop ISV? We are turning the flywheel on interoperability!

Last month, we also announced that we are bringing Microsoft’s accessibility framework to Linux. This points to our core values of being a Linux leader, an interoperability leader, a company that is bringing Microsoft into open source, and a socially concerned citizen improving access for the handicapped.

Enterprise Management

2007 proof points for enterprise management abound. Three times in the last several months, Gartner placed Novell in its coveted leaders quadrant on management technologies – once for Novell Secure Login, once for Novell Identity Manager, and once for Novell Access Manager. We totally refreshed ZENworks. ZENworks Configuration Manager now integrates with multiple directories and is a great product to manage Vista deployments. ZENworks Orchestrator brings Novell into the world of data center and virtualization management. Last year we acquired Senforce to give us a security solution for desktops. For our NetWare customer base, in file and storage management we released Open Enterprise Server 2, virtualized on SLES with dynamic storage management. In collaboration management we released Novell Teaming + Conferencing. Most recently, we announced the industry’s most integrated roles and provisioning module as part of our Identity Management framework.

Let’s reflect on just one of these innovations, Novell Teaming + Conferencing. The way work gets done in a world of the web, wikis, blogs, and social networking is changing. Empowered teams form virally and need new tools to share information. Novell is now the open source leader in providing such teaming solutions.

Enterprise management is enriched by our focus on interoperability. We manage the mixed source environment. We manage both Windows and Linux. Open collaboration runs on numerous platforms. ZENworks plays in all environments.

Perspective

Our strategy is working, but we need to remind ourselves why. What customer pain points are we addressing? Why will customers keep buying this? At the highest level, it is because the strategic interoperability between open source and proprietary software is a twenty year problem which needs a strategic vendor. Underneath are more pragmatic concerns. Open source solutions are lowering cost for customers. And Novell’s approach to interoperability removes the complexity and risk. We provide management solutions: identity, secure desktop, event management – that directly address key CIO issues of risk and compliance.

What will be new in 2008?

So far, I have demonstrated fidelity to the corporate strategy articulated here 12 months ago. And I have stated that we are staying true to this strategy in 2008. What will happen in 2008? What new products, new partnerships, new initiatives? Rather than speculate on every product release of 2008, it is more important to describe the process we will use to turn the flywheel on our strategy. However, this post is getting long. So the 2008 discussion will be in the next posting.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 10:23 am and is filed under General, Identity, Security and Systems Management, Linux Operating Systems, Workgroup Collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.