Novell News » 2006 » May

Jaffe on new face of identity management

Bruce Lowry — Tue, 30 May 2006 08:59:07 +0000

Novell's CTO Jeff Jaffe has put up a interesting post today on how he sees identity management changing to address issues of corporate governance. Combining identity management, workflow and, now, with e-Security, event management, gives Novell a strong toolset for helping customers meet both management and compliance challenges. The posting is a good overview of the issues, the challenges, and how we think we help companies meet those challenges.

Good Mono Tones

Bruce Lowry — Fri, 26 May 2006 10:37:53 +0000

There's an interesting blog posting from John Carroll over on ZDNet on Mono. As a Bay Area native, I like the imagery in the post of Mono as the programming "Golden Gate Bridge" linking Windows and Linux environments for developers. A key point John (a Microsoft employee, by the way) makes is that regardless of developers' motivations for developing on Windows (i,e., many actively like it, as opposed to being "forced" into it), the advent of Mono is good for Windows developers in that it expands the market for their work. We've used Mono to develop a number of the cutting edge new applications on our new Linux desktop, due out this summer. Mono is an important piece of our cross-platform story, and Miguel de Icaza continues to lead in innovating with Mono (check our his blog for the Mono project's involvement in Google's Summer of Code.) It's great that others are really starting to understand the value of Mono as well.

Retailers … they know what sells

Kevan Barney — Thu, 25 May 2006 16:49:03 +0000

You probably saw Novell's news with NCR earlier this week. Novell continues to pick up steam in the retail industry, as evidenced by three recent customer stories that highlight different Novell solutions for different customer needs, although all are in the retail industry. Success Apparel, Karstadt and Jan Linders are having a similar experience, as described by Jan Linders IT manager Marcel Gommans: "Novell has given us a very stable platform on which to support our most important business processes."Sounds like business is good.

Oracle on Linux from Novell

Kevan Barney — Tue, 23 May 2006 14:49:07 +0000

Oracle solutions running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell are gaining momentum, as illustrated in today's customer win announcement from Oracle. Similarly, Novell has posted a success story about the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto in Portugal. Among other things, the information systems manager said, "The performance of Oracle on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is excellent – our solution shows Linux working perfectly in an intensive environment."In a slight rehash from last month, I thought it germane to point out again some steps Novell and Oracle are taking to continue to improve life in the data center.

Look at SUSE Linux 10.1 community distribution

Kevan Barney — Mon, 22 May 2006 16:16:38 +0000

A comprehensive review at Mad Penguin.org gives high marks to SUSE Linux 10.1, the newest version of our community distribution aimed at the new Linux user and Linux enthusiast markets. It previews technology that will make its way into our upcoming enterprise offerings. The review goes into a lot of technical detail on the distro, and touches on all the key new innovations, from the Beagle search to the Xgl graphics to new plug-and-play features. The reviewer makes a pretty interesting confession: "At no point in my career, no matter how much I liked a distro when I reviewed it, have I been tempted to migrate, but today is a new day my friends, and I see SUSE in my future."

More Enthusiasm for Linux on the Desktop

Bruce Lowry — Mon, 22 May 2006 13:02:19 +0000

Ladd Timpson, Novell's global director of channel and partner marketing, gave a keynote over the weekend at CMP Xchange Tech Connect, a leading channel event focused on the systems builder market. Ladd talked about the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, and Peter Bowen of Novell demonstrated the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. According to coverage from the event, there was significant interest in the desktop from the systems builder community, and the demo was standing room only. There are some interesting quotes in this piece from systems builders saying they plan to take a serious look at SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop when it ships this summer.

IBM Boosts ODF

Bruce Lowry — Wed, 17 May 2006 15:39:16 +0000

IBM's announcement yesterday that it'll support ODF in the next version of Lotus Notes is another boost in the arm for the OpenDocument standard. Lotus is number two in the collaboration market after Exchange – and Novell, with GroupWise, holds the third place – so we're talking serious numbers of users here will be able to tap the benefits of "open" document collaboration. And Sun's commitment at JavaOne to open source Java – though not a big surprise – is noteworthy nonetheless. On the same day, two of the biggest hardware/software players in the industry made statements about supporting open standards/open source in the fundamental areas of office productivity and application development. This is important stuff.Perhaps the most interesting part of this is that both announcements are being described as logical, sensible business decisions, not radical experimentation in untested waters. Good proof points that "open" is here to stay.

Notes from the Software Strategy Summit

Bruce Lowry — Tue, 16 May 2006 17:39:36 +0000

It's conference week in San Francisco, with JavaOne, Gartner IT Symposium and SIIA's Software Strategy Summit all competing for IT eyeballs this week. Must be a sign that Silicon Valley is back. I've spent a couple of days at the SIIA gig. There are four main themes permeating this event – software as a service (SaaS), open source, globalization/outsourcing, and security. A few of the more interesting observations:- The financing models are getting turned around. With open source and SaaS, companies can get up and running – using low cost software and reaching customers thru the internet – at extremely low cost relative to the past. Greg Gianforte of RightNow Technologies made a pretty compelling argument for not taking VC money. Fellow panelist, VCer Ann Winblad, (Winblad Hummer) didn't necessarily agree – Open source and SaaS are a powerful combo. Per keynoter Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame, the business architecture has now changed from a vertical, highly complex product-focused model (think IBM in the 70s, Microcsoft in the 80s), to a volume operation, services focus (Amazon, Google). Running software as a service on low cost commodity hardware and Linux is a key to this shift.- Complexity and uncertainty in IT are proliferating for companies as they integrate with the Web. Russ Davies of HP argued that the counter to that is modularity and markets. Services oriented architectures are the current way companies are striving for modularithy in their IT environments. This will help decouple IT changes from business changes, delivering more flexibility to customers.- Security remains paramount, and challenges posed by security for service oriented architectures require new thinking. Companies need a comprehensive approach to security that goes beyond access management. Protecting the perimeter is a concept that simply no longer works. Security now has moved out to the nexus of application and user, requiring comprehensive identity and asset management approaches. Novell's Loren Russon, director of product management for our identity group, was on a panel with HP and Ensim talking about changing distribution models for software and some of the security issues around these changes. I suspect conversations at the other San Francisco conferences today revolved around similar issues. It's great that Novell is playing at the core of some of these key trends.

Guest Blog: Musings from the Internet Identity Workshop

Kerry Adorno — Thu, 11 May 2006 09:34:31 +0000

Sarah Mees, product marketing manager at Novell shares her observations and experiences from last week's Internet Identity Workshop 2006.I'm just back from three fascinating days rubbing elbows with the identity intelligentsia at the Internet Identity Workshop held last week in Mountain View. The workshop is focused on user-centric identity and other identity-related issues and featured an unusual format called open space. That is to say, there was no formal conference agenda – everyone had the opportunity to propose topics and the agenda was created on the spot….very dynamic, very fresh totally engaging. I wish I could have cloned myself and attended more presentations.Day one was a primer for folks that are not part of the Identity Gang and other leading identity-driven thinkers, and provided a terrific level set for the rest of the workshop. One of the most interesting things from my perspective was to get an overview of the Lexicon project underway at the identitygang.org, only to discover within a matter of minutes that every presenter had their own lexicon for identity…but by the end of the day it was clear that there was a lot of common ground despite the semantics.There were a few conversations that were so intriguing that I can't stop thinking about them. First, there was a lot of interest in Microsoft's InfoCards and even more interest in the development of an open source implementation. In fact, there was a group of students from the University of North Carolina that built and demoed a Java version of the InfoCard-like identity selector/GUI. I'm still not 100% sure what InfoCards are, but they do look very convenient and they won't work on my Linux desktop unless the community gets together and makes it happen the prospect of which seems quite likely after all the chatter this week.One of Novell's distinguished engineers, Dale Olds, led one of the more interesting sessions that I attended. It was a group effort to build a map of open source identity initiatives, as well as open standards and protocols. I was aware of a few, including the Higgins Project, but there are a lot of other projects and protocols that I'd never heard of – including an open source implementation of Liberty that is very encouraging. Last for now is a conversation that I had with another workshop attendee who works for the world's leading lock group, think Yale Lock, Sargent, etc. It was only a brief chat but I asked him what his interest was in the workshop and it turned out to be a subject that I've spent a little time thinking about as well the convergence of physical and IT security using identity. This is something that his company's customers want and it's something that our customers want and chances are we have many of the same customers. I was unable to attend his session on the subject because it was time to fly home, but I hope to continue the conversation with him and others.I also heard a lot about topics that I intend to follow moving forward, including reputation systems, identity rights agreements, intention, personas and much more.

"Real Open Source"

Bruce Lowry — Wed, 10 May 2006 07:52:36 +0000

Neil McAllister of Infoworld asks an interesting question in a recent article about whether a company that innovates on top of open source is a "real" open source company. Red Hat's recent acquisition of JBoss got some similar conversations going over open source vs. proprietary stacks. As one of the few companies in the industry with a foot solidly in both the open source and proprietary software worlds, we have our own thinking. The world is heterogeneous, and will remain a combination of open and proprietary for a long time. Vendors need to be responsive to customers, all of whom have made significant investments in proprietary solutions. Customers are looking to solve business problems, and most don't care whether a solution is open source or proprietary provided it solves those problems at a cost/value point that is acceptable.Nobody can doubt Novell's open source credentials. We actively participate in a large number of open source projects – among which are OpenOffice.org, Xen, Eclipse, Apache – and sponsor and/or maintain a number more, including openSUSE, Mono, AppArmor, Higgins, Evolution, Hula, iFolder. At the same time, we don't believe open source is the answer to all the challenges companies face in today's market. If we can bring a proprietary solution to bear on a customer problem today, we'll do it. The question can't be open source vs. proprietary. These have to co-exist, for customer benefit.