Not surprisingly, the public cloud still presents serious security concerns for many organizations. So much so that public cloud adoption for enterprises is still a long way off. Of the nearly 100 survey respondents, key findings included:

• Slightly more than 13 percent of respondents have or plan to deploy a public cloud in the next year, while less than 13 percent have a hybrid strategy in place
• 23 percent of those looking at a public cloud plan to take more than a year to deploy, 14 percent for hybrid
• 48 percent of those surveyed noted that data security is their top cloud management concern
• 45 percent noted concerns with control of both physical and virtual environments
• 23 percent are focused on visibility in the cloud

On the other hand, when asked about their private cloud deployment strategies:

• More than 24 percent of survey respondents have or plan to deploy private clouds within their organizations in the next year
• Close to 15 percent are concerned about interoperability

It's no surprise that the main barrier for faster public cloud adoption is the lack of sufficient security, control and visibility. CIOs and IT managers normally cite these as the primary reasons for their reluctance of trusting a third-party cloud provider for storing or processing their sensitive data.

Private cloud computing deployments are being announced on an almost daily basis, but interoperability is the growing concern of close to 15 percent of survey respondents. Many businesses want interoperability between their in-house infrastructure and the cloud. And with industry analysts agreeing that heterogeneity is the future of IT, we expect this number to increase quickly in the coming months.

It’s not enough.

None of us can stop at this level.  I’ve personally done the IWM conversation numerous times and as suggested, have made it my own, and it has changed in how I deliver it as well.  Sometimes I bring the viability pieces to the front, sometimes I press harder on some areas of specific listener interest and lighter on others.  This isn’t about thinking “my version is better” it’s about the next level of resonance.

I remember being with Jon Wilburn and Patrick O’Brien at a Federal customer shortly after the vision deck came out.  The customer listened closely and did what we can all hope for.  He offered input back to us.  He said he got the vision, and he could align to it but if that was the Novell story he didn’t see a lot of point in more conversation.  His perspective was that vision is critically important, but that if we didn’t add value by sharing where we saw opportunities to leverage that vision in his specific business, we weren’t creating a differentiating event.

I took these comments to heart.  Partly because I really care about the company of course, but more importantly because a prospect took the time to share what we had done right and what was missing.  Jon had prepped us well, we understood the business and the very public challenges.  What we all failed to do was to take our vision and ensure that we made the presentation a bi-directional conversation about the customer/prospect issues.  I hope I haven’t continued to make the same mistake I did there.

So this post isn’t about catharsis for me.  It’s about being differentiating.  Every customer and prospect has a queue of vendors lined up.  Every one of those vendors has a vision.  Every one of them believes that their vision is “right”.  Put yourself in the customer’s chair and if the mental picture doesn’t bring on intestinal roulette you’re tougher than most.

We all acknowledge how busy we are, how many hours we put in, but as my esteemed colleague Tony Nocco puts it “you know who else is really busy?  Customers are really busy, in fact they’re getting hammered by low budgets, staff reductions and increased demand.”  There’s a good reason Tony is successful.  He puts himself in the shoes of the customer and treats them as he would want to be treated.  If you ever get the opportunity to do a call with Tim Wolfe pay close attention, he’s a master at being on the side of the customer with their best interests in mind.  And when you watch Tim, you see that doing so does not prevent Novell gaining value from the conversation.

So, all I ask of all of us on the vendor and partner side is to make sure that before we invite someone to a presentation or webinar or briefing that the primary objective is to deliver the specific context each customer or prospect is going to get as differentiated value.  And for the customers and prospects who read these missives, when you hear from us and don’t hear compelling value propositions please say “I’m not hearing compelling value propositions that will cause me to spend my expensive time.”  I promise you that we will make it right.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the 1.8 and 2.0 releases of the openSUSE Build Service (OBS). It is an open package and distribution development platform that provides a transparent infrastructure that allows developers to build for various major Linux distributions and hardware architectures.

The public server http://build.opensuse.org is available for all open source developers to build packages for the most popular distributions including Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu. It is also used to build the openSUSE and MeeGo distributions.

OBS 2.0's key features are a newly designed Web UI, anonymous access and an enhanced request system. OBS 1.8 is an update to the 1.7 release driven by the needs of the MeeGo project. Its major feature is access control enforcement. The next OBS release 2.1 will also include the access control enforcement, which is not yet in 2.0.

The completely refreshed Web UI for OBS 2.0 allows developers to work more efficiently, as data is displayed where it is expected, and the Web service loads faster and provides better access to projects, packages and meta data.

Anonymous access in OBS 2.0 to all packages and projects offers great convenience for users and more effectively promotes packages in the Build Service to the world at large, enabling search engines to index the Build Service as well. It also makes it easy to collaborate with other developers to show them patches or log files.

With OBS 2.0, review handling by a team is supported and roles can get assigned to groups instead of just to a single person.

The access control enforcement feature of OBS 1.8 allows access for projects, packages and repositories to be restricted to specified users and groups. This acknowledges privacy concerns of users.

"openSUSE Build Service has substantial momentum in the mobile and embedded space, specifically being used now by the MeeGo project," said Amanda McPherson, vice president marketing and developer services at the Linux Foundation. "The Linux Foundation is proud to be a strong contributor to OBS, including making substantial contributions to these new releases and features. We look forward to working with our members on OBS-related projects."

“The openSUSE Build Service 2.0 release is a significant improvement for developers,” said Michael Löffler, chairperson of the openSUSE Board, “It eases collaboration with the broader open source community due to supporting anonymous access. Developers can get their job better done with the new WebUI and the faster and more flexible OBS. ”

Users can use OBS 2.0 on the project's public server http://build.opensuse.org or run it in their own on-premise infrastructure. Deployment is possible directly from source code or from our appliance image (http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/OBS-Appliance).

For additional information, please read the release notes for OBS 1.8 (http://www.gitorious.org/opensuse/build-service/blobs/1.8/ReleaseNotes-1.8) and 2.0 (http://www.gitorious.org/opensuse/build-service/blobs/2.0/ReleaseNotes-2.0).

Today, Novell and VMware announced the expansion of their partnership to include a new offer of VMware vSphere bundled with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. What does this mean to cloud service providers? Service providers, specifically IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) providers, now have the opportunity to take advantage of a fully optimized OS included as part of the industry leading virtualization platform, ensuring a more integrated and simplified solution to start developing your private cloud.

In addition, VMware has selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell as the standard OS for all VMware product appliances! This allows ISVs to create their applications with more agility both inside and outside cloud environments.

This announcement from VMware and Novell marks a movement towards more fully integrated solutions for IaaS providers. This partnership will deliver scalability, availability and reliability to the cloud and gives validation to the need for solutions addressing the intelligent workload management market.

As part of this landmark agreement, customers can deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware® in VMware vSphere™ virtual machines and will be entitled to receive a subscription that includes patches and updates at no additional cost. In addition, VMware and its extensive network of solution and channel partners will market and sell customers the option to purchase technical support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server delivered directly by VMware for a seamless support experience.

VMware and Novell have both invested in delivering solutions as software or virtual appliances, providing customers a pre-configured package of OS plus application that is easier to deploy, maintain and manage. Several VMware products are already distributed and deployed as virtual appliances. Standardizing virtual appliance-based VMware products on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware will further simplify the deployment and ongoing management of these solutions, shortening the path to ROI.

This is a significant agreement for the Linux, virtualization, and cloud computing markets. Gartner research indicates that at the end of 2009, 18 percent of enterprise data center workloads had been virtualized, but the number is expected to grow dramatically to more than 50 percent by the close of 2012. VMware is the clear market leader in virtualization solutions, and this agreement is a tremendous opportunity for Novell's Linux business. To support customers moving to a cloud infrastructure, both companies also intend to provide the ability to port SUSE Linux-based workloads across clouds. Such portability will deliver choice and flexibility for VMware vSphere customers and is a significant step forward in delivering the benefits of seamless cloud computing.

This strategic partnership gives VMware and Novell customers a simplified and lower-cost way to virtualize and manage their IT environments, from the data center to the cloud. It gives our partners exciting new solutions with which to modernize their customers' IT environments and deliver significant ROI. This agreement is a strong validation of Novell's strategy to lead in the emerging intelligent workload management market and our goal for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to be the most portable operating system foundation across the broadest heterogenous physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Despite what you hear, there are more than two choices when it comes to desktop operating systems. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 continues to gain momentum as it provides the core functionality your users need like e-mail, Internet and productivity applications.

With that recent release of SP1, here are three reasons why you should consider Linux desktops:

• Increased support of audio and Bluetooth headsets
• Updated versions of leading open source applications such as Mozilla, Banshee, and OpenOffice.org, Novell Edition
• Improved multiple monitor configurations

Linux is becoming a viable desktop alternative. Here are some links where you can learn more about what is new in SP1.

Serverwatch

Linux Devices.com

Linux Desktops

What do you think is the most interesting new feature in this release?

In celebration of the 10th anniversary, we've been across the globe at industry events such as SHARE, CEBIT, WAVV and at IBM and Novell events discussing the benefits of Linux on System z. Marketshare leadership and innovation in a category for more than 10 years is something we are very proud of. For SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z, we're proud of our 1000+ customers, hundreds of partners,1000+ ISV's, the Novell team focused on IBM, and our engineers and developers responsible for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z.

The mainframe is one of those funny technologies that people ask the question: “is that technology still around?” Well, the answer is yes, it is still around; and thanks to Linux it is stronger than ever, it is very healthy – and growing.

Novell's leadership position on the mainframe is just one of the many proof points of why Novell is an ideal choice for companies that seriously want to improve their IT environment. There are many other reasons that I won't elaborate on in this blog, but you can see for yourself how Novell technologies are helping customers across the globe.

Novell and our business partners spend quite a bit of time educating the market on the benefits that Linux on System z can bring to enterprises to reduce costs, simplify IT management and increase overall performance. Like many of our customers I believe that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z is the ideal server consolidation platform? There are many reasons, but the top 5 we hear from customers include:

1- Lower costs with the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), which is treated as a single processor for licensing software
2 – Achieve extreme security, high scalability and greater flexibility- all benefits native to Linux
3- Consolidate servers through virtualization; running Linux as a guest of z/VM saves on hardware, software license, floor space, power usage and staffing expenses
4- Choose from a large portfolio of 1000 + commercial applications
5- Easily migrate and run even Windows workloads with Mono on System z -only from Novell on IBM System z servers

Thank you to all our customers, partners and IBM for their support to make Novell the marketshare leader for Linux on System z.

Later this week, we will release a series of interviews and podcasts with some of the original members of the SUSE mainframe team You will find these on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z blog: http://bit.ly/dgjC9W. You can also follow us on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/sle4systemz

For now start your trip down memory lane on the past 10 years of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z with the following articles/assets:

* View the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z timeline today – bit.ly/9rQzlM
Carol Stafford's IBM's WW VP of System z sales discussing the 10 Year Anniversary of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z – http://bit.ly/9mqSdm
*Linux User & Developer article: Novell’s Markus Rex – celebrating 10 years of Linux on the mainframe SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z – http://bit.ly/a8dW44

If you are a customer, business partner or IBM employee that has a 10 year anniversary of Linux on System z story, I'd love to hear from you. What's your experience with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z?

These days it’s hard to get excited about anything short of the most innovative solutions. Still, it takes time and effort to stay on top of it all and then be prepared to sell it internally to your organization. Linux, largely due to its roots in the open source community, consistently leads the market with rapid innovation and feature-rich development.

As a result of the past economic challenges, most recent innovations have focused on impacting the bottom line—smart ways to cut costs, increase efficiency, and generally do more with less.  Here are five areas of innovation we see making a difference now.

1. Virtualization – The birth of virtualization enabled enterprises to significantly reduce the risks and challenges of computing across multiple environments, while granting you secure and compliant access. While the associated cost savings and increased flexibility have changed the IT landscape, more recent innovations in identity, security and compliance are making your intelligent workload management a simpler reality.

2. Hardware advances — Chipset manufacturers like IBM (Systems E and Systems P environments), AMD and Intel (x86 and x86-64) have launched recent releases that are translating into great strides in system performance, particularly for businesses with large servers. The Intel® Xeon® Processor 7500 Series, for example, is now providing a 5 to 8x performance gain, creating great flexibility for enterprises looking to scale.

3. Patching methodologies – A bug used to force your hand, but patching updates just got a lot more user-friendly. Want to update only what’s broken? With new solutions that create more flexibility and less downtime, fixing a bug doesn’t need to cost you unnecessary time and money.

4. High availability extensions – Disaster recovery isn’t a scary or costly exercise anymore. For example, you can now affordably manage clusters spread across multiple data centers within a metropolitan area, providing high availability for your most mission-critical applications. Create a stretch cluster in your city, and if there’s a power outage or disaster, your applications are protected and can be brought online in another local data center. Other solutions allow you to restore an individual server that’s not part of a cluster, providing real-world business continuity.

5. Support – While it may not come in a box or a download, support stands strong as an innovation that’s making a difference in the marketplace. With everyone consuming the same code, the best technology remains important, but the difference in user experience lies with the relationships you form from the time you first install. The most innovative companies are committed to nurturing their relationship with you and placing a top priority on supporting the best user experience with Linux.

What did we miss?  Want to learn more about how Linux can help you innovate?  Register to attend a Linux Day near you.

1. Economies of scale – You can achieve greater economies of scale in terms of application licensing and systems management. Deploying Linux on new X86-64 systems based on Intel Xeon 7500 processors gives you massive scalability in terms of cores per server.

2. Flexibility through virtualization – You can use Linux in whatever way makes the most sense for your environment. But too many assume the only value in virtualization is consolidation. While consolidation and the reduction of your physical system footprint tend to be the biggest motivators, the resulting flexibility in your data center management can also yield great returns. By using the available tools to achieve intelligent workload management (ie the secure, compliant and automated management of resources across physical, virtual and cloud environments), you’ll create real value for your enterprise. And when virtual machines are priced per physical system, rather than per virtual machine, enterprises can run an unlimited number of virtual machines at no additional cost, creating significant savings.

3. System agility – Some worry that cutting costs will force sacrifices elsewhere, but Linux enables you to save and stay agile. For example, intelligent workload management solutions enable you to take your logical servers and move them to whatever is the optimal platform for each specific workload (i.e. from a physical environment to an internal or external cloud). Also enabling agility are software appliances, which allow you to quickly deploy applications in a turnkey fashion on physical, virtual, or cloud environments.

Want to discuss more cost-cutting strategies? We're hosting a series of Linux Day events.

First there is an initial belief that this marketplace is already saturated and that there really isn’t room for new players.  So, who are the market players do you think, I ask.  While I do hear Huddle, Elluminate, SharePoint (really?) amongst others, the 800lb gorilla answer is WebEx and the second biggest gorilla is Citrix.  This is fascinating because they could not be more different.

When I query what people like about WebEx, sometimes they don’t even mean WebEx the product, they mean WebEx the concept, and often other products are called WebEx even when they aren’t.  WebEx is noun as well as a proper name.  What do they like?  Efficient delivery to a very large audience of one way content with minimal setup hassles and no ugly client setup.  What don’t they like?  Client setup for viewers and the cost.  So if you could do something different that was less expensive for this purpose, would you?  The average response is maybe, but changing would be hard.

When I ask about Citrix, the answers are more diverse, given the prodigious family of GoTo Something offerings the company offers.  Only GoToMeeting comes up in the context of a “WebEx”.  The other offerings are much more used in the fashion of 1:1 even if they are capable of more.  What do people like?  Ease of setup, speed to operate and efficiency of operation.  What don’t they like?  The cost, and the confusion because of the number of seemingly similar offerings.

So then I ask, what do you need?  The responses are telling.  Cheap.  Fast.  No attendee client.  Cheap.  Launch it right now capability to a small to mid sized audience.  Cheap.  Audio.  Video.  Have I said cheap?

Now marketing professionals hate the word cheap because it has negative connotations, somewhat akin to the Canal Street Rolex.  So let’s go with cost effective.

We recently released Novell Conferencing.  You may not have heard a lot about it, and if so, that’s a real shame because for what it does, it’s an incredible offering.  What it does is enable customers to do really fast conferences with desktop sharing, presentation sharing, audio and video for substantially less than what the alternatives can do.  Oh and whiteboarding, session recording and a bunch of other useful functions.  If you are the presenter, there’s an agent you run to control what gets shared.  If you are the viewer, you need an internet connection and a browser.  When I said Internet connection I meant port 80, regular http, no odd pokeholes in the firewall and not some random high range port you’ll have to open and forget about leaving the doors open to all manner of rogues and malcontents.

If you’ve ever used the very good Elluminate or Huddle, you know that there is configuration required and that if you get it wrong, stuff doesn’t work.  Novell Conferencing is so simple, you really have to work at it to break it.  Now while I won’t underestimate the breakage capability of some folks who can disrupt the kitchen microwave, in general simple is effective.

So whether Novell employee, partner, customer or prospect, when next you think WebEx or whatever you call it, instead think Conferencing.  If your use case is fast, effective, no config and oh yeah cost effective, this might be exactly what you are looking for.  Look back in this post and what we see is that there is a real market demand for ad-hoc, right now, prep-light, easy to use, easy to view Conferencing that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, or require the neverending subscription or charges of between .10 and .24 PER MINUTE PER ATTENDEE.  How very fortunate that Novell Conferencing fills that requirement.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

PS:  In my post about using ZENworks Application Virtualization to deploy Office 2010, I was chastised in another blogger’s work for “trying to sell Novell products.”  Yes.  I am.  I think Novell is the Best Software Company in the World.  Anyone who heard me on Tim’s Americas All Hands early this fiscal knows that I do say this.  And yes, while I hope that readers find these posts informative and maybe even funny from time to time, my motive is to encourage people to become customers and buy our software.  I’ll be so forward as to say it is my fervent wish that we generate tons of revenue and plenty of profit from each sale.  Doing so means we get to keep building great products for customers and makes our company rewarding to shareholders and employees.  Oh and any commercial enterprise software company that says they are not interested in profitability or revenue, is, what’s the word?  Oh yeah lying.  So yes you know who you are, I do want folks to buy our great products.  Thanks for the coverage and the publicity.