For those of you who don’t know Dister, he is the mascot for SUSE Studio, a free, web-based appliance building tool that is a key technology component of our SUSE Appliance Program. For appliances built in SUSE Studio and published in SUSE Gallery, we will be awarding $10,000 to the creators of the most inventive software appliances in two categories: “Community Use” and “Commercial Use”. Judges include Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Markus Rex, senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions at Novell, and other industry influencers.

“It’s a great way to show off what you can do and win some money at the same time,” says Bowen.

Anyone using SUSE Studio today is eligible to win, so start building or vote for your favorite appliance today!

CA certainly has been on a buying spree recently to try to move itself into the Cloud space.  With the space predicted to grow at more than a 15% CAGR, it's little wonder as to why.  However, this recent acquisition smacks of putting a square peg in a round hole.

Arcot has a nice solution for strong authentication but as an authentication play, it's not that interesting.  It's about time that CA patched that hole in their SiteMinder portfolio.  Other providers (Novell included) offer token-less strong authentication.  I'm left scratching my head and wondering if this is truly a cloud security play or merely paying a lot for a technology labeled "cloud."

The second part of the Arcot acquisition is a solution for providing single-sign on for cloud applications.  I think it's missing in a couple of fundamental aspects:

• It's only hosted by Arcot.  Other state-of-the-art players, such as Novell and Ping Identity, are working with cloud providers to offer this to their existing customers instead of trying to build a new channel.  If you're an enterprise in the middle of the move to the cloud do you really want to have to deal with yet another vendor?
• It misses the fact that single-sign on in the cloud is about a lot more than just sign-on.  Providers need to provide auditing, logging, and the foundational technology needed to ensure compliance.

Identity and Security in the Cloud are on everybody's mind these days — particularly with the VMWare conference this week — but this was an big acquisition by CA that will require a lot of integration work and cause yet more churn.

But, if you partake of social networking, go look in a mirror.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.  Do you remember the person you saw?  Good, because that person is also a curator.

One of the most powerful functions of any social media endeavor is curation.  The amount of information on the net is so enormous that without some kind of filtering we could never find what we need when we need it.  Thus, the leaders in social networking tools leverage the power of curation to filter content.  Unlike the classic picture of the museum curator who uses his or her expertise to filter the content you see, in the social world, you choose your own curators.

Let’s look at three examples of social curation, FaceBook, Twitter and Digg.

FaceBook has the perspective of seeing posts from your friends on your wall.  You choose your FaceBook “friends” based on criteria you self select.  So instead of seeing the enormous influx of FaceBook posts, you get a curated view.   With over 500,000 active members, each generating an average of 90 posts per month, there’s no way any person could deal with that influx.  So we select the friends we see and look at their posts because they may interest us, or have a high likelihood of creating interest.  FaceBook uses apps and targeted advertising through a highly curated model for content injection as well.

Twitter is curation by design.  This was a design precept of founder Jack Dorsey and is continued with great focus by Ev Williams and Biz Stone today.  The whole concept behind following someone is to create a filtered stream of content that may be of interest to you.  This makes handling the 105M users and 600M searches per day a more personal affair.

When Kevin Rose saw Digg’s numbers start to plummet, he looked closely at the data and discovered that users were finding Digg was becoming too much of a firehose on wide spray, instead of more focused content.  In an interview around the design precepts for Digg4, he shared that one of the key design elements in the revamp was to ensure that a Digg user’s first view was of Diggs from other Digg users that the viewer followed.  Initial reviews of the new design have been resoundingly positive and web hit data indicates a strong upturn in Digg resonance.

All this may be fascinating, but what’s the point?  The point is the coming release of Novell Pulse.

Pulse is the next generation of collaboration.  As you’ve seen from announcements, press coverage, videos and other media, Pulse is more than email, more than IM, more than chat, more than co-editing.  It is absolutely all those things, but I think there is a critical value proposition not yet clearly elocuted.

By bringing together different people, and different groups and by design providing incredibly agile “views” without some artificial constraint, Pulse provides the user the power to created curated streams without having to learn any code, convoluted filter statements or perform other computing gymnastics.  So while I see tons of content in my Pulse stream, if I want to see only what Ken Muir has posted, including stuff he posted months ago, I just click on Ken’s avatar.  I’ve performed curation without thinking about it.  When I want to find something that Andy Fox or Wendy Steinle has posted, it’s equally easy.  The same is true for groups.  Moreover, I don’t need to be online when the post is made because Pulse retains history with transparency.  I also don’t need to worry about downloading attachments to Pulse feeds for fear of not being able to find them later, because they will be where they were, and if needs be I can search for them.  Search is just another form of curation.

The challenge that we all will face is not that there isn’t content, it’s that there will be more content than we can reasonably deal with.  The other problem is one of authority.  How can we be sure that the content creator or commenter is who we think it is?  We’ve already seen the privacy and security concerns burst into flame around some of the open socials.  Pulse brings identity and security to the process, so not only can we control the inbound, we can also have confidence that the source stream originator is who we think it is.

Lot’s of people who didn’t get the difference wrote the Pulse = Wave equation.  They were and are wrong.  Similar in concept but different in execution.  As Mr. Parker once said “with great power comes great responsibility” and today only Pulse provides the 360 degree capability to exercise that power responsibly.

Until next time, peace.

Ross Chevalier

CTO, Novell Americas

I recently had the opportunity to be a guest on cloudchasers on the role service providers are going to play in the evolving cloud computing market. It was a great opportunity to discuss the issues driving service providers in this market.

The markets for service providers are shifting. The increasing adoption of cloud computing is creating a level of market dynamics we have not seen in many years. These dynamics are forcing all service providers to question the services they offer their customers and how they will differentiate themselves in the future.

The first thing I notice when looking at this market is the wide spectrum of different service providers being impacted by this shifting market. We can look at the service providers across the following segments:

• Current cloud services providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Savvis)
• Current telcos (Verizon, AT&T)
• Content providers (Comcast, Time Warner Cable)
• Hosting/outsourcers (ACS, CSC, Dell/Perot)
• System integrators (Cap Gemini, Accenture, Deloitte and Touche)

It is important to note that for the purposes of this conversation we are talking about very large, Tier 1 service providers. There are thousands of smaller providers in the consulting and MSP markets that are equally impacted by the market conditions we are discussing.

The impact of the shift to cloud computing is being felt in each of these service provider segments.  We are in the midst of one of the rare tipping points where we will see a complete realignment of how and where customers will consume IT services. Those service providers that embrace this change and work hard to position themselves in the new markets will succeed. Those that do not will quickly lose relevancy with and the commitment of their customers.

These shifts are putting both financial and technical pressure on the service providers to not only define what services they will offer customers but also determine if they are capable of doing so at the new market driven price points.

Service providers are working out how they fit in this world but, right now, there are more questions than solid answers. These questions range from which type of services to offer all the way to how cost effectively they can deliver cloud services.

Some of the questions facing today’s service providers are:

1. What type of cloud (or cloud services) will the service provider focus on?  Public, private, hybrid?
2. What delivery model do they believe is tailored to their current strengths and assets?  Infrastructure, Platform or Software (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) as a service?
3. What customer segment will they target? Will they target enterprise or  small/medium business? How does this reconcile with their current customer base?
4. How will they monetize their cloud offerings?
5. Do they have the infrastructure to offer these services at the right price point? Can they be competitive based on their current cost structure?
6. How will they fill technology gaps needed to be successful? Key areas like security and compliance.
7. What partnerships will they need to achieve their goals?

The shifting market dynamics do not stop with the service providers. While the service providers are trying to answer these questions the future consumers of their services are busy with questions of their own.  Everybody from global enterprises to small/medium business have to decide what services they will consume from the cloud. The increased adoption of cloud services is fairly universally accepted but what services that adoption will include are not completely clear.

The only thing that is absolute here is that both sides of the equation are aiming at a moving target. It is going to be real interesting to see how both sides evolve together as the cloud computing market matures.

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If you want to hear the podcast of this show, you can download it free from the cloudchasers blog or from iTunes.

Does Social Media Make MORE Sense for B2B Marketers?

I was pleasantly surprised to find my blog mentioned in a post called “5 Good CMO Blogs: Why aren’t there more?” written by John Ellett.

I’m not sure why there aren’t more CMOs blogging but I do have an idea why the majority of the five CMOs mentioned come from the B2B world (as one Robert Lesser pointed out on Twitter):

The crux of social media is conversations between and among people and Business to Business marketing is more about people and their relationships than Business to Consumer marketing.

In the B2C world, the relationship that matters is the one between the consumer and the brand or perhaps more specifically the consumer and the product. Does the brand (company) represent who I am or would like to be. For instance: Nike vs Adidas.  Coke vs Pepsi.  Walmart vs Target.  To me the impact of social media in B2C is among the consumers themselves and their collective and individual relationships with the brands they follow and the products they use.

In B2B,  brands are certainly useful in narrowing the selection process. But when it comes to the actual purchasing decision, it’s all (mostly?) about relationships.

I think the reason for this is that B2B purchases tend to be more enduring and strategic. The decision you make can have an impact on your organization for years even decades. You don’t just buy a thing – a server, an application, or what have you. You also often actually buy a relationship: support services, service levels, integration, consulting. The works.

What concerns you when making a B2B purchase is relationship driven. You are entering into what is essentially a partnership so you want to know if you can count on your future partner. Will this organization or this solution be viable over the long haul? Do they act with integrity? Can I trust them?

Because social media is personal and because it emphasizes connections between people it is an excellent channel for building relationships. That’s why, I believe, it’s a good fit for CMO’s, marketer, and sales people in B2B.

What do you believe?

John

Monday, August 30
12:00 pm -  Skip Paul, Appliance Architect, presents on "Virtual Appliances: Simplifying Application Deployment and Accelerating Your Journey to the Cloud”

Tuesday, August 31
2:00 pm -  Richard Whitehead, Novell’s Director of Marketing for Intelligent Workload Management and Ben Grubin, Director of Solution and Product Marketing for Data Center Management, present on “IDC Says: Don’t Move to the Cloud”

For more information, visit Novell booth #931 or VMworld’s conference agenda.

Recently Grant Ho, Director Solutions Marketing, End User Computing, caught up with Darrin Sanders, National Sales Manager for Novacoast to discuss the challenges of Windows 7 migration and the successes Novacoast is seeing with its customers. They also talked about Novacoast’s strong partnership with Novell both now and in the future.

For more, listen here:

IDC forecasts that the software appliance market will grow to $1.2 billion by 2012. Skip Paul, appliance architect at Novell, will explain why appliances are growing in such popularity at next week’s VMworld 2010, Aug. 30-Sept 2, 2010, in San Francisco.

Join Skip on Monday, August 30th from 12:00-1:00 p.m. PT to learn why appliances are fast becoming the preferred choice when it comes to deploying and integrating software applications.  His session, “Virtual Appliances: Simplifying Application Deployment and Accelerating Your Journey to the Cloud,” will also cover how the strategic partnership between Novell and VMware is delivering innovative appliance versions of VMware products running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and how they can help enterprises move applications to the cloud.

Skip will demonstrate SUSE Studio, used by ISVs and enterprises to build appliances in minutes for on-premise and cloud environments.

For more information about Skip Paul’s session, visit VMworld 2010 or stop by Novell booth #931 for a one-on-one demonstration of SUSE Studio.  Also, to learn about the first annual “Disters” awards and enter for a chance to win $10,000, go to http://tinyurl.com/2a7wwtq.

According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, 50% of companies state they either currently use cloud services or are actively experimenting with them.

While some cloud-based services have gained a measure of acceptance with enterprises, and broad acceptance among consumers, my favorite topic – collaboration – has lately been in the spotlight. While the above Forrester statistic shows the world is definitely turning to the cloud, the question is whether or not enterprises are ready for cloud-based collaboration.

I’ve seen plenty of research that says people in the workplace are using social tools for business. On the flip side, many businesses are blocking access to public social sites for fear of privacy, security, and compliance. According to Michael Fauscette, GVP of Software Business Solutions at IDC “survey data shows that 54% of US companies report blocking access to all public social sites while 57% of employees report using public social sites for business at least once per week".  It is clear that people are looking for something to help them work better together, and the business is rightly concerned about maintaining advantage and staying out of trouble.

When Google recently announced it was ending development of Google Wave, there were many opinions about why and what it meant for the future of collaboration in general. I joined in this conversation with Seth Weintraub, who covers Google for Fortune Tech, on a recent episode of cloudchasers. If you listen, you’ll see that I believe YES, enterprises ARE ready for cloud-based collaboration, BUT the nuance is all in the definition of collaboration and what other elements such as enterprise-class security and compelling use cases must surround it. Hint: Twitter and Facebook don’t = enterprise collaboration.

Of course I wouldn’t put that out there if I didn’t have an answer. You can listen to the cloudchasers episode where we discuss the future of cloud-based collaboration. Download free from either the blog or from iTunes.

Recently, a privately held log management vendor, LogLogic, announced that they were interested in having their proprietary log transportation and storage protocol become an industry standard. This is clearly a self-serving power grab with very little substance behind it. LogLogic is doing nothing more than taking a proprietary protocol they have created and attempting to co-opt industry attention by claiming they are making it an open standard.

Novell welcomes open standards and has a long history of working with other vendors to create and support open standards. Standards are not created overnight, and take a lot more than a creative acronym to pull off. Developing an open standard requires buy-in from other industry players with significant marketshare. Last I checked, LogLogic was not exactly the market leader in SIEM. Perhaps, they are thinking, their standard is such a feat of engineering that other SIEM vendors will clamor to adopt it? Not likely as the other large players in the SIEM industry have invested significant sums in optimizing their log collection and storage protocols for their particular architectures. Any amount of re-architecting around the LogLogic protocol would take years and give LogLogic such an advantage that no vendor in their right mind would pursue it.

The fact is, true industry standards exist or are already being worked on. Syslog has been around for a long time, for all its perceived faults. There are two emerging efforts – XDAS by The Open Group and CEE by MITRE – that are working hard to create cross-platform, cloud-interoperable standards that have a real chance of being adopted by the entire industry. Novell is directly involved in both efforts. Both of these are true, non-proprietary, open standards that address forward looking challenges. If LogLogic was truly serious about working with the vendor community to create a real open standard, they would contribute to these projects rather than simply trying to spin their own, proprietary standard into an open standard.