Recently, IDC completed a Customer Spotlight for Novell highlighting GroundWork Open Source, Inc., a leading U.S. commercial open source based IT management and network monitoring software firm.

GroundWork wanted to expand its market and customer base, as well as grow market share in an segment that it could not profitably sell or support with its existing sales and pricing models. GroundWork initially tried to develop a downloadable solution and even a software appliance using an unsupported version of Linux. However, both of these solutions were technically problematic and did not help to increase sales as the company had hoped.

Then GroundWork came across SUSE Studio from Novell, which made the process of creating and managing software appliances much easier. So easy in fact that the first prototype was created by their marketing director! Here is what GroundWork discovered in its deployment process:

• Deployment was completed within one week using only half of a person’s time over that period.
• After viewing a 45-minute demo of the product, GroundWork engineers required no further training and could use the product out of the box.
• The first prototype was created in a single day by GroundWork’s senior director of product marketing.
• The company sold 100 of its virtual appliances in the first 96 days on the market despite the fact that it launched the sales campaign in December — traditionally a bad time for a product launch.

And some of the benefits that GroundWork has achieved include:

• Ability to build, market, and support the company's custom software appliances more quickly and inexpensively than ever anticipated.
• Easier evaluation, purchase, and use of GroundWork monitoring appliances for customers due to lower price, uncomplicated setup, and quick download time.
• Increased savings as a result of less time and effort for the company to build and release its software appliances.
• Reduction of Test and QA time from 4 man months to 1 week.
• Shortened Installation time for Enterprise Quickstart software appliance-which now takes only 15 minutes as the downloadable software is 74% smaller than GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition.

The process was not without normal challenges, including fine-tuning the product for GroundWork’s use and memory constraints; however, the results for Groundwork have been overwhelmingly positive.

The success GroundWork is seeing with its software appliance product and the SUSE Appliance Program is not surprising given a recent IDC survey, which found that the acquisition, integration, and installation of traditional software accounted for approximately 80% of the total cost of that software. IDC also expects that the total software appliance market will grow to over $3.7 billion by 2014, which translates into a 60% compound annual growth rate over five years.

Yesterday, Network World announced the winner of its five-vendor cloud management shootout and we're excited to announce Novell Cloud Manager took top honors! Novell Cloud Manager was awarded the Clear Choice Test winner, getting the highest marks in every category, including installation, features, security, and administration.

Network World was particularly impressed with Novell Cloud Manager's ability to attach and display costs of business services, workloads, resources, and service levels. This cost visibility, across all stakeholders, helps control virtual sprawl, or as Network World said, "Novell Cloud Manager will make your CFO happy".  Network World also appreciated the comprehensive dashboard view offered by Novell Cloud Manager, which gives administrators a "complete picture of private cloud management".

To read the complete Network World article click here.To learn more about Novell Cloud Manager, click here.

This week Novell announced the winners of its first annual Dister awards contest via a virtual Facebook event. If you missed the event, you can check out the video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fibxy196kFA

You can also read more about the winners in the at Linux.com, OStatic and ZDNet.

The Dister contest awards innovators and inventors who build Linux-based software appliances using our appliance-building tool SUSE Studio. The top commercial and community winners will each receive a cash prize of $10K.

And the winners are:

• Commercial category –  Bryan Lunduke, Radical Breeze, of Everett, Wash., for the Illumination Software Creation Station
• Community category –  Tommy Anderberg , Anderware, a software company from Sweden, for the Hypergrid to Go appliance
• Honorable mention commercial — Paul Scripko, ROC Software, for the EasySpooler Appliance
• Honorable mention community — Jacob Rask, Opera Software, for the BrowserBox appliance
• SUSE Spirit award — Gourav Shah, Efficient Frontier in India for his FreeSWITCHBOX appliance

Dister winners were selected by a panel of leading Linux and open source luminaries, including Jason Brooks, eWeek Labs editor in chief; Sean Michael Kerner, senior editor at InternetNews.com; Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE community manager; Markus Rex, senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions at Novell; and Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

Novell congratulates the winners of the Dister awards and thanks the judges for their help in evaluating the submissions. For more about the contest and the winners and to view video demos of the winning appliances, you can go here.

Following the Facebook event, the award winners as well as those receiving honorable mentions will be available to answer questions in real time via Novell Vibe  Cloud and engage one-on-one with the SUSE community.  Novell Vibe is also the place for more information on the winning projects and Novell’s appliance program. So, if you’re interested in more details about the thought process involved in creating winning applications, how the winners built their appliance and most importantly, what they plan to do with their winnings, post a question and get all the details. Hope to see you on Vibe!

When: 12:15 PM- 3:00 PM ET

Where: Novell Vibe  Cloud (Dister Awards group page)

How: To connect with the award winners live:

1.       Sign up for a vibe account here: https://vibe.novell.com/

2.       Join the “Dister Awards” group where winners will be available for questions, chat: http://vibe.novell.com/disterawards

3.       Post a message and start a dialogue!

Tis the season for Vegas, gambling and the Gartner Data Center Conference and thus many top 10 Predictions for the coming year. I'm not a gambler, take these as you may, but for those who know me might say she might just have a bit of challenge the status quo in her and a knack for blowing things up from time to time. As a bit of a researcher of the IT management industry, these are just my musings to add to recent flurry of top 10 lists from my friends on WorkloadIQ and Baseline that sparked my imagination of further possibilities. Here goes, a tad controversial, I welcome the discussion!

• ITIL has reached its height in the America's and ITIL will begin to wane in conversation. Data center efficiency is an expected given to the busines and are tiring of investing in inward focused programs and are demanding a focus on the top line versus the bottom line and deployment of agile technology for growth.
• ITIL will begin its next revision to release late to the wave in late 2012 in reaction to waning interest. Second rev took 20 years, 3rd rev took 6 years and the 4th rev is late. Service Value will take ITIL center stage in the 4th revision in advancing ITIL up the maturity curve from silos of processes, integrated processes, a service life cyle to finally focusing on the Service Value contribution.
• Service Providers will experience double digit growth driving the growth in IT Management Technology spend leading to new licensing models with lower up front costs and longer term revenue sharing with the vendors. The tide begins to turn with the customer to the vendors shifting toward the Service Providers. Growth in the Management market and the Service Provider market is driven by virtualization, private cloud and public cloud deployment.
• Management of the private/public cloud and virtualization is the make or break key to value and success, whether internal or external. Service Providers that ignore management are one outage away from being out of business and data centers that ignore management are in the process of being outsourced.

I'm not a gambler, won't bet my house on these, but having been witness to the same new technology, IT Management and Sourcing cycles for >25 years (I started working IT when I was twelve I agree with Richard's blog that we are at a tipping point. Sourcing options become appealing when the level of frustration for change is high and we are in a perfect storm of agile technology, sourcing options and an increasing focus on growth and innovation.

Those who embrace new technology and sourcing options and harness the power with agility for driving value with speed are those that will drive their industry. All you have to do is look at the annual F500 list and see who leads your industry and leads it by magnitudes greater than #4, 5, 6, etc. and you see those that lead with technology. Which cloud does your data center choose to be on, the Cloud Leader or a Stealth Cloud Follower?

Let the discussion begin . . . comment, drop me an email, I welcome the discussion! michele mhudnall@novell.com

Windows IT Pro has just announced the 2010 Windows IT Pro Editors' Best and Community Choice Awards and Novell is not surprised that its community has awarded bronze medals to ZENworks Configuration Management for Best Deployment/Configuration Product and ZENworks Patch Management for Best Patch Management Product.

The Community Choice awards program lets the Windows IT Pro readers decide which products are the best. In fact, rather than presenting a predefined list of products and services that limited selection, the publication opened up the Community Choice nomination process to all. The editors let the readers nominate their favorite products and services, built the voting survey from there, and let everyone participate in the final voting phase. Just another validation of how Novell ZENworks stands out for customers.

To see all the winners go here. To learn more about how ZENworks can help you address your configuration and patch needs, go here.

On Monday, SAP announced the enterprise edition of StreamWork, their on-demand, collaborative decision-making solution. SAP also announced SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Appliance Toolkit was selected to build and distribute StreamWork enterprise edition as a software appliance.

Leveraging SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Appliance Toolkit from Novell makes SAP StreamWork enterprise edition quick to deploy and simple to maintain. It's designed as  a virtual appliance that can be installed on-premise or on-demand.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Sever is the number one Linux platform for SAP applications and for the past 12 years has provided a secure platform to thousands of SAP customers. With this announcement, SAP and Novell are expanding their partnership to license and distribute SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with SAP StreamWork enterprise edition.

Both companies have a long standing relationship enabling customers of all sizes to confidently run SAP applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise. There is nothing more mission-critical than a SAP solution. An application is only as reliable as the operating system it runs on. That's why SAP recommends SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a preferred platform for companies who want to run SAP on Linux.

For more on how Novell and SAP are working together to ensure the delivery of solutions that meet the needs of customers and the market, go here.

SAP and Novell are taking steps to bridge the gap between business peoples’ need for software that is easy to obtain and use, and difficulty for IT’s need for managing the security of data in the cloud. The result of this co-innovation is a new enterprise edition of SAP StreamWork– SAP’s collaborative decision-making application – that uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Appliance Toolkit from Novell to ensure security of the data shared in the integration of SAP’s cloud-based application with any on-premise system.

SAP StreamWork helps workgroups come together to share information, problem solve, build consensus, drive decisions and achieve meaningful results. It’s different from other collaboration solutions in that its chief purpose and design is to help people organize ad-hoc work to drive toward outcomes based on team discussion, proven methodologies and intelligence collected through documents, social networks and enterprise systems. At the same time, it’s a free, easy-to-use application that takes almost no time to get up and running.

Now, with the new enterprise edition using Novell’s technology, people have the ability to work the way they want to work, and IT departments have the enterprise-class features and controls (pictured below) they need to manage things like integration, security, auditing and rollback. SAP can provide a standard foundation for collaboration and activity streams (feeds) across heterogeneous environments to secure corporate data from enterprise systems to the cloud. With activity streams or direct integrations with any application, users can easily monitor work activities, people and events, and obtain quick notification of changes in the business for rapid response.

You can read more about today’s announcement here.

In an earlier announcement, Novell canceled its earnings conference call to discuss these results. Novell has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Attachmate Corporation.