Novell News

A week ago I was honoured to speak with the End User Computing team about 20Ten.  I challenged those incredible people in a couple of ways.  Here’s what I shared with them, you may choose to take this challenge on yourself.  Actually I challenge every reader to do so, whether you are a Novell employee, a partner or a champion inside your own organization.

When you begin your day, look in the mirror and ask yourself,”what am I going to do today that will positively change other people’s perception of Novell?”  There are so many things that we can share.  We don’t have to be pedantic, we don’t have to be defensive, but we do have to be positive and open.  When you look at Novell as an infrastructure software company there is an incredible compendium of solutions available that are capable of adding great value to reduce costs, to manage complexity and to mitigate risk.  Yes there are competitors out there, good competitors and those that don’t walk their talk.  We can each make assessments of the opportunity, challenge or problem and respond with a Novell solution that creates value but doesn’t require a forklift upgrade.  This is I believe a unique differentiator but it requires all of us to step up, be professional and be positive.

The second challenge I extended to that team, because it is critical and because I already know that they will succeed in this is to ask ourselves this question as we get caught in the daily grind.  Ask yourself, “is what I am doing making a difference to our customers and partners.”  You may find that this is true more than you may have initially thought.  But, if you find it isn’t, consider the prioritization of that activity in the context.

One area that everyone can make a difference in right now is in our online communities.  We’re very fortunate that participants tell us what they think.  At the prompting of one of the people I have enormous respect for and with the assistance of our communities leader, I found that folks were taking time to provide thoughts, sometimes negative, and those comments were not being responded to.  As Novell people, we all can make a community difference by investing time each week to review and participate in the communities and to respond, to educate and to help where you can.  It’s not just to Product Management to handle, we all have experience, we have expertise, we have perspective so I am asking you again in this context, what can I do today to positively enhance the perception of Novell.  Don’t wait for someone else to do this, we all must do it.  Hit it hard and hit it often.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

Contrary to some thoughts I did not fall off the planet or have my blogging account locked down, just got really busy in the last quarter.

In that time I spent many hours with our customers, partners and sales professionals on calls and I kept hearing this comment that frankly really disappointed me.

We aren’t moving to OES 2 from NetWare because it’s a) too hard or b) so hard we really think we should look at alternatives.

What?

Let’s step back a minute.  When I hear the term NetWare, I always think of NetWare 1.X my first exposure and the amazing for its time NetWare 2.05 that helped me make this industry into a career.  When NetWare 3 came out I started to think differently about NetWare and by the time NetWare 4 was released my perspective had changed completely.  By this time I saw NetWare as a set of services that created value for end users and for corporate IT.  The underlying OS while interesting was not the most important part and the reality even then was that the services were where the real value was.  Organizations used NetWare not because of that screaming fast 32 bit engine but because of the services, like file, print, Novell Directory Services and all the other value in the box.

A lot of time has passed since then, with NetWare evolving the set of services through the remainder of its life.  But like happens everywhere, an evolutionary spurt had to take place.  We wanted 64 bit CPU support.  We wanted the ability to run lots of commercial and open source applications.  We wanted more scale.  We wanted the file systems, the print services, the directory, the network tools like DNS and DHCP.  We didn’t want to be tied to closed kernel.  Open Enterprise Server has delivered on those requirements and in the current release delivers a much richer experience than has ever happened.  Today we can do the things we could not do on the old NetWare stack.  We have client independence.  We have massively scalable 64 bit computing.  We have the ability to run virtualization without spending one thin dime on additional software.  We have the ability for every OES Linux server to run applications, over 3,000 are certified.  We have a rich development framework from the open source community.  Stop and think about that.  Is there any other server environment that has demonstrated this level of evolutionary enhancement in so short a time?  No.

And with the release of SP2 we raise the bar even higher by delivering file system audit controls for NSS on Linux, by gaining support from Citrix for the incredible Domain Services for Windows, a new FTP gateway and other enhancements.

Our customers have mixed environments.  Open Enterprise Server 2 is designed to function in mixed environments and does so more effectively than any other alternative out there.  As we enter our 2010 fiscal year I offer the following challenge.  When a customer or partner suggests a decommit or a concern about OES 2, don’t say ok I understand.  Ask why.  Ask for an appointment to have a conversation on the subject.  Invite Juan Carlos Cerrutti (there I did it, I volunteered him with asking) or myself.  We will help you.  We may not win every case, but we will win.

Be confident, be strong, be Novell.  Novell team members should leverage the Employee Enablement page (built with Novell Teaming) at https://teaming.innerweb.novell.com/ssf/a/do?p_name=ss_forum&p_action=1&action=view_ws_listing&binderId=68144 for consolidated materials.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

I have the wonderful opportunity in my roles to talk to senior people at customers, partners and prospects, and a really hot topic is the one around virtualization at the desktop level.  As you would expect the definition of what that “is”, the business case justifications, the timeline and the target base varies enormously.

No matter what route is being addressed or considered there are some very consistent outcomes that can in fact be addressed today through Application Virtualization, specifically ZENworks Application Virtualization.  And, no this is not coincidental timing because as I write this we’ve just released V7.1 of this fabulous tool.

We still see challenges every day related to software version incompatibility, “DLL hell”, time consumed with cross testing and application rollouts, and calls to the Help Desk on application issues.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could really do lockdown at an application level so the app didn’t create conflicts, or modify the registry or be able to run alongside a different version of itself or run on an OS version that won’t natively run the application?

Well it is great because you can.  What we all have to do is make sure that folks know about this capability, that it exists and that it is extremely cost effective.

A virtualized application is isolated from the underlying operating system where it runs.  It makes no changes to the registry or to the hosting OS.  The virtual apps is not actually installed on the host, it’s installed in a secured runtime environment.  Building a virtualized application is simple and can result in an executable file that can be distributed to the workstations, run from a central repository or even deployed on a USB stick.  Gartner says that the cost of application deployment, packaging and support can be reduced by 60% and that TCO savings of up to 7% are easily achievable.

The really cool parts of the solution means that the builder decides how much integration with local resources on the workstation takes place.  Maybe it’s just screens and keyboards, maybe it includes ports or disk storage.  The packaged application delivers what is necessary without what is not.  Best of all, the end user doesn’t see a difference between a virtualized application and one that is locally installed.  Performance looks the same, no admin rights are needed on the local OS, so the user gets on with his or her work and doesn’t need to learn and adopt new processes.

With ZENworks Application Virtualization there are some new functions added that we have already heard are in demand, including support for Windows 7, improvements in the support of IE6 and coexistence with local installs of IE7 or IE8 and the ability to make the virtualized application “expire”.  Other new functions are improvements to leveraging .Net 3.5 and the addition of the ability to support SQL  Server  2005 Express.  We’ve also made the process to publish the virtualized application to a USB drive even simpler.

Customers can expect higher productivity for users and simplified rollouts, coupled with lower operational costs and improved security.  There’s also promotional pricing through October 31, 2009 with user or instance licensing available.

So please, while we think about desktop virtualization in depth, let’s not forget that many problems can be solved right now.

Product Information is at : http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/applicationvirtualization/

Licensing Information is at : http://www.novell.com/licensing