Novell News

In case you missed them, there were a couple of online stories this week in leading business publications based on interviews with our CEO, Ron Hovsepian. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen posted this blog. Yesterday, BusinessWeek put up this piece. Novell’s business story is gaining visibility.

Gartner has just put out a Top 10 tech trends for 2008 and beyond. Open source expansion is one of them. In the next four years, Gartner sees open source elements in 80 percent of all commercial software. That’s a really big number. The business value of open source, in terms of flexibility and cost, as well as the compelling leveraged cost of open source as a development model, are really driving the space forward. We’re happy to be smack in the middle of this key trend, not only with SUSE Linux Enterprise, but also with our participation in open source projects around identity (Bandit), collaboration (ICEcore) and other areas.

We’ve been talking about Novell’s two-pronged strategy around enterprise Linux and enterprise management services for some time. But it’s not always easy for people to understand how these two pieces tie together in practice. This new success story just up about the Municipality of the Hague is a good example. The Hague has used Novell technology for some time. It uses GroupWise for its employee email, and ZENworks to manage employee desktops. Fairly “traditional” stuff. As the Hague has moved to offer more services and applications via the Web, both for internal employee use and citizen services, they’ve turned to SUSE Linux Enterprise as the platform and Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Manager for security and access control. Because of tight integration between the products, they’ve been able to deploy and manage the technology using relatively limited in house resources.

The Hague provides a good example of what Novell offers. We provide a state of the art, open platform, with a series of management tools that make it easy to administer, secure and integrate mixed IT environments. It used to be “Novell = NetWare.” Over the last several years, many have seen us as purely a Linux company. That’s not right, either. As the Hague illustrates, we provide a full range of infrastructure software. That’s always been our sweet spot, and it still is.

The ODF Alliance, which promotes the use of OpenDocument Format in governments, has just published its annual report for 2007. You can read the press release, which highlights some of the key developments of the year, here. The annual report itself is here. There’s no question that there is growing momentum behind the idea of open formats in government. The Alliance highlights as proof points decisions by the Netherlands, Norway, and South Africa to embrace ODF, increased applications support for ODF, progress on accessibility issues, and the growth of the alliance itself, which is now approaching 500 members (Novell is one) .

The OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, for which ODF is the default word processing file format, continues to be one of the great successes in open source. It’s got great features, it supports all the leading file formats, it runs on multiple platforms, and it’s easy to use (my 80-year old mother is a user). Oh yeah, and it’s free. What’s not to like?

I was looking for inspiration for a “year in review” blog post, but Jeff Jaffe, our CTO, just posted a great overview of the progress we’ve made in the last year in implementing our strategy around enterprise-wide Linux and enterprise management services. So, I’ll cop out and point to Jeff for a good synopsis of Novell’s progress in 2007. Read it here.

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance is highlighting today more forward progress for ODF. The public sectors in the Netherlands, South Africa and Korea have all recently taken steps to promote ODF as a standard for document exchange. Membership in the ODF Alliance, which was formed in early 2006 to promote the use of ODF in governments, is nearing the 500 mark, a pretty strong endorsement of the idea of open, standards based computing.

The ODF Alliance has put out a press release around the Berlin ODF Workshop I blogged about last week. Sounds like it was an interesting event, and that there’s growing momentum in the public sector worldwide around open document formats. The ODF Alliance also put out a release last week pointing out recent application support for ODF, including, among others, offerings from IBM, Apple, Sun, Corel, and Adobe. Good stuff.

There’s an interesting ODF shindig happening early next week in Germany. The ODF Workshop taking place in Berlin is touted as the first international OpenDocument Format user workshop. Sponsored by the German Federal Foreign Office in collaboration with the ODF Alliance, of which Novell is a member, the workshop is designed for government entities that are either already using open document formats, or interested in deploying them. A look at the agenda indicates a fairly hands-on event, with sessions on ODF Migration, deployment in municipalities, application support, and other issues organizations considering ODF would want to know about. Participants are representatives from various levels of government, with a number of open source vendors, including Novell, acting as panel moderators.

This should be a good event to get the pulse on ODF adoption in Europe.

The Economist this week has a special report on innovation. Not surprisingly, the main theme revolves around how innovation is becoming more open. There is a section that talks about open source software, highlighting IBM’s embrace of Linux, pointing out both the innovation opportunities and the competitive challenges open source introduces. We’ve been arguing for awhile that open source is the new paradigm for innovation. This Economist report is confirmation that this idea has become mainstream, and is expanding beyond software to include innovation across many industries, around the globe.

The CMO Council, a national organization focused on the key issues facing marketing executives, has posted a good interview with Novell’s marketing chief, John Dragoon. Their Marketing Magnified monthly newsletter features John in the “Getting to Know a CMO” column. John outlines his views on the marketing function, customer affinity, prioritizing objectives and measuring results. That Novell’s chief marketing officer would be tapped for this profile is nice recognition of Novell’s forward progress in the marketing arena over the last couple of years.