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

Today, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) released a white paper that is a must read for anyone interested in the next steps for cloud interoperability. The white paper, “Interoperable Clouds – A White Paper from the Open Cloud Standards Incubator,” outlines usage scenarios for cloud interoperability, the cloud service lifecycle and a cloud reference architecture.

Novell is a board member of the DMTF, an organization focused on bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on system management standards. As part of its work with DMTF, Novell participates on the DMTF Open Cloud Standards Incubator, and contributed to the development of the white paper.

This paper is timely because as cloud computing continues to evolve, standard interfaces will play a pivotal role in promoting interoperability between cloud service providers and cloud service consumers.

Novell is committed to delivering solutions to enable our customer to move their existing infrastructure to a shared cloud environment, and ensure their private and public cloud environments work well together. Our PlateSpin virtualization and workload management products help to identify and evaluate workloads and migrate them to the cloud. Our business service management products help to maximize service levels and optimize workload efficiency. Our Cloud Security Service serves as an entry point for cloud control, extending existing enterprise authentication credentials to the cloud and allowing workloads to be deployed to the cloud in a secure and auditable manner.

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’m in the middle of a blog series on Product Quality—of critical importance to all our stakeholders. I need to interrupt this series to comment on an exciting development.

Last week we announced one of our most innovative and impactful projects—Novell Pulse. My interruption is to explain why we are exhilirated with this. Be assured, we will get back to Product Quality promptly.

Novell Pulse—Description and Background

Novell Pulse is the product name for our project Cockpit. As I mentioned at the time, it was funded earlier in 2009 as part of our breakout move initiative. I’m excited not only because it is great technology, not only because it solves a big customer problem—but also because it shows Novell’s innovation, and demonstrates the entrepeneurial spirit of our team to get new projects brought quickly to market.

Since I outlined the project a few months ago, I will not repeat the description.

Google Wave

As we developed Pulse, Google announced their Wave project. We were stimulated by the possibilities. In the emerging real-time collaboration market there is a need for multiple providers and they need to federate. Google announced their Wave Federation Protocol (WFP) as an open approach to addressing this need. We asked—why not federate? Open is key to Novell’s value proposition! So we approached the Google team and they agreed! From this began a rapid embrace and technology collaboration to show two companies interoperating with different but related visions.

Mixing the “New” with Enterprise Needs

There are many exciting features in Pulse; focused on real-time communications and social networking. That is where we find the greatest amount of pure technical excitement.

The function will appeal to many stakeholders. Service providers will provide Pulse’s real-time communications to their customers. Enterprises will leverage this as their new communications paradigm.

Additionally, Novell has a unique platform to introduce this. This is the existing platform of enterprise communications. We have a large group of customers with our GroupWise and OES products. Pulse adds value to this customer base—bringing them into new paradigms of collaboration. In fact, we learn a great deal from our customer base in terms of enterprise requirements for cloud-based real-time communications.

This is what is truly unique about Pulse. It is secure. It is managed. Identity management. Provisioning. It is not only cool. And social. Real-time. Chat speed. Easy-to-use. But it will be a product that appeals to the enterprise.

Federation

Google got it right by developing an open federation protocol. After all, there is such an explosion of collaboration paradigms—no single company will handle them all. And different users will want to experience them differently. We’ve already discussed the explosion of communications paradigms. We all need to work together. All companies that participate in WFP will carve out their specialty. For Novell, we are focused on getting the emerging real-time communications paradigm to fit enterprise needs.

With the recent release of Window’s 7 and the flurry of operating system activity over the last few months, it’s clear that choice is coming in a big way regarding pc and mobile device operating system selection.  I wrote about this in a recently posted article on forbes.com which you can find here.

While the winner on the vendor side is far from clear, it seems obvious that the consumer will win no matter what the outcome.  Let me know what you think.

John

By far, the major obsession of Novell’s engineering team is to deliver products with the enterprise level quality that customers demand and deserve for mission-critical usage.

It is useful to review our comprehensive approach to quality. Quality is not a single process. It is baked into everything we do: before and during development; after products are shipped in the field; with maintenance provided to customers well after products have been shipped. Due to this breadth I will “fishbone” our activities and address this topic over several postings.

In this posting we define quality, provide key tenets, and outline future posts.

Quality Defined

There are numerous definitions of quality—the most general being “the degree to which the product meets customer expectations”. This can be interpreted as—choosing the right features to meet market needs—and in the past I have described our Integrated Product Development (IPD) process that has that goal. By the way, we are broadening IPD to include a new Requirements Management System which allows customers and partners to directly input their needs to Novell’s product management. But, that is a story for a different day.

Colloquially, when people talk about product quality however, they refer to product defects or bugs. We address bugs throughout the lifecycle of a product by preventing defects in the first place, testing and debugging to remove them, and patching and fixing problems in customer installations. This definition is akin to a classical Six Sigma focus on defects and this is the aspect of product quality that I will discuss.

Philosophy

Herein are basic tenets or beliefs about product quality. Many of these are common in the industry; some are unique to Novell.

1. We are in business to provide mission critical software. Accordingly, we hold ourselves to high standards for initial product quality and strive to correct defects found by our customers.
2. Quality must be built in prior to customer shipment. The cost for Novell and our customers alike grows exponentially the later in the deployment process one finds a bug.
3. The practice of software development has not been perfected. There is no such thing as bug free software. We strive for excellence, but recognize that defects will occur.
4. The response to these defects is modulated by severity. Critical defects found in a customer’s production environment get the most immediate attention.
5. We make mistakes. And we fix them. If a defect occurs, we patch it. If a product has too many bugs, we redouble our efforts to restore quality to that product as soon as possible.
6. Consequence of 5—we try really hard not to make the same mistake twice!
7. Our employees respond to management’s attention. Hence we carefully measure our quality, review it on a regular basis, and won’t ship products that do not hit quality criteria. This ensures that we will build quality in.
8. There are different methodologies for developing software including agile, waterfall, and open source (community). Our customers expect and deserve equal quality regardless of the methodology.
9. Consequence of 8—although there might be different methods to develop software; the software quality metrics and release criteria must be the same.
10. Quality is a continuous learning process. Time is set aside for our engineers to continue to grow and learn to improve their skills.

The Fishbone

This is a broad topic and it is already running a bit long. Let me summarize my intentions by listing the key aspects that I will discuss in future blog entries:

• Building in quality from the ground up: In the development of a product, how do we build with as few defects as possible. For agile, waterfall, and open source.
• Metrics: What are the common metrics we track to ensure that we release with quality.
• Testing tools: Methodologies, laboratories, cross-product testing, defect management process.
• Product introduction: How do we manage that very challenging time when a new product is first introduced into the field. Readiness criteria.
• Continuous improvement: Engineering Excellence Steering Committee. Learning Initiative.
• Cadence between product development and Novell services: How we work together and hold each other accountable within Novell to take care of our customers.

We’ve been talking about security and access control management—most recently as part of “securing the cloud“. Securing the cloud is based on technology that Novell has developed for securing the enterprise. As we design for the future of securing the cloud—today’s enterprises also require continued enhancement to secure their enterprise.

Some recent notes.

SAP Partnership for IT Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Programs

For enterprise needs our recent focus has been on the creation of a compliance platform. Compliance has emerged as a key customer issue. IT systems are the window into how businesses are governed. Much of our attention is on integrating with partners; such as our April announcement to certify to SAP’s NetWeaver platform.

We took this to the next level with today’s tight announcement with SAP. SAP’s Business Objects GRC solutions are outstanding, and by integrating with Novell’s compliance and identity management capabilities we add to the value proposition for customers. Specifically, the integration improves performance, automation of controls, simplification, and risk reduction. Overall, it makes it easy for customers to manage security and compliance policies.

Novell Secure Login

Customers require Enterprise Single-Sign On for enterprise applications. Earlier this year, we intensified our focus in this critical area, so we acquired some technology from ActiveIdentity.

Last month, we strengthened what customers can achieve with Novell SecureLogin. Two major focus areas: Interoperability and Scripting. The interoperability enhancements ensure that customers can use our solution irrespective of their compute platforms. The automated Scripting is more critical than ever. As access control, security, and compliance play a deeper role in enterprises, Single-Sign On needs to be integrated across a broader set of applications. The Scripting enhancements automate a customers’ ability to use Novell SecureLogin.

Recognition

It is not only Novell that touts the importance of this product. Novell SecureLogin was recognized in Gartner Inc.’s 2008 ESSO Magic Quadrant report. Last month, Gartner released their MarketScope for Enterprise Single Sign-On and gave our product a Strong Positive rating.

NYC

On a personal note, I was born and bred in New York. While I now live in Massachusetts—once a New Yorker; always a New Yorker.

So I was delighted to see that New York City has recently announced adoption of Novell’s Compliance Management Platform. I enjoyed seeing that my hometown was leveraging Novell’s technology depth, automation, ease-of-use, and interoperability in the Security and Compliance area—to simplify access to city services and better integrate across city departments.

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

Last December we took the difficult but correct decision to cancel Novell’s premier user and technical training conference – BrainShare.  While most of our customers, partners and employees understood and supported the decision, there was a clear demand and passion for the event to return in 2010.

It’s with great excitement that we are announcing the return of BrainShare in 2010.  Not only will BrainShare return to Salt Lake City, Utah where it’s been for more than 20 years but after a five year hiatus, we will be holding a BrainShare EMEA event as well.  Our customers told us loud and clear that they viewed BrainShare as a critical component of their overall education and training on all things Novell.  They also told us what they liked and didn’t like about the event.  Accordingly, as we bring BrainShare back, we’ll make sure it remains the best forum for technical training and education.  We’ll also assure that we and our partners offer the hands on experiences and real life case studies that help our customers get the most out of their Novell investments.

Our Salt Lake City BrainShare will take place from Sunday, March 21 through Thursday, March 25, 2010.  Our BrainShare EMEA event will take place in May, 2010 with the exact dates and location to be finalized in the coming weeks.

BrainShare is a Novell institution and an event that every Novell employee contributes to and takes pride in.  We are truly excited about the return of this marquee conference to Salt Lake City and Europe and look forward to seeing many of you next year.

John