Novell News

Jeff Jaffe, Novell’s new EVP and CTO, will be keynoting the conference banquet at Globecom 2005, the 48th annual IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference taking place in St. Louis this week. Globecom covers a wide range of technical and business issues in the telecoms sector. Jeff will be talking about the nexus of open source and telecommunications, and what he sees as the increasing relevance for open source in telecoms. We’ll make his presentation available here on the blog after the conference.

Microsoft’s announcement that it will submit its Office Open XML file format to ECMA to be ratified as an open standard has raised a few eyebrows. The move is a bit of a surprise, given Microsoft’s well-known history and position on open standards relating to its Office software.Novell is the major external contributor to OpenOffice (our site www.go-oo.org is the developer go-to site for new contributors to OpenOffice), and Novell is also backing up the OpenDocument effort. As an active member of ECMA, we are happy to participate with the ECMA review group to ensure the specification that results is complete enough that it allows for alternative office suites to interoperate with the Office Open XML file format.

Novell is the only tech company with a representative in a newly launched initiative – the Society for New Communications Research – designed to look at how new communications vehicles are affecting the communications business. The group will explore how blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds and the like are changing traditional media and communications activities. The group includes public relations representatives and individual bloggers, and has affiliations with several influential journalists, including Dan Farber of ZDNet and Tom Foremski, formerly of the FT and now SiliconValleyWatcher.com, who have been early proponents of blogs in the media. I suspect the group will watch the success of Novell’s PR blog initiative as a test case of whether blogging can be an effective communications tool in a corporate environment. So for those of you who visit the blog, you’re part of an experiment.

A new Microsoft-sponsored report that is being picked up in the press aims to confuse the market about the value of Linux and downplay the various reliability, security and TCO issues Windows users are facing. Independent studies regularly credit Linux in general, and SUSE Linux in particular, as secure, reliable, supported platforms that customers can leverage today to gain greater flexibility, performance and value in the IT infrastructure. A couple of quick points about the study: – Linux customers who use Novell-certified solutions do not have the interoperability problems suggested by study author Security Innovation (a Microsoft certified partner). Novell is continually adding to its list of more than 700 ISVs with more than 1,800 products certified and ready. It is just a matter of time until the issue of Linux interoperability with third-party proprietary applications disappears. But Windows will continue to face major security problems (and customers will suffer the financial consequences) as long as Windows is not re-architected and made more modular. – The number of patches to fix security vulnerabilities and other bugs can’t reliably be compared between operating systems as different as Microsoft Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. In contrast to Windows, Linux distributions come with a vast number of packages for services, middleware and software, not just with the operating system and its management framework. – Security Innovation talks about Microsoft’s “integrated innovation” philosophy. That philosophy is widely regarded as the primary reason Windows is an inherently insecure operating system allowing intruders to attack Windows through applications such as Internet Explorer, IIS, etc. This integration with strong dependencies makes it possible for an intruder/worm to bring down an entire system. Integrated innovation is also generally cited as the primary reason for Microsoft’s schedule slips for Windows Vista and Windows Longhorn Server. The lack of modularity means all developers have to be concerned with all dependencies in each part of the system.Those are just a few initial observations. SUSE Linux has achieved the highest level of security of any Linux distribution, and Novell’s additional Linux application security and identity management offerings give customers a powerful, comprehensive security framework for Linux and mixed environments.

GWAVA announced a partnership with Kaspersky Lab today that allows GWAVA to bundle Kaspersky Anti-Virus with the GWAVA scanning engine. GWAVA makes management and security solutions for Novell GroupWise, and according to the announcement, “By utilizing Kaspersky Anti-Virus, GWAVA is able to scan and search the entire GroupWise message store for viruses, including dormant viruses, at the industry-leading speed.” This is another great example of Novell’s partners rounding out valuable solutions for customers, in this case cross-platform enterprise collaboration.

There has been a lot of debate over the last few days in the media and on message boards about what is happening regarding GNOME vs. KDE at Novell. Here’s the situation. All future enterprise-class Linux product releases, including Novell Linux Desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell Open Enterprise Server, will continue to ship with both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments. In upcoming versions of Novell enterprise applications, the default desktop environment will be GNOME. When customers install Novell Linux products, they will be given the option to choose either the GNOME or KDE environment during the installation process. If the user makes no explicit choice, GNOME will be installed. This change has no implication for current Novell customers. Novell will continue to invest in both GNOME and KDE and we will continue to offer maintenance and support for these products and their desktop environments throughout their planned product lifetimes.This decision has very little impact on either the openSUSE project or future versions of SUSE Linux. SUSE Linux will continue to showcase the newest open source desktop, development, and server technologies in a complete, stabilized operating system. SUSE Linux will continue to deliver both the GNOME and the KDE desktop environments along with the latest open source packages for those environments.

Novell is one of the backers of a new company launched today, Open Invention Network, that is being formed to help drive advancement of applications for, and components of, Linux. Open Invention Network will do this by buying patents that can help Linux developers. Patents owned by Open Invention Network will be available on a royalty-free basis to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux operating system or certain Linux-related applications. The others backers of this are IBM, Sony, Philips and Red Hat. Among OIN’s initial patent holdings is a set of business-to-business electronic commerce patents that were purchased from Commerce One by JGR, a subsidiary of Novell, earlier this year. We think the creation of OIN is an important step forward for Linux. You can read the OIN press release here.

The French tax agency is replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org on 80,000 desktops, according to a CNET News.com story. The agency expects to save 29.3 million euros on the plan … that’s $34.5 million. The 29.3 million euros savings is from the estimated 29.5 million euros a migration to Office XP would cost. In other words, the OpenOffice move will only cost them 200,000 euros. That’s a savvy bit of shopping. The Direction Generale des Impots is also considering moving to Linux desktops in the future, once they iron out some application issues.

There are several articles out talking about a delay in Novell’s Q4 earnings announcement. There is no delay. We submitted an 8-K on Thursday, Nov. 4, indicating we’d be making an earnings announcement on Thursday, Dec. 1. As is normal practice, that filing was the first time we’d indicated any date for an earnings announcement. So it’s hard to see how we’re delaying something we’d just announced. We traditionally report earnings three to four weeks after quarter end, which was October 31. With Thanksgiving week in late November, we settled on a December 1 date. That’s a normal time frame for our peer group in the tech sector.

The PR team was hit by the reduction in force. These situations are always tough at a personal level. For our press contacts out there, the new portfolios are:Kevan Barney – Linux and open source, plus workgroup (OES and collaboration)Susan Morton – Identity and resource management, plus MonoKerry Capone – PR coordination, logistics, and keeping it all togetherI’ll continue to do corporate PR, plus services and channel.