Novell News

We’ll be taking a break from the blog for the holidays. Hope everyone has a great end to 2005. See you in 2006! Thanks.Novell’s PR team

We’ve put up a new case study this week about American First Credit Union, the sixth largest by membership in the US. They’re a long-time Novell customer, using the full range of Novell technologies, including Identity Manager, ZENworks, GroupWise, and NetWare. They’ve just recently added SUSE Linux, within OES, to the mix, and are using it to run their ATM network. They’ve seen strong improvements: Instead of processing a transaction in three seconds, the new ATM system processes 85 transactions a second. So Linux is helping folks get their money faster…And spend it faster…Linux continues to flex its muscles as a retail point of sales platform. Overstock.com, which moved to a SUSE Linux platform to keep pace with its rapidly growing business, reportedly enjoyed record sales on Black Friday. Burlington Coat Factory, Ritz Camera and Boscov have also deployed SUSE Linux retail solutions.Linux – greasing the wheels of commerce….

Not everyone will be celebrating this New Year’s Eve. On Dec. 31, Microsoft discontinues support for Exchange 5.5. This change won’t affect just a few customers analysts estimate that up to one-third of the Exchange installed base is still on 5.5. Upgrading to the next version will involve a great deal of time and money, plus a whole new infrastructure.We’re encouraging these Microsoft customers to make a New Year’s resolution to change over to GroupWise, which offers long-term security and reliability, including 69 percent less downtime than Exchange. MeritCare Health System, the largest medical group practice in North Dakota, has already made the switch. By migrating 6,500 users to GroupWise from Exchange, MeritCare reduced back-end administration time by 50 percent. Its IT staff no longer needs to distribute regular security patches, combat virus attacks or restore e-mail files.

The Economist has a good story out this week on Firefox, with a nice focus on Mitchell Baker, who heads up the Mozilla Foundation. In it, Mitchell talks about how lack of competition in the browser space has been a real impediment to innovation on the Web, causing a delay in many of the “Web 2.0″ user-generated innovations we see emerging today. She also makes arguments about the risks of monoculture in the browser space for innovation and stability. It seems to me the same arguments apply to the document world. There’s little doubt that the word processing environment is a monoculture today, despite the availability of a few commercial options. OpenOffice is emerging as a strong open source alternative to the existing monoculture, although its uptake is still limited. The promotion of a true standard for document interoperability – like ODF – will help drive forward the attractiveness of OpenOffice. That’s why the Massachusetts decision to embrace ODF as part of their new Enterprise Technical Reference Model is so relevant.Many of the most interesting things happening on the Web and in technology today come from unanticipated ways creative people are leveraging technology innovation for new business models. Can ODF lead to openness and innovation in the word processing arena in a way that echoes what’s happened on the Web, with its standards and open platforms like Firefox? It seems to me it should.Maybe we’ll see an Economist article a year from now talking about how ODF is driving innovation and new business models.

A new study by Optaros Inc, a consulting and systems integration firm, provides solid data on the momentum behind open source. You can see a copy of the study, published Dec. 19 under a Creative Commons license, here.A few of the keys points:

• 87% of the 512 companies surveyed are using open source software. All of the 156 companies with at least $50 million in annual revenue were using open source.
• Companies and government institutions use open source for three primary reasons: to reduce IT costs, deliver systems faster, and make systems more secure.
• In 2004, open source software saved large companies (with annual revenue of over $1 billion) an average of $3.3 million. Medium-sized companies (between $50 million and $1 billion in annual revenue) saved an average $1.1 million.
• More and more companies are using open source software for business applications.
• Once organizations start using open source software, their usage increases.

According to the study, the four most significant barriers to adoption remain:

• executives lacking knowledge about the benefits of open source and harboring fears about quality and support;
• legal and licensing issues;
• corporate cost allocation policies that dont provide incentives to business functions to reduce the cost of commercial software;
• the difficulty of procuring open source systems that will be supported after installation.

The community, including Novell, is actively working to eliminate these remaining concerns around open source.

Novell Linux Desktop continues to gain momentum in schools, with Whitfield School being the latest example. Read the whole story to get a full sense of what Linux is doing for the school and its students, but here’s an example from Alex Inman, director of technology for Whitfield School: “As anyone in education IT knows, kids go out of their way to download games and software which can wreak havoc on systems. We considered a Windows desktop, but found that it would be far more difficult and expensive to manage than a Linux desktop. Novell Linux Desktop was by far the best option.”And in case you missed this one, here’s an interesting piece in Government Technology about how Linux is making a positive difference to Indiana high school students.

A couple of announcements this week point to how much progress Novell has made in building out its partner ecosystem around Linux. From the East, we have today’s announcement from IBM that Novell has been elevated to the top tier of IBM’s strategic alliance program. This puts Novell into the top 10 of IBM’s strategic partners. This is a great vote of confidence in Novell, SUSE Linux, and Linux as a whole. This will benefit Novell through joint marketing and go to market efforts, as well as through a deepening of our technology cooperation. On the other coast, one of Novell’s top solution provider partners, Novacoast, based out of Santa Barbara, put out an annoucement last week about an open source VOIP offering they’ve built using SUSE Linux, AppArmor from Novell, our identity management and directory solutions, and some additional open source technology. This is a great example of how open source and open standards are helping solution providers quickly develop new, innovative services offerings leveraging their in-house technical expertise. A long-time Novell partner, Novacoast has moved quickly to seize the new opportunities for partners that Novell’s embrace of open source has produced.

Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server keeps bringing home industry awards, reflecting what customers are saying, too. The December issues of Business Computing (page 61) and Service Provider Weekly (page 44) honor SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 as winner of a “Top 50 Business Products” award and a “Product Excellence 2005″ award, respectively. Add those to the recent LinuxWorld Frankfurt award, and it’s been a good few weeks for Novell’s enterprise Linux, indeed.

Over the last few days, Red Hat has made a couple of announcements around directory technology and certified open source software stacks. These announcements are an implicit admission that the operating system isn’t what customers care about. It’s what you can do with it that counts.That’s been Novell’s approach from the beginning of our move into Linux. Some of you will remember how emphatic we were around talking about adding Linux to what we do. We never claimed and we still don’t that we wanted to be the Linux company. We’re huge fans of Linux, and think it’s a great platform. But it’s what you can do to drive business value with Linux that matters.When it comes to services around Linux, or validating stacks with Linux, we think we have the best stuff on the market. We launched our validated configuration program earlier this year. Our validated stacks address both hardware and software, and both open source and proprietary products. We think this reflects real-world customers’environments, of which few (if any) are pure open source. We have mutual support agreements with JBoss and MySQL, key parts of any open source stack, as well as with a number of proprietary partners. And we have 24×7 worldwide support.We’ve been doing directories for 13 years. We have the best apps on the market for running and securing Linux, alone or in mixed source environments.A lot of people thought Novell was trying to become the next Red Hat. It seems maybe they got it backwards.

Novell has been working closely with the State of Massachusetts for some time on its Enterprise Reference Technical Model, the most visible piece of which is the state’s decision to adopt Open Document Format (ODF) as its default document format moving forward. We’re a strong supporter of ODF, and believe it presents a compelling alternative not just for Massachusetts, but for any organization with long-term document retention requirements.Novell has weighed in officially on the debate over ODF, including this testimony submitted to the Massachusetts Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which has been discussing the issue.Novell also has recently gained a seat on the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications Technical Committee, the group leading the work on developing an XML-based file format specification for office applications.We’ll continue to work to publicize the business benefits of open standards and open source. Open is in our corporate tag line, so you can be sure we’re fighting for ODF