Novell News

It was a good night at the UK Linux & Open Source Awards 2006 last week. Novell engineer Michael Meeks was honored for top “Individual Contribution to Linux/Open Source.” Michael is a key contributor to the lauded usability features of Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, including office productivity suite OpenOffice.org.

In addition, Kent Police Authority, a Novell customer, was judged “Best Public Sector Linux/Open Source Implementation. You can find more about what put Kent Police on top here.

Aaron Schwartz of JPMorgan put out a research note on Novell following yesterday’s Oracle announcement regarding support for Red Hat Linux. It makes a couple of interesting points. One is that “Novell’s Open Platform segment is less than 10% of aggregate revenue and stands to benefit more from broader enterprise Linux adoption (a goal of Unbreakable Linux) than face challenges from third party support offerings.” Secondly, JPMorgan believes “Novell’s ability to capitalize on a mixed source model will provide a competitive advantage as enterprise open source adoption moves up the stack.” JPMorgan highlights the need for Novell to continue to work to expand margins, and discounts the likelihood of Oracle’s announcement impacting that effort.

Novell SVP John Dragoon has put up a post on his blog with his take on today’s Oracle announcement regarding support for Red Hat. Worth a read.

We don’t normally double track Novell press releases on this blog, but sometimes we can’t help it. This week has seen a couple of pretty cool developments on the Linux desktop front. First was Nat Friedman being named Technologist of the Year by VARBusiness. If you stop to think about it, this is a pretty amazing thing. We’re talking about a guy being honored for innovation on the desktop, long considered a moribund area for innovation. There are a lot of people doing innovative things at a lot of companies in this industry, but they honored a guy for work on the Linux desktop. Clearly, the word is getting out.

Today’s announcement about several white box OEMs in Europe and the US deciding to pre-load SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on their boxes is further proof of momentum around the space. These guys don’t do something like this unless they see demand for it.

Industry leading innovation. New routes to market. Feels like momentum to me.

It’s getting clearer by the day that conversations around open source has moved beyond discussions of “what is it?” to “how do I leverage it?” Case in point: IBD Networks, a Silicon Valley based group focused on new trends in the industry, is putting on a Under the Radar event tonight in Mountain View on open source management companies. The event will showcase four young companies in the open source systems management market. They’ll demo their products to a panel of industry experts, along with an audience of early adopter technology insiders. Both audience and experts will get a chance to beta test and offer feedback based on favorite features and areas for improvement, as well as explore the ideal industry “partner” match‑ ups for the companies.

Martin Buckley, who heads up product management for systems and resource management at Novell, will be on the panel of experts. Martin has helped make Novell’s ZENworks product line one of the leading management tools for heterogeneous environments, including Linux.

If you are in the area, check it out and see how the open source ecosystem is growing and improving.

Novell’s CEO Ron Hovsepian will be featured in a fireside chat at the Future Forward Executive Retreat in Beverly, Mass., this Thursday. The Future Forward retreat has become one of top industry events in the Boston area over the last few years, and it’s great to see this kind of session dedicated to open source. Ron will talk about integrating, securing and managing open source in corporate environments. Two years ago, the topic would have been, “Why you should adopt open source in your corporate environment.” We’re past that stage. Now the issues revolve around “normal” tech buying criteria – performance, value, integration, management, security. Needless to say, we think Linux scores well on all these fronts.

The Hines Corporation manages eight manufacturing facilities in the Midwest and Texas along with a distributorship in New York, which make a wide range of products from valves and springs to gasoline dispensers and boilers. What they needed, though, was to reduce IT administration and licensing costs. Guess what that meant … yes, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Hines Corporation had a mixed IT environment that included Windows, UNIX, NetWare and AS/400. The company decided to standardize as much as possible on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and costs have gone way down. For example, with a stable Linux platform, the company can implement a new Web-based ERP system for $400,000, instead of $1.2 million in a Windows environment.

“Moving to Linux was a logical choice,” said Ed Harper, CIO of Hines Corporation. “We had a Linux server that we hadn’t worried about for three years so we knew Linux would improve the security and stability of our environment. We chose Novell because we wanted a major player in the Linux market who could give us the right backing.”

Forbes has an article out this week on Richard Stallman and the GPL3 issue. It’s a fairly alarmist piece, in my view. It suggests that disagreements among the open source community around GPL3 threaten to derail the whole Linux and open source movement. Novell was contacted for this story, but we wouldn’t comment on specific provisions of GPL3 because the talks are ongoing, and we prefer to discuss our positions directly with the folks involved, rather than staking them out in the press.

What we did tell Forbes, which didn’t make its way into the article, is that we believe the industry will work its way through the disagreements that currently exist. If some projects do not adopt GPL 3, and other projects do, that will certainly present a challenge, but this challenge has to be be seen in a broader context. All major software vendors include significant amounts of third party code in their products, whether the product is primarily proprietary or open source in nature. Vendors understand that third parties may change their licensing policies and vendors make appropriate adjustments when that occurs. When the relevant technologies have been available under open source licenses such as the GPL, vendors actually have more options and flexibility to deal with changes in licensing practices.

Licensing negotiations go on all the time and the issues are complex and esoteric for most people. The discussions around GPL3 are different because they’re so public. It’s like watching the sausage being made. We’re certainly working our hardest to come up with solutions that will continue to push open source forward in the marketplace. We’re confident that the hurdles that do emerge will be overcome.

As we announced back in August, Novell took the top two slots for operating systems for OES and SUSE Linux Enterprise in this year’s VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC) awards. VARBusiness has now published the data behind the ARC awards here and done a nice write-up of the operating system category here. It really is a clean sweep for Novell, with Novell’s Open Eneterprise Server taking top ratings in all four categories of measurement – product innovation, support, partnership, and loyalty. SUSE Linux Enterprise came is a close second.

This is nice validation from our solutions providers that we’re hitting on all cylinders – delivering products they can sell, providng the support and program infrastructure they need, and making them want to continue to work with us. The response for Novell to the question of “likelihood to remain a partner,” which really sums up in a nutshell partner satisfaction with a vendor, registered the single highest score of any of the survey questions across all vendors in the category. Given the importance of the channel to Novell, this kind of support warms our hearts….

Rocky Mountain Voices has pulled together a nice podcast tribute to Ray Noorda over on Podtech. They spoke with Drew Major, the inventor of NetWare, David Bradford, the former general counsel of Novell, Ty Mattingly, right hand man to Ray Noorda at Novell, Ransom Love, the former CEO of Caldera, Ron Heinz, the managing director of Canopy Ventures and a former Novell exec, and Darl McBride, CEO of SCO and also a former Novell exec. A nice picture of the man from those who knew him well.