Novell News

You might have seen in my previous post that Novell was up for several awards at the European Identity Conference 2008 awards. I’m pleased to say we did not leave the awards event empty-handed. Novell customer BASF received an award for “Best internal Identity Management project” for implementing identity management within a complex corporate structure and excelling in consistent approaches to centralized auditing. Our open source identity project Bandit also scored a joint award in the “Special Award” category with our friends at the Eclipse Higgins project. Bandit and Higgins received the award as both are groundbreaking identity management initiatives based on open source.

Novell is in the Hall – the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) Web Support Hall of Fame. Novell is in based on being named a winner in ASP’s “Ten Best Web Support Sites” competition for 2008. It’s Novell’s fourth “Ten Best” finish, putting us in the Hall of Fame.

ASP’s “Ten Best Web Support Sites” is a prestigious award that showcases excellence in online service and support. Sites were judged on usability, design, knowledgebase and search, interactive features, and customer experience, among other criteria. Check out Novell’s support site and judge for yourself.

TechTarget has announced the results of its prestigious Information Security magazine and SearchSecurity.com 2008 Readers’ Choice Awards (registration required). For the second year in a row, Novell Identity Manager took the top spot in the Identity and Access Management category. As noted on SearchSecurity.com (registration required), Novell Identity Manager, this year’s identity management winner, is widely regarded as a leader in this market, automating user provisioning to get employees what they need–and only what they need–to get to work quickly. Readers particularly liked its user transparency, ease of use, scalability and, most important, ROI.

The center of identity thought leadership next week is the European Identity Conference (EIC) taking place in Munich, Germany, April 22 to 25. As a key player in the identity market Novell will be exhibiting at the show and participating in a number of activities:
- On April 22, Novell EMEA President Volker Smid will present on “Beyond Compliance: Policy Management as a Business Enabler”
- Novell has been nominated for three EIC 2008 awards: our open source identity Bandit project in the Special Award category, Endress & Hauser for customer project, and BASF for customer project
- Novell identity and security management customers BASF, bwin and Premiere will present on their identity management and compliance experiences
- On April 23, Novell distinguished engineer and Bandit project Leader is participating in a panel discussion “The Future of Web Identity”
- Novell’s Bandit project is one of the participants in an Open Source Identity Systems (OSIS) identity interoperability event. The technology companies and projects of OSIS will test network interoperability between identity providers, card selectors, browsers and Web sites, demonstrating practical uses for user-centric identity technology.

So, if you are planning to be in Munich next week, stop by and say Guten Tag.

In CIO magazine today, Sesame Workshop’s Noah Broadwater discusses at some length the benefits his organization is seeing from virtualization using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with its built-in Xen hypervisor.

From the story:

“Sesame Workshop had been spending approximately $250,000 every three years on hardware and support for its Sun Solaris servers, Broadwater says. The new approach combined 25 virtual machines onto 4 physical servers within a blade center and reduced that cost to $24,000 every 3 years, he says. Broadwater’s team also consolidated 10 servers including application, image and log servers onto 4 physical boxes. When done with its virtualization effort, the company will reclaim 2 racks worth of space in its already cramped data center, and reduce power consumption by 15 percent, Broadwater estimates.”

As the CIO story headline says, those are some monster savings.

The latest blog posting by Novell distinguished engineer and Bandit Project leader Dale Olds is worth a read if you are interested in learning more about how identities will be managed on the Internet. Dale joins recent discussions in the identity community regarding the meta vs. virtual directory. Specifically, he provides thoughts on the “identity bus” and how he sees it fitting in to the identity metaystem. Check out his blog posting here.

If you are not in the Boston area you might not have had a chance to listen to Tech Talk with Craig Peterson. This weekly radio show includes interviews with industry insiders and explains tech in ways everyone understands.

This past week, Richard Whitehead, Novell director of product marketing for Systems and Resource Management, was a guest on the show. Craig and Richard discussed the growing security threat from storage devices and how individual users and businesses can protect themselves. For more, listen here.