1.  Web content is static and requires people to come to you.  Social is dynamic and encourages dialogue with employees, customers and partners.  When you get social, your market presence increases

2.  While you probably have great data storage mechanisms and file search tools and semantic services (and if not, well keep reading) but there is a ton of valuable information in the heads of your staff.  Social encourages sharing that is searchable and shareable.  So then when your great folks retire, or move on, your intellectual edge doesn't go with them

3.  If you don't get enterprise social going, your users will find alternatives.  Alternatives that won't be secure, won't have user integrity and that despite every rule you put in place you won't be able to control.  Embrace enterprise social, don't fight it.  Happier people, better attitudes.

4.  With great respect to IT professionals, the common actions to get social into the business when led by IT take a really long time and have an unfortunate history of failure.  Organizations that have made enterprise social an assignment to an executive sponsored team to implement the social solution have very high success rates with rapid implementation and successful viral adoption.  And here, viral, means excellent.

5.  Structured data is a great thing, when properly managed and secured.  But much of what we as organizations know is unstructured, and lives in the minds of many.  Enterprise social unlocks those minds to share, to contribute and gather remarkable* ideas that make your company stand out.

*remarkable in this context is as used by Seth Godin – special, unique, differentiated

Are there more reasons.  Yes there are.  What are yours?  Please offer your thoughts, comments and ideas.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

But, if you partake of social networking, go look in a mirror.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.  Do you remember the person you saw?  Good, because that person is also a curator.

One of the most powerful functions of any social media endeavor is curation.  The amount of information on the net is so enormous that without some kind of filtering we could never find what we need when we need it.  Thus, the leaders in social networking tools leverage the power of curation to filter content.  Unlike the classic picture of the museum curator who uses his or her expertise to filter the content you see, in the social world, you choose your own curators.

Let’s look at three examples of social curation, FaceBook, Twitter and Digg.

FaceBook has the perspective of seeing posts from your friends on your wall.  You choose your FaceBook “friends” based on criteria you self select.  So instead of seeing the enormous influx of FaceBook posts, you get a curated view.   With over 500,000 active members, each generating an average of 90 posts per month, there’s no way any person could deal with that influx.  So we select the friends we see and look at their posts because they may interest us, or have a high likelihood of creating interest.  FaceBook uses apps and targeted advertising through a highly curated model for content injection as well.

Twitter is curation by design.  This was a design precept of founder Jack Dorsey and is continued with great focus by Ev Williams and Biz Stone today.  The whole concept behind following someone is to create a filtered stream of content that may be of interest to you.  This makes handling the 105M users and 600M searches per day a more personal affair.

When Kevin Rose saw Digg’s numbers start to plummet, he looked closely at the data and discovered that users were finding Digg was becoming too much of a firehose on wide spray, instead of more focused content.  In an interview around the design precepts for Digg4, he shared that one of the key design elements in the revamp was to ensure that a Digg user’s first view was of Diggs from other Digg users that the viewer followed.  Initial reviews of the new design have been resoundingly positive and web hit data indicates a strong upturn in Digg resonance.

All this may be fascinating, but what’s the point?  The point is the coming release of Novell Pulse.

Pulse is the next generation of collaboration.  As you’ve seen from announcements, press coverage, videos and other media, Pulse is more than email, more than IM, more than chat, more than co-editing.  It is absolutely all those things, but I think there is a critical value proposition not yet clearly elocuted.

By bringing together different people, and different groups and by design providing incredibly agile “views” without some artificial constraint, Pulse provides the user the power to created curated streams without having to learn any code, convoluted filter statements or perform other computing gymnastics.  So while I see tons of content in my Pulse stream, if I want to see only what Ken Muir has posted, including stuff he posted months ago, I just click on Ken’s avatar.  I’ve performed curation without thinking about it.  When I want to find something that Andy Fox or Wendy Steinle has posted, it’s equally easy.  The same is true for groups.  Moreover, I don’t need to be online when the post is made because Pulse retains history with transparency.  I also don’t need to worry about downloading attachments to Pulse feeds for fear of not being able to find them later, because they will be where they were, and if needs be I can search for them.  Search is just another form of curation.

The challenge that we all will face is not that there isn’t content, it’s that there will be more content than we can reasonably deal with.  The other problem is one of authority.  How can we be sure that the content creator or commenter is who we think it is?  We’ve already seen the privacy and security concerns burst into flame around some of the open socials.  Pulse brings identity and security to the process, so not only can we control the inbound, we can also have confidence that the source stream originator is who we think it is.

Lot’s of people who didn’t get the difference wrote the Pulse = Wave equation.  They were and are wrong.  Similar in concept but different in execution.  As Mr. Parker once said “with great power comes great responsibility” and today only Pulse provides the 360 degree capability to exercise that power responsibly.

Until next time, peace.

Ross Chevalier

CTO, Novell Americas

I hear about VDI a lot.  Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.  Sounds interesting.  Unfortunately the number of "definitions" are so varied that every day the term means less and less.

Some years back I took the Question Based Selling program.  Many of you who read this probably did as well.  So when I hear a prospect or customer talk about doing, wanting to do, thinking about, VDI, I use the response from that training "how do you mean?"

Unsurprisingly, the answers are varied.  Often they will resemble at a high level the slanted proposal from a vendor.  By asking questions, I find that most times, the whole concept is not well thought out.  VDI, in most flavours, has a significant impact on network infrastructure, bandwidth, perimeter devices, skills and usability.  VDI is often associated with a specific technology.  Examples include running a virtual machine containing a full OS and applications, or we see it presented as a new way of describing thin client, or sometimes some middle ground with a rich OS on the client but some things streamed and some things virtualized at the application level.

Invariably, a consultative approach will reveal that no one of these models serves even 80% of the business needs, and in most cases, what the customer-prospect actually needs is all of them and more.  The perception in that marketplace today is that the customer-prospect has to settle.  This is wrong.  They don't have to settle for a solution that doesn't provide the scope and agility needed by the business.

Many of the VDI "solutions" aren't actually solutions at all.  They start with a shipping product, what the market refers to as COTS (common off the shelf) software and then wrap it in a lot of custom code that requires a lot of specialized services.  Interesting, but as noted in a recent Harvard Business Review article shared with me by Patrick Hynes, that doesn't change the world, it perpetuates an aging model.

REDI is our answer to the customer question, "how do I best deliver desktops as a service to my business, based upon the needs of the user, group or role, leveraging bandwidth, equipment, load, capacity and efficiency in a complete manner?"  Hence not a bunch of point products that only address one vector, or a compendium of non-integrated point products.  The key that I hear from customer execs is that it's not about OS virtualization or app virtualization or streaming, it's about a standardized management framework that facilitates all of these deliverables.  And the binding of that to Identity is not an optional step, it's integral in what the consumer of the service receives.  If we concur that IT is a Service Provider to the Business, then the Service Provider must place significant focus on delivering what the business needs, not just the technology therein.  So this includes the management framework, the security, the identity, the redundancy, flexible delivery models tuned to the workload, and of course must provide the recipient of the service the ability to see at a glance what the deliverable quality looks like.

We all have service delivery expectations.  Think about your own expectations for your personal mobile, or high speed internet, or online banking.  There is a service level agreement in there explicitly or tacitly understood and when we as customers can see validation that we are getting what we expect, we are happier.  The same thing applies to the business obtaining services.

I have to give a ton of credit to Steve Ewald, Valentin Mihai, Jerry Combs and the other team members who have taken standard Novell offerings and built them into a comprehensive answer to the problem of managing a complex deliverable that doesn't force the end customer into some constrained box.  I thank them for the education they've provided to me, and as I've been talking about the model with customers via presentation, telephone and whiteboard, I have to say that it works.  I was at a prospect just a week ago where the senior executive in the room said to the CE and I that while he has heard VDI so much it means everything and nothing to him, our conversation was the first time he heard any vendor show up with a complete story and scalable solution that was sufficiently modular and that could fit the evolving requirements his team was working on.

We've all seen it happen in technology.  Brilliant ideas that are too early for the marketplace.  A solution that is so exciting, it turns into a mess as everybody wants to play "me too" with many players engaging too late in the game.   In my opinion, we are in the right place at the right time with a solution that actually works and woe upon us if we don't get out there and take the lead in this incredible market opportunity.  Amazing technology, put together to solve business problems, using existing and proven components that leverages the existing customer investment.  That's REDI.  That's what makes our offering special and why we can lead this space.  VDI is the ship that never left the dock, REDI is the ship that traverses the world.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

It’s not enough.

None of us can stop at this level.  I’ve personally done the IWM conversation numerous times and as suggested, have made it my own, and it has changed in how I deliver it as well.  Sometimes I bring the viability pieces to the front, sometimes I press harder on some areas of specific listener interest and lighter on others.  This isn’t about thinking “my version is better” it’s about the next level of resonance.

I remember being with Jon Wilburn and Patrick O’Brien at a Federal customer shortly after the vision deck came out.  The customer listened closely and did what we can all hope for.  He offered input back to us.  He said he got the vision, and he could align to it but if that was the Novell story he didn’t see a lot of point in more conversation.  His perspective was that vision is critically important, but that if we didn’t add value by sharing where we saw opportunities to leverage that vision in his specific business, we weren’t creating a differentiating event.

I took these comments to heart.  Partly because I really care about the company of course, but more importantly because a prospect took the time to share what we had done right and what was missing.  Jon had prepped us well, we understood the business and the very public challenges.  What we all failed to do was to take our vision and ensure that we made the presentation a bi-directional conversation about the customer/prospect issues.  I hope I haven’t continued to make the same mistake I did there.

So this post isn’t about catharsis for me.  It’s about being differentiating.  Every customer and prospect has a queue of vendors lined up.  Every one of those vendors has a vision.  Every one of them believes that their vision is “right”.  Put yourself in the customer’s chair and if the mental picture doesn’t bring on intestinal roulette you’re tougher than most.

We all acknowledge how busy we are, how many hours we put in, but as my esteemed colleague Tony Nocco puts it “you know who else is really busy?  Customers are really busy, in fact they’re getting hammered by low budgets, staff reductions and increased demand.”  There’s a good reason Tony is successful.  He puts himself in the shoes of the customer and treats them as he would want to be treated.  If you ever get the opportunity to do a call with Tim Wolfe pay close attention, he’s a master at being on the side of the customer with their best interests in mind.  And when you watch Tim, you see that doing so does not prevent Novell gaining value from the conversation.

So, all I ask of all of us on the vendor and partner side is to make sure that before we invite someone to a presentation or webinar or briefing that the primary objective is to deliver the specific context each customer or prospect is going to get as differentiated value.  And for the customers and prospects who read these missives, when you hear from us and don’t hear compelling value propositions please say “I’m not hearing compelling value propositions that will cause me to spend my expensive time.”  I promise you that we will make it right.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

First there is an initial belief that this marketplace is already saturated and that there really isn’t room for new players.  So, who are the market players do you think, I ask.  While I do hear Huddle, Elluminate, SharePoint (really?) amongst others, the 800lb gorilla answer is WebEx and the second biggest gorilla is Citrix.  This is fascinating because they could not be more different.

When I query what people like about WebEx, sometimes they don’t even mean WebEx the product, they mean WebEx the concept, and often other products are called WebEx even when they aren’t.  WebEx is noun as well as a proper name.  What do they like?  Efficient delivery to a very large audience of one way content with minimal setup hassles and no ugly client setup.  What don’t they like?  Client setup for viewers and the cost.  So if you could do something different that was less expensive for this purpose, would you?  The average response is maybe, but changing would be hard.

When I ask about Citrix, the answers are more diverse, given the prodigious family of GoTo Something offerings the company offers.  Only GoToMeeting comes up in the context of a “WebEx”.  The other offerings are much more used in the fashion of 1:1 even if they are capable of more.  What do people like?  Ease of setup, speed to operate and efficiency of operation.  What don’t they like?  The cost, and the confusion because of the number of seemingly similar offerings.

So then I ask, what do you need?  The responses are telling.  Cheap.  Fast.  No attendee client.  Cheap.  Launch it right now capability to a small to mid sized audience.  Cheap.  Audio.  Video.  Have I said cheap?

Now marketing professionals hate the word cheap because it has negative connotations, somewhat akin to the Canal Street Rolex.  So let’s go with cost effective.

We recently released Novell Conferencing.  You may not have heard a lot about it, and if so, that’s a real shame because for what it does, it’s an incredible offering.  What it does is enable customers to do really fast conferences with desktop sharing, presentation sharing, audio and video for substantially less than what the alternatives can do.  Oh and whiteboarding, session recording and a bunch of other useful functions.  If you are the presenter, there’s an agent you run to control what gets shared.  If you are the viewer, you need an internet connection and a browser.  When I said Internet connection I meant port 80, regular http, no odd pokeholes in the firewall and not some random high range port you’ll have to open and forget about leaving the doors open to all manner of rogues and malcontents.

If you’ve ever used the very good Elluminate or Huddle, you know that there is configuration required and that if you get it wrong, stuff doesn’t work.  Novell Conferencing is so simple, you really have to work at it to break it.  Now while I won’t underestimate the breakage capability of some folks who can disrupt the kitchen microwave, in general simple is effective.

So whether Novell employee, partner, customer or prospect, when next you think WebEx or whatever you call it, instead think Conferencing.  If your use case is fast, effective, no config and oh yeah cost effective, this might be exactly what you are looking for.  Look back in this post and what we see is that there is a real market demand for ad-hoc, right now, prep-light, easy to use, easy to view Conferencing that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, or require the neverending subscription or charges of between .10 and .24 PER MINUTE PER ATTENDEE.  How very fortunate that Novell Conferencing fills that requirement.

Until next time, peace.

Ross

PS:  In my post about using ZENworks Application Virtualization to deploy Office 2010, I was chastised in another blogger’s work for “trying to sell Novell products.”  Yes.  I am.  I think Novell is the Best Software Company in the World.  Anyone who heard me on Tim’s Americas All Hands early this fiscal knows that I do say this.  And yes, while I hope that readers find these posts informative and maybe even funny from time to time, my motive is to encourage people to become customers and buy our software.  I’ll be so forward as to say it is my fervent wish that we generate tons of revenue and plenty of profit from each sale.  Doing so means we get to keep building great products for customers and makes our company rewarding to shareholders and employees.  Oh and any commercial enterprise software company that says they are not interested in profitability or revenue, is, what’s the word?  Oh yeah lying.  So yes you know who you are, I do want folks to buy our great products.  Thanks for the coverage and the publicity.

This past month, our partner Aveksa, made available a study that they sponsored by the highly respected Ponemon Institute.  The study covers trends in Access Governance and it's an eye opener.  It's not our study to share but there are some highlights that I think all organizations might want to consider.  The key findings from the study are as follows;

• User access rights continue to be poorly managed
• Organizations are not able to keep pace with changes to users' job responsibilities and they face serious noncompliance and business risk as a result
• Policies are not regularly checked and enforced
• Organizations lack budget, resources and staff for effective access governance
• Granting end user access to information resources is increasingly seen as the responsibility of business units, not IT staff
• Cloud computing is expected to impact access governance processes
• Company data and applications are considered the most at risk from poor access

Now stop, take a deep breath and slow your heart rate down because help is available.  That help comes from us in the form of the Novell Access Governance Suite or the Novell Compliance Management Platform.  Tools themselves are not enough to solve these issues and Novell has a number of partners with specific and proven expertise in this vertical.

As we look to help folks it's imperative that we not only show up together but that we broaden the scope and scale of our conversation.  As Aveksa and Ponemon have asserted, the accountability for this subject doesn't lie predominantly in IT.  In my own work helping organizations develop business cases to prioritize addressing these business threats, I've often started the interview process in IT and invariably we discover that people in legal, in audit, in marketing and of course in corporate security need to be involved to make the case strong.  Most all of these folks have had a prior interest and commitment but were left out of the conversation, or had started down the road independent of IT, creating fractured approaches.  If we together reach out to all of the participants and facilitate that conversation, we change the priority of this initiative.

Many organizations have historically ignored these concerns because there was no penalty.  In many cases in years past, a "finding" occurred, but the faulting organization got a pass.  According to Deloitte partner and friend Daniel Poliquin, this trend is over, with organizations seeing fines on the first finding and definitely if a finding recurs.

Organizations that implement an access governance process as part of a compliance initiative have also discovered that this process is ongoing, not something that gets pulled out of a drawer once a year.  Those organizations have significantly reduced operational expense, risk and annual audit fees.

The problems are real, but so is the solution.  Please take time to reach out to customers and prospects and not just to IT.  Organizations need answers and we are in an ideal position to provide them.

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace.

Ross

This month Microsoft starts making Office 2010 available through MSDN and Technet, to Volume Licensing customers and eventually into general release by mid May if the blogosphere's dates are correct.

So what, you may ask, and why do I care?

It's pretty safe to say that most all Novell customers are also Microsoft customers. It's the nature of the marketplace we live in. For the last couple of years, we've also been very clear that Making IT Work as One isn't some bogus tagline, it is in fact what we do, what our infrastructure software enables. This commitment has enormous impact for organizations that will be receiving, investigating and deploying Microsoft Office 2010.

We know that there will be retraining required for users, especially those users who still live their days inside Office 2003. But even those organizations that migrated to Office 2007 and the ribbon interface are going to have a transitional period.

It is technically possible to have both an older version and a new version of Office installed on a Windows machine, but depending on the version of WIndows, and the version of Office, this lives somewhere on the scale between "has issues" and "certifiable nightmare". Fortunately, we can help any organization that will be going through the Microsoft Office transition. Or any other application transition or upgrade for that matter.

With ZENworks Application Virtualization, Novell enabled organizations to deploy applications to desktops as runtime executables or MSI files in a manner that they did not alter the local workstation and its registry in any way. ZENworks Application Virtualization makes it easy to run different versions of the same application on the same workstation and even to run applications not supported on the current version of the installed operating system. As was noted in a recent NetworkWorld article by Denise Dubie, a substantial number of organizations still have applications with a dependency on Internet Explorer 6.   These same organizations that want to leverage the power, stability and flexibility of Windows 7 were at a crossroads, or at least until they are made aware of ZENworks Application Virtualization.

More and more though, we are hearing about the idea of Virtual Desktop. There is a team here at Novell working on this today, and they have done some work that is truly amazing. But what if your organization isn't ready or architecturally aligned for a full virtual desktop environment but the idea of delivering apps in this manner sounds appealing?

With ZENworks Application Virtualization version 8, we've introduced application streaming. In sessions delivered at BrainShare with my co-presenter Ron van Herk, we were able to show the attendees how simple it was to deliver applications in a stream, as well as how ZENworks Application Virtualization optimized the preloading process so the user experience was fast and very positive.

With all the new applications that are constantly coming out (this is an example of the ongoing innovation being driven in our industry) there are times and situations where the traditional entwined install just doesn't make business sense. Application virtualization and application streaming are just more practical, faster to deploy and easier to maintain. If you haven't seen ZENworks Application Virtualization lately, you owe it to your organization to have a look. I think you'll be very impressed and see your own value proposition right away.

Until next time, peace.

Ross Chevalier

I confess I've been disenchanted by some events from time to time, but I still believe that there's real value in these things. Allow me a few thoughts on why that is. I'll share some of the comments I've heard and then provide my perspective and since I'm the guy behind the keyboard I get to do that.

One view is that the Internet changes everything, including the value of going to this kind of event. I have to disagree. Certainly some vendors do excellent Web sites with lots of information and if your whole goal was to collect brochures, the Web is clearly a better choice. But maybe you'll notice that some Web sites are nearly unnavigable and it's easier to use a search engine than to navigate the site directly. What happens when you have questions about a product or service? Too often I find that this is true, and the Web site is ineffective at getting me what I need so I get to spend hours searching tips and forums trying to find a simple answer. Being at a show gives an opportunity to speak to vendor or partner representatives and get useful answers without having to wade through a ton of dreck.

Some people think that learning on your own time using tools that run in your browser are ideal. Not awful, but gets boring really fast. Events often have classes, tutorials and other presentations where you can actually learn something new. And since you're there, you get to pay attention instead of trying to do fifty seven other things while watching a webcast. When you have a question, you ask it. And a real person answers you. Then something very cool often happens. Someone else adds to your question, or offers a different perspective or takes the conversation in a new direction. I've been a public speaker for over thirty years and I promise you that the most fun for me is when the audience stops being listeners and become engagers. Think about your own experiences and I think you'll agree that the interactivity makes live attendance much more powerful than some simplex remote talking head.

I've read that social interaction is highly overrated. Events often have places where attendees get together to eat, have a beverage or get some needed work done. When you look up from the laptop or the smartphone, you might actually have a conversation with someone you've never met. It's called socializing and we humans for the most part seem to enjoy the whole thing. Often there are places where attendees go after hours to unwind. More social time. A good idea I think. Looking at FaceBook, Twitter and the entire social network space confirms that we enjoy interacting with others, and doing so live is pretty darn good.

When you attend a technical event, you get to meet people with similar or different interests, learn from others, share your knowledge, expand your personal network, have some fun, enjoy some time away from the desk or cube and when you come back, you bring knowledge, new skills and new perspectives to help you do your job better and make a difference to your place of work. Sounds like a win-win to me.

I'm doing five sessions at BrainShare this month, March 21 – 25 in Salt Lake City, Utah. I look forward to seeing you there. Come find me and say hi.

And if you won't be in SLC, you'll be missed. Until next time, peace.

Certainly the purchase price of media continues to drop. I've watched 1TB SATA drives fall by $50 in 4 months to below $100 regularly. Even the new solid state drives (SSD) prices are falling. But it's illusory to say that files are cheap. As a CIO I respect greatly said to me last year, "it costs virtually nothing to create a file, but it costs a fortune to find it and manage it for the rest of its life." He's right of course, but there is a solution to the problem.

In the classical sense, a user creates a file by saving something somewhere. Sometimes that's a local store, but in the enterprise we would prefer to see files stored in a repository that is managed, backed up and appropriately redundant. And for the most part that works just fine. It's not enough.

Files are created by people, and most decent file systems have sufficient attribute level controls to identify the owner, the creation date, the modification date and other important metadata. So why not leverage that information and create a linkage of the file to the owner in the enterprise directory, to a role that "owns" the file and its directory structure, to its location and tree. This isn't hard, for us at least. Our Novell File Management Suite starts the process of intelligent file management by injecting the power of identity management into file management. So now, not only can we leverage the power of identity management and provisioning to simplify management and gain more control over file management, we also increase flexibility by making it incredible simple to move or redirect or reassign files throughout the lifecycle of the user, the group or the role. Excellent process and step one. Oh, and make this work whether the customer's file framework is a Novell estate, a pure Microsoft estate, or the most common scenario – the heterogeneous environment.

Step two is to maximize the value of the storage systems already in place. We acquire storage incrementally, and only decommission old storage when it dies, gets too small for the content application, or reaches the magic MTBF (mean time before failure) number when we know we roll the dice on every write or read. What happens then is that we end up with files in multiple locations, or keep moving old junk to our newest and most expensive disks. There's some pretty interesting data that suggests that on average, a file of unstructured data, such as documents, spreadsheets etc., is accessed once in the fourteen days after save and never again after thirty days. Certainly there are exceptions, but industry pros continue to cite the familiar 80/20 rule, where 80% of files are stale or unchanged. Why not put those older files or unchanging files that we cannot delete to less expensive storage and get them out of our backup stream. Now some folks chime in here and say "we use differential backups so this isn't a factor" There is always some kind of scan or table that defines whether a file has changed or not. If the file isn't there at all, we save time. But, there's a huge problem. If by moving the file we cause ANY change in the way that the user interacts with the file, our best case is that all we get is another help desk call. Fortunately, Dynamic File Services, part of Novell File Management Suite, provides for policy based control of file storage tiering without any change in the user experience whatsoever. And as you should expect, we do this for Novell, Microsoft and mixed estates.

The last piece is communication. If you've ever received an email that says something like "less than 5% available file handles on LUN 2" you clearly understand the problem. A message like that makes great sense to a storage management professional but may as well be Glagolitic to a business unit leader or user. The ability for IT to act as a Service Provider to the business requires both powerful reporting, and reports that real people can understand. Reports that business leaders, team leaders, managers and groups can act upon.

Only when you bring all three pieces together can you deliver Intelligent File Management. We're here to help with a solution that works for you right now, across your file management needs. For more information, please click on this link. The Novell File Management Suite

Until next time, peace.

Ross

Yeah, me too.  I've seen too many customers and non-customers who have dropped millions of dollars on some desktop management solution that created more problems than it solved.  Fortunately that doesn't have to be true.

The Novell solution set is incredibly comprehensive and brings unique value to the marketplace.  The primary value to organizations that have already made investments in alternate solutions is that they do not need to make further investment in Kubota or Caterpillar for the purpose of the forklift upgrade.  This is because ZENworks is built to work modularly.  Certainly the pieces work together marvellously, but we aren't so arrogant as to believe that every org will use only our tools.  We've been doing ZENworks for over twelve years, we've achieved maturity for today's market ahead of the others.  As Patrick Hynes likes to say, ZENworks is a hot-rod.

So why is ZENworks the best choice for customers right now?

Do you remember when we went through the pain to re-architect the entire ZENworks engine?  We did this to ensure that ZENworks did not have a dependency on any particular estate.  It was a lot of hard work and a fundamental set of changes were required.  Our Product Managers fielded a high volume of questions on the "whys" Fortunately our Systems and Resource Management leadership stood by their guns. and we are now at the state where we have a wonderful product with great scalability.  But, readers will remember that there were some teething pains in that process.  Our major competitors are in the process of re-architecture right now.  However fine their people and teams are, they will experience teething pains too.  In today's fragile economy and state of caution, customers of those vendors are very concerned about what's going to happen to their installs, their skills and their overall plans.

Landesk is in the blender.  First they were bought by Avocent whose focus had always been switching technology and recently by Emerson Electric, a renowned provider of electrical equipment.  Is Landesk up on cinder blocks in the yard?  They are working to lock customers into 3 year deals, with emphasis on the lock part.  Their future is not clear at this point.   The question I would ask if I were a customer CIO is what is Emerson's long term commitment to Landesk?  It's a pretty reasonable question I think.

Symantec is working to position itself as the endpoint security company and customers fear that there is not sufficient focus on their investments in Altiris.  They've built a brand new release that will have teething pain.  Symantec is successful in malware protection – it drives revenue for them.  Customers still aren't clear on the commitment to endpoint management.  And to be fair Symantec is really focused on Windows.  Understanding the market demographics, one can see this, but it's always important to remember that when it comes to endpoint management, cross-platform is reality.

And what of our friends at Microsoft?  They have worked hard to build SCCM.  It's a decent enough offering, so long as you like the idea of being handcuffed to Microsoft.  And you need a lot of hardware.  It's big.  From a value delivery perspective, it's not a contest.  Engage your Endpoint Management specialist with your customers to understand how this fits the customer specifically, or more particularly, how we fit better.

Now is the ideal time to be aggressive in going after the competition.  They did this when we re-architected, and it's time to return the favour.

So what makes ZENworks better than the alternatives?

ZENworks has evolved significantly since the version 7 code base, and even since the first cut of the ZENworks 10 release.  It is technically richer than anything out in the market and also follows the ITIL model in design and delivery.  ITIL is on the requirements list for every large and very large organization and has received enough impetus that small and medium business are putting ITIL on their requirements list.  All of the North American Endpoint Management team have achieved ITIL certification and the rest of the End User Computing team will also be certified this year.  This is not like other certifications, you cannot buy "answers" or challenge the exam and hope to pass.  It's hard work and when you understand the ITIL framework, it's easy to show how a solution like ZENworks, by aligning to the ITIL framework, creates incredible customer value.

When customers and prospects look at the UI from the competitors they'll see a mishmash.  Looks and function matter – ask Apple.  Our solutions have a brilliantly intuitive UI framework.  It's role based, easy to use, delivers dynamic links and provides a much higher usability index.  Customers like the deliverable of single agent, single console.

ZENworks uses a single database schema that does not require the implementer to have a bucket of SQL server skills.  ZENworks doesn't have a preferred frame of reference, the engine runs on Windows and on Linux, the database can be Sybase (included), SQL Server or Oracle.  The full version of the industry standard Admin Studio that builds application packages is included.  We include the Business Objects reporting engine that has over 25 years of proven industry success. Why is this so important? Because we all know we will be called upon to prove value in an easily consumed way.

Organizations are aggressively building their plans for Windows 7.  We have more proven capabilities in this space than any other offering.  We all need to be asking customers about their plans for Windows 7.  If they are planning to migrate to Windows 7 look at the ZENworks Trifecta.  Presentations have been done and there is a posted netcast at www.novell.com/salestalk discussing this program.  If the organization is not moving to Windows 7, ZENworks is a great set of solutions to help them get the house in better shape.

The ZENworks family has a number of components that provide enormous function level values.  ZENworks Configuration Management, ZENworks Application Virtualization, ZENworks Asset Management, ZENworks Endpoint Security Management, ZENworks Handheld Management, ZENworks Linux Management, ZENworks Network Access Control, ZENworks Patch Management, ZENworks USB/Wireless Security are all the members (so far!) of the ZENworks family.  Customers and prospects face business challenges every day that are resolved by one or more of these components.  If you aren't cognizant of the value proposition of each component, please reach out to your local Endpoint Management specialist and to Enablement Central to get up to speed.

There's more coming too.  In this fiscal year, you'll see additional value being added through new components and enhancements to existing solutions.  ZENworks is the best choice today, and tomorrow.

So as they used to say on Saturday morning TV, "and now you know".  And with half the battle won, let's get out there and win the other half.

Until next time, peace.  More or less.  Ok peace after the battle is won by us. Toss out the lipstick tube and let the pig go.

Ross