Novell News

Thanks to BrainShare, it's been a bit too busy to post the last few days, but things have slowed down on the press front today. It's been a good show. We had over 40 press here, roughly split down the middle between U.S. and non- U.S. press, with good representation from Novell's key European, Canadian, and Latin American markets. We did extensive interviews with senior management – Jack Messman, Ron Hovsepian, Jeff Jaffe, Roger Levy, Kent Erickson, and more. We also had solidly booked tracks on our major solution areas – desktop, data center, resource management, security and identity management, and workgroup. The online press room has plenty of photos, keynotes (video and documents), partner news, some good customer wins, and more. I've been to six BrainShares, and this has been the best. We've had a lot of good announcements in key areas of customer focus – Linux management, data center issues like virtualization and performance, expanding the partner ecosystem around Linux, and compelling news for our installed base around GroupWise, NetWare support and OES futures. And Nat Friedman's desktop demo brought down the house, just like it did at BrainShare Europe last fall. Nobody can watch this demo and say that open source is just "catching up" to existing proprietary platforms. There are innovative features in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 that you definitely don't get from Windows. Any customer who's facing a Vista upgrade in the coming year really needs to look at this as a serious alternative – a full-function, open desktop at very low cost. My sense of talking to the press this year versus earlier years is that we've moved beyond the "Is this Linux thing working for Novell?" stage to questions around the business value of what we're delivering. That's where the conversation should be.We've seen a lot of good coverage so far, and expect to see more. You can see some of that here.