ACS, a Dallas, Texas-based Xerox company – and Novell strategic partner – provides a variety of business process, information technology, and systems outsourcing to commercial and government clients worldwide. In other words, they’re the people you call when you need your technology to work.

A major part of ACS’s success is the company’s expertise in providing customers with truly one-off solutions. Whether a company is interested in outsourcing its help desk or its entire IT environment, ACS offers solutions that are custom-tailored to the customer’s exact needs.

As cloud computing emerged, ACS launched a major internal initiative it termed the ACS Management Platform. Or AMP, for short. The goal of AMP was to give customers and business partners visibility into the cloud-based platforms that their services would be hosted on. In practical terms, that meant configuring, provisioning, adding an identity fabric, and managing everything within the cloud.

Because ACS didn’t want to rip and replace, it turned to Novell solutions to complement its existing infrastructure:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is one of the operating platforms made available to ACS customers.
• PlateSpin Orchestrate is the workflow tool for provisioning.
• PlateSpin Migrate moves workloads into the cloud.
• PlateSpin Recon discovers all physical and virtual environments for providing visibility into the outsourced environment.
• Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Manager are used for provisioning, access management and directory synchronization.
• ZENworks Configuration Management is ACS’ software configuration and delivery tool of choice.
• ZENworks Linux Management is the Linux configuration tool ACS uses.
• Novell Sentinel provides automated security information and event management for true policy enforcement.

With these Novell solutions in place, ACS is able to give its customers the value they’re looking for. Results so far have included increased process efficiencies, improved data accuracy, shorter billing cycles—and lower overall costs.
Just like business needs, clouds are constantly evolving. ACS has found a way to deliver value in clouds of every shape and size.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian will kick off the show by sharing how Novell is helping customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk on every IT platform. He will also discuss Novell's strategy for delivering the next generation of solutions that address both the intelligent workload management and collaboration markets.

Next, we’ve queued up four not-to-be-missed keynotes showing our latest innovations that solve the current and future needs of our customers and partners, including:

• Novell will unveil the much anticipated next generation, cloud-based, real-time collaboration platform for the enterprise.
• Novell customer and strategic partner, Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) will showcase how they use Novell Compliance Management Platform to provision and secure their 70,000 person workforce
• We will provide the first preview of the next major release of our award winning identity and access management solution, Novell® Identity Manager
• We will show you – via live demonstration – how Novell can help you migrate to Windows 7 using ZENworks® 10 Configuration Management

Click here to check out the keynote sessions at BrainShare.  Not going to the show? Get news, photos and archived versions of the keynotes here.

With 2010 just around the corner, many companies are testing, evaluating and planning a move to Windows 7, but many are wondering how to efficiently make the migration across their entire organization. Today, Novell has released an update for ZENworks Configuration Management (10.2.2) that offers full Windows 7 support. With a unique policy-based approach, ZENworks Configuration Management, together with advanced imaging and personality migration features, can help companies accelerate the ir Windows 7 migration process, automatically restore end-user environments and minimize business disruptions.

Download the latest ZENworks Configuration Management (10.2.2) update here. Also, go here to compare ZENworks to alternatives and see why it offers customer's the best value for their system management dollars.

Sussex Health Informatics Service (HIS), part of the world's fourth largest employer, the U.K. National Health Service (NHS), is responsible for the IT infrastructures of all 10 Sussex NHS Trusts, which includes 280 practices, 350 employees, and more than 25,000 PCs and other devices. With all this to manage, the Sussex HIS did not know how many systems they had, where they were, how they were configured or what software they were running, and they clearly needed a solution to help them get control. Enter Novell ZENworks Configuration Management.

ZENworks Configuration Management allowed the IT support team at Sussex HIS to see and manage all connected devices at each location, and enable secure remote access and application deployment. As the largest single deployment of a Novell solution worldwide, ZENworks Configuration Management scaled to meet the needs of the Sussex HIS managing 22,000 devices while decreasing the organization's remote fix time from three days to 12 minutes, lowering its costs and administration, and reducing travel time and expenses.

To learn more check out the success story here or watch this video.

In this video, Grant Ho, senior solutions manager for Novell Endpoint Management Solutions, offers some tips to help organizations manage, optimize and secure their endpoints.

Today we are introducing the first podcast in a new series on how to effectively manage corporate endpoints. In this debut podcast, Jack McLaine, VIST Financial vice president of IT, speaks with host Grant Ho, senior solution manager at Novell, about managing assets and achieving compliance.

Based in Pennsylvania, VIST Financial is a diversified financial services company offering banking, insurance, investments, wealth management, and title insurance services. Managing user information across all applications is a daunting task for the IT staff, as is maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements including HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and GLB. VIST relies on ZENworks Configuration Management to ensure compliance as well as efficiently manage operations and accurately report assets.

Learn more about how the robust functionality of ZENworks Configuration Management can help you manage your assets and simplify compliance here. Stay tuned for future episodes that will discuss topics including cutting risk with sound endpoint security practices and reducing complexity with endpoint configuration management.

According to Alan Murray, vice president of product management at Novell, “Today's data centers are heterogeneous environments with multiple masters and stakeholders, but in order for any organization to make decisions or analyze business performance these mixed environments need to work together simply and seamlessly. Novell is a strong supporter of the Configuration Management Database Federation standard, because it facilities the interoperability of data from multiple points of view. With a comprehensive view of the entire IT environment, administrators can utilize configuration data to streamline management tasks resolve issues and most importantly effectively manage the components in their IT infrastructure.”