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Novell Pledges Open Source, Takes Aim at Microsoft

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DQI Bureau
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As the snow melts from the mountain peaks in Utah, the state's largest

technology company, Novell Inc. gets ready for a busy year ahead. The company's

annual conference BrainShare 2004 saw renewed interest with over 6000

participants, a third more than last year.

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The reason: Novell's acquisitions of SuSE and Ximian in 2003 signals its

entry into the enterprise Linux distribution and services market and in 2004,

the strategy of company is expected to play out. "Novell is back,"

said Jack Messman, chairman and CEO, Novell pumping his fists, concluding his

keynote address at BrainShare 2004. He had further good news to share after

delivering on the promises made last year to embrace the open source world.

Messman announced the convergence of SUSE Linux and NetWare in a new product

family called Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES), to be released in December

2004, a full year ahead of schedule. OES will deliver networking capabilities

associated with NetWare platform and the company's newly acquired SUSE Linux

and Ximian offerings to provide all components necessary to establish a

manageable, low-cost infrastructure for hosting mission critical networking

services, said Chris Stone, vice chairman, Novell Inc.

The product is intended to give customers the choice to move over to Linux

even as they continue under NetWare upgrade protection and maintenance

agreements. Apart from the choice customers can make, the management tools

across the system would be common, company officials said.

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What does this line-up mean to corporate customers? Primarily, it offers them

plethora of choices. Existing Netware customers can choose to migrate to Linux.

Such of those who have both Linux and Netware can integrate the heterogeneous

environments. Those who are currently using Linux for peripheral applications

but Netware at the core can move Linux to the core. Older Netware users can

migrate directly to Linux.

Said Harish Mehta, managing director, Onward Novell, "Of course, there

is whole new base of new Linux users migrating from other environments. The

bottomline is the array of choices available and the value that comes in from

the services and support associated with it."

Harish

Mehta,




MD Onward Novell

"There

is a whole new base of new Linux users migrating from other

environments"

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Novell sees 2004 as the year when large scale Linux adoption, both in the

enterprise server and desktop space. The keynote sessions were peppered with

digs at Microsoft and Novell is set to challenge Microsoft even in the desktop

area. Red Hat, the largest Linux distribution vendor is the other target.

"Clearly, we want to be the number 1 in Linux market too," said

Messman.

The acquisitions, the announcements of roadmaps of various product families,

and the announcement of OES-taken together present a new market opportunity to

Novell. Traditionally seen as a product and engineering focused company, Messman

announced a reversal. He said, "We are turning customer backward from being

lab forward- that is, learning from customers what they want rather than

finding customers for the products that the lab produces." The management

teams have been reportedly regrouped and new customer management methodologies

have been put in place to deliver this strategy.

To articulate its claim to the Linux market, the BrainShare keynote had a

guest none less than Linus Torvalds, the progenitor of Linux, whose presence was

kept a surprise till he was called for a short tête-à-tête. Torvalds was his

usual geeky self. He revealed that he was working on a new Linux kernel and

expected that the focus of Linux for the next few years will be the desktop. But

the open source community has one cause to worry: when a Linux distribution like

SuSE falls into the hands of a commercial software company, whether innovation

and unfettered sharing of code, both hallmarks of the open source movement,

would get stalled. Especially so, when Novell is borrowing product features from

the open source world for its own line of products and converging its product

families with Suse's line-up. For example, in the area of resource management

Yast, ZenWorks, and Red Carpet would be combined into one solution. Messman

assured the open source camp that their fears were unfounded.

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Said Messman, "We would give more to the open source community than what

we take away."

For instance, Novell has put out its product iFolder to the open source.

Strengthening Alliances



From the point of view of reaching out to the market, Novell's

relationships with independent software vendors and independent hardware vendors

would be revitalized, revealed Jack Messman, chairman and CEO, Novell.

Vindicating this statement, Novell announced two partnerships that could turn

out to be key in its overall plan of expanding the SUSE Linux footprint into the

enterprise.

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Forrester's

Recommendations to CIOs

n

Look

before you leap-If you are a Novell user, the company is

fundamentally sound, has adequate cash, and may begin to show

positive revenue growth. Migration for sound

architectural/corporate standardization may make sense, but

migration out of fear for Novell's future prospects or

commitment to its core products is certainly premature.




n
Consider

Novell as a source for infrastructure services if you are

investing in Linux on the server side. Novell's print, file,

directory and other products are proven and mature, and will

provide the same utility under Linux that they provided to

precious generations of legacy users. Novell is the first vendor

to publish a high-end benchmark for the new 2.6 kernel, beating

rival Red Hat.




n
Consider

Novell as a leading source for Linux desktops, especially if you

are using its other services on Linux servers. Novell has an

impressive suite of desktop office and management tools and is

working to fully integrate them with its other resource

management offerings.
Source:

Richard Fichera and Stephen Wenninger, Forrester Research
Pix

courtesy:
Novell. All visuals capture moments from the

BrainShare 2004 Conference

Significantly, Novell today announced an expanded commercial agreement with

IBM, which enables IBM to ship or preload SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with the

entire range of IBM's servers comprising iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, zSeries

and eServer BladeCenter systems. Previously, IBM had this agreement directly

with SUSE. The agreement gives Novell a new channel for market access through

IBM.

IBM on its part has been promoting Linux through its relationships with both

SUSE and Red Hat and has been a major force in moving Linux into the higher end

of the enterprise market. Said Jim Stallings, general manager-Linux, IBM,

"We have embarked on a 40-city road-show promoting Linux and one of the

things that we have been demonstrating is NT to Linux migration. Similarly we

are also planning a Exchange to GroupWise (Novell's groupware brand)

migration."

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Attendees shop

at the Novell store at Novell's BrainShare 2004 Conference

Novell's partnership with HP too has been expanded to cover select HP

Compaq client systems.  HP has already hit a sweet spot in selling

Linux-based systems. According to IDC, in 2003, HP led the market in revenues

and shipments for x86 and Itanium-based Linux servers. Even in Q4, HP's market

share for x86 and Itanium-based Linux servers in unit shipments stood at 27% and

42 % respectively. Novell can now look at getting a piece of this action in

expanding the Linux market.

Novell's agreement builds upon HP's existing certification of Novell SUSE

Linux across HP Proliant and Integrity servers, storage, software, and services.

With the agreement. Novell SUSE Linux will become HP's standard Linux

distribution across its business desktop and notebook PCs in North America

immediately and the other geographies to be soon added. Previously HP had also

provided a Linux indemnity program for qualified customers similar to Novell

offering an indemnity program in January. The indemnity programs give a measure

of legal protection to Linux customers. Though the indemnity programs offered by

HP and Novell differ in their content, it is reported that they are

complementary and not conflicting.

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Novell had earlier announced a new, comprehensive partner program that will

bring under one umbrella the company's products, solutions, and technology and

training partner relationships. Upon the SUSE acquisition in November, Novell

has inherited 560 global partners that belonged to SUSE and these would get

added to Novell's partner network. The new partner program and the

alliances with HP and IBM are instrumental for the success of Novell's market

expansion fro its expanded product offerings in the NetWare and Linux areas.

Iishwar Daas Nair at Salt Lake

City, Utah

Novell to Enhance Global Support Activity Anchored Out of India

Despite the general backlash against outsourcing to India and other

countries, US organizations still find value in farming out key business

activities like software development, customer service management, technical

support, product development, R&D amongst others. At BrainShare, Jack

Messman, chairman and CEO, announced the intention of continuing to

leverage India and its capabilities in many areas. In an exclusive interview

with Cyber News Service, Messman revealed, 'A few months ago, we had

an India Day back here at our headquarters specifically to look at India and the

opportunities it can offer.'

To start with, beginning May 2004, Onward Novell, a 50:50 joint venture with

Onward Network Technologies and Novell Inc. would handle global customer support

to include customer from the US too. Hitherto, as part of Asia Pacific region,

Onward Novell has been rendering this service for APAC clients. This would be

now enhanced to handle a larger share of the global technical support activity

for Novell and its customers. Novell already has invested in a R&D and

product development center in India, based at Bangalore, since 1994. The center

has over 350 engineers handling leading-edge product development for the NetWare

family. Post the acquisition of SUSE and Ximian, some of the new developments in

the open-source and Linux area would also happen out of Bangalore.

Novell's Way into Web Services and Secure Identity Management

With the SilverStream acquisition, Novell has managed to bolster up its Web

services offering. Its application platform suite now comprises a J2EE-based

application server, an XML-based integration server, and a portal server for

delivery of applications. 'The key goal is to provide an end-to-end

solution for building a service-oriented architecture using visual tools for

each step,' said Ashish Larivee of Novell. She revealed that Novell is

working on developing tools and pre-built components for applications like

identity management, building provisioning type of applications, and building

identity-based applications and services. Towards this, the security and

application development teams at Novell started collaborative development a year

back and the group even won an award at LinuxWorld in January for the new

version of its product.

Novell has been famous for its directory offering, now called eDirectory.

This provides the identity foundation to manage authentication and

authorization. Voted as the market leader by a recent Meta Group report on

directory services, the next version is expected to ship in the third quarter

this year. By putting a meta-directory on top with connectors for data

transformation and objects to share data- this becomes a hub for identity-based

services. Said Larivee, ' By adding centralized secure login, identity

management applications and policy management, identities can be

synchronized.' Along with provisioning and de-provisioning, this forms the

base for secure identity management.

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