02.02.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part V: Novell’s Corporate News, Policies
Jim Ebzery once again gets his portion in an article covering security and identity.
With an eye on the business implications of security threats, software company Novell identifies three key areas where money will be spent this year: dealing with regulatory compliance, coping with insider threats and preventing identity theft.
“Technology that can automate and validate network activity to meet compliance requirements will grow in importance,” says Jim Ebzery, senior vice president for identity and security management at Novell.
Jeff Jaffe talks about Novell’s career ladder. He also happens to mention some familiar characters such as Greg KH.
Novell, like most technology companies, has a dual career ladder.
[..]
Novell’s technical leaders provide an impressive pipeline of Fellow candidates. While we have initiated the program in 2007 with two Fellows – expect more in years to come.
David Patrick, whom we mentioned in the past, is listed among those in a xkoto press release.
– In November, xkoto named seasoned software industry executive David
Patrick as President and CEO. With over 25 years’ senior executive
experience in the software industry, Patrick joined xkoto from Novell.[…]
– In December, the company named Charles Ungashick as Vice President of
Marketing. Ungashick joined xkoto from Deltek, Inc. and brings more than
fifteen years experience in sales and marketing with enterprise software
companies including Novell, Silverstream Software and Filenet.
Novell proudly backs FOSSBazaar, which was discussed last week.
OpenLogic’s CEO, Steven Grandchamp, said in a blog post Tuesday that HP’s media release essentially hogged the limelight, downplaying the fact that many other companies are backing FOSSBazaar, including Google and Novell.
Kewney at ITWeek does some pondering over Novell’s NetWare.
Five years ago, there were still headlines about Novell NetWare. Most people probably imagine that NetWare became history long before that, but the operating system was still clinging onto life in 2003 despite being mortally wounded by Windows NT Server.
One particular headline related to Surrey Council, which bravely threw out its Windows NT servers and went for nostalgia. “We decided to standardise on Novell because we had a better in-house skills base for Novell,” said the council’s IT chief.
After a couple of weeks of large acquisitions, Paula Rooney asks herself whether open source IPOs are still a distant idea. She also uses SUSE as an case study.
Novell’s purchase of SUSE Linux in 2003 fulfilled predictions that a large operating system company would buy a Linux distribution.
That’s it for this week, which was covered in 5 parts (it was only 2 parts last week). █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
Open Honesty said,
April 28, 2008 at 3:08 pm
If Novell protects us from Microsoft, who protects us from Novell:
The one thing we all have to remember is that open source leads to new concepts and market opportunity for small development shops. Just ask Astrum Inc. http://www.astruminc.com, what astrum did was to develop the first SUSE based Solution Stack using Novell technology. What they produced and what the independent testing reported was a beast of an appliance and Astrum published these reports on its website.
This solution described at RSA is the first true Identity based encryption system that can target users who have access to critical data or compliant sensitive data and harden compliance based policies that are compliance mandated. Astrum then did a OEM with nCipher and converted the nCIpher HSM from a 32bit card to a true 64bit card with eDirectory integration. Now if that wasn’t enough they then developed a key management system that never exposes any part of the key to a hacker outside the appliance and without making a customer change it’s network or put agents on it’s storage. I was very impressed as I spoke to representative from Astrum. Now according to nCipher as told to me at RSA this makes the Astrum solution the only solution to meet the up coming FIPS 3 compliance changes and make this appliance very unique in the market space.
The problem:
The concept from what I could gather was presented to Novell under NDA two years ago at the end of 2006 and promises of concept protection were made and agreements were signed and both worked with business units to ensure no competitive issues may arise. They did not! So Astrum shared with Novell executives the plan that at the end of the day for example map 8 of the PCI requirements to the appliance along with all the major compliances while having the ability to leverage all the security solutions sold by Novell or any other security software based solution that could sit in the network. What happened is Astrum became the first ever to develop and Novell based solution stack using SUSE enterprise server in a appliance only to have it stolen from them!.. Hence the following links.
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20080416/AQW05816042008-1.html
http://www.novell.com/linux2/appliance/
So if the solution is potentially a market changing concept as Linux can be why expose a concept to a company like Novell who touts protection in the Open source community, of course they promise protection from Microsoft but who promises concept protection from Novell. When Novell realized the market impact of such a solution they have moved to slowly create competition for little Astrum who is coming to market with out any assistance as promised by Novell. This solution from what I hear from internal Novell had enough potential market impact that it changed a direction for a major software company like it did for Novell. Prior to 07 and from what I understand Novell couldn’t spell compliance much less understands an appliance stack approach to compliancy and encryption.
Develop for Novell on SUSE or jeOS, and expose a development and market plan, NO WAY!!! I really feel for these guys and have to ask why anyone would trust Novell and are they truly moving to a channel model.