03.23.08

BrainShare 2008 Press Roundup: Part III

Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, SLES/SLED, Marketing, NetWare, Videos, Virtualization, Database at 11:46 am by Roy Schestowitz

This will be the last part which concludes the developments made in a busy week. Part I is here and the second is here.

Some New and Returning Customers

This press release absolutely flooded the feeds, but it’s rather uninteresting and didn’t attract the attention of reporters.

Novell today announced one of the world’s leading providers of online
gaming and entertainment has selected Novell to secure its IT
infrastructure and enforce compliance mandates. The bwin Group has millions
of users for its betting, poker, casino and games offered over the Internet
and other digital distribution channels. Using Novell’s security and
information management solution Novell(R) Sentinel(TM), bwin can now
automatically detect threats to user data and meet the stringent auditing
requirements of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

Here is a more significant announcement from Western and Southern Life, which became a Linux user and bragged about considerable savings.

Novell today announced that Western & Southern Life, a subsidiary of
Fortune 500 financial company Western & Southern Financial Group, has
implemented SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server from Novell(R) in each of its
branch offices for 25 percent of the cost of an equivalent proprietary
solution.

A university that tried to escape Novell chickened out and came back to Groupwise.

MACQUARIE University has delayed offering Google’s Gmail service to thousands of staff members because of high transmission costs.

[…]

Staff members will continue to use the Novell Groupwise platform for email.

Pat Bernard, whom we mentioned on a few occasions in the past, talked about VARs as a key to relationships with end users (paying customers).

Pat Bernard is wasting no time in using her recent appointment as Novell’s vice president of global channel sales to emphasize the company’s dedication to its channel partners. At Novell’s BrainShare 2008 conference in Salt Lake City, Bernard outlined the company’s four-point strategy aimed at strengthening its relationship with VARs.

Teaming + Conferencing

Quite a few announcements were made here.

Novell has just uploaded this one video which is perhaps more entertaining than all the boring text.

GWAVA does its thing with Teaming + Conferencing.

GWAVA, Novell’s largest collaboration partner for GroupWise and Teaming + Conferencing, announced today the next version of Retain for GroupWise, improving the speed and extending the reach of the already robust search and archiving capabilities of the fastest selling compliance solution in GWAVA history.

GWAVA also does some PR for Novell’s latest acquisition.

GWAVA, Novell’s largest collaboration partner for GroupWise and Teaming + Conferencing, has announced comprehensive support for Novell SiteScape with its GWAVA Redline.

For Novell GroupWise administrators that have installed SiteScape or Novell Teaming + Conferencing into their GroupWise infrastructure, Redline tracks the entire SiteScape infrastructure in real-time, notifies users via email or pager, and provides a Web-based viewer that lets users see all of the details of components in a single view and produces reports.

Here is GWAVA chatting to some blokes. It talked with Novell’s VP of Product Management.

GWAVATV also did this quick talk with Xiotech.

Getting back to boring text, here is a boring press release which talks about people begging (pretty please! Down on your knees) for Novell’s Teaming + Conferencing solution. This has “commissioned study” written all over it.

Novell today released details of a study by IDG Research Services that
found while collaboration tools are very important for companies, their
effectiveness leaves much to be desired. The study, commissioned by Novell,
surveyed 100 senior IT executives on their experiences with and plans for
collaboration software. A full 80 percent said it is of critical or high
importance that individuals in their companies have the ability to
collaborate securely within and beyond organizational boundaries, but fewer
than half said their current collaboration solutions are extremely or very
effective in enabling collaboration among individual knowledge workers or
among teams and virtual teams.

On top of the drivel above, there is also this PR high-fiver from WorkLight.

WorkLight, the Enterprise 2.0 security specialist, say that Novell’s vision for the future of collaborative business working via social networking sites - unveiled at the company’s Brainshare event in Utah on Monday - highlights the power that services like Facebook offer technically aware modern businesses.

One has to wonder if this kind of feedback was genuinely earned or paid for. Anyhoo… we digress. Here is another recent one we did not mention. As announced briefly by Novell:

Honeywell Releases Security Convergence Study Results

Honeywell (NYSE: HON) today released survey results that reveal how some organizations are integrating physical security measures such as video surveillance and access control with traditional IT security systems. According to “Enterprise Threat Management and Security Convergence: A Benchmarking Study,” significant barriers still exist that prevent organizations from converging their systems and many of these organizations remain conflicted on how to best attain optimal results.

[…]

“This study reinforces that companies are increasingly concerned with protecting their information assets as well as their physical assets, and they recognize that integrating once-disparate systems can be effective in addressing threats,” said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president of Identity and Security Management at Novell, which recently collaborated with Honeywell to develop a converged physical-IT security system.

Blech.

SAP and Novell’s SUSE

We wrote about SAP and SUSE in the past. SAP, unlike Oracle, is still fairly close to Microsoft. By association, it’s also close to Novell and it shows.

BrainShare(R) 2008 — In order to deliver expanded support options to companies running their business operations on SAP applications and the SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise operating system, Novell and SAP AG today announced an extension of their long-standing relationship. In a move that will help meet the growing demand for SUSE Linux Enterprise and provide support for the open source community, Novell and SAP are planning to offer enhanced options for customers who choose to run open source. As part of this initiative, the companies will work together to enable SAP’s industry-leading enterprise applications to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise and Novell’s virtualization and identity management technologies to provide new data center options for customers. In addition, the companies plan to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP’s data center infrastructure requirements, further promote SAP(R) Business All-in-One solutions based on SUSE Linux Enterprise and collaborate within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program to help strengthen customers related to the SAP governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices.

Also reposted here with an article that follows.

Cheap rewrite of the press release:

Novell and SAP strengthen relationship to deliver business critical Linux

Novell and SAP are extending their relationship to improve support for manufacturers running on SAP applications and the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system.

Very unoriginal, but never mind. You can see how similar the article is to the PR, including the headline.

Here is the article which appears in sys-con.com and CBR:

US-based software firm Novell has extended its partnership with SAP to deliver expanded support options to companies running their business operations on SAP applications and the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system.

SJVN wrote an article about it also.

Novell and SAP are out to get even the smallest SAP user running mission-critical applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Novell and SAP have announced that they will customize SAP’s enterprise applications to work even more efficiently with SUSE Linux Enterprise and its associated virtualization and identity management technologies.

Bits of interest even in the Financial Times, which find big names like SAP difficult to ignore.

SAP hopes to woo mid-sized businesses with a range of pre-configured solutions that combine Intel-based hardware with a range of software.

The software includes Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise operating system, SAP’s MaxDB database and its Business All-in-One enterprise suite.

Infrastructure Plans

Novell is throwing around the word “integration” quite a lot nowadays. Even when it speaks of SUSE/SLED it prefers to describe it as a “solution”, not just software. Shades of Microsoft.

This platform will be created as an appliance. Novell said the new release will aim to harmoniously integrate mixed-IT environments. Novell outlined a broad focus for the SuSE Linux Enterprise release which includes supporting appliance development in the data center, helping customers looking for easier UNIX to Linux relocation. Other than that, the leveraging of Xen technologies to deliver virtualization, which will help realizing the benefits of green IT and increasing technology for Windows optimization.

And here the key word is “infrastructure”.

Against a backdrop of efforts aimed at remaking itself, Novell executives today seized the opportunity to help put its sizable Linux and system management initiatives into some context for enterprise IT buyers.

“Novell is first and foremost a software infrastructure company,” said John Dragoon, the company’s chief marketing officer, during a press conference today at Novell’s (NASDAQ: NOVL) annual Brainshare user conference in Salt Lake City.

Add another fancy word and what have you got? “Modular infrastructure”. Yes. Shiny.

Novell details modular infrastructure plan

Novell has laid out a technical strategy that would let users mix and match physical and virtual machines along with management tools, identity services, collaboration software, and open source operating systems.

QLogic

QLogic made this announcement, which went by without much attention.

Novell BrainShare 2008 — QLogic Corp. (NasdaqGS:QLGC - News), a leader in networking for storage and high performance computing (HPC), today announced that it is the first HBA vendor to ship production ready N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) solution for a shipping Linux distribution. Enterprise Linux customers can now get NPIV-capable Fibre Channel HBAs for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 1 (SP1), the latest Linux platform from Novell that features significant enhancements in virtualization, high performance computing, security, interoperability and system management. QLogic(r) market-leading 2400 series HBAs provide hardware-assist features that enable dynamic provisioning and flexible usage of HBA resources, helping IT managers to extend SAN best practices into virtualized data centers.

This earned at least one article.

Aliso Viejo-based storage networking products firm QLogic said Thursday that the firm has shipped an enhanced version of the firm’s host bus adapter (HBA) storage networking products for Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. QLogic said that it is now shipping a production ready HBA with support for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), a storage industry standard used for supporting virtualization software.

PlateSpin

Novell’s recent acquisition, PlateSpin, heralded their relationship in the following press release.

Novell today announced it will be offering a first look at
next-generation data center management at BrainShare 2008. This event will
showcase the offerings available today from Novell(R) and PlateSpin* that
deliver complete workload lifecycle management, helping customers plan,
provision, protect and optimize their data center provided services. These
solutions reinforce Novell’s ability to harmoniously integrate mixed IT
environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. The combined
solutions allow customers to seamlessly move workloads between physical and
virtual environments creating greater agility and reducing server sprawl,
complexity and costs in their IT infrastructure.

Dan Kusnetzky responds:

Quite a few companies are developing technology that can help organizations move from seeing their datacenter as a number of silos to seeing their systems as a pool of resources that can be dynamically allocated according to their own policies, guidelines and service level requirements and then reallocated as conditions change. Novell and PlateSpin have both offered interesting technology in the past to address parts of the requirements of such a solution. Putting the pieces together is likely to make the task somewhat simpler.

He also offers a compliment to Novell:

I’ve been in Salt Lake City at Novell’s Brainshare. As in years past, Novell presented an enthusiastic rendition of its messages, interesting demonstrations and even labs allowing folks to actually use the newest editions of the company’s products. It’s an event worth attending if you’re interested in Novell’s technology.

Leftovers

There were all sorts of relatively minor announcements, including this one from Condrey Corporation.

Condrey Corporation announced today at Novell BrainShare the immediate availability of DocXchanger 1.0, a product that allows users to easily discover and securely access their network files and folders from any location, enabling interactive document sharing capabilities that eliminate email attachments.

Compellent was there also.

Compellent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE Arca: CML) today announced at the Novell BrainShare event that its storage area network (SAN) has been certified with both Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and NetWare 6.5 operating systems, helping make it seamless for Novell administrators to leverage the Compellent SAN to lower storage costs and energy consumption. The Novell Yes Certified designation applies to both Fibre Channel and iSCSI server connections to the Compellent SAN.

Conclusion (BrainDump)

Summary of some bits from this event as a whole comes from Todd Weiss:

At the BrainShare 2008 conference this week, Novell Inc. executives shared their visions of the future with customers, partners and developers as they outlined new products, services and strategies.

But some of the most interesting tidbits came in interviews held away from the glare and video cameras of the keynote spotlights.

That’s it for BrainShare. There’s the possibility of ’spillover’ affecting next weekend’s reports. █

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