Novell Kicks Off BrainShare with Bevy of Promises, Products


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Filing in for an ailing CEO Jack Messman, vice chairman Chris Stone vowed Monday that Novell will simplify pricing for customers, reinvirgorate its channel with new investments, streamline its convoluted product line and step up efforts to root out proprietary interfaces that the software and services company depends on today.

Speaking before an estimated 5,000 attendees gathered here in Salt Lake City for the week-long event--Novell's biggest annually--Stone took the opportunity to announce that the company will borrow a page from IBM, Intel and others and create a single, unified alliance organzation to be headed by an internal Novell executive. That individual will have responsibility for interactions with all Novell's various partners--ISVs, hardware makers, resellers, distributors, consulting organizations and systems and solutions integrators. It will mark the first time Novell has ever consolidated the management of these disparate constituents under one umbrella, he said.

Stone also took great pleasure in poking fun at Microsoft and vowed that the new Novell, which will maintain two separate brands in Novell and Cambridge Technology Partners, will be a more agressive competitor than before. In particular, he said Novell will not shy from competing head-to-head with Microsoft--so much so that it will even borrow a page from the software behemoth's marketing plan. Stone said in conjunction with some of Novell's forthcoming changes to its pricing model, the company will adopt a "seed and build" model used by Microsoft. Among other reasons, Novell attributes the significant drop-off in support among partners for NetWare to Microsoft's aggressive moves to give away NT and displace Novell products, Stone says.

"The game they play is that if you give away the platform, you can upsell the other components and generate revenue that way," he said. "Well, dammit, we're going to do the same thing."

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One concrete change that will come from this: streamlined pricing.

"As you move to a solutions model, it's one price," Stone said. "It's not priced about how many objects you have in the directory."

Although repeatedly questioned about the creeping influence of Cambridge Technology Partners over Novell, Stone said Novell will remain a viable, Utah entity with deep ties to the channel, no matter how big or successful CTP's consulting engagements.

"Let's face it, folks, we need you more than you need us," Stone told developers and channel partners.

To achieve its aims and transform its product portfolio into a solutios portfolio, Novell must reorganize. That means smaller engineering teams, closer ties to partners, more aggressive marketing and better support of key industry technology standards, including SOAP, J2EE and XML.

To that end, Stone and CTO Carl Ledbetter confirmed that Novell will soon connect its eDirectory with other LDAP directories. And they vowed to continue to enhance NetWare and better support other platforms, including Windows, Linux, Solaris and AIX.

"Other than marketing, the largest frustration [with Novell is the inability to integrate all of our products together in a very clean way [with a single interface to all of them that looks the same," Stone said. "That's our No. 1 goal in engineering this year--one way to manage across all of our products."

On Monday, Novell supported its marketing message with the introduction of several new products, including ZENWorks Synergy and ZENworks Workspace. It also outlined identity provision, and rolled out a new version of its eDirectory and an expanded alliance with BEA.

ZENworks Synergy bundles a set of Novell services into a single solutions suite that helps users get information and applications to employees no matter where they reside on a network. ZENworks Workspace provides what Novell says is an easy to use, Web-based workgroup solution for exchanging information and messages so teams of individuals can collaborate more effectively.