The Tao Of Software: Novell Takes ZENworks To a Higher Level

So it may come as somewhat of a surprise that Novell, a vendor that more than a few VARs are wary of, has delivered the real deal, winning VARBusiness' Tech Innovators Award for nonWeb services with ZENworks 6, the resource-management tool it introduced this past April.

"Over the past couple of years, customers...have been cautious about deploying solutions that are supposed to lower their TCO or have a very short ROI. They were burned many times with products that made claims that they couldn't substantiate," explains Paul Anderson, CEO of Santa Barbara, Calif.-based solution provider Novacoast. "And with a downturned economy, [they] don't have the leisure of making those kind of purchasing mistakes. ZENworks [is] one of the few products that actually delivers on what it promises...We are able to show an incredibly short ROI for our customers."

Alan Murray, director of product management and marketing, Novell Resource Management, echoes Anderson's sentiments.

"The unique policy-based management of ZENworks ties together an organization's business processes, users and systems to help customers reduce costs and get more value out of existing investments. Novell's partners have been successful with ZENworks because it provides customers with a rapid return on investment."

Specifically, VARs are saying they like the policy-management features of the ZENworks 6 product set.

"[It] gives us a centralized way to control the way users' desktops are configured based on who they are, not where they log in," says Michael Goldstein, vice president of sales and marketing for LAN Associates, a VAR based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "It's extremely powerful and gives the user a consistent look and feel."

Goldstein also says he likes the software's application-management features, which let applications be managed by user name and groups. "ZEN gives us the ability to make sure that the application is configured

correctly and that the user always gets the right version," he says.

Tim Finnegan, Novell business development manager at Raleigh, N.C.-based Alphanumeric Systems, responds well to the software's ability to work with servers, desktops and handhelds. He thinks the suite offers a lot of salable features, including desktop-personality migrations, software-usage tracking, Tiered Electronic Distribution (TED), patch-distribution capabilities, support of directory-based profiles and policies, and Web self-service requests for applications.

The suite's biggest drawback just might be the fact that it doesn't carry the Microsoft logo, despite its cross-platform capabilities with Microsoft, as well as Solaris and Linux.

"Our biggest challenge is selling the product into a non-Novell environment," Goldstein says. "We typically overcome this by trying to help them understand the benefits of the product."

Adds Finnegan: "Novell is a third-party, cross-platform application provider. For some people, this a difficult point to get across; they don't want to listen."

To counter customer pushback due to unfamiliarity, Novacoast regularly offers a demonstration of ZENworks in a live environment. Anderson acknowledges that there are times when customers are hesitant about deploying a suite of applications that are so pervasive throughout their organization.

"Their concern is that they will get bogged down in a deployment that will take months or years," Anderson says. "We allay this fear by deploying ZEN for a fixed price amount and within a fixed time frame. We have been able to deploy every feature of ZEN to our clients, train them, and leave them to use and maintain the product."

"Many of our customers have not kept up with ZENworks and aren't aware of the advanced features added over the past two years," Finnegan says. "In some cases, we have been able to save our customers money immediately because they were looking to purchase another product to solve a business problem--and they had no idea that they already had that functionality available to them in ZEN 6."

But just because a software tool is good doesn't mean it can't be better. Anderson says the ability to update a PC's BIOS via ZENworks "would be great," while Finnegan had a laundry list of improvements for V.7, including enhanced reporting features, more robust asset-management capabilities, Windows XP Tablet Edition support, more enhanced support for Windows CE devices, Macintosh OS support, and, as icing on the cake, a lower price point for the suite.

Both also suggested patch modifications. Finnegan wants an inherent patch database functionality similar to what PatchLink provides. And Anderson would be happy with a patch-management solution.

"ZENWorks does a great job of distributing patches but needs to do more with managing them," he says.