CNME: Let’s talk about your landmark collaboration this year - Novell says hello to Microsoft. So what will this mean for the emerging regions and the industry in general?
Smid: I was involved in this deal from the early days and our view was driven by the fact that customer demand is forcing people in the industry to work together. Linux has penetrated into the enterprise, Microsoft products are in the enterprise so in the era of industrialised data centres it is only logical that that these products start talking to each other. Customers need value, stability and service and the idea of this collaboration is to deliver on this.
CNME: Customers are demanding this, but surely they have been for a long while now. So what else drove this decision?
Smid: Co-opetition is the truth for the IT industry today. In terms of a technology driver I would say it is virtualisation. So this alliance enables the customer to take advantage of both Novell offerings and Microsoft in a virtualised fashion. So there can be seamless exchanges between Active Directory and E-directory, Open Office and Microsoft Office. CIOs can no longer afford vendor bias and this has caused a paradigm shift in the thinking. For Novell this is great news because we thrive on a heterogeneous environment which brings together best of breed.
CNME: Open Source is the core of your business today. Let’s talk about the scope of its adoption in the enterprise…
Smid: People in general have for long been frustrated with the lack of choice. But open source offered them alternatives. Enterprises are looking for technology that can span across their platforms and systems seamless and Linux can do that. So from being a subject of discussion at the core, Novell has been working with customers to take Linux across the board and to the desktop, particularly with SLED (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop).
We are also happy to announce that we have signed an alliance with UAE’s Zayed University to support the Gulf Open Source Labs (GOSL) initiative which will now help the lab to train, develop skills and support research in the area of Open Source for the region.
CNME: You talk about enabling the Open Enterprises, what is your vision in this area? Will it be focused on the IT management domain with Zen Works?
Smid: Enabling the Open Enterprise means embracing the complexity of today’s IT environment. With Zen Works we are offering customers a platform that can help them manage complexity and multi-platform environments.
Being a strong supporter of open source has helped us understand that companies today realistically have mixed environments. So our strategy accepts that and our technology enables that.
CNME: Talking about Linux desktops, is SLED going to be all that Vista cannot be for the enterprise?
Smid: The great thing that Vista has done for the industry is trigger and force the market to re-look at the desktop and more importantly invest in re-training staff on its usage. This is an invitation for us to use this opportunity and offer people a core cost effective yet equivalent option.
So SLED will put the spotlight on training, more stable OS and doing all this with less hardware requirements as compared to Vista. While some aspects like training will be similar in the two, on the long run SLED will offer more value for money with all the feature richness.
CNME: The security business particularly identity management is another pillar in Novell’s business. Where is that going?
Smid: Compliance requirements are a major driver to any technology adoption today. Using it, companies can actually cross political, cultural and business barriers. The identity management space is going to be a major area of focus and it should be.
The future is clearly going to lie in enabling federation of identities across businesses and processes. Currently aspects like provisioning are top of mind.
Novell is looking to elevate this whole game to the next level by taking the identity management concept into the ‘Identity Assurance’ domain.
Identity Assurance is about creating a platform that will bring logical verification and physical verification together for companies to monitor identities and security. We have signed a partnership with physical security major Honeywell to integrate our IDM offering into an identity assurance package and offer it to customers.
This region clearly has the benefit of infrastructure, so Novell is focused on working with our customers across our key business functions to leverage this foundation.
The Middle East was always a market which wanted to invest in tried and tested technology. But this is fast changing as companies in the region are beginning to push the boundaries and invest in innovation for their business instead. We are well placed in this change.