Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Thoughts on Novell Brainshare   Last week was the annual Novell user’s conference in Salt Lake City called Brainshare (http://www.novell.com/brainshare/index.html). This makes the third consecutive year I’ve attended while the conference is in its 19th year. Attendance was somewhere around the 6,000 level although the keynotes held in a large section of the Salt Palace seemed to be pretty full.   I attended the conference as a member of the Press. For all intents and purposes you could get all the information you needed on the company and their products in two days. The Novell PR folks schedule interviews and briefings for all the press / analyst folks on Monday and Tuesday. They also took us to a Jazz – Spurs basketball game on Monday night which was fun (I’ve been David Robinson fan for a long time and enjoyed getting to see him play one last time).   Session management at Brainshare is very efficient. For most sessions you can just walk up, scan your badge and walk right in. For the more popular sessions it’s a good idea to sign up ahead of time. If you don’t you run the risk of not getting a seat. Some of the really popular sessions, like Laura Chappell’s talks on analyzing packet trace files, identifying attack signatures using packet filtering, and network analysis tools, were held in larger rooms this year (yea!) but were still comfortably full. Laura has a great web site (http://www.packet-level.com) for anyone interested in the nitty gritty details of network traffic.   Monday’s first keynote speaker was CEO Jack Messman (http://www.novell.com/company/bios/jmessman.html). Jack goes way back with Novell (President and CEO from 1982 – 1983) and was President and CEO of Cambridge Technology Partners prior to the merger of that company with Novell. As a speaker he doesn’t have the stage presence of a Gates or Chambers or Fiorina. He also made some statements about Linux that required a “clarification (http://lwn.net/Articles/29345/)”.   I think the book is still out on the new CEO.  The company is afloat but treading water at best. I asked a Novell employee their opinion of the company at present and the response was “we’re OK”. With $750 M in the bank and no debt they are fiscally better off than some in the industry but that amount of cash pales in comparison to Microsoft’s war chest. Time will be the judge of the job that Mr. Messman does.   Second up on Monday was Chris Stone (http://www.novell.com/company/bios/cstone.html). Chris is definitely the better speaker and has the position as the technical driver behind the company’s new directions into open source and a better relationship with developers. Novell has made a key decision in embracing the open source movement. Their acronym of choice is NAMP (NetWare, Apache, MySQL and PHP) as opposed to LAMP. The latest version of NetWare runs all three open source tools natively. 9:22:14 PM    comment []

Interview with Chris Stone   I had a chance to spend 15 – 20 minutes with Chris Stone during Brainshare. I didn’t really have any kind of assignment to interview him so most of the questions were just things I was curious about. At last years Brainshare Chris had just made his return to Novell after stints at several startups. His message to the crowd was that he was back and had a desire to see Novell show more interest in the developer community.   This year they have attempted to make good on that promise with a number of new initiatives.   Q: Novell has stated that they are making a renewed effort to focus on the developer community. Who do you see as the primary focus of that effort?   A: Developers working with XML, J2EE and open standards like XForms. We have a focused developer campaign that is coming. We’ve also put up a Web site (http://forge.novell.com) that will serve as a collaboration point for open source developers looking to host their applications on NetWare.   Q: What do you see as Novell’s role in the open source community?   A: To be a true member of that community you have to give back. You have to add value. We think we’re doing that with the contribution of our UDDI server to the open source community. We’ve also contributed back to projects like Apache when we’ve had something to contribute.   Q: Do you see a future for Linux on the desktop and if so when?   A: I absolutely think that Linux on the desktop has a future. And it will take off when there is a one to one transition of all the popular applications including things like Real Player.   Q: Where’s the money in the Linux space?   A: We think it’s in adding value that customers are willing to pay for. Things like our eDirectory that provide stable, secure, robust identity management across every platform. We also think there’s a market for integration and support services. Many companies don’t want to build mission critical systems without some type of support organization behind it.   Q: Where do you see the Web services arena going?   A: I think there will be a slow, gradual adoption. The question of proprietary versus open standards will still be debated. We think that open is the way to go.   9:05:27 PM    comment []