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Novell positions its collaboration strategy at Brainshare
Wednesday, June 9, 2010 by Angela Ashenden
Despite Novell’s long history in the collaboration software market through its trusty email platform GroupWise, the company has been largely forgotten as an enterprise collaboration software player over the last few years. Those closer to the company may have been aware of the launch of two new collaboration products back in 2007 – a team workspace offering (Teaming) and a web conferencing tool (Conferencing) – however these too have failed to raise the company’s profile in the collaboration market in the way the company might have hoped, and neither have they greatly boosted its flagging revenues in this area. In the meantime, Novell’s other business areas – such as security, systems management and its Linux server business, for example – have grown significantly by comparison, and to a large extent define the way in which the Novell brand is viewed today.
And so it was against this backdrop that I attended this year’s Novell Brainshare conference in Amsterdam in May – with relatively low expectations from a collaboration perspective, prepared to have to pluck snippets of collaboration strategy from a vast sea of security and systems management information (which, frankly, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to). However, while I was, I think, the only analyst in attendance with a specific collaboration focus (which I took as a bad sign!), in fact I was pleasantly surprised by the event. There was indeed a significant focus on what the company terms “Intelligent Workload Management” – which incorporates Novell’s security, systems management and SuSe Linux business in a convincing strategy designed to help organisations manage and optimise their IT infrastructure both on premise and in the cloud – but there was also a major emphasis on collaboration and how Novell intends to pull these two sides of its business together while reinvigorating its collaboration software business.
I will be looking at Novell’s collaboration software strategy in detail in a forthcoming Vendor Insight report, but at a high level there are two central pieces to the strategy:
- Novell Pulse – this is a real-time, social collaboration platform which is due for release later this year. Built using the Google Wave protocol, Novell sees solutions like Pulse becoming the heart of future collaboration strategy, with other tools including email, team workspaces and web conferencing acting as services which feed into or out of this central hub.
- Collaboration Data Management – this is an evolving strategy which aims to apply Novell’s expertise in security and systems management to enterprises’ collaboration environments, enabling data from multiple collaborative sources to be managed and secured centrally, synchronising internal and external data sources, and supporting both on-premise and cloud-based services, as well as a combination of the two environments.
Overall, the strategy from a product perspective seems strong, although there are still significant questions around how well the company can communicate and sell its vision to the right people within enterprises, particularly given its IT-centric background and its parallel focus on Intelligent Workload Management.
You can read our Capability Summary and Overview of Novell’s collaboration software offering here.
For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.
Posted in Collaboration
With respect to Intelligent workload management and Novell’s Groupwise – collaboration software – would you / Novell be also looking at allowing business users to ‘collaborate’ on projects and ‘share’ servers in real time? By sharing I mean – increasing server utilization (physical, virtual or cloud server instance). Typically server utilization are below 10% according to industry reports hence the query.
There is technology available to do this magic – allow more than one application to run on a server without impacting application performance. Requires no change to the application, no overheads. Check out Silverline from Librato – http://silverline.librato.com
Thanks for your comment, however this topic falls outside the scope of this blog (which is specifically around collaboration software and best practices). Please continue to offer comment and feedback, but keep it relevant to the focus of the blog. Thanks!