This session was over at the Marriott … that’s a first. The
projectors are not working … there is no audio … and Juergen Geck
couldn’t make it here. Bummer. The VP of R&D is doing
the presentation … I didn’t catch his name.
He defined SuSE as a new business unit of Novell … I hadn’t heard
that before, but it makes sense. He also expanded into discussing
the difference between Open and Closed Source companies … “the
difference isn’t that big” … SuSE simply takes Open Source projects,
tests and certifies, and supports. So they are really selling the
process … not the product. It’s cool to hear this since I used
to argue this at Novell … we used to have people that thought we sold
NetWare … but we really sold the development and support services
. At least that is what customers were paying for …
SuSe has been going forward with the 2.4 kernel, and has been adding
features of the 2.6 on their own. They are now embracing and
integrating the 2.6 kernel in their latest products.
He brought up an interesting chart of “Effort” and “Committment” …
what you get with what product. With SuSE Linux you get “no
committments” … with the Enterprise products you get “availability of
support” and “availability of maintenance”. They have a model for
their “Technology Strategy” … he has a great chart … Customer Value
across the bottom (with build, manage, and integrate) and then
Competitive Advantage up the left side (with technology, platform, and
integration platform) … from this he explains that they began
at the “build-technology” … moved to “build-platform” … then to
“manage-technology” … and now to “manage-platform”. I might
have to recreate this diagram … it’s interesting.
Again … they emphasize the power and value of their “AutoBuild”
process .. . and I would agree … it’s this automation that enables
them to deliver. He indicated a database of ~4000 packages that
they track. Updates are detected, patches are created, builds are
created, QA and Doc are notified, eventually they are released to
maintenance. There are both manual and automated aspects … some
of the original tests and security checks are manual.
The Support cycle is:
- Phase One – bugs reported/found
- Phase Two – temporary patch released to reporter of bug
- Phase Three – recertification/testing
- Phase Four – customer deployment
Ok … now I’m really bummed. They aren’t talking about futures
at all … this is the same stuff that I have heard in several SuSE
presentations. What the products are … how AutoBuild works …
what’s in each product … what is different between products. I
understood this the first time I heard it.
Wow … he just finished his presentation! People are grumbling
out loud … they are as shocked as I am … No Futures!
This is the worst presentation that I have been to … not that he
didn’t present well, it’s just that he didn’t touch on *anything* that
the title and synopsis mentioned … this sucked.