Jack Messman kicked off the conference keynote by indicating that
Brainshare doesn’t do Windows. They have pushed that all of the
PCs around the conference are running SuSE Linux Distributions.
As he is going through the “Promises made, promises kept” he is
indicating that they are offering “Flexibility and Choice” …
“Customer Focused” … “Linux in the Enterprise”. He is
emphasizing the value of Ximiam and SuSE. He is also emphasizing
the support that Novell intends to provide to customers – Support,
Consulting, Certification, and Training. He indicated there are
800 training partners. Novell is pushing to become *the* “trusted
support partner, 24×7, for Linux”.
Security is the next place that Jack is talking about. Promoting
Red Carpet Enterprise as a solution for systems management and
maintenance. He even indicated that if your systems were attacked
and wiped out, Red Carpet can re-image. What? I thought it
was all so secure … 😉
Liability and Indemnification … Novell will provide this with
contracts. I was impressed that Jack chose not to spend much time
on this, nor even mention the SCO name.
Migrating to Linux … Novell will provide the process to make this
simple and possible. They are pushing a “Getting Started”
promotion to begin this migration. He then moved to the “roadmap”
… They are going to accelerate the release of NetWare v7.0 … by
releasing Open Enterprise Server … a product that will include both
kernels. He continues to emphasize Novell’s “we have answers”
position. He then moved through the various product lines …
their application development stuff (good move … they are adopting
Eclipse!) … the directory products … open source contributions of
iFolder and YaST. It seems to me that they are open sourcing YaST
with the new emphasis on Red Carpet. iFolder in Open Source will
be cool … I’ll look forward to checking out the project. I saw
a session where they indicated they were rewriting in C#/Mono …
New partner announcements – PartnerNet Program now consists of Solution
Providers, Technology Partners, and Training Partners. The focus
on these Partners will be: Linux, Secure Identity Management, Resource
Management, and Web Services.