I’ve been involved in a discussion about Novell in general on a message board. I’ve come to the conclusion that Novell as a company confuses me. Technology wise, they have some of the most integrated and best cross platform products that you can purchase in terms of directory services, groupware, identity management, and asset management(all of Zenworks). You can certainly argue that they have the best of breed in many of those areas available to run on the Linux.

However, the specter of shrinking market share comments analogous to Slashdot’s netcraft claims about BSD’s untimely demise continue to hang over Novell. I’m not entirely sure if they are true. I also can’t be sure they are not. What I do know that if it’s not the technology that is lacking, something else has to be.

That brings us to three key areas, upper management, sales, and marketing. Going from back to front, we’ll start with marketing. In the user community, Novell has had a reputation for having very lack luster marketing, if any at all. Their ads in magazines are always well designed but are sometimes vague at what they’re actually marketing. There also seems to lack an air of excitement that a company like Apple manages to promote with OSX. The latest version of OSX was just released, and a major feature that reviewers have been talking about is the change of the dock from 2D to 3D. Let’s be honest, that’s a very trivial change in the grand scheme of things but one that Apple promotes and creates excitement around. While it’s hard to make eDirectory exiting(unless you’re an x.500 super nerd), you can drive that excitement using OpenSuse and SLED.

Sales is a related major component. My only issue with sales is purely annecdotal, but important nontheless. When I first took my current job, our licensing for Novell products had expired during the brief period between the last guy and me. I was trying to play catchup and the licensing is something that slipped through the cracks. I finally realized that it had expired and rectified the situation. However, in all that time, Novell had not tried to contact our organization. While we’re small compared to large businesses and other organizations, every little bit counts. Aside from doing my license every year, I hear nothing from Novell. Every other software company that I deal with every year at least tries to contact me and find out what is happening, any issues I might be having, and just a general sense of how my experience with their software product(s) are. Novell is strangely the only non participant. The technical people from Novell do a far better job “selling” the products than the actual sales force, however most of the technical people doing a better job at selling these products are talking to the technical users who might already be using or own the product. You can see the problem there.

Finally, all this is controlled by the upper management. I don’t work at Novell. I don’t know the corporate culture or the day to day operations. All I can say is that if major parts of the business are not doing a great job, the blame ultimately flows up.

I do actually have some suggestions. Some of these might be unrealistic, but that’s the benefit I have from not actually making the decisions!

• Market and promte OpenSuse. SLED is a fine product, but due to it’s licensing and price barriers, it is more difficult to promote than something I can just download. Make OpenSuse something you can buy support for, even if the updates/patches are not something that customers and users are charged for.
• Try to build excitement around your products. OpenSuse is a great platform to do this. It’s visually a good looking operating system(distro technically), and that’s a good start. The barrier to entry is only as large as a user’s hardware and technical ability. As I mentioned before, SLED creates a much higher barrier. Use Apples methods as a standard and adapt to them. If Apple can get people excited about a toolbar, then there’s no reason why Novell can’t get people excited with something in OpenSuse/SLED.
• Sales should stay in contact with their customers. A call every once in a while goes a long way. Imagine this scenario. I’m a current Novell customer and I need a collaboration tool. I post on something in a message board asking about such tools. People come back mentioning Sharepoint or various other solutions. That can get the ball rolling in an unfortunate direction for Novell. Imagine that instead, my rep calls me and asks me what’s happening and what we’re working on. I mention the need for collaboration tool and he or she start telling me about the great new product Novell will be selling. They go on to tell me all the great points about it and even offer to set up a demo so I can see it in action. That’s the way it should be done. You can see Gwava for that type of practice. It works.
• Offer free setup assistance when someone purchases a new product or licensing. If you purchase Sophos virus scanning software, you also receive 6 hours of free setup support. Help getting the software setup, beyond the official documentation, or very expensive ATT classes would be helpful.

These are just a few suggestions. I want Novell to succeed. For some reason, I actually care about the long term viability of a corporation I have no financial stake in. The point I’m trying to make is that Novell has an amazing chance to really surge forward. The technology is there. They need to wake up in other faucets of the business. Maybe hiring an outside marketing firm who can bring in fresh new ideas or properly motivate the sales team to go those few extra steps that mean a lot. Novell needs to go beyond their standard operating procedure because it clearly isn’t enough. I hate using buzzwords, but in this case, innovation is a word that Novell really needs to embrace within all phases of business, not just the development.

I get a whole bunch of IT related magazines each month that despite my objections to the publisher, keep getting sent. I normally read the cover and then toss them. This month’s CIO magazine caught my attention. On the cover it reads “can outsourcers innovate?”. My first thought was….NO! Then I went on to actually read the story which prompted me to send the following email to their letter department and the author of the story:

While I’m certainly not a CIO, I think it’s pretty much common sense to think that outsourcing innovation is a ridiculous expectation. You can’t gut an entire service from your company, effectively severing that component of your business from the core business outside of utility needs, and expect the lack of communication that results to drive any sort of business process. It’s like selling your car and then wondering why the bus service doesn’t drop you off at your house after work.

Beyond the communication issues, what driving force is there for an outsourced business module to innovate for a company? As was said in the article, how do you build innovation into a contact? You can’t. Innovation is not something you can quantify. Even if you try to fit it into a contract, you’re quantifying it based on what would most likely be flawed and subjective evaluation process. Moreover, that evaluation process will be partially driven by the CIO who can’t drive innovation in the first place which is why they would be trying to write innovation into a service contract.

So we end up in a situation where a CIO is either ordered or of his or own volition decimates an entire part of a business under the guise of saving money and turning around and being surprised when they realized they were taken for a ride by these SLA sales people because the CIO didn’t do their own due diligence.

My opinion on the matter didn’t change. I could be wrong on this. I just hate the idea of outsourcing because I feel that the reason for doing this is saving money despite the bull shit execu-speak reasons that are fed.

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