Novell CEO picking his battles

Novell wants to shed historical comparisons with industry titans and focus on developing its core technologies into a set of infrastructure services it says will define its success going forward, according to company CEO Ron Hovsepian.

Novell, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this week, lost its industry titan tag more than a decade ago, but its strategies continue to draw comparisons to the likes of IBM and Microsoft. Hovsepian says he won't back down from a fight, but that Novell is now picking its battles, and its friends, wisely.

"We are past that old business of hanging on," Hovsepian says. "As you look at the [networking] stack it is about knowing what your role is at each layer at macro and micro levels."

The Novell chief, known for a friendly demeanor that hides his competitive fire, says the company will continue to battle the likes of Microsoft in certain areas, such as server and desktop operating systems, but will complement Microsoft and other vendors in technology areas such as systems management and applications.

Click to see: Chart of open source efforts

The latter is evidenced by this week's extension of a partnership with SAP that opens to Novell the huge SAP install base and the opportunity to supply it with platform, virtualization and identity support.

Novell's strategy, called Fossa and introduced this week at its annual BrainShare conference, calls for delivery of network infrastructure as a set of services that can be interconnected, integrated across platforms or run stand-alone. The modular platform isn't long on new technologies, but mostly includes enhancements, acquisitions and infusions of standards to its Linux, virtualization, orchestration, policy, identity, compliance, management and collaboration tools.

Hovsepian says he set the ball rolling on Fossa in 2006 when he aligned Novell's core strengths with network layers and began figuring out where Novell would compete and partner.

The major milestone has been the controversial interoperability and cross-patent licensing deal Novell signed with Microsoft in November 2006. The latest signs of the plan have been acquisitions of collaboration vendor SiteScape and virtualization management player PlateSpin.

Hints of success were also evident in Novell's 2008 fiscal first quarter earnings that showed a 65% revenue increase in its open platform division that includes SUSE Linux desktop and server. In addition, net income hit $16.8 million, a significant turnaround from the $19.5 million loss Novell posted in the same quarter a year ago.

"[Fossa] is not a far-flung dream," Hovsepian says. "It is a lot of reality; it is our core competencies. We are just tying them together. We have to look at the market segments and we have to attach ourselves to those markets."

Hovsepian may be on to something as Fossa, which Novell admits is in the vision stage and might not fully bloom until 2012, is getting a warm reception nonetheless from the company's users.

Those users see Novell regaining its balance and pointing in the right direction, albeit with a few corrections needed in the short term such as fostering the education of more certified Linux engineers.