* Novell didn't just get into identity management
To really grasp the marketing problem Novell has, it’s only necessary to look at one headline from an online publication last week.
First, the background: Novell has put in motion another open source project, this one called “Bandit.” It’s headed up by Novell distinguished engineer Dale Olds, with whom I got to sit down last week at the annual Burton Group Catalyst Conference – the oldest conference dealing with identity management issues. The conference was started by Burton Group Founder Craig Burton, an early refugee from Novell who left the networking company more than a dozen years ago.
Bandit is described in this TechWorld story as: “an ambitious open source identity management project, which aims to allow companies to integrate different identity systems and provide a consistent approach to securing and managing identity.”
It is an ambitious project but one that Novell definitely has the expertise to lead based on its years of experience in the identity area, starting with NDS (now eDirectory) back in the early 1990s, right through to today’s Novell Identity Manager offering.
But there’s the headline on Ars Technica, a fairly well respected online journal of computing: “Novell gets into identity management“!
If a technology journal that’s been around since the 1990s doesn’t realize that Novell almost invented identity management, what hope is there that non-tech business executives will?
In a somewhat related development, Novell announced that William Hewitt, former vice president of marketing and most recently president of Novell Asia-Pacific, has resigned for “personal reasons.”
Hewitt was moved to the Asia-Pacific post when current Marketing Vice President John Dragoon was named as his replacement. This was similar to Hewitt’s start in Waltham when he replaced Debra Bergevine as marketing head while she was reassigned to “unspecified duties” – then left the company after a few weeks. Hewitt spent around a year as marketing honcho, a bit shorter stint than most, but it appears that neither Bergevine nor Dragoon was any more successful in getting the right recognition for the networking – and identity management – company.
By the way, if you’re at all interested in identity you should check out the Bandit project; it’s really an interesting approach to identity management.
