Schwab helps fly the Novell flag

I was in San Diego last week for the annual Catalyst conference put on by the Burton Group. This was the 11th annual gathering of those in the business of identity management, along with a few other disciplines, and it was, as always an enjoyable experience. Novell participated in the Federation Interoperability demo that highlighted the first night of the event. The interoperability event was the first of its kind and demonstrated how identity federation products can co-exist in a multi-protocol scenario. As expected, Novell’s products performed flawlessly.

Frank Auger Novell Vice President of product management for identity-driven products also participated in a roundtable discussion about how regulatory compliance impacts identity management programs.

I expected those things, but what I didn’t expect was what I heard on the second day of the event.

Ken Weiss, technical director for Charles Schwab gave a session entitled “Using Web Services to Manage Identity and Access.” In it, he outlined Schwab’s journey from an assortment of mismatched, rag-tag, stand-alone products to an integrated state-of-the-art set of identity management services. He talked about Novell’s eDirectory and its Identity Manager product – and they were part of the final Schwab system, not the old stuff that got thrown out.

It’s so refreshing to hear someone who isn’t connected to the company talk about how Novell is a key to their business and a core part of their infrastructure. Even better, Novell played an important part in the solution, but was certainly not the only provider. The list included Oblix CoreID, Novell Identity Manager, Novell eDirectory, BEA WebLogic and Red Hat Advanced Server. And it all worked well together.

I’ve heard from some of you that I may sometimes tend to emphasize the negative aspects of Novell’s current directions. And I’ll admit that the company takes some steps that do mystify me. But it still heartens me to hear about customers who are using Novell’s products – especially the long-established products – to solve current problems using leading edge technologies such as Schwab’s Web services/service oriented architecture (SOA) approach.

The downside is that I didn’t hear about this from Novell, yet it is something that users and implementers want to hear about – it was the one presentation that kept popping up in all of my discussions throughout the week. A press release, a case study or some bit of publicity about this could go a long way towards helping you convince your management that Novell products are still a viable choice and perhaps stem the tide of enterprises moving to Windows servers. We can only hope that something will be forthcoming.