* Where is ZENworks in Novell's strategy?
I ended last week’s first newsletter with a bit of a cliffhanger. I’d talked about NetWare and GroupWise in light of what they once meant to Novell and where they were headed. Then I alluded to the third member of the triumvirate of products that I thought might be on their way out.
While I didn’t specifically mention the name, I was alluding to BorderManager. But my phraseology did elicit a quick e-mail from Novell’s Martin Buckley asking if I’d heard something about ZENworks that he hadn’t as yet been told (and he is director of product management for the ZENworks product line, although he prefers to be referred to as the evil Zen scientist!).
Truth is, I’ve never thought of ZENworks as a stand-alone product any more than I think of eDirectory as one. I still think of the mythical “10 Zens” that Novell ex-CEO Eric Schmidt announced a half dozen years ago and the fruits of that initiative – ZENworks for Desktops, ZENworks for Servers, ZENworks for Networks, maybe even ZENworks for sinks and drains or even ZENworks for Dummies.
I still consider the whole ZENworks family as services intimately connected to the directory and to the network operating system they’re running on – not a stand-alone, shrink-wrapped product. The reality is, of course, that ZENworks is now a single product or, at least, a single product number. It’s the ZENworks suite, which includes all the tools necessary to manage the entire lifecycle of desktops, laptops, servers and handheld devices.
ZENworks didn’t even have to change (much) after the SuSE Linux acquisition – it already came in a Linux version. In fact, ZENworks is certainly Novell’s most multi-platform offering, if not the all-time champion. Just look at the platforms it either runs on or manages:
* BlackBerry devices running Research In Motion (RIM) OS 2.1 and later.
* Fedora.
* Mandrake 9.1, 9.2.
* NetWare 5.1, 6, 6.5.
* Palm OS 3.x and later.
* Red Hat 7.2, 7.3, 8, 9; Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1, 3; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, 3.0; Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3; Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 3; Red Hat Enterprise Server 2.1.
* SuSE Linux 8.2, 9; SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0; SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.
* Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional; Windows 2000 Server; Windows 98 SE; Windows CE 2.11 and later; Windows NT 4.0; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP Professional.
As far as Buckley is aware, ZENworks will be around for some time to come. I think so too. Probably longer than either NetWare or BorderManager (at least in the “current products” guide). I’ll find out a lot more when I sit down with Buckley at BrainShare next month, but for now you can be pretty sure that an investment in ZENworks won’t be wasted.
