* A low-key BrainShare
I went off to Salt Lake City for BrainShare last week not knowing what to expect. Deep down, though, I think I harbored the feeling that it would more closely resemble an O’Reilly Open Source conference (see “Inside the lions’ cage” link below) than the NetWare Developers’ Conference that had been rechristened BrainShare almost 15 years ago.
The more radical open source faithful, though, were either not there or keeping a low profile. One person did suggest that they would have been out in force at last month’s LinuxWorld show in Boston and were unable to pony up the big bucks needed for entry into the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. For whatever reason, BrainShare did seem to harbor a larger number of “partners” (Novell-speak for the folks that sell Novell stuff – the retailers and independent consultants) than before, as Novell tried everything it could to convince resellers that selling packages of stuff (like the Novell Linux Small Business Suite) could be profitable.
I also wondered, going in, how the company would replace former vice chairman Chris Stone’s charismatic speaking and former CTO Alan Nugent’s visionary speaking. The answer turned out to be – it didn’t. CEO Jack Messman may be a tough, hard-headed business manager but his opening address to the “Novell faithful” had all the charisma of a shareholders meeting. The only time he had to pause for applause was when he thanked the partners – then lead the applause for them. Even that was a rather tepid response. His speech was competent and workmanlike, but not inspiring (as Stone’s remarks of the past two years have been) and certainly no where near the orations that Ray Noorda used to deliver which could whip the faithful into a furor.
By contrast, David Patrick, vice president and general manager of Linux, Open Source Platforms and Services and David Litwick, vice president and general manager of Linux, Open Source Platforms and Services seemed almost ebullient as they led demonstrations of the various Novell product offerings. But even these were a far cry from the general histrionics that BrainShare used to provide. For example, when he first demonstrated System Fault Tolerant (SFT) NetWare, former Novell Chief Scientist Drew Major pulled out a fire axe and chopped the cables between the two paired servers. Patrick demonstrated clustering by gently removing the plug from a machine.
The low-key keynote went well with a rather low-key week as most new announcements (Open Enterprise Server shipping, SuSE Linux 9.3, etc.) had been made 2 to 4 weeks before BrainShare started. Still, there were a few interesting things that I came across and I’ll start talking about them in the next issue.
You might also check in this week’s Identity Management newsletter (https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/index.html) for the one demo from the keynote that did almost make me jump up and shout.
