* Novell wins a surprise award
What a week it was last week. People were whooping in the streets. Staid, conservative businessmen were jumping up and down in their glee. I’ll bet the entire state of Massachusetts (actually, it’s a commonwealth – along with Pennsylvania and Virginia – but nobody knows the difference any more) was seeing red. It was an unprecedented occurrence. No one could remember such a thing ever happening before.
Novell won an award for, get ready for this – marketing!
And it wasn’t one of those funny, “how bad are you?” awards like the Ig Nobel prize (https://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002052231_ignobel02.html) or the Hasty Pudding award (https://www.hastypudding.org/new/pages/show/moywoy.shtml). Come to think of it, both of those are also Boston-based. Is there something in the Charles River water?
What Novell achieved, though, was a real honor. The Information Technology Services Marketing Association (http://www.itsma.com) gave the Waltham, Mass., networking company its Gold Award for Developing New Solutions, specifically citing the Extend secure enterprise dashboard.
According to David Munn, president and CEO of ITSMA: “Enterprises are looking for more than a quick product sale out of their relationships with vendors. They want to work with providers that partner with them in building strategies and complete solutions to address specific business problems. In this environment, it is critical that traditional product companies make the shift to become solutions providers if they want to build relevance with customers. Novell was recognized for its understanding of this relationship and the innovation and effectiveness of its marketing programs.”
Novell has been trying hard for the past couple of years to move away from being seen as “just” a product company to one that offers answers to complex problems, and this award seems to justify its effort.
The Novell Extend secure enterprise dashboard is a decision maker’s tool which gathers information for you from the dozens of different business systems across the enterprise, consolidates it and puts it at your fingertips in an intuitive format that’s customized (via the services of eDirectory) to your role and responsibilities. So you have everything you need for fast, informed decision-making.
Today’s problem is not that your enterprise doesn’t have the necessary data, but that the people making the decisions can’t get at it – at least not in the time frame and form in which they need it. The data is stored on many different systems that are scattered across the enterprise, that don’t readily talk to each other and don’t recognize your organization’s unique information needs.
Both of the preceding paragraphs are condensed from Novell’s marketing documents for the Extend secure enterprise dashboard, and they do make me want to investigate the (oops, almost said “product”!) “solution” in more detail (https://www.novell.com/solutions/extend/extend_solve10.html), maybe you should also. After all, a marketing award for Novell doesn’t come along very often. Less often, even, than the Red Sox win the American League pennant.
