Q&A: Novell CEO touts Linux, identity products

Computerworld - SALT LAKE CITY -- With NetWare usage continuing to decline, Novell Inc. is making Linux and "identity-driven computing" the focal points at this week's annual BrainShare user conference here. In an interview with Computerworld yesterday, CEO Jack Messman talked about his company's strategy, its efforts to court Windows users and recent shake-ups in Novell's executive ranks.
It's been about 14 months since Novell acquired SUSE Linux AG. In what ways has the acquisition helped the most? It allowed us to change the strategy of the company to focus on Linux and identity. We had the identity products in the house. But we weren't being very successful knocking on doors and trying to talk about identity. And now with Linux, we get in the door to talk about Linux, and then we tell 'em about our identity products and they say, "Oh, I didn't know you did that." So that's been a very, very big help. ... A lot of people had sort of written Novell off because they didn't know where the NetWare product-line migration was going to take us. And now that we showed that we've put that on a different trajectory by getting NetWare services on top of the Linux trajectory, they see that we have relevancy again.
You've had the identity products before, but they didn't catch on. Why is it going to be different this time? We had a different and maybe you could even say it was the wrong approach. We were developing products when, in fact, the market needed a solution. We had 166 products when I joined the company, and we had a history of being able to develop great products that had no market. Back in '95, as an example, when we created the directory, people said, "So what. We don't know what a directory is good for."
But then when we got into the Internet Age, where you had many people having to talk to one and one to many, they saw that having a directory to organize all this was an important thing. And that's when we started developing a solution. We knew that in order to sell it as a solution, you had to have consultants, because the products couldn't sell themselves. ... So we bought Cambridge Technology Partners to provide us with the consulting side, the solution side. And we bought SilverStream, which provided us with some components of identity that we didn't have ... in terms of the services-oriented architecture and the business process management, the provisioning