New Study Demonstrates Novell Identity Management Solutions Have the Lowest Total Cost of Ownership

WALTHAM, Mass., Nov. 15, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Novell today announced that a recently completed study proves that Novell's Identity and Access Management solutions offer a 25 percent lower total cost of ownership over a five-year period than competing solutions.  Conducted by independent consulting group Rencana, the study surveyed more than 50 customers and systems integrators about identity solutions from Novell, CA, IBM, Oracle and Courion.

Researchers gathered quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate the total cost of ownership of Provisioning and Web Access Management products and analyzed the differences in licensing, configuration and operations costs between all solutions.  In addition to demonstrating the differences in TCO across businesses ranging from 2,500 users to more than 40,000 users, the study also showed that the cost of services drives the overall TCO.  Novell excelled in this category with competitors being between 33 percent and 83 percent more expensive for services.   This provides a wide range of benefits with system integrators quoting 20 percent less for Novell IAM implementations than for competitive products and Novell products costing 30 percent less to deploy.

"At Identropy, we work with a wide range of scenarios for Identity and Access Management.  Our implementations with Novell are consistently successful and help save our customers time and money," said Victor Barris, CEO of Identropy. "This study validates what we've seen in practice for quite some time."

"One of the consistent drivers for purchases is total cost of ownership. Organizations are not making their buying decisions based on initial costs for service and operation; they need to know what the solution will cost them two, three, five years down the line," said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president and general manager of Security, Management and Operating Platforms at Novell. "This study concludes what we have known for years – Novell® Identity and Access Management solutions are a substantially better value over competitive products. Novell's clear leadership in total cost of ownership helps customers meet their identity and access management needs while driving value to the bottom line."

Additional findings from the study include:

• Systems integrators regularly quote 20% less for Novell IAM implementations than for competitive products.
• The primary differentiator in TCO between IAM products is services expense; Novell was found to be 33% - 83% less expensive than leading vendors.
• Novell out-of-the-box provisioning connectors require up to 75% less systems integrator time to deploy than competitive products.
• Novell custom provisioning connectors require up to 30% less systems integrator time to deploy than competitive products.
• Novell averages 20% less systems integration fees for a comparable provisioning project at companies of all sizes.
• Novell IAM products require an average of 81% less time to generate required audit reports.
• Novell IAM products experience an average of 55% less downtime.

Full details of the study are available at: http://www.novell.com/LowestTCO.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL), a leader in intelligent workload management, helps organizations securely deliver and manage computing services across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. We help customers reduce the cost, complexity and risk associated with their IT systems through our solutions for identity and security, systems management, collaboration and Linux-based operating platforms. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit www.novell.com.

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SOURCE Novell, Inc.