Novell Celebrates Year of Innovation With Record Number of New Products

WALTHAM, Mass., Dec. 15, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- One year after announcing its intentions to lead in the rapidly growing market for intelligent workload management, Novell has shipped more than twelve new products, signed over 4,500 new customers and inked landmark partnerships with leading companies including SAP AG, Verizon, VMware and Vodacom Business. New innovative products shipped include Novell® Identity Manager 4, Novell Cloud Manager, ZENworks® 11 and the SUSE® Appliance Toolkit – all important solutions that customers can use to realize intelligent workload management within their own enterprise organization. As a result, both business and IT professionals are better able to balance flexibility with IT control across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Novell's differentiated strategy to lead the intelligent workload management market is WorkloadIQ™ – a unique approach based on integrating identity and security into every piece of the IT infrastructure.  Leveraging its historic strength in IT infrastructure and identity management, Novell has brought new levels of security to workload management, by providing a way to securely build, manage and measure workloads across the entire IT infrastructure.  While other companies are only beginning to develop new products for the intelligent workload management market, only Novell currently offers an approach that delivers single, point solutions that integrate easily with existing IT investments or work together to create a seamless solution set.

"Over the past year, we have delivered unparalleled innovation to our customers – shipping more than twelve new products that have seen rapid adoption," said Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell.  "By collaborating with our partners and customers, we have identified an emergent market opportunity that Novell is uniquely qualified to lead. As we continue Novell's history of innovation, we will continue to invest in developing cutting-edge technologies that provide our customers with a competitive advantage."

Delivering on Product Innovation

In December 2009, Novell committed to delivering eight new products and solutions designed to help customers execute on their intelligent workload management strategy.  One year later, the company is proud to announce it has exceeded expectations by releasing more than twelve related products.  These new products address each lifecycle of intelligent workload management:

• Build - Enables simplified workload creation, building and transformation in mission-critical computing environments.
• Secure - Allows enterprises to secure the cloud and virtualized environments through effective identity and security management.
• Manage - Allows for management and movement of workloads within and across all computing environments to optimize workload execution and utilization of IT assets.
• Measure   - Enables enterprises to understand IT risk through real-time insight into IT operations and logging, auditing and reporting capabilities.

"In a recent survey of IT decision-makers commissioned from Harris Interactive by Novell, cloud computing—both public and private—will be an increasing part of the mix of resources deployed by enterprise IT organizations, and that companies are particularly interested in simplifying management across their integrated physical, virtual and cloud environments," said Bob Tarzey, analyst and director at Quocirca. "IT infrastructure needs to be versatile to adapt to changeable business requirements, but if the management tools are not in place, the cost benefits that should accrue will be lost through misuse of capacity, risk introduced through inadequate security and value lost through sub-optimal performance of workloads. Novell's WorkloadIQ offerings help address these issues."

Novell has and will continue to have a strong emphasis on innovation.  Over the past year, Novell introduced market-leading products that address the components of the entire intelligent workload management lifecycle:

Build

• SUSE Appliance Toolkit - a collection of tools designed to streamline the configuration and management of software applications deployed in physical, virtual and cloud environments.  
• SUSE Gallery - a new online showcase for SUSE® Studio users to publish and download appliances and cloud-based applications free of charge.
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 - the most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing—both physical and virtual—from the desktop to the data center.

Secure

• Identity Manager 4 Advanced Edition - a significant advancement in identity management, it is the industry's first solution to ensure consistent identity, security and compliance policies for an organization's entire IT ecosystem – across physical, virtual and cloud environments, enabling customers to better protect their corporate data while reducing the cost and complexity of demonstrating compliance.
• Novell Cloud Security Service - the best way for cloud providers to deliver secure access and compliance in the cloud for their customers. Part of Novell's broader identity and security portfolio, it enables enterprises to have a consistent framework for managing identities across physical, virtual and cloud deployments.
• Sentinel™ Log Manager Appliance - the industry's first log management solution available as a software appliance, handling log management, corporate compliance and enhanced IT security.

Manage

• Novell Cloud Manager - the only cloud solution in the market that enables companies to build private clouds using existing IT infrastructure, regardless of hardware, hypervisor or operating system.
• PlateSpin® Migrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Forge® - the first virtualization management solutions to offer live migrations of workloads from physical to virtual, virtual to physical, and physical to physical for both Linux* and Windows*.
• ZENworks 11 - seamlessly integrates desktop, asset, patch and endpoint security management capabilities into a single console; ZENworks 11 enables customers to lower the cost and risk of managing devices across physical, virtual and cloud environments, while dramatically simplifying near-term needs such as Windows* 7 migrations.
• ZENworks Configuration Management virtual appliance - one of the industry's first plug-and-play solutions that integrates desktop, asset and patch management capabilities.

Measure

• Novell Operations Center - the next generation of business service management, enables customers to implement an end-to-end view of IT services, to ensure they are meeting service levels.

Additionally, in the first calendar quarter of 2011, Novell plans to ship SUSE Manager, a new open source tool designed to manage both SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as Novell Identity Manager 4 Standard Edition and Novell Privileged User Manager 2.3.

Partner and Customer Momentum

Over the past year, Novell has also executed new and expanded partnerships that provide customers with a complete, integrated solution. With VMware, Novell signed a unique original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement through which VMware is distributing and supporting the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) operating system, as well as building software appliances with SLES. With Verizon, Novell joined forces to deliver security and identity services for its cloud offerings. In addition, Novell and Vodacom Business announced a partnership that is integrating much of Novell's WorkloadIQ portfolio into the network provider's cloud hosting solutions.

"As businesses move to the cloud, successfully managing all aspects of infrastructure technology including service quality, security and availability, become more critical," says Richard Vester, executive head of Hosted Services, Vodacom Business.  "We opted to leverage Novell's solutions, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, PlateSpin Virtualization and Workload Management and Novell's Identity and Security solutions, to respond to growing business demands, while giving customers the ability to treat their cloud assets as a secure and compliant extension of the existing data center."

In addition, several Novell customers spanning multiple industries and geographies continue to take advantage of Novell's WorkloadIQ products, realizing significant ROI.

"As a non-profit organization, we have minimal resources to work with and need to be strategic with our technology investments," said Noah Broadwater, vice president of Information Services at Sesame Workshop. "We started working with Novell several years ago in order to better manage our online assets as well as take advantage of the benefits of Linux. Since that time, we have implemented multiple solutions and have experienced tremendous benefit -- reduced inventory administration time by 70%, the ability to better comply with auditing requests, 85% reduction in infrastructure costs, 80% server consolidation, reduced hardware costs of 30% and an overall IT budget reduction of 18%.  Now with the advent of cloud computing, Novell and its leading-edge solutions will once again benefit us as we look to provision workloads to the cloud."

Awards and Accolades

Novell's innovation has also resulted in the company receiving several top honors related to product and partner initiatives.  To date, the company's partner organization has been awarded with the "CRN Partner Program Guide 5-Star" award as well as CRN's "2010 Top 100 Executives" award.  In addition, ERP Executive magazine honored Novell with the Best of SAPPHIRE® NOW award in the category of Excellence in Product Innovation.

Other Novell accolades include the "American Business Award for Best New Product or Service - Computer Hardware or Services" for SUSE Studio™ and the HPC in the Cloud  "Editors' Choice Awards for 2010 Cloud Security Leader" for the company's work in cloud security.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL), a leader in intelligent workload management, through WorkloadIQ, 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.  

Copyright © 2010 Novell, Inc.  All rights reserved.  Novell, the Novell logo, the N logo, PlateSpin, PlateSpin Forge, SUSE, and ZENworks are registered trademarks and Sentinel, SUSE Studio, and WorkloadIQ are trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

SAP, SAPPHIRE and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries.  All third party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Novell, Inc.