Novell Delivers Business Service Management Solution In Support of SAP® ITSM Application

WALTHAM, Mass., March 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Novell today announced, as part of its ongoing alliance with SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), that Novell® Operations Center can now be configured to integrate with the SAP® IT Service Management (SAP ITSM) application. The value-added Novell product is part of the Novell business service management solution. This integration with SAP ITSM and Novell Operations Center provides configurable service views into deployments of SAP ITSM. As a result, customers benefit from a near real-time view of the relationships and interdependencies of business services, workloads and IT infrastructures. This solution leverages the SAP-certified Novell CMDB360 4.6 configuration management database product announced in October 2009, which is part of Novell Operations Center.

"Through this offering with Novell Operations Center, our customers can further standardize IT processes," said Oliver Conze, vice president of IT Management Solutions at SAP. "This will help enable businesses to wield IT as a competitive differentiator and better support business objectives through improved performance."

Novell Operations Center maps and measures mission-critical services in physical, virtual and cloud computing infrastructures. It monitors performance and availability, maps service models to meet compliance while providing real-time measurement, and mitigates the risk of service-impacting events with a proactive view of changes before going into production. Novell Operations Center enhances the SAP ITSM solution by delivering views that are configured in a user's environment through services for a standard deployment. Customers can leverage this solution to add a more complete view of their SAP infrastructure and align service management to the business without re-implementation.

"Monitoring and mapping are some of the key drivers in the systems management market," said Dr. Thorsten Wewers, CEO at ecenta, an SAP services partner and Novell channel partner. "Novell Operations Center for use with SAP IT Service Management provides an opportunity for customers and partners to initiate a fixed business service alignment project quickly and grow it at their pace."

The Novell Operations Center product for use with SAP IT Service Management delivers three standard views to be configured as part of a customer's implementation:

• IT Service Desk Agent View: Delivers the ability to view relationships of configuration items as services, allowing users to navigate the infrastructure views and pinpoint the root cause of an incident quickly. It provides a live view of the environment from a single dashboard and enables users to drill down and determine activity in order to gather accurate information about how to most efficiently restore service.
• IT Service Professional View: Provides a view of the infrastructure (during the planning process) that enables an understanding of services, change calendars and other planned changes.  Understanding these events allows the organization to assess the effects that could impact the environment and plan changes accordingly. It provides a single dashboard, offers everything needed to properly assess the effect of change, and delivers the insight to make those changes at the right time.
• IT Service Manager View: Provides a global summary dashboard that gives viewers a broad overview of service performance. It can drill into the Service Desk Agent view to see exactly what is going on within the infrastructure and provides a summary of service health and basic statistics, which indicate both good and poor performance. These statistics show which mission-critical services and potential service-impacting events should be focused on to achieve the greatest benefits.

Novell Operations Center provides customers with the flexibility to begin with a very simple and limited, configurable implementation with SAP ITSM. They can later choose to build upon this initial implementation to a more complete business service management deployment. The pace and choice is up to the user without re-implementation of the solution needed.

"Novell Operations Center enhances the overall value of SAP ITSM by providing an end-to-end view of services to monitor, map, measure and manage an organization's complete IT infrastructure," said Joe Wagner, senior vice president, general manager Global Alliances, Novell.  "As part of our ongoing alliance with SAP, we can offer customers a defined solution that not only addresses specific challenges, but also adds value to both companies' growing footprints in the data center systems management market."

To learn more about Novell Operations Center in support of SAP IT Service Management, please visit www.novell.com/products/operations-center/. To read more about Novell's alliance with SAP, go to www.novell.com/partners/sap/. To learn more about ecenta products and services for SAP, please visit http://www.ecenta.com.

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.

Copyright © 2010 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. Novell, the Novell logo and the Novell logo are registered trademarks, and WorkloadIQ is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. All other third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SAP Forward-looking Statement

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

SOURCE Novell, Inc.