Novell announces new Exec team - and I'm kind of happy about it

Today, Attachmate announced the new Executive line up for the Novell Business Unit.  The good news is I know a large number of those folks and one that I know doesn't run from me - John Delks.  At least I hope he won't run from me, but there's the chance that either Ron Hovsepian or John Dragoon, or both forewarned him about me.  Guess I'll have to wear my running shoes at BrainShare this year.

I am liking what I'm hearing out of Novell though.  The re-commitment to giving the products the attention they deserve, the continued support of NetWare for loyal customers who've been unable to move to Linux, and the comments from friends still working there who were guarded but are more excited than they've been in years about working there.  Dean Lythgoe and Alex Evans are still on board and leading the GroupWise charge, which is great news as I still can pester them.

Top that with relocation of the headquarters back to Provo and there's only two things that still make me sigh with frustration: support being in India instead of returning to regional centers, and development not returning to the US/UK/EU for the non-SUSE products.  At least that's how it stands for now.

Novell's New/Old Headquarters

Now, don't get your panties in a wad, I'm not exactly slamming India's talent base.  It's just that there are cultural barriers causing issues with quality coding and an understanding of how business is done in these regions.  If Novell were "my" company, I'd keep commodity programming in India (primarily bug fixes and management tool development like iManager) and move the new development (new features/enhancements/product lines) to US/UK/EU.  We might see more stable code then and hopefully bug fixes would happen faster if customers could work with support staff in their own time zones and regions.

I will repeat what I've said to Colleen O'Keefe on multiple occasions - "it's not the accents or any language barriers that I have trouble with, it's the cultural differences".  Main issues being that India still has issues with treating women with respect and being equals, they do not have the freedom to, and often are discouraged from, think outside of "the box", and business processes/operations are different than what is "normal" for US/UK customers.

Still, all-in-all I'm getting more comfortable with the acquisition and the loss of jobs for many, many friends, Ron and John included.

There's still room! This Friday - Lunch-n-Learn

I'm working on some last minute addition of useful TIDs and latest information on the Attachmate buyout.  We still have room for Friday's Lunch-n-Learn at Optimal Solution's offices (my current employer) if you'd like to join us. We'll feed you at a minimum, and you might just win a fun prize to boot.

Here's the key topics in case you're interested:

• Best Practices for scheduled events
• Basics of GroupWise Health Checks
• GWCheck Switches you may have forgotten about
• Why Top-down Domain rebuilds are needed
• Recovering from a server hardware failure
• Future of GroupWise and latest on the Novell Acquisition by Attachmate

 
Optimal's offices are located in Wyoming, MI off the 131 and 54th Street. 

Novell Re-org continues

We all heard that the executives - including Ron and John - were all gone last week.  Then Ken Muir was gone.  And the "pruning" continues...I just heard one of my favorite Novell Trainers is gone as well.  I'm beginning to think we'll be at a skeleton crew of people I know and I have to wonder if I have the energy to re-train an entire new set of exec's, PMs and engineering staff to understand the needs of my customers.

I feel a change in the force...the "dark side" is pulling harder.  Maybe I should reconsider my Linux cert paths and go after Red Hat after all...

Acquisition is now complete - Novell's website has changed

The deal is done and Novell is now officially a part of the privately owned holding company Attachmate.  More changes will be coming, I expect much of management will change over at some point.  That means BrainShare is a must this year so I can get in front of the new players and let them know they need to support the local user groups and partners at least as well as we have been.

Check out the details at Novell's site and I'll dump more info here as it becomes publicly available.

Novell News

First a bit of a sales pitch:  Danita's released a guide for GroupWise on iPhones.  Go check it out at calendonia.net.  She loves GroupWise and she loves her iPhone so I'm sure this new guide will be as useful to iPhone users as her GroupWise upgrade guides are to GroupWise Admins.  Well worth shelling out the bucks!

Okay, so now the interesting Novell news.  There's a bid to buy out Novell.  Check out the article at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-10462638-260.html.

It seems at this point the majority of us talkative Novell customers/partners are concerned about the merger.  We're not necessarily assuming this is a positive move.

Although, when I think about it, perhaps this will be good.  That is if the purchasing group will actually LISTEN to the customer base about issues such as buggy code and bad tech support.

Back in the 1990's more than once I said that if Novell were to put out a Linux distro and couple it with their world class support Corporate America would be more likely to consider it as a serious contender in their computer centers.  Of course back then Novell still had regional support.  Meaning, we had support centers in each large regional area that spoke our native languages and understood our cultures.  Really, Canada and the US are pretty much kissin' cousins so one center in Utah would be just fine to support both countries, but a big place like Brazil may need it's own center.  And it was easier to get past the first line support when calling in for a bug fix than it is now.

And off she goes into another rant about India support....kind of.  Having support in India for India-based customers makes sense.  They understand their culture, speaking patterns, and language.  But India support for a female US-based customer is insufficient at best.  I end up in "Certifications pissing contests" with men who weren't even considered yet when I started in the industry (okay, so I'm old and crotchety but I have a point).  Colleen O'Keefe seems to think it is all an issue of accents  And that's SO not it!  I understand them just fine, no linguistics class will solve the major problem.  There's a huge difference in culture - women in India are still second class citizens and no manner of US "re-training" is going to change that attitude any time soon.  (Heck I still struggle with it here in the US MidWest!)  Front-line support in India is also afraid to go off-script or escalate calls and that's a cultural thing as well.  Free-thinking and risk-taking is not something most folks there are comfortable with given their unemployment rates.

My point is, if the bidding company does due diligence and talks to Novell's long time customers and actually listens, Novell may have a chance at one last resurgence.  But there's been so much damage already - and this is coming from a Bleeding Red "N" fanatic - most customers are going to very cynical of any new promises.

So, my suggestion to Elliott Investments is this: put back the WorldWide support the way it was in the late 80's/ early 90's when it was truly world class support.  Make it easier for partners to open calls and have access to back-line engineers and developers when reporting a bug.  It's a sad day when it is easier and cheaper to get an SR open and resolved with Microsoft than it is Novell.  Talk to the partners left in the channel (there aren't that many) and really listen to their needs.  Then follow through.  And finally - bring back the innovative coding to the US/UK/EU programmers who can think outside of the box and have proven time and again they can deliver solid, reliable code.  India is best used for commodity coding, not new products.  It can be done, and it can be done in a cost effective way if you get creative about it.  Reverse the off-shore trend and instead invest in a quality product and you may win back customers who left.  May, being the key "gotcha" word.

All-in-all, I'm on the fence about the deal if it goes through.  And for my environment, it looks like it's time to take a closer look about the pros and cons to move from Novell to Microsoft.  Which is a very sad day for me, but not a first in a long career that's had me in the programing chair, training chair, engineer chair, consultant, and "All things IT" chair.