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.