Novell announces WorkloadIQ to lead intelligent workload management market

Novell today announced WorkloadIQ - the company's differentiated and branded approach to lead and enable the rapidly growing intelligent workload management (IWM) market.

Novell's WorkloadIQ provides a comprehensive and cohesive portfolio of products that give customers a simple way to securely build, measure and manage workloads across physical, virtual and cloud environments. With WorkloadIQ, Novell addresses fundamental security and automation concerns by taking an identity-centric approach to workload management.

Following its December 2009 announcement to compete in the IWM market, Novell has shipped seven related products and plans to ship five additional solutions before December 2010.

These 12 products provide the foundation for Novell's WorkloadIQ. In addition, more than 30 new customers and major partners have committed to purchasing one or more of these foundational solutions. While Novell is the only vendor able to support the entire IWM life cycle of build, secure, manage and measure, WorkloadIQ is modular, allowing customers to address their most pressing needs while building toward an integrated solution.

“Novell's strategy is to work with our partners to help customers solve a point problem today, with the promise of reaching intelligent workload management tomorrow,” said Richard Whitehead, recently appointed director of Intelligent Workload Management at Novell. “For example, with Novell Identity Manager 4, a customer can manage identity policy consistently across physical, virtual and cloud environments. When that customer eventually deploys Novell Cloud Manager, he or she can now build a private cloud using existing data centre assets. Each product solves a specific customer pain point. However, when used in conjunction, these two products enable a customer to securely manage their IT services in physical, virtual and cloud environments, and optimise their computing resources.”

Customers have embraced Novell's differentiated approach to the IWM. Early customers of WorkloadIQ include ACS, A Xerox Company, BC Card, Beech Grove City Schools, Burlington Coat Factory, Deutsche Flugsicherung, Essent, Europ Assistance, HSBC, Huntington National Bank, Johnsonville Sausage, National Vision, Synovus Financial, Toll Brothers, US Navy Cyber Defence Operations Command, University of Dayton and Vancouver Convention Centre. All are already implementing many elements to move down the path of - and benefit from - IWM.

IWM is one of the hottest growth markets in the IT industry today and with Novell's WorkloadIQ solutions customers have a pragmatic approach to its adoption. According to IDC*, the total market size for IWM solutions was valued at more than $4.2 billion in 2009. IDC defines IWM as the intersection of software appliances, server and workload automation and identity and access management.

“Over the next several years, IDC expects that enterprises will deploy a mix of physical, virtual and cloud computing resources,” said Mary Johnston Turner, research director for enterprise systems management software, IDC. “To make the most effective use possible of this dynamic and heterogeneous infrastructure environment, IT teams will need to shift to a more policy-based, automated approach for managing the building, provisioning, migration, monitoring, measuring and securing of corporate workloads. IWM is an emerging market concept that addresses this complex set of needs by integrating a number of important technologies.”

While other companies are delivering pieces of the IWM solution set, only Novell's WorkloadIQ offers products and services in each of the four key categories of IWM - build, secure, manage and measure. While each of these products addresses a specific IT challenge, the broader vision gives customers confidence they are selecting a solution that will grow with their business.

* SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SP1 is a world-class operating system with more than 5 000 fully certified applications, more than double any other Linux distribution. In the last year Novell expanded its virtualisation strategy of being a “best-guest” with Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, providing customers with the greatest flexibility, performance and choice.

* SUSE Appliance Toolkit and SUSE Gallery offers the fastest and easiest solution set for independent software vendors and end-users to create, test, advertise and deploy workloads. The award-winning SUSE Studio solution has grown to more than 82 000 registered users, almost 450 000 software appliance builds, and more than 3 million appliances downloaded. SUSE Gallery is a free-of-charge showcase for users to promote and share their software appliances, and for end users to gain access to a diversity of software appliances that run in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

* SUSE Gallery is a free-of-charge storefront for users to promote and share their appliances and for end users to gain access to run in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

* Identity Manager 4 is a family of solutions that securely manages identity and access across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It is the industry's first solution to ensure consistent identity, security and compliance policies for an organisation's entire IT ecosystem; including offering the same level of trust in the cloud that exists in the data centre.

* Sentinel Log Manager Appliance is the industry's first log management solution available as a software appliance. Built using SUSE Studio Novell's web-based appliance building solution, Sentinel Log Manager helps customers collect and manage log data from their IT infrastructure decreasing enterprise risk and reducing the cost of compliance.

* Novell Cloud Security Service enables cloud providers to offer customised security for their enterprise users. With NCSS, enterprises can impose security policies on the cloud vendor, instead of a one-size-fits-all model.

* Novell Cloud Manager, available later this year, enables companies to build a private cloud using their existing IT infrastructure, regardless of which hardware, hypervisors or operating systems they currently have.
* PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Forge support both Linux* and Windows*, making them the first virtualisation management solutions to offer live migrations of workloads from anywhere to anywhere - physical to virtual, virtual to physical, and physical to physical - regardless of operating system platform.
* ZENworks Endpoint Management 11, available later this year, ensures workforce productivity and endpoint security through a unique location-aware architecture that gives granular configuration control to the IT staff, who needs to control where and how workloads are run.

* Novell Operations Centre, available later this year, is the next generation of Business Service Management. With the Novell Operations Centre, customers can implement an end-to-end view of an IT service, to ensure they are meeting service levels and commitments to the business.

Novell's partners, large and small, have identified WorkloadIQ as the strategy of choice for IWM. In June 2010, VMware announced it will include an OEM copy of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with every shipment of its VSphere product at no additional cost to the end customer. VMware also announced it is standardising its virtual appliance programme on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

In addition to the VMware announcement, Novell has signed significant cloud partner agreements with Amazon Web Services, Atos Origin, BasisOne, Fujitsu and Vodacom Business, adding to previously announced support from ECS Technology, Gen-i, IBM, Tencent and Trustmarque. Each of these cloud vendors is using various components of the WorkloadIQ architecture to help them securely manage their cloud environments, and help their customers realise intelligent workload management.

Novell solution providers, system integrators and services partners are also embracing the WorkloadIQ vision. Market-leading partners such as Infosys, Novacoast and Paragon Development Systems see opportunity to provide design and implementation services for their customers seeking to realize intelligent workload management.

For more information on WorkloadIQ, from Novell, go to http://www.novell.com/workloadiq.