Novell addresses CIO needs

Following its business unit restructure last year, Novell has undergone further changes in a bid to link the technology it produces to the end-users it targets.

Matthew Lee, data centre channel manager at Novell SA, says that traditionally Novell has not been good at linking its technology offerings to the CIO agenda. This last structural change aims to remedy that.

“The CIO is into reducing costs, mitigating risks and reducing complexity within the organisation, while increasing productivity,” Lee says. “Over the last three years, Novell has been looking at restructuring, focusing on matching Novell's technology to CIO pain points. This restructure was a planned, phased execution,” he adds.

Filling the gap between Novell's technology and technology gurus and the CIO are two new structures. The first comprises several buying centres - data centres, end-user computing and identity and security management. These pull technology from the company's four technology business units (WorkGroup, Open Platform Systems, System and Resource Management and Identity and Security Management) into solutions aimed at addressing customer needs.

In front of that, and in front of the customers, linearly speaking, are the company's solution centres - data centres, end-user computing and identity and security management, explains Lee. “Novell and its partner now have a 'go to' plan to say how Novell addresses any particular area.”

As part of its restructure, the company completed a technical gap analysis, and where it discovered technology gaps in its solution sets, it made a plan to acquire or OEM technology to flesh out the offering. Its recent acquisition of Platespin, says Lee, is an example of this. Platespin is a software company that provides tools for automated conversion between physical and virtual architectures in the data centre. This has been integrated into the Data Centre solution set.

Novell has also launched an incentive scheme aimed at increasing partner profitability and driving new business its way. “We have created a deal registration system,” says Lee. “Partners registering new deals with existing customers will get a 10% incentive on the value of the deal from Novell. Partners registering deals with new customers will see even greater profitability increase on the deals concerned.”

That said, this is contingent on the partner closing and fulfilling the deal. “We're not closing our eyes here,” Lee says. “We will work with the partner on the deal and protect the partner on it.”

The company has also reduced the barrier to entry for new partners to join its reseller community. “We're doing on-demand training, for free, online,” says Lee. “This way we make sure that it's not just the partner making a commitment and Novell having its expenses covered because it has sold training. Also, we still offer unlimited technical support to all partners.”

Lee says Novell is seeing a need in the market for effective partnering with vendors. “We're blowing the traditional model out of the water,” he comments.