BrainShare 2000, Novell`s three-day product and technology showcase, started yesterday at the Sandton Convention Centre, with JD Marymee, Novell`s corporate integration manager, highlighting the company`s solutions strategy in his keynote address.
Marymee outlined the company`s evolution of its Novell Directory Services (NDS) to its One-Net services strategy.
He explained that the basic idea behind directory services is that "no matter where I go, my user identity goes with me".
He said NDS has become platform-independent and is now known as eDirectory. "In 2000 and beyond, the directory becomes the platform."
According to Marymee, Novell`s vision is to enable a one-view of both internal (employees) and external (customers and partners) networks, and the Internet. "Firewalls cut out my internal networks from my clients and partners, but it makes no sense. Internal and external networks should become one network."
Marymee also outlined Novell`s market evolution from a network operating system company [NetWare] to "2000 and beyond, where Novell wants to be a Net services software company".
"Today, we want to tie in the Internet, e-commerce and B2B [business-to-business] services and make them interoperate with the rest of the infrastructure."
He defined eDirectory as a platform for deploying integrated services across One-Net. "We really don`t care what platform is underneath. The majority of Web environments are Unix-based, but you can choose your operating system, we don`t really care."
He said Novell aims to take the complexity out of Internet computing, making it both simple and secure. One of the solutions that allow this is Novell`s Single Sign-On product, currently in version 2, which was demonstrated yesterday.
Marymee stressed that the company`s NetWare operating system (OS) will not go away. "We have found new ways of taking NetWare into new spaces where a scalable and fast OS makes sense. NetWare has become the overall component of our Net services strategy."
But Novell will be making the strongest push in the Net services space. "You`ll see us evolve this in the next year," he concluded.
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