Novell Unveils Strategy and Roadmap to Lead in Intelligent Workload Management Market

12/09/2009

Strategy unifies identity and systems management, transforming the way enterprises securely manage and optimize computing resources across physical, virtual and cloud environments

Novell today announced its strategy and product roadmap for addressing the emerging market for Intelligent Workload Management (IWM) solutions.

ebizQ received the following:

Novell's differentiated approach to Intelligent Workload Management integrates identity and systems management capabilities into an application workload, thereby increasing the workload's security and portability across physical, virtual and cloud environments. As a result, enterprises are able to significantly reduce the risks and challenges of computing across multiple environments while granting their users secure and compliant access to the full computing services they need.

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"Customers today are looking for a pragmatic solution to securely manage and optimize their distributed computing resources," said Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell. "Novell's approach to Intelligent Workload Management will help companies leverage their existing IT assets, realize the significant cost benefits offered by new models like virtualization and cloud computing, and provide them with the necessary tools to secure information as it moves inside and outside the organization. With our unique portfolio of technology and partners, Novell is well-positioned to become a leader in the rapidly emerging Intelligent Workload Management market."

The market for Intelligent Workload Management

New technologies like virtualization and cloud computing have changed the IT landscape by freeing applications from hardware in the traditional data center. While the lower cost and increased flexibility of these new technologies are compelling, new security and compliance requirements need to be considered for enterprise-wide adoption. Security and compliance requirements have also increased as regulators more tightly monitor company operations and as data becomes increasingly distributed across multiple locations. As a result, traditional approaches to IT service management are no longer sufficient in addressing the needs of the modern IT enterprise.

Intelligent Workload Management is a new and more effective model of computing that enables IT organizations to manage and optimize computing resources in a policy-driven, secure and compliant manner across physical, virtual and cloud environments to deliver business services for end customers. A workload is a portable, self-contained unit of work built through the integration of the operating system, middleware and application. With Intelligent Workload Management, organizations can build, secure, manage and measure workloads.

Intelligent Workload Management handles any IT workload, but organizations can reach a new level of optimization with intelligent workloads. An intelligent workload has embedded identity and access controls that move with the workload across environments. Intelligent workloads have built-in, real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, can self-determine when and where to deploy, and can be managed by existing and new management frameworks. For example, an application workload doing health insurance claim processing for a U.S.-based company would have the intelligence to know it is using sensitive data regulated by HIPAA. Accordingly, an IT policy might direct the workload to run on a private cloud behind the firewall, but not allow it to deploy on a public cloud.

With existing workload management tools, customers can allocate workloads to machines in an ad hoc fashion, as workloads have no policy statement or compliance enforcement, and they are difficult to manage and secure. With Intelligent Workload Management, customers run workloads based on policy, manage through dashboards, and get compliance reports that assure security and fidelity to policy.

"ACS needed a way to integrate identity and security into every aspect of our infrastructure. Therefore, we are leveraging the tenets of Intelligent Workload Management in our ACS Management Platform (AMP) which facilitates best-in-class service management capabilities for our clients," said Ken Stephens, senior vice president for strategy and transformation at Affiliated Computer Services (ACS).

How Novell will Compete in the Intelligent Workload Management Market

Novell is well-positioned to become a leader in the rapidly emerging Intelligent Workload Management market. Novell has the right combination of identity management, systems management and operating system products required to deliver IWM solutions -- as well as the broad ecosystem of partners, system integrators and independent software vendors that can work together to help customers realize IWM's value and potential.

Novell has received widespread support for its differentiated approach to intelligent workload management from leading industry partners including Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), Atos Origin, ECS Technology, Gen-i, Infosys, KIS, Tech Data, Tencent, Trustmarque and VMware (for a complete list see http://www.novell.com/intelligent-workload-management/iwm-supporters/).

"As enterprises increasingly seek application portability across private and public cloud environments, security and identity issues become paramount," said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware. "Novell's Intelligent Workload Management offerings promise to bring the relevant technologies together in a way that helps customers extract optimal value from their workload asset."

Over the next 12 months, Novell will introduce eight new products that further extend the solutions the company already has for the Intelligent Workload Management market. Core to Novell's Intelligent Workload Management approach will be the unique integration of its market-leading identity and security technologies into products that address customer challenges across the entire IWM lifecycle: build, secure, manage and measure. Because Novell's approach is modular, customers can start with any product at any point in the lifecycle and be confident that they are moving down the path to Intelligent Workload Management.

"Our value-added reseller customers look to Tech Data to provide them with the latest technology solutions that help their customers reduce cost, complexity and security risks in a broad array of IT environments," said IT products distributor Tech Data Corporation Vice President, Software Product Marketing Stacy Nethercoat. "Novells Intelligent Workload Management strategy addresses those critical points and creates exciting opportunities for VARs to deliver more cost-effective and optimized IT infrastructure solutions to end-user customers of all sizes. Tech Data will support Novells Intelligent Workload Management strategy through our new Open Tech program."

In addition to Novell's current portfolio of products that address the Intelligent Workload Management market, the company plans to introduce products in each of the following four categories:

Build

To help enterprises and ISVs build intelligent workloads, Novell will add products and capabilities to its successful SUSE (R) Appliance Program. SUSE StudioTM, a Web-based product released earlier this year, builds complete software appliances in a matter of minutes. SUSE Studio is the leader in the software appliance market, with more than 100,000 built appliances and more than 40,000 registered users worldwide. In 2010, Novell plans to introduce the following products to help customers build intelligent workloads:

• SUSE Appliance Toolkit -- a new suite of tools that will dramatically improve the efficiency of deploying and maintaining Linux-based appliances in physical and virtual environments, including update, access and configuration management capabilities.
• Novell "Workshop" -- a new tool to build and edit intelligent workloads with embedded manageability, security and compliance for both Linux* and Windows-based applications, including one-stop configuration, manipulation and modification of virtual machine images.

Secure

To help customers address their identity and security needs, Novell offers a portfolio of solutions today, including Novell (R) Identity Manager, the Novell Compliance Management Platform and Novell Sentinel. In the future, Novell will add capabilities to these products that bring identity and policy awareness into workloads. Novell plans to ship the following products to help customers secure their intelligent workloads:

• Novell Identity Manager 4 -- a significant update to Novell's flagship identity management product that helps customers manage identity inside and outside their enterprise with real-time provisioning, reporting and industry-leading roles management.
• Novell Cloud Security Service (announced earlier this year, targeted to ship in 2010) a new tool that will enable enterprises to impose their individual identity and security protocols on software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors.

Manage

To help customers manage and move workloads within and across their physical and virtual environments, Novell today offers PlateSpin (R) solutions and Business Service Management solutions. In 2010, Novell plans to introduce new products that integrate and extend these management capabilities to the cloud to ensure optimal execution of workloads both on and off-site. These product developments include:

• PlateSpin Atlantica -- a self-service provisioning portal that enables line-of-business managers to provision applications based on business need, while allowing IT to automatically optimize deployment using a combination of physical, virtual and cloud computing resources.
• PlateSpin Bluestar -- a new physical server change and configuration management and monitoring system.
• ZENworksA® "Workbench" -- a master repository and change/control system for workloads, from which they can be deployed on-demand to any environment.

Measure

To help customers measure and gain real-time insight into their IT operations, Novell offers a suite of products including Novell Business Service Manager, Novell Business Experience Manager TM, Novell myCMDB, Novell Sentinel, and Novell Sentinel Log Manager. In 2010, Novell plans to release a new offering that will enable customers to measure their security and their system performance across physical, virtual and cloud environments:

• Novell Compliance Automation -- this new offering integrates the Novell Compliance Management Platform, the Novell Sentinel security information and event management products and Novell Business Service Manager to deliver identity-aware, real-time monitoring of events happening throughout the IT infrastructure.

"Enterprises worldwide are rapidly expanding their IT infrastructure to include private, public or hybrid clouds which adds complexity and security challenges," said Rajesh Gupta, associate vice president at Infosys. "Forward-thinking customers are addressing these challenges by leveraging the concepts of Intelligent Workload Management to integrate identity and security into every aspect of their IT infrastructure during their journey to cloud computing. Infosys, in partnership with Novell under their go-to-market offerings, is pro-actively engaging customers to develop their own Intelligent Workload Management strategies, which will help them reduce cost, complexity and security risks in their IT operations."

"Organizations today are grappling with maximizing their existing and legacy infrastructures, proving compliance and managing their identity framework, and they are dealing with this while shifting to newer computing models," said Frank Gens, analyst at IDC. "These challenges have created the need for cutting-edge strategies to provide customers with greater levels of flexibility for securely administering resources, providing holistic views of business services and workloads in the data center, and maintaining security and compliance. Intelligent Workload Management is a tremendous market opportunity as it addresses customer demands to securely manage their IT assets and capitalize on virtualization, cloud computing and pay-as-you-go consumption models."

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