Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Random Thoughts on Novell's Recent Press Releases

Reaching 6000 users. Impressive, but how does it tally? Is it me, or does that sound high? How is that broken down per product? I'd also be interested in the $33m they reported in revenues for Q4 and how that breaks down per product. They categorize it under the "Identity and Security" umbrella, $30m of which came from identity... Is there a report that can help distill their real marketshare, as well as for other vendors? Either way, its impressive.

On another note, Novell's CTO Jeff Jaffe talks about FOSSA in an interview, and describes Identity as one of the pillars. When asked about how open-source their identity product line is, he honestly states:

Very little. We have some open-source projects; but it's still growing. From the point of view of where the customer wants go with agility, we need it all, but in practice it's going to mature at a different rate.
Given their interest in the open source space, I wonder if the folks at Novell are looking to existing open source initiatives in the identity space and how they might work together?