Novell wants to be your flexible friend
19-03-2008
by Emmet Ryan

Infrastructure software firm Novell wants to deliver products that can proverbially perform back flips and triple toe loops.

Novell's chief technical officer, Jeff Jaffe, told attendees at the firm's annual BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, that it will focus on developing agile infrastructure software. "The word infrastructure sounds inflexible but we intend to fix that," said Jaffe.

Speaking at the event's opening general session, Jaffe announced the launch of the Fossa Project (a reference to the particularly agile animal of the same name), which will focus on delivering more agile infrastructure software. Jaffe coined a 'backronym' for the project, calling it 'Free Open Source Software and Agile'.

"Whenever a task needs to be executed, the infrastructure should find the best means and place to execute that task," he said. Jaffe told attendees that recent acquisitions made by Novell, including that of virtualisation provider PlateSpin last month, would aid the firm in its bid to make its projects more agile.

Social networks could play a role in helping to make software infrastructure more flexible, according to Jaffe. He cited a recent IDG study which found that 80 percent of businesses consider collaboration to be of critical importance, and Jaffe reckons that enterprise equivalents of MySpace and Facebook could become part of an agile IT infrastructure.

In addition to flexibility, Jaffe also sees growth opportunities for Novell on the compliance front. He referred to the recent events with investment bank Bear Stearns, which saw the firm narrowly avoid bankruptcy and get sold at a fire-sale price, citing this incident as a possible harbinger of more compliance requirements being introduced. "I think we are going to see a lot more regulations after this weekend," said Jaffe.

Firms operating in the compliance market have enjoyed some good form of late with companies such as Dublin-based Norkom performing well. The Bear Stearns incident might yet create more opportunities in this market as regulators could crack down even further, meaning that bad news for the market might be good news for firms such as Novell.

The BrainShare conference runs until 21 March.