Irish operation drives change at Novell
19-03-2008
by Emmet Ryan

Novell's Irish operation is playing a key role in the reshaping of the infrastructure software firm, according to Novell's president of EMEA, Volker Smid.

Recent changes at the Dublin operation reflected a shift in focus by the firm, Smid told ENN at Novell's BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. "A very visible sign of this was the opening of the Dublin telesales centre on 5 November," he said. Novell employs 40 people at its telesales operation in Sandyford, County Dublin, and has a total of 165 employees in Ireland.

"We've created a team in Dublin that has two objectives," said Smid. "This is the team that is behind the renewal contracts in EMEA and this is the team that should drive up-sale and cross-sale opportunities in EMEA."

The latter part of this duty means the Irish side of Novell's business is responsible for identifying new opportunities in existing accounts. This frees up the rest of the business to build out the firm's relationships with partner firms such as Microsoft and SAP. "In any case when we go after a market opportunity, the partnering aspect is the number one priority. That is a fundamental change in the way this company thinks and acts," said Smid.

The shift towards operating more with partners began in 2006 when Novell announced a controversial agreement to work with Microsoft. It has since added to its partner base with IT services firms like SAP and Atos Origin linking up with the infrastructure software business.

"There's more leverage in these things. You can either beat your head against the corner of a desk and sell one Linux at a time, or you can attach yourself to these other eco-systems," said John Dragoon, chief marketing officer with Novell. He said the move to link up with these larger firms would help Novell move further into the SME market. "[SMEs] don't care about the operating system frankly; that is the last part of the decision process for them," said Dragoon.

Instead, the Novell chief marketing officer said, these firms make their IT decisions based on applications, so it made sense for Novell to partner up with firms who deal with SMEs at this stage of the decision process. "For us, attaching ourselves to an SAP makes good sense because that's how the value chain works," said Dragoon.