The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy has openly wondered — again and again — whether Novell will ever connect the dots between its various products groups. A potential answer to that question emerged today. It involves Novell’s Intelligent Workload Management (IWM) strategy, which melds cloud and virtualization opportunities with Novell’s solutions, according to Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon (pictured). Here’s the scoop, and the implications for solutions providers.

As Red Hat, Synnex and nearly a dozen open source application providers today launch the Open Source Channel Alliance, The VAR Guy offered equal time to Red Hat rivals Novell (SUSE Linux) and Canonical (Ubuntu). Our resident blogger reached out to Novell Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon (pictured) and Canonical for their respective thoughts on distribution. Here’s the scoop.

Novell is starting to connect the dots between SUSE Linux and two recent product acquisitions: PlateSpin and Managed Objects. The VAR Guy isn’t suggesting Novell will dominate tomorrow’s data centers. But during an April 7 seminar in New York, Novell finally delivered a coherent server consolidation strategy for partners, independent software vendors and customers. Here’s the scoop.

The VAR Guy is packing his bags and heading to a Novell event in New York City on April 7. During several hours of briefings, our resident blogger expects to hear plenty about SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, PlateSpin Workload Management and a Mono Extension that allows SUSE Linux to run .Net applications. The obvious question: Will the Empire State embrace Novell’s updated messaging? Plus, here’s the interesting twist that really intrigues our resident blogger.

Novell is generating buzz this week with the December 18 launch of OpenSUSE 11.1. But The VAR Guy is looking at Novell from a slightly different perspective. The far bigger news involves senior VP Roger Levy (pictured) — who may bring order to Novell’s product lines. Here’s the scoop, from The VAR Guy.