Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

My next several posts will relate to BrainShare. I want to summarize my keynote address and discuss several of our significant announcements.

My keynote address started by discussing Ron Hovsepian’s business vision for Novell – Novell harmoniously integrates mixed-I/T environments to allow people and technology to work as one. I asked: what does this mean for our products? Novell is a technology company – we deliver technology that helps our customers solve their business challenges. So when Ron says Novell’s corporate positioning is Making I/T Work as One, how do we achieve that technically and how does the technical vision transform our customers’ I/T environments?

To address this, about three months ago, we assembled a team of Novell visionaries: our Fellows, Distinguished Engineers, and market-focused thinkers. We asked them: what technical foundation provides the next revolution in our industry? By looking at several use cases (see below), we settled on the notion of agility.

Agility

If you talk to any CIO today, I/T infrastructure is anything but agile. Yet that is what the CIO wants. The CIO wants infinite flexibility to deploy I/T resources against business objectives. In a word, that is Novell’s vision for the future – the agile infrastructure. Sounds like an oxymoron – the word infrastructure sounds inflexible. Our vision is to fix it. Fix it for both the data center and the user’s desktop.

We have given our vision a code name – The Fossa Project. Why “Fossa� If you “Google†for an agile animal you come up with the Fossa. This most agile creature – living quietly in the jungles of Madagascar with no natural predator – is our model of agility. We like the name – it sounds like Free and Open Source Software, with agility. But not every technology immediately attracts a community, so we invest in proprietary technology to fill the gap.

Maturity

I mentioned above that we have been developing these themes for three months. The project is both very mature and very early at the same time!

Why would we unveil a project that arguably is very early? This is not exclusively a Novell project – it needs to be an industry project. We need to work with our key hardware, software and distribution partners. Most important, we need to leverage the participation, innovation, quality, speed and drive of the open source community. Key pieces are essential to be done in open source, although we see a role for proprietary development where we cannot attract a community. So we want to establish a dialog with our partners and stakeholders and develop this in the open.

Megatrends enable an agile infrastructure

Technology trends have evolved to a point that agility is possible. So there is a match between the needs of an agile infrastructure and what is available in the technology storehouse. The key megatrends that are enabling this are:

The Fossa Project vision

How do all these megatrends enable agile I/T? To a CIO, agile I/T is a simple concept. Whenever a compute task needs to be executed, the I/T infrastructure should find the “best†place to execute that task. And it should be easy to do so. Defining the word “best,†however, is where all of the magic lies. The compute infrastructure needs to accept different notions of what it means to be best – so a customer can use I/T assets to provide value to the business. The value will differ in time: it could be to improve ease of use, scaling, innovation or other purposes.

This is where Fossa comes into play. To be sure, we are early in the development so we don’t yet have the full architecture. However, I want to introduce the core constructs here.

It all starts when a user has a workload that he or she needs to run. He or she makes a request of the I/T infrastructure – “the cloud.†What happens when that request goes into the cloud?

Our vision provides two key attributes: interoperability and usability. Interoperable heterogeneity is needed because the customer might require specific applications running on specific operating systems. The usability is via user interfaces such as visualization and a simple policy language where the customer expresses requests and the sophisticated infrastructure handles it. So we provide a sophisticated infrastructure – capable of a great deal. However, we don’t surface the complexity. We surface the right knobs for the customer, the policy expression, to enable the customer to have agility with simplicity.

More to come

I want to provide a deep dive on our roadmap for these seven areas, but this post is getting long. So we will need to wait for the next post.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 3:13 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.