Novell Announces WorkloadIQ: Next Step in Strategy to Lead Intelligent Workload Management Market

Novell today announced WorkloadIQ™ – the company’s differentiated approach to lead and enable the rapidly growing intelligent workload management (IWM) market. Novell’s strategy for IWM, WorkloadIQ, is based on its ability to integrate identity and security into IT workloads thereby giving customers the confidence and flexibility needed to deliver IT services to end users across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Following its December 2009 announcement to compete in the IWM market, Novell has shipped seven WorkloadIQ products, to date, and plans to ship five additional products before the end of December 2010. Many customers and partners have committed to WorkloadIQ by investing in one or more of these products.

WorkloadIQ offers customers a unique and pragmatic approach to intelligent workload management, which is one of the hottest growth markets in the IT industry today. According to IDC, intelligent workload management solutions are evolving and being built on a number of existing technologies, including software appliances, server and workload automation, and identity and access management (IAM) solutions. IDC estimates that in 2009, the server and workload automation market totalled approximately $600 million worldwide, the identity and access management software market was $3.5 billion, and the market for software appliances was $156 million.

"Over the next several years, IDC expects that enterprises will deploy a mix of physical, virtual and cloud computing resources," said Mary Johnston Turner, research director for Enterprise Systems Management Software at IDC. "To make the most effective use possible of this dynamic and heterogeneous infrastructure environment, IT teams will need to shift to a more policy-based, automated approach for managing the building, provisioning, migration, monitoring, measuring and securing of corporate workloads. Intelligent workload management is an emerging market concept that addresses this complex set of needs by integrating a number of important technologies."

A differentiated approach to IWM

With WorkloadIQ, Novell and its partners address fundamental security and automation concerns by taking a unique identity-centric approach to workload management. WorkloadIQ, from Novell, provides a comprehensive and cohesive portfolio of products that give customers a simple way to securely manage workloads across physical, virtual and cloud environments. In addition to supporting the entire IWM lifecycle of build, secure, manage and measure, WorkloadIQ is modular, allowing customers to address their most pressing needs while building toward an integrated solution.

Many IT automation and security vendors are competing in the IWM market, but only Novell has announced a comprehensive vision to deliver products across all four IWM market segments. Since announcing last year its strategy to compete in the IWM market, Novell has shipped seven products as part of its WorkloadIQ portfolio, including SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1, SUSE Gallery and the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, PlateSpin® Migrate, PlateSpin Protect, PlateSpin Forge®, the Novell® Sentinel™ Log Manager appliance and the ZENworks® Configuration Management virtual appliance. Novell plans to ship five additional products before the end of the calendar year, including Novell Cloud Manager, Novell Identity Manager 4, Novell Cloud Security Service, Novell Operations Center and ZENworks 11.

Taken together, these 12 products reinforce the foundation of Novell’s WorkloadIQ vision. However, customers do not need to deploy the entire WorkloadIQ portfolio to be successful; rather, customers can select one or more products to address an immediate need with the confidence that these solutions will integrate seamlessly with future investments to help realize the full potential of intelligent workload management.

"Novell’s strategy is to work with our partners to help customers solve a point problem today, with the promise of reaching intelligent workload management tomorrow," said Richard Whitehead, recently appointed director of Intelligent Workload Management at Novell. "For example, with Novell Identity Manager 4, a customer can manage identity policy consistently across physical, virtual and cloud environments. When that customer eventually deploys Novell Cloud Manager, he or she can now build a private cloud using existing data center assets. Each product solves a specific customer pain point. However, when used in conjunction, these two products enable a customer to securely manage their IT services in physical, virtual and cloud environments, and optimize their computing resources."

Rapid customer and partner adoption of WorkloadIQ™

Customers have embraced Novell’s differentiated approach to the intelligent workload management market. Early customers of WorkloadIQ include ACS, A Xerox Company, BC Card, Beech Grove City Schools, Burlington Coat Factory, Deutsche Flugsicherung, Essent, Europ Assistance, HSBC, Huntington National Bank, Johnsonville Sausage, National Vision, Synovus Financial, Toll Brothers, U.S. Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command, University of Dayton and Vancouver Convention Centre. All are already implementing many elements of WorkloadIQ in order to move down the path of – and benefit from – intelligent workload management.

"ACS needed an identity management solution to efficiently manage our global and highly dynamic workforce," said Steve Houser, Chief Technology Officer for ACS’ ITO Group. "We selected Novell Identity Manager to address this demand. Furthermore, ACS has adopted multiple components of WorkloadIQ to enhance our cloud services and to meet client needs. We are seeing solid growth in this area, and the Novell stack is an important part of our strategy to securely optimize our cloud computing environments."

In addition, Novell has been working with partners across the ecosystem to enable customers to move down the path toward intelligent workload management. In June 2010, VMware announced it would distribute and support the SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Customers who want to deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware® in VMware vSphere™ virtual machines will be entitled to receive a subscription to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server at no cost that includes patches and updates as part of their newly purchased qualifying VMware vSphere license and Support and Subscription. VMware also announced it intends to standardize its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

"Customers are looking for a pragmatic approach to easily and cost-effectively virtualize tier-1 applications," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "Novell’s WorkloadIQ helps customers transition to the cloud computing journey."

In addition to the VMware announcement, Novell has signed significant cloud partner agreements with Amazon Web Services, Atos Origin, BasisOne, Fujitsu and Vodacom Business, adding to previously announced support from ECS Technology, Gen-i, IBM, Tencent and Trustmarque. Each of these cloud vendors is using various components of the WorkloadIQ architecture to help them securely manage their cloud environments, and help their customers realize intelligent workload management.

Novell solution providers, system integrators and services partners are also embracing the WorkloadIQ vision. Market-leading partners such as Infosys, Novacoast and Paragon Development Systems see opportunity to provide design and implementation services for their customers seeking to realize intelligent workload management.

"Customers come to us every day to ask how and where they should deploy cloud computing and from which vendor should they acquire tools to manage their expanding infrastructure," said Angela Daniels, director, Identity-based Computing, Paragon Development Systems. "With WorkloadIQ, we have a compelling reason to recommend Novell. Only Novell integrates identity into all aspects of intelligent workload management. WorkloadIQ provides us the tools to help customers implement a secure infrastructure across physical, virtual and cloud environments."

WorkloadIQ product architecture

While many other companies are delivering various pieces of the intelligent workload management solution set, only WorkloadIQ from Novell offers products and services in each of the four key phases of intelligent workload management – build, secure, manage and measure. While each of these products addresses a specific IT challenge, the broader WorkloadIQ vision gives customers confidence they are selecting a solution that will grow with their business.

Building workloads

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 is a world-class operating system with more than 5,000 fully-certified applications, more than double any other Linux distribution. In the last year Novell has expanded its virtualization strategy of being the "perfect guest" operating system that runs on hypervisors from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, to provide customers with the greatest flexibility, performance and choice.
• SUSE Appliance Toolkit and SUSE Gallery offer the fastest and easiest solution set for ISVs and end-users to create, test, advertise and deploy appliances and other workloads. The award-winning SUSE Studio™ solution has grown to more than 82,000 registered users, almost 450,000 software appliance builds, and more than 3 million appliances downloaded. SUSE Gallery is a free-of-charge showcase for users to promote and share their software appliances, and for end users to gain access to a diversity of software appliances that run in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Securing Workloads

• Identity Manager 4 is a unique family of solutions that securely manages identity and access across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It is the industry's first solution to ensure consistent identity, security and compliance policies for an organization's entire IT ecosystem; including offering the same level of trust in the cloud that exists in the data center.
• Sentinel Log Manager Appliance is the industry's first log management solution available as a software appliance. Built using SUSE® Studio, Novell's web-based appliance building solution, Sentinel Log Manager helps customers collect and manage log data from their IT infrastructure decreasing enterprise risk and reducing the cost of compliance.
• Novell Cloud Security Service enables cloud providers to offer customized security for their enterprise users. With NCSS, enterprises can impose security policies on the cloud vendor, instead of a one-size-fits-all model.

Managing Workloads

• Novell Cloud Manager, available later this year, enables companies to build a private cloud using their existing IT infrastructure, regardless of which hardware, hypervisors or operating systems they currently have in place.
• PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Forge support both Linux* and Windows*, making them the first virtualization management solutions to offer live migrations of workloads from anywhere to anywhere - physical to virtual, virtual to physical, and physical to physical - regardless of operating system platform.
• ZENworks Configuration Management virtual appliance is one of the industry's first plug-and-play solutions that integrates desktop, asset and patch management capabilities. Built using SUSE Studio and SUSE Appliance Toolkit, the ZENworks Configuration Management virtual appliance simplifies installation and reduces the support and maintenance costs associated with endpoint management.
• ZENworks 11, available later this year, seamlessly integrates desktop, asset, patch, and now, endpoint security management capabilities into a single console. Combined with new innovations in location awareness and power management, ZENworks 11 seamlessly manages and secures your endpoints across physical, virtual, and cloud environments while providing your end-users with the precise desktop environments and security rights they need wherever they're located, and whatever device they use.

Measuring Workloads

• Novell Operations Center, available later this year, is the next generation of Business Service Management. With the Novell Operations Center, customers can implement an end-to-end view of an IT service, to ensure that they are meeting service levels and commitments to the line of business.