Novell's CTO talks up change
By Christine Burns
Network World, 04/07/99
Last month's Brainshare
user conference was Novell's opportunity to boast that
after a somewhat rocky recent history it's back on
track as a leading networking company. Novell has
traditionally used the conference to tell its fiercely loyal
customers how the company will be
making their lives as network
administrators easier with the delivery of
more directory-based management tools
and more reliable versions of NetWare.
But this year, the company jumped out
of its old mold and started talking about
newfangled Internet products like
DigitalMe, a Novell Directory Services-based
application that gives end users control over how their
own personal information stored in NDS is distributed
around the Internet.
Network World Senior Editor Christine Burns recently
sat down with Novell Chief Technology Officer Glenn
Ricart, to discuss what these new directions mean for
Novell and its customers.
Q. Novell has recently focused on several new
initiatives like DigitalMe, caching appliances for ISPs,
the I-chain electronic commerce concepts - that don't
directly relate to its loyal customer base. What's the
value in these products for them?
A. All the things that Novell is doing contribute to the
idea that people can trust the network as a place to do
business. We are trying to make the network a more
responsible place. We want folks to be able to have
identities and be responsible for their actions. We want
to be able to trust that if we carry out a transaction
with somebody across the network there is some notion
of identity in place that we can build on. We want to be
able to access information knowingly and be assured a
certain level of privacy in how that information is used.
The directory is at the center of this trusted identity
concept. That kind of respect for people and the
information will lead toward a more trustworthy
network.
Q. How important is the concept of DigitalMe to
Novell?
A. It's a very important step in realizing the importance
of the directory. Consistent information across the
network is what helps all of the network players play
nicely with each other. The directory outlines the social
norms for the network. It tells you who the players are,
what the rules of engagement are and what pieces of
playthings are out there.
DigitalMe is an important piece of that directory
promise because it represents the individual and giving
them control. Up until now, you could have gone to a
Web site and it would ask you for all your personal
information. God only knows how many passwords you
may have to these various sites you go to. We are
bringing that kind of control back to the person who
actually owns that information. We are rebalancing the
Internet in favor of the individual.
When we've done that, we will have taken a huge step
in realizing the power of the directory. It means that we
have got people taking significant roles as players.
We've always had users represented by names and
passwords but now we are giving users the ability to
have a much richer version of themselves stored in the
directory. They can have custom cards with pictures. It
is a way for users to feel that they are actually part of
the network rather than needing some foreign
description of themselves to access the system. We are
letting them step into the networked world.
Q. How are you going to push this into existing
customer base where network administrators are used
to having control over this kind of information?
A. Well, if we were in Detroit, DigitalMe would be
what we would call a concept car. It's an attempt to
see what we can do by moving the line back toward
the user or the customer so that they are responsible
for their own information. Right now, our directory -
like anyone else's - is managed by a systems
administrator and if you want to change your telephone
number you talk to him and he changes it. It is just one
stop in many in the process of changing your telephone
number across all aspects of your life.
The DigitalMe concept is trying to pull that task back to
the individual. And by doing that, I think that we have
reshaped how the network works for you. You only
change it in one place and these other locations point to
you and change that number automatically.
Now imagine some future technology able to provide
that kind transference of responsibility for corporate
network users. What would that mean in terms of
freeing up a network administrator's time for actually
managing the network and not cleaning up the
information stored in the directory?
DigitalMe is perhaps very consumer looking but
perhaps it is just the beginning of the notion that we are
going to have more players taking more responsibility
for their own information and their own roll in the
organization.
Q. So the business model for Novell here is to sell
more copies of the directory?
A. Well that is a potential business model. But I have
to tell you that we are so near the beginning that we
are not sure what the final business model is going to
be. We know it is an important concept and we want to
see where it goes.
But instead of having a systems administrator totally
responsible for all information in the directory, it not
only makes sense for directories but also for Web sites
- that we try and place the responsibility for
disseminating the information to those who own it.
Therefore, that information only has to be stored once
and can then be accurately distributed.
Q. What are the key new technologies involved in
Novell's new e-commerce strategy - called iChain -
going forward?
A. iChain is the notion that you get value when things
are connected together. This is about taking advantage
of hooking together suppliers, vendors and customers
and having a synergistic system that the directory is the
organizer for. The directory mediates all of these
things.
There are five stages of electronic commerce. Stage
one is where companies advertise on the 'Net. In stage
two, I think the businesses are trying to educate the
customers. The customers are brought to a buying point
by giving them information. Stage three is transactions.
I am educated, I know what I want and I am going to
buy it. Stage four is building a relationship with the
customer. You are not just giving the customer the
things they buy but you are forwarding information
about similar things to them.
Stage five is where the customer actually helps design
the goods or services being delivered. We are
beginning to see a very little bit of this in the
information space where this is easier to do. Give me a
customized Web paper in the morning. It is created just
for me with the information I want.
As we move through these stages we need more and
more information about the customer. The directory is
going to end up supplying those varying degrees of
information to which whomever you as an individual in
the chain are interacting.
With this whole move toward this new products
pipeline how has that affected R&D at Novell?
A. When Eric came in Job One was to get out the
products that we had already promised. That required a
significant push from the engineering organization.
Things got a lot more real. The number of products we
were working on got cut down drastically.
Last summer it became clear that we were beginning
to see the end of the pieces that had been promised
finally getting shipped. When we got NetWare 5.0 out
the door in September there was a new question.
Where was the value for the customer going to be
beyond that? Eric led a revolution inside Novell to think
much more creatively, much more about the Internet,
about the real power of out directory. That has led to
some very interesting things in the engineering
organization.
We are asking individual engineers in the company to
come up with new and interesting ideas. And if we like
those ideas we let them work on those new ideas for a
few months.
Q. Didn't the ideas always come from the engineers?
A. Well, the ideas have. But we had a period of a little
more than a year where we were focusing on getting
the promised products out the door and suppressing the
new ideas a bit. Now we are into a more
entrepreneurial load within the company than I have
ever seen.
Q. What's your favorite new technology in the works?
A. The unified directory view is one. We are working
on a technology that gives users a way to access
multiple directories as if they were a single directory.
We are tackling issues like how can you make them
look as one even though there might be different
schema's and were created by different systems
administrators.
There are a lot of things happening in the security
arena that are taking a lot of brain cells as well.
Q. Do you think that NDS is the only directory service
that can support this kind of expansion - what about the
older players in this market today like the X.500
products or Netscape's LDAP directory?
A. Netscape's LDAP directory is terrific as long as
you are looking up a distinguished name. As long as
you are looking up "Christine Burns" - Netscape is a
wonderful directory. But if you want to look up Senior
Editor, Network World, you are no longer going to get
the same performance. The Netscape directory is
perfectly great for the first generation use of directories
where you put in a name and you get back information
about that person. As you begin to get more role-based,
sophisticated interaction, NDS has got a significant
advantage.
The X.500 directories are also very good in the
distinguished name look-up. They are more hierarchical
and therefore performance suffers but they can be
scaled depending on how you set up the tree structure.
That can be good for searches, but not so good for
linking together hundreds of thousands of objects and
then establishing relationships between them. Those
kinds of contextual queries are going to be more
important as the directory gets used in more
sophisticated ways and NDS can do that now. |
