Novell CEO: Directories key to commerce
(Online News, 04/14/99 05:05 PM)
computerworld.com
Novell CEO: Directories key to commerce
By Juan Carlos Perez
HOUSTON -- Directory technology, which consolidates a user's information centrally on a network, is critical to the success and development of electronic commerce, said Novell Inc. Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt here today.
"Directory and identity are two sides of the same coin. You need a directory to know who you're dealing with. You can't do e-commerce if you don't know who you're dealing with," Schmidt said during a keynote at Compaq Computer Corp.'s Innovate Forum '99 this morning. "Without a directory, you can't make the next-stage transition; you can't make it to a true e-business solution."
Avoiding electronic commerce isn't an option for companies that want to be successful, he argued, because the Internet is changing the way business is conducted and the way society in general works.
Directories are the key to making the jump from the Internet's first phase, characterized by simple connections, to the second phase, which is anchored by a deeper understanding of who the users are and marked by trust and relationships, he said.
The Internet's first phase has been so successful "that it has become a success disaster," Schmidt said. Nobody can find anything on the Internet anymore, he added.
"I have five e-mail accounts and five phones, and nobody can find me," Schmidt said.
But directory technology is the key to moving to a real e-commerce environment with intelligent networks, he said. Directories will also let users determine how they will be contacted and have control over how their information is used on the Net. That is a big outstanding issue in the Internet today because it's not clear "whether you use the Internet or whether the Internet uses you," Schmidt said.
Also at Innovate Forum '99, Schmidt demonstrated several Novell products, including ZENworks and Novell Directory Services (NDS), that let companies create and store centrally in the network a single profile for every user. That way, users get access to all their network resources by logging on once instead of multiple times. It also lets them have the same access and applications configuration they have on their office desktops while they're on the road.
Novell's directory technology lets IT departments configure users' desktops automatically from a central location, which eliminates the need, for example, to manually load software on PCs, Schmidt said.
"The reason we built these products is that customers told us that every time they touch a PC client, something goes wrong or their costs go way up," Schmidt said, an assertion that drew applause from the audience. "This turned out to be the single biggest cost driver in their entire MIS structures."
Schmidt also demonstrated how he was able to search for one particular user on an NDS directory loaded with 1 billion objects -- 1.7T bytes of data -- and get an instantaneous response to his query. |
