Hello Paul!
digialme was not demoed as a product but rather an enabling technology. Novell did an impressive job of enhancing their Novell Connection Points with digitalme signons. There was something called a "digitalme preview" where you could create your digitalme cards and check your preferences for those cards.
The only digitalme based product is called Whenever! and it's styled after ICQ in a way. It basically allows you to be known on a network. The level someone "knows" you is set by digitalme. For instance, any of your coworkers would "know" you or see you online with information regarding your ProfessionalMe card.
Whenever! allows you to chat, send email and collaborate online. It's all controlled by digitalme framework.
I know you understand this very well but maybe for those who are not up to speed on digitalme let me say this -- it's a technology, not a product. Novell will develop "showcase" products (as they have with ZENworks for NDS) but they would more happy if someone else were to take up the ball and run with it.
They are afraid that by creating products for digitalme, they would limit the technology behind it because it would be forever linked to those products. Novell understands that this enabling technology has no limits and wants to promote it that way.
Ok, so many of us want to know about revenue streams and how this will impact Novell's bottom-line. Let's take a look at digitalme...what is it's foundation? The directory. digitalme products will directly and in-directly promote NDS which will in turn generate sales. Once people get "NDS religon" they will then begin to incorporate more NDS-aware products.
Isn't this how MSFT finally won the desktop war? They created a platform (Win32) and got everyone to develop for it...Novell gets everyone on NDS and everyone develops for it...direct relationship in stock performance? I'm banking on it.
See, for Novell, everything lies in the directory. It's the glue that binds different networks and services together. Let's not lose sight of that. Directory sales will become the #1 revenue generator within the next 3 years.
And people will be able to develop not only products based on NDS but services too. I have at least 6 services I can rattle off that you could startup a company tomorrow and begin making sales, all of them based on NDS (IE, Internet Caching and Hosting, Virtual Private Networking, disaster recovery systems, online backups and data vaults, desktop management, help desk services). I am confident that others can think of a few more or even refine the ones I have listed.
Aside from i-Chain, there were many product announcements from partners. Again, Novell is leaning on partnering with people to get their message out (specifically NDS). There were many products from Site Manager to NOS utilities to Caching systems to Online Learning. But I know you want to hear about those 10 new ZENs...so do I.
Let's face it, without partners Novell is beating it's own drum listening to the echoes. We will see more things from Novell in the second half of the year, specifically,
- Development tools for digitalme (Q4)
- Development tools for NDPS (QuickStart in Q3, Full Toolkit Q4)
- Clustering services
- BorderManger Parsing Filter enhancements (filter web content at schools?)
- ZENworks 2.0
- NDPS 2.0 and Enterprise NDPS (NDPS=Novell Distributed Printing Services)
- NDS v8 (with new utilities)
Let me backtrack here for a moment. NDPS is something that will move up quietly on most people's radar scopes. The demo I witnessed was amazing, you could almost troubleshoot every printer problem from a remote location. As more and more printer companies begin "embedding" the NDPS technology into their printers, life will get much easier at work :)
Another kewl thing they showed off was Internet Printing. I think it will change the face of faxing in Corporate America one day. Also, in the new version of NDPS, not only will printers be enhanced but also support for scanners, fax machines and copy machines (even multi-function machines) will come into play. The product manager for NDPS also stated that in the future, people will be able to print to a printer (with the embedded NDPS technology built in) even if the network is down!
Well, I know that's not the solid numbering game that people really want but if I could do that, I would be working at a slightly different job :)
Peter Strifas
ps - it's so nice to be home... :) By the way, I met up with Phil Jacobson and we had an interesting talk :) And to all you lurkers, GO NOVELL! |
