Realigning Business Strategies Date:   Monday , January 02, 2012 Earlier last year, when The Attachmate Group acquired Novell for $2.2 billion; it was an end of an era. Since the early 90s, Novell was one of the original key players in the network operating system and identity management. The company had a significant grip and continued influence on many vendors, ranging from the identity and access management to the Linux market, from email to virtualization, and security. In most of these cases the company made a good show of technology and was quick to improve upon it and in some cases to outpace its competitors both in terms of vision and architecture. In an exclusive with The SmartTechie, Narayan Menon, Lead - Strategy & Marketing Novell India/South Asia talks about the impact of acquisition and company’s strategy and market positioning in India hereon. The strategy behind Novell's acquisition The Attachmate Group acquisition of Novell provides a unique opportunity to further deliver significant value to customers and partners worldwide through innovative solutions, quality products, and exceptional service. Bringing these well-recognized, global brands together under The Attachmate Group umbrella significantly improves our ability to deliver value to customers on a global scale. We are now a $1 billion+ software organization. At this scale, we will be able to bring to bear richer solutions, more talent and expertise, a larger product portfolio, and an expanded field presence to customers and partners worldwide. The addition of Novell and SUSE to The Attachmate Group furthers the organization’s mission and ability to deliver solutions that are strategically aligned to our customers’ needs. Novell enjoys a long history of innovation, product quality, and commitment to customer success, which is wholly consistent with the Group’s values and beliefs. Market Positioning with the backing of The Attachmate Group To put it simply, we are now ‘bigger & better’ and much more focused than ever on our core technologies and, more importantly our customers and partners. Today, the Novell BU is focused on collaboration, endpoint management, and file and networking services areas. Our current efforts are engineered to deliver high quality products, provide exceptional service, and be easy to do business with. With the focused portfolio of products, a larger sales force and partner network and the shared customer base; Novell, under the Attachmate Group umbrella today enjoys more coverage in the market place, while supporting comprehensive end-to-end solution stacks that can address the complex IT requirements of our customers. A re-alignment of go-to market strategy We are now clustered under four business units – Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell and SUSE – while being united under a single holding company named "The Attachmate Group", making us one of the largest, privately-held enterprise software holding companies in the market today, valued at over 1$ billion. This re-alignment ensures that there is more focus with respect to R&D, development and support along with sales and marketing engines for the product lines under the business units. An added advantage of the new approach would be the availability of dedicated resources to each division for enhanced focus. This would also ensure more depth from each business unit with respect to products and solutions, and support and services that benefit the customer. Partners will also stand to benefit with the focused realignment, as they now have the opportunity to build their core competencies and grow to become specialized and dedicated partners to one or multiple business units, depending on their strengths. Thus we see the enhanced GTM approach providing more breadth in terms of coverage and at the same time more depth with regard to solutions and the associated support and service offerings. India as a market - The promising avenues India is not only a very complex region in terms of demographics, but also a market that promises steady growth and great potential despite inflationary pressures. The Indian domestic IT market is relatively small, but growing fast: Overall the domestic IT market is around $20 billion and is expected to grow at 16 percent as compared to the IT exports segment which is around $70 billion making it an important growth market for us. Mirroring this fact, we have shown significant growth in the region. We have acquired several new customers while expanding our partner network and investing in people, both in sales as well as the engineering (R&D) divisions. We see strong potential for growth within the avenues of: 1. Open platforms solutions – fast growing segment clocking a 30 percent + year-on-year (SUSE). 2. Vendor rev from security S/w was estimated to be growing at 12 percent pa (NetIQ). 3. The collaboration market is estimated to be growing at 19 percent (Novell). In India, we focus primarily on the following verticals (with our product/solution set aligned mentioned in brackets): - Government/Public Sector – One of the largest IT buyers in India (Linux, IDAM, Mailing & Collaboration). - BFSI – Continues to be a growth segment especially with new regulatory 7 compliance mandates that need to be met with regards to IT (IDAM, End point management and SUSE Linux). - Manufacturing – Opportunities around process automation & ERP/CRM deployments (Open Source/Linux & Platespin). - Education – (Collaboration, Mailing, SUSE Linux and Platespin). - IT/ITES (SUSE Linux, IDAM, End point management). Key customers in India include ELCOT, Café Coffee Day, HPCL, IOCL, Mahindra & Mahindra, L&T to name a few. We are a prominent player within the Govt/PSU space and our components are under deployment with many of the current government projects on a large scale. Road map for Novell Novell under the Attachmate Group, shall continue to be focused on customers and partners to provide the best-in-breed solutions. From a product perspective, the next quarter and early 2012, will see new releases of all of our core products: Novell GroupWise, Novell ZENworks, Novell Open Enterprise Server and Novell Vibe. We are also excited about growth opportunities available in cloud-based enterprise email (offered by HostedEM), endpoint management, social collaboration, application virtualization and believe it or not, files. Hence to summarize, the realigned GTM approach under The Attachmate Group will provide a strong backing towards achieving our objectives and driving growth within the region. The development of key products out of India, supported by a healthy market environment and the availability of highly skilled manpower puts our operation in India right at the top in terms of focus geographies. We are also expanding in to markets like SriLanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh which would assist in incremental growth opportunities.